Aftermath

by Ann McMan

  Celine raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really?” She sighed. “All my years, mentoring med students at Hopkins certainly came in handy. Last night, I made a phone call to a very reliable source in the medical records department at Beth Israel. Turns out that your pride and joy was a big baby—nearly eight pounds.”

  Doris gasped. “Violating HIPAA laws is a felony . . .”

  “And I’m sure that’s exactly the first thought Howard will have, too. Won’t he, Dorrie?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “I’m glad you appreciate my quandary.” Celine picked up a triangle of pita bread and bit off its tip. “The numbers just don’t add up, do they?” She smiled. “You might say it’s a spot of Fazzoli math.”

  Doris picked up a sweating glass and flung its contents across the table at Celine. “You bitch!” she screamed.

  The liquid went everyplace. Celine jerked back and jumped to her feet, knocking her chair over. Sweet tea and chunks of melted ice dropped from her face and chest like an amber waterfall.

  Syd couldn’t take in what was happening. Time seemed to speed up—like someone had pressed a fast-forward button. Two men seated behind their table got to their feet, too.

  “Hey!” one of the men, yelled. “What the hell?”

  Celine ran a hand across her face, then picked up the tomato pie. “I think you’ll like this Dorrie—it goes with your outfit.”

  Syd saw what was coming and reached out a hand to try and stop Celine, but Celine threw the pie with pinpoint accuracy and hit Doris right in the center of her silicone-enhanced bodice. An organic sash of chunky tomato magma spread out across her ample chest. Red splatters dotted her face and neck.

  Syd stared at Doris with disbelief. She looks like she has the measles . . .

  Doris stared down at her ruined couture and exploded with rage. “You bitch!” she shrieked. She shoved her hand into the bowl of hummus and scooped up a soggy handful. Celine ducked, and the gloppy mass flew past her and hit the same man who had already been doused with the iced tea.

  “Goddamn it!” he yelled. “I’ve had about enough of this bullshit. You two bitches need to take this shit outside.”

  Things went from bad to worse when Nadine exploded from the kitchen like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. She made a beeline for their table, shoving bystanders out of her way with all the grace of a fullback busting through a goal line defense.

  “Just what in the hell is going on out here?” she demanded.

  Doris looked at her with a murderous gaze. “Stay out of this. It’s none of your fucking business.” She picked up a cheese biscuit and hurled it at Nadine.

  Uh oh, Syd thought. Not a good move, Doris . . .

  Nadine caught the incoming biscuit . . . in one hand. She stopped dead in her tracks and looked from Doris to the biscuit, and then back to Doris.

  Time stood still. Syd heard a collective gasp from the rest of the diners.

  “Oh, no.” Nadine wagged a long, flour-covered index finger. “Somebody better please tell me that this skinny white woman did not just throw one of my own biscuits at me in MY OWN DAMN ESTABLISHMENT!”

  Syd closed her eyes. Hell was certainly out of its box now . . . And that was pretty hard to imagine.

  Nadine hurled the biscuit back at Doris and clocked her right in the center of the forehead. “Nobody throws my food but me!”

  Doris staggered backward and slammed into the table behind her, sending three, half-eaten bowls of chicken and dumplings crashing to the floor.

  Nadine stormed to the table and stood over Doris, who was splayed across the floor in a most unladylike posture.

  “Girl,” she said, pointing down at her with all the umbrage of Jehovah on Judgment Day. “All I can say is you better have a big damn checkbook, because somebody is going to pay to clean up this mess.”

  Doris was too overcome to speak, but Celine stepped forward.

  “Let me get that process started for you, Nadine.”

  She pointed the nozzle of the douche at Doris and gave the bag a good, big squeeze. A hefty stream of clear liquid shot out. Celine carefully doused her from head to toe.

  A pleasing scent of Country Flowers filled the air.

  Nervous titters of laughter started from someplace within the crowd of onlookers. Before long, it erupted into a full-blown chorus of whoops and whistles.

  The noise was so loud that Syd didn’t notice the sirens until all three of the sheriff’s cars skidded to a stop out front on Raymond’s fresh bed of gravel.

  DAVID WAS POURING them each a splash of champagne. He said they had something big to celebrate, and he couldn’t wait around any longer for the rest of the crew to show up. Besides . . . he’d opened the bottle an hour ago, and there was only about one full glass left.

  It was nearly four-thirty, and Syd wasn’t home yet, but Maddie just assumed that she had stopped by the school to turn in her final grades, or gone on into town to run some errands on her way home. She was very anxious to hear how her meeting with Doris went, but she assumed that no news was good news. She was certain that she would’ve heard something if the encounter had gone south in any truly dramatic ways.

