Everything's Relative

by Jenna McCarthy

  “Yeah, she was a regular Rockefeller,” Lexi snickered. “In that case, I want the Tuscan villa and the Chevy.”

  “Lexi, please,” Brooke said. As the middle sister and self-appointed peacekeeper, Brooke was uncomfortable with any level of conflict. Lexi, on the other hand, enjoyed nothing more than making others, Brooke in particular, excruciatingly uncomfortable.

  “As I was saying,” Mr. Wiley continued, “your mother was a wealthy woman. I should probably say a very wealthy woman.”

  “And I’m the Queen of Sheba,” Lexi snorted. Brooke gave her a pleading look.

  “You’re talking about Juliana Alexander?” Jules asked. “Our mother? The woman who lived in a seven-hundred-square-foot condo and drove a 1993 Chevy Caprice and wouldn’t consider shopping anywhere but the clearance rack? Are you sure you have the right person?”

  “I’m quite certain that I have the right person, and believe it or not, women like your mother are not as uncommon as you might think,” Mr. Wiley told the three stone-faced sisters. “Women who grew up with a financial disadvantage frequently learn the value of saving and being thrifty. Often the result is a nice, comfortable nest egg, although unfortunately, many times these ladies are so unaccustomed to spending even a single frivolous dime that the whole thing winds up being distributed among their heirs. That’s partially the story in your mother’s case—the bit about her not spending it, at least. Where her story diverges from most is that she managed to amass a lot more than what most would call a comfortable nest egg. Apparently she was a bit of a savant when it came to investing.”

  “How much?” Jules whispered.

  Mr. Wiley plucked a heavy pen from its stand on his enormous desk and started to write a number on his legal pad. The sisters’ eyes grew wider with each zero. He turned the paper so that it was facing them.

  “Is that . . . Wait, where’s the comma? Is there a decimal point in there?” Jules couldn’t make sense of the number she was seeing.

  “It’s thirty-seven million,” Mr. Wiley said.

  “Dollars?” Brooke croaked. Mr. Wiley nodded.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Lexi said.

  “Lexi,” Jules hissed, “watch your mouth.” Jules hadn’t seen Lexi in over a year, and she’d come here today hoping her baby sister had cleaned up her act at least a little. It was clear she had not.

  “Why should I?” Lexi shouted. “I’m fucking rich! I can do whatever I want! Fuckity fuck fuck fuck! How do you like me now?” Lexi had jumped up out of her chair and was dancing around Mr. Wiley’s office in an appallingly suggestive manner. It didn’t help that Lexi had decided that an appropriate outfit to wear to a meeting with your dead mother’s lawyer consisted of painted-on jeans and a white T-shirt so sheer she might as well have been wearing her purple lace bra on the outside of it. When Jules realized her sister’s racy little victory dance could go on for days, she grabbed her around the waist and thrust her back into her chair. Lexi pushed her sister’s hands away and folded her own arms across her chest. Her perky nipples strained against her T-shirt and Jules fought the urge to take off her own cardigan sweater and cover them.

  “Mr. Wiley, I sincerely apologize for my sister,” Jules said. “She’s not well, as you can see. But you started to say something about . . . I guess I’m just not even sure . . . I mean are we . . . Are my sisters and I even the beneficiaries?” Jules, Brooke and Lexi held their collective breath.

  “Yes, you are,” Mr. Wiley said. Brooke let out an uncharacteristic squeal; Jules was too stunned to respond.

  “Fucking-a-men! Goddamn it, Mom. Way to go! Can you hear me up there? I said, WAY TO GO! I take back every awful thing I ever said about you! You’re the fucking bomb!” Lexi had leapt up again and was shouting this at the roof, both fists raised in a double Black Panther salute.

  “Alexis?” Mr. Wiley said. When he did, Lexi stood stock-still, and her sisters watched as the color drained from her perfect face. Nobody on earth called her Alexis except her mother. And since her mother was no longer on earth but technically below it, that left nobody. Lexi lowered herself back into her chair.

  “Mr. Wiley?” Jules asked.

  “As I started to say, your inheritance comes with what I suppose you could call conditions,” Mr. Wiley said, tapping his pen absentmindedly on his desk.

  “Conditions?” Lexi scoffed. “Like doormat over there has to get some rich doctor to marry her—like that’s ever gonna happen—and Jules has to, I don’t know, stop dressing like she’s an eighty-year-old nun? Ooh, wait, she has to get knocked up! And let me guess, I have to cut off all of my hair or start flossing my teeth every day or get some stupid, shitty actual job or something before we get any money?” Lexi used air quotes when she said “actual job,” and her sisters stifled anxious laughs. That was one of the many things they referred to as a Juliana-ism.

  “Actually, you’re not that far off the mark,” Mr. Wiley said, nodding at Lexi.

  “What does that mean?” Jules demanded. “What exactly are the conditions, Mr. Wiley?”

  “Why don’t I just read Juliana’s note to you? I think it will answer a majority of your questions,” Mr. Wiley suggested. He handed them each a copy of the letter so they could follow along.

  Of course Juliana would die filthy rich, thought Jules. How else could she control us from the grave?

  Jefferson Wiley, Esquire, cleared his throat and began:

  Julia, Brooke and Alexis,

  It’s hard to imagine that when you hear these words, I’ll be gone. I like to believe I’ll be in a better place, one without pain and suffering. That’s what I want for you all, too.

