Shopping for a Billionaire 4

by Julia Kent

  Elena Montgomery McCormick.

  Declan’s mother.

  Born in 1956. Died in 2004. She had him when she was older, and that makes James in his late fifties, which makes sense. My eyes race over the words to get them all in, and then I come to a dead stop.

  Stung by the words in front of me.

  The obituary is tasteful, mentioning her three kids—Terrance, Declan and Andrew—and her loving husband, James.

  It’s the link under it, though, that makes me hold my breath. Makes time stand still. Makes the air go thick.

  The headline for a Boston Globe story reads:

  Local business leader’s wife dead from wasp sting.

  Oh my God.

  Amanda’s hands are gentle on my shoulder as my eyes race across the page. “I can’t find more about it, yet,” she explains. “There isn’t a major news story to explain how it happened.”

  “His brother had a bad incident around the same time,” I tell her, brain reeling. Declan’s mother died from a sting? Died?

  “I guess this explains why he knew exactly what to do with you,” Amy whispers, eyes glistening. My own throat goes salty and tight as tears I didn’t know I had in me spring to the surface. The memory of that picnic, how Declan was so calm and steady yet swift and immediate, reacting with perfectly orchestrated steps, how he ran with me in his arms so far, so hard, so fast…

  He saved my life and then he broke my heart.

  “This can’t be real,” I choke out, but deep down I understand more. Suddenly. Like a clap of thunder and lightning that makes the landscape bright in a flash, revealing parts unknown, the sound echoing in a ripple of cacophony, now I get it.

  I get it.

  “He can’t date me because I remind him of his mother,” I say.

  Amy raises one skeptical eyebrow. “You look nothing like her. For one, she has cheekbones more prominent than Heidi Klum’s.”

  I wave my hand in the air between us. “No, not that I look like her. The sting. She had an anaphylactic allergy, I have an anaphylactic allergy. Declan can’t handle it. Maybe I’m a trigger?”

  Amanda makes a noise that tells me she’s not convinced. “He would have dumped you right after the ER incident, then.”

  “It’s a miracle he didn’t,” Amy adds with a snort. “You nearly decapitated his second head.”

  I give her a look that shuts her up. “Maybe he was just being nice. Not breaking up with me when I was in a medical crisis.”

  “That doesn’t explain Easter,” she declares.

  We sit in brooding silence. Amanda takes action and starts googling furiously. I take action by searching through all the open mystery shops available at work to see if there’s one at a bakery. I have a hankering for muffins suddenly.

  “What are you doing?” Amy asks, peering over my shoulder.

  “Discovering my ex-boyfriend’s mother died from the same allergy I have always makes me crave baked goods, you know?”

  Amanda ignores us both. “You two leave me alone for an hour and I’ll have an answer.”

  “What the hell am I supposed to do for an hour while I wait to find out the one little piece of information that could put all the puzzle pieces together?” I demand.

  “Eat ice cream,” she says.

  “Okay.” Good answer.

  “How about we go for a nice power walk?” says my sister, Richard Simmons. In about fifty years she’ll look just enough like him with that curly reddish hair…

  “Power walk or ice cream. Power walk or ice cream. That’s like asking if you want to have sex with Sam Heughan or just use your vibrator, Amy.”

  She blushes. “Some vibrators are pretty damn nice.”

  “Like the one I got at the sex toy shop with Shannon last week!” Mom chirps from the main door.

  “You summoned her. Say the word ‘vibrator’ and if she’s within three miles, she just appears,” I hiss. To be fair, Mom came to my rescue at the sex toy shop. The trauma of seeing Jessica with Declan, then creating a minor traffic catastrophe that thankfully missed being covered on local news, meant I was completely useless by the time we’d reached the store’s parking lot.

  Instructions memorized, she went in and spent ninety minutes doing a fabulous customer service evaluation of the store, and came out with a lifetime of orgasms in a surprisingly compact shopping bag.