  Celine wasn’t at home either. David said she had asked to borrow his car around lunchtime, but he didn’t think anything about it. She had been looking around the area at some vacation cottages, thinking she might invest in something more permanent, since she now was spending so much time back east. They all were encouraging her in this enterprise—Maddie especially.

  David handed her a glass.

  “What time did you say Mom left?” she asked.

  David glanced at his watch. “I think it was noon, or shortly after.” He took a sip of the champagne. “I guess it was more like twelve-thirty, because it was right before Isobel came to pick up Henry.”

  Henry was celebrating the end of the school year with his best friends, Gabriel and Héctor Sanchez. Isobel was taking the boys to pick strawberries, and then they were going to make ice cream and watch videos.

  “Care to tell me what we’re celebrating?” Maddie asked. “And where did you get this?” She held her glass up to the light. The straw-colored liquid looked familiar.

  “It’s that last bottle of De Margerie you’ve been hoarding.”

  Maddie lowered her flute. “I thought so. Where did you find it?”

  David impatiently fluttered a hand. “On the third shelf in the barn refrigerator, behind four fridge packs of Diet Coke . . . you know . . . where you hid it.”

  “So much for that brilliant idea.” Maddie took a sip of the champagne. The Grand Cru Brut was her favorite, and she had been saving it for . . . something to be determined. “I hope you enjoyed it,” she added.

  “Are you kidding? This stuff is great.” He took another sip. “We’re going to have to start stocking this at the inn. It totally kicks The Widow’s ass.” He looked at Maddie. “Got any more of it hidden around this joint?”

  “No.”

  “I so do not believe you. You’re doing that thing you do when you lie.”

  “What thing?”

  He pointed at her face. “That thing . . . you know . . . with the eyebrow and the convulsive blinking.”

  “Convulsive blinking? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “See. You just did it again.” He slowly shook his head. “You totally should get that checked out, Cinderella. It could be early onset blepharospasm.”

  Maddie sighed. “How do you come up with this crap, and where in the hell did you hear about blepharospasm?”

  “It happens to be a serious and underreported condition that affects nearly one in every twenty-thousand people.”

  “Have you been watching Nurse Jackie marathons again?”

  “No.” David was offended. “For your information, I read about it.”

  “You read about it?”

  “I do happen to read, you know.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “For your information, wise
guy—not only am I erudite and well-read, I’ll soon be a published author.”

  Maddie raised an eyebrow, then realized what she was doing and reached up to smooth it with her fingertips.

  David smiled brightly at her.

  “Shut up,” she said. “Tell me about your . . . book?”

  “It’s actually a story collection. I’m the editor and co-translator.”

  “Translator? You?”

  “Yes, me. Why is that so hard to believe?”

  Maddie sighed. “David. You’re the only person I know who needs subtitles for operas that are sung in English.”

  He humphed.

  “Okay, okay . . . I apologize. Now tell me. What are these stories, and what language were they written in originally?”

  David continued to pout.

  It was time to haul out the big guns.

  “If you talk with me, I’ll tell you where there’s another bottle of De Margerie . . .”

  That got his attention. He sat forward on his chair. “It’s this incredible series of German stories—fan fiction, written by an amateur author in Düsseldorf. He posted them for free on the Internet, but they weren’t available in English. I read about them in a random blog post comment at Gawker, so I contacted him.”

  “What on earth is fan fiction?”

  “Are you seriously asking me this question?”

  “Am I to infer from your response that I should already know this?”

  He looked toward the ceiling. “You might say that.”

  She sighed. “Enlighten me, please.”

  “Really, Cinderella. You might want to consider joining this century.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  “Fan fiction—also called, alternatively, fanfic, slash fiction, femslash, het, and gen—are all genres and subgenres of fiction written about characters who were not created by the amateur authors. These stories are generally posted for free on various Internet sites that host the works and categorize them by subject or type.”

  “And these German stories are examples of genre work that spins off other, preexisting characters?”

  David nodded.

  Maddie was confused. “Don’t you run into copyright issues with the creators of the original works?”

  “Not if you’re careful and change enough detail—including names—before publication so it isn’t a clear rip off.”

  “But if you do that, how do people know what the real subject is?”

  David dropped his chin to his chest. “Do you live under a rock?”

  “Come on . . . I’m really trying to be supportive here.”

  He gave a dramatic sigh. “Fine. Let me try to simplify this for you. Let’s suppose, for the sake of discussion, that you and Syd are actually fictional characters patterned after other, preexisting and supremely popular cultural icons, and that I created you to loosely imitate them and make a tidy profit in the process.”

  “Cultural icons?”

  He shrugged. “Sure. Like, say, Cagney and Lacey.”

  “Syd and I would be rip offs of Cagney and Lacey?”

  “It could happen . . . you’re dark and brooding . . . she’s light and hot. You’re butch, she’s femme . . . it’s that whole yin and yang thing. Get it?”

  “No. Weren’t Cagney and Lacey straight?”

  David slapped his palm against his forehead. “Duh. That’s the whole point of fanfic, Cinderella. I get to make you anything I want, and fulfill the fantasies of zillions of baby dykes in the process. All of them, I might add, with credit cards and access to eReaders.”

  Maddie thought about that. Then she looked at him. “Do we have to be Cagney and Lacey?”

  “Good god. Do you always have to be so damn literal? Pick any pair of popular Vagitarian wannabes you want.”

  Maddie finished her champagne. “How about Xena and Gabrielle?”

  “Xena? Seriously? Can you say ‘welcome to 1995?’ How about something for people who aren’t on life support?”

  “Um . . . Rizzoli and Isles?”

  David raised his hands to the heavens. “I think she’s got it.”

  “All right, all right. So this is what you’re publishing? A collection of German fan fiction stories that spin off some cultural icons, but don’t compromise any copyright restrictions?”

  “Precisely.”

  “Who is your publisher?”

  “MaleStrum Press.”

  “Maelstrom? Like the storm?”

  “No . . . Male-Strum, like strum a male.” He pretended to strum an imaginary guitar.

  “I’m not familiar with that one.”

  “That’s because I just created it. I also like the double entendre in the name—you know . . . homage to the tornado?”

  “I’m confused.”

  “Sigh. Ever heard of self-publishing? It’s all the rage these days.”

  “Oh. You’re putting this out on your own?”

  “Did you overdose on Benadryl or something? Yes . . . I’m self-publishing. And why not? Even some of the top-selling authors are going this route now. The profits are astronomical.”

  “Don’t you need an editor—at least for the German translation?”

  David rolled his eyes. “I have an editor, thankyouverymuch. And she’s an accomplished scholar with serious street cred.”

  Maddie was dubious. “Who? If you don’t mind my asking.”

  “She’s using a pseudonym—Stanford Hopkins.”

  “Stanford Hopkins?” Maddie pondered that for a moment, then she stared at David with wide-eyed disbelief. “Mom?”

  He gave her a smug smile.

  “You have got to be kidding me?”

  He shook his head.

  “You got Mom to translate a bunch of German pulp fiction?”

  “She’s truly amazing, Cinderella. She knocked them all out in a fraction of the time we thought it might take. I think she has unsung talents. She should seriously consider ditching the med school gig and wading into this full time.”

  Maddie was staring at him with an open mouth.

  “What’s the matter with you? You look just like you did when you found out that Little House on the Prairie got canceled.”

  “You . . . and Mom? Really?”

  “Yes, really. That’s part of what we’re celebrating. The first e-books went live at amazon.com last night.”

  “Oh, god . . .”

  “Hey . . . before you try to rain on my parade, let me just tell you that the book is a smash.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “I’m not kidding. It debuted at number one at amazon.de, and in the U.S. alone, we’ve already sold more than twenty-five-hundred e-books.”

  “I’m going out on a limb here and guessing that’s good?”

  “Good? No. It’s not good, it’s effing phenomenal.”

  Maddie was still in a semi-state of shock. “How much do these things cost?”

  David brushed the fingers of his hand across his chest. “Seven ninety-five each.”

  Maddie did a quick calculation. “That’s nearly twenty thousand dollars.”

  “No shit, Sherlock. And that’s just the U.S. sales.”

  “What’s the name of this book?”

  “The Tales of Rolf and Tobi.”

  Maddie shook her head. “I need another drink.”

  “Now you know why your mom is out window shopping. Well,” he took a deep breath, “at least it’s safe to say that between this and the calendar sales, I finally met my fundraising goal.”

  “I’ll say.”

  David set his glass down. “Now . . . where’s that other bottle stashed? We have more good news to celebrate.”

  Maddie looked at him morosely. “I honestly don’t think I can take any more good news.”

  “Trust me . . . this you want to hear.”

  She sighed. “All right.”

  He stood up. “So . . . where’s the hooch?”

  She jerked a thumb toward the big Sub-Zero. “In the
back of the vegetable drawer, behind the broccolini and chard.”

  He stared at her. “Gross.”