  “Look at this puppy! While Shannon was having her breakdown in the garbage-covered car, I was a professional and handled everything for her,” Mom announces with glee. She fishes a pink and white vibrator out of her purse.

  It is bigger than a compact umbrella.

  “Jesus Christ!” Amy screams.

  “No, he’s the butt plug.” Mom pouts. “I didn’t have enough in my budget for him.”

  The three of us stare at him, mouths agape.

  Make it four. Even Chuckles’ jaw drops just a little.

  “They make a Jesus butt plug?” Amanda asks in a shaky voice.

  “See why I wanted you to go with her?” I say with more viciousness in my tone than I’d planned. But it’s sincere.

  “See why I blackmailed you?”

  Fair enough.

  “Let’s go for that walk while Amanda stalks your ex boyfriend to learn how his mom died,” Amy says in a shell-shocked voice.

  Mom marches into the living room and searches through the coat closet.

  “What are you doing?” Amy asks.

  “I need to hide this,” Mom announces.

  “Oh, God, we don’t need to watch that!” I shout.

  “Not in my body,” Mom says with disgust. “In your closet. It’s a surprise for your dad.”

  “Oh, that would be a surprise in bed, all right. It’s basically a third partner.”

  Mom brightens. “That was my thinking, too!” She frowns. “Why are you researching how someone’s mom died?”

  “We’re making plans,” Amy whispers. “His mom came home with a giant vibrator one day and BAM!”

  “I heard that.” She shoves the vibrator inside a bag with great effort, shoving once, twice, three times.

  “Give the poor thing a cigarette after all that,” I mutter. “You didn’t even buy it dinner.”

  Mom makes a sour face at me, then brightens as she sees Amanda at the laptop. “Are you really researching how Declan’s mother died? Did James do it?” A bit too eager with that question, isn’t she?

  “Hey, wait a minute. You never finished telling me how Declan nearly became my stepbrother.”

  Amy does a double take. “What? Wouldn’t that make Shannon and Declan’s relationship incestuous?”

  “No, more like Marcia and Greg on The Brady Bunch.”

  “Ewwww,” Amy and Amanda say in unison.

  Mom pretends not to hear us.

  “Mom? James? You said you dated him.”

  “When did I say that?”

  “The day Steve appeared at the ice cream shop.”

  She frowns, then grins like an idiot. “You were so commanding with Steve! So fem dom! I’ll bet if you got one of those strap-ons at the sex toy shop—it turns out they’re not just for lesbians!—you could have…”

  Her voice trails off when she sees the looks on our faces.

  “Walk!” Amy announces. “You’ll spill your guts while Amanda does her cybersearching.”

  “Where are we walking?”

  “Not where. What. The plank.” She shoves me out the front door.

  The big orange fireball in the sky is so interesting. I haven’t seen it for days, holed up in my apartment, and I’m tempted to wave hello, like it’s some neighbor I’ve known for years but haven’t chatted with for a long time.

  “Some vibrators are pretty nice,” I taunt Amy. “You had to say that, didn’t you?”

  “Sometimes it’s true.” She won’t back down. Sheesh. Little sister syndrome. When in doubt, dig in your heels.

  “Something is very wrong with you,” I mutter, but we go for a walk. Because she’s right.


  Not about the vibrators, but about needing to get out of the house.

  “Tell the story about James, Mom. I can’t believe you let a real billionaire get away.” She misses the obvious sarcasm in my voice.

  She chuckles. It’s not a happy sound. “He wasn’t a billionaire back then. Far from it. I was an artist’s assistant in some crappy squatter’s building where we were all avant-garde painters and he was with the real estate company that was trying to turn our run-down warehouse into fancy loft apartments. If he could get the building, he could make his first fortune. Only one thing stopped him.”

  “You?”

  “Rats.”

  “Rats?”

  “Rats.” She says that single word like it explains everything.

  Chapter Nine

  “Go on.”

  “You want me to go on about rats?”

  “Could you please connect the rats to James?”

  “Isn’t it clear?”

  “No.”

  She sighs heavily. “The building was overrun with rats.”

  Amy and I both shudder and gag. I shudder, she gags. Then we trade.

  “And the only way to keep the rats away was with cats.”

  “Is that where we got Chuckles?”

  She snickers. “No, but Chuckles could be the baby of one of the babies of one of those old warehouse cats. There were so many.”

  “Rat killer thrice removed,” Amy says.

  “Get on with it. The James part.” I’m impatient. My life is hanging in the balance here. Amanda’s researching what the hell happened with Declan’s mother, who died in a most fragile way and one that could kill me, too. Meanwhile, my mother spills the fact that she once dated (slept with?) Declan’s father, and she’s blathering on about rats.

  “So when he saw how we controlled the rats, he went to the humane society and adopted fifty cats. Set them loose in the building. Except he didn’t think about the stray dogs in the neighborhood.”

  “Dogs?”

  Mom’s laugh is infectious, and I study her profile. The years strip off her face and she looks like she’s twenty again. Sunshine frames her face and I hold my breath, enraptured.

  “All these dogs started sniffing around the building, howling. They wouldn’t kill the rats, but they loved to chase the cats. We slept on these little pallets in the art studios and it reached a point where you didn’t know if a rat, a cat, or a dog was running over your body at 3 a.m.” She makes a funny frowny face. “Or if it was the residual effects of the hit of acid from that night.”

  “Are you sure any of this is true?” Amy asks. “Maybe it’s all just an elaborate flashback.”

  Mom whacks her lightly on the arm and Amy yelps with manufactured injury. “It’s all true. You can ask James.”

  “I can’t ask James anything,” I argue.

  “Sure you can. He’s still your client.”

  “What about you and him? How’d you start dating?”

  “He came to the building one day and was horrified to find that it had become a doggie hotel. The cats were in hiding, the rats were gone, and a ton of homeless women had followed the dogs who were so starved for attention that they curled up in everyone’s laps. There was one, named Winky—this cute little mangy Jack Russell terrier. That thing was smaller than some of the rats he managed to kill.”

  “A rat-killing terrier?” Amy’s laughing.

  “Mom! Dating!”

  “He came over one day to assess the mess and I told him he had to take care of Winky’s vet bill. The poor thing had an infected paw from a rat bite. James thought I was crazy.”

  “You are crazy,” Amy and I say in unison.

  “James agreed.” She chuckles. “I got that man to take me and Winky to a downtown veterinarian who treated him with antibiotics and stitches, though. James paid the bill, then asked me out for dinner.”

  I stop smiling. “When was this?”

  “About a year before he married Elena.”

  Elena. Mom knows her name. Mom knew all this time about Declan and played dumb. The sidewalk dips and cracks from old tree roots along the tree lawn, and I halt, one foot higher than the other on a slab of concrete. Being off kilter makes sense.

  “You’ve been lying this entire time,” I blurt out.

  “Not lying, honey.”

  “Don’t call me honey! Declan called me honey!”

  “I haven’t lied, Shannon. I just…didn’t tell you.”

  “A lie by omission is still a lie.” Throwing that in her face gives me a certain satisfaction, because it was what she always said to us when we were kids and didn’t tell the whole truth.

  She sighs and looks up at the sky. A massive jet leaves contrails that spread out like a zipper opening, white fluff filling in the space.

  “You’re right. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “All this ‘marry a billionaire’ and ‘you can love a rich man as much as you love a poor man’ crap has been because you regret being dumped by James McCormick a million years ago?” I snap.

  Angry eyes meet mine.

  “That’s not true.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know what’s true, Mom? I dated Declan. I brought the man to Easter dinner and you pretended not to know his mother is dead! A woman whose name you know because you dated his dad.”

  “I had no idea Elena had died! I haven’t seen James McCormick in thirty years, Shannon. Aside from the society and business pages of the newspapers.”

  “And Jessica Coffin’s Twitter stream.”

  Her cheeks pinken. “He’s in there sometimes.”

  I’m so livid that words turn into angry balloons in my head. I march forward, Mom and Amy rushing to keep up. We’re halfway around a giant loop we walk in my neighborhood, and if I have to spend one more second being patronized I’m going to scream.

  “‘Marry a billionaire! Billionaire babies! Farmington wedding!’ Jesus, Mom, you’re one big, fat hypocrite.” I come to such a sudden halt that Amy slams into my back and squeaks.

  “Does Dad know you dated him?”

  “Of course. Jason’s the reason I broke up with him.”

  Awestruck. I’m awestruck, and Amy looks like she’s just been hit by a bolt of lightning. Are we smoking? We should have tendrils of fine white smoke pouring up to meet the jet trails.

  “You dumped James McCormick to be with Daddy?” I gasp.

  “Well, he wasn’t the James McCormick back then. He was just an arrogant man who was hungry to make a deal and launch himself in the business world.”

  A pink flower catches my attention. Then the drip of a lawn sprinkler. A dog barks in the distance once. Then twice. The pneumatic wheeze of a dump truck starting to move after being stopped at a red light fills my ears. This cannot be real. My mother cannot be telling me that—

  “You mean he was the equivalent of Steve? Like, the 1980s version of Shannon’s ex?” Amy says.

  Mom swallows, her hand fluttering at the base of her throat, eyes troubled. “I suppose so. I never thought of it that way, but yes.”

  I slump against a giant, knotted oak, a triple-truck so gnarled and scarred it looks like it saw combat. “That explains so much.”

  Mom leans against a shiny patch of pale yellow wood where the bark has been picked clean. Sheared off. “I guess it does. I wanted you and Steve to work out because he reminded me of James.”

  “And when I brought Declan home?”

  “I wanted that even more.”

  I snort. “Because it was like reliving James. For you. If I got together with Declan it was James, once removed.”

  “No!” Mom’s face flushes bright red, almost purple, and her eyes turn so angry. All that youth that captured her levity and light in her laughter moments ago is banished, replaced by an outrage I rarely see. “Don’t conflate the two. I wanted you to be with Declan because it was immediately apparent from spending ten seconds in both your presences that something very unique is there. The air arou
nd you two is charged. You don’t see that often.”

  “You didn’t have that with James?”

  “No.” She blinks, hard, working to control her emotions. This is a side of my mother I’ve rarely seen. In fact, I’ve never seen this.

  “What did you mean Daddy’s the reason you broke up with James?” I ask quietly. We resume our walk, talking long strides, measuring our speed. Amy’s eyes are alert and perceptive; she’s taking it all in without saying much.

  Mom looks at the sky again. “You can’t choose who you fall in love with.”

  “And you didn’t fall in love with James?”

  “I tried.” Without elaborating, she lets that hang there. A child flies by on a scooter and we move to get out of his way, the wind whipping through his hair, pure joy on his face as he races his dad, who is on his bike on the road. The dad is pedaling slowly, moderating his pace so his son can win.

  We all smile at the sight. Mom’s face folds in fastest, though, going somber, her eyes a bit haunted. “I tried,” she repeats. “But you can’t force yourself to love someone if it’s not right.”

  “And maybe that’s what’s happening with Declan.”

  “You’re not forcing anything, Shannon,” she says, gently touching my arm.

  “No—not me. Him. Maybe I really wasn’t enough.” I let a frustrated sigh burst out of me. “Or I was too much.” His words ricochet in my head.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  We round a corner and watch the dad and son fade out over the big hill we’re about to climb.

  I can’t answer. My mouth has gone dry and my throat aches. So much information. Too much history. Mom dated James? Mom rejected James? Mom watched me bring Declan home and didn’t say a word? Was that really out of respect or was there something more?

  “How did James take it when you ended your relationship?” I ask, deflecting. I don’t want to answer her question.

  She gives me a rueful smile. “Not well. James doesn’t like to lose.”

  I laugh so hard I trigger a bunch of dogs behind a fence, their furious barking making me laugh even more. “That’s an understatement.”