  By now you are aware of the fact that I managed to sock away a little money before I passed, and you probably want to know how. I received a million dollars in life insurance money when your father died. Spending or enjoying it was never an option; I couldn’t have lived with myself knowing that I was profiting from his death. So I invested it, and I guess I have quite a knack for picking stocks. I managed to turn that money into several dozen times what I started with. Now I want the three of you to have it. I really do. But I also don’t believe that just handing it over would be doing you any favors, so instead you must earn it. In order for my inheritance to be divided in equal thirds and disbursed to each of you, you have exactly one year to meet the following conditions:

  Julia: Walking dogs is not a career. I would like you to write your book and make a concerted effort to sell it. The topic can be anything of your choosing, with the explicit exception of pornography. (I don’t care how well that Fifty Shades business sold; hopefully you won’t need the money anyway.) Jefferson knows some literary agents he can introduce you to; please don’t embarrass him.

  Brooke: No more dating down. You must sever all ties with this Jake person Julia has told me about and be dating a man both of your sisters deem suitable. (Julia and Alexis, I expect you to be discriminating.) Also, you must take up running again. I didn’t drive you to track meets all over California for you to just throw it all away. You have a year to train for and compete in a race no shorter than a half-marathon. A marathon would be better.

  Alexis: You must get an actual job. A respectable one with a paycheck and regular hours and, ideally, health benefits. And no more of this “Lexi” business. Your father and I didn’t give you a stripper name; we gave you a beautiful, elegant, classy name. It’s Alexis, and you must start using it.

  Jefferson has an extensive file with many pages of notes that I am confident will address any issues or complications that arise; anything that’s not covered specifically will be decided solely at Jefferson’s discretion. Please be clear: All of these conditions must be met or the money will go to charity. I pray you won’t let your estrangement stand in the way of what could be a very rich and rewarding future for you all.

  Love, Mom

  Mr. Wiley set down the letter and l
ooked at the three sisters. “Any questions? Comments?”

  Jules looked at her watch. January fifteenth. One year.

  Brooke sat dumbly, looking as if she’d been slapped.

  “She didn’t even know she was going to die,” Jules said, her voice barely above a whisper. “It was an accident.”

  “Your mother updated this letter annually,” Mr. Wiley explained. Jules, Brooke and Lexi tried to process this information.

  “That fucking bitch,” Lexi finally said.

  “Alexis, watch your mouth,” Jules said.

  Jules

  Jules opened the door of her Honda and slid in, tossing her purse into the empty passenger seat. A novel, a half-marathon and an “actual job”? Had her mother been mad? Jules had made a point of visiting her weekly, and none of these things had ever come up. Sure, Jules had probably mentioned in passing that she still pined to see her name on a book cover, and she might have let it slip that Brooke had put on some weight and clearly wasn’t running any longer, and certainly it would have come up when Lexi was invariably between waitressing jobs. But to lay out such specific stipulations for each of them? Who did that?

  Juliana, that was who.

  Jules’s head was reeling as she eased onto the jam-packed 405 Freeway. Her mother had gotten a million dollars twenty years ago and had never said a word, had never stopped shopping at the dollar store, never even bought herself a single new stick of furniture? They’d stayed in their tiny two-bedroom house, the three sisters squished into a bedroom not much bigger than a single-car garage. As the girls grew up and out of that house, Juliana had watched all three of them struggle to try to make ends meet, and never once offered help. Hell, it was Jules who’d paid the ER bill the time Lexi passed out in a drunken stupor and broke her jaw; Jules who’d worked three jobs until she’d managed to save enough money to buy her own dog-walking franchise; Jules who had learned to make a week’s worth of soup with just a cube of bouillon, a few carrots and a stalk of celery. And all along, her mother could have helped. Even a hundred dollars would have gotten any of them out of countless binds over the years—and Juliana could have forked over dozens of times that. But she hadn’t, not even once.

  None of it made sense. Why would her mother deprive herself of seeing the joy her money could bring to her daughters? Juliana Alexander had thrived on recognition, and as much as she loved to control Jules and her sisters, she could have lorded that money over them day and night. She could have bribed Jules to write her damned book and paid Brooke to dump Jake and forced Lexi to get her act together and actually been alive to witness it all. Why had her mother had her entire last wishes spelled out when she wasn’t even that old or sick? Why, oh why, had she chosen this of all possible routes?

  “I don’t need your money,” Jules said out loud, wiping away a tear that had fallen despite her best efforts to keep it together. “Shawn and I are fine. Fine, do you hear me? We have a house and jobs and I’m not a dog-walker, I’m a business owner. And I can grow that business as big as I want to! Shawn’s going to be a lawyer, and do you know how much money they make? A lot, I’ll have you know. I took care of myself as a kid and I’m taking care of myself now, so screw you.” The tears began to fall in earnest and Jules carefully edged to the side of the freeway. At the next exit, she pulled into a Burger King and found a parking spot under the shade of a giant oak. Then she turned off her car, rested her head on the steering wheel and let the tears come.

  As she cried and cried, there was no escaping the truth of the situation: She might be fine, but Brooke and Lexi certainly weren’t. Brooke had let a string of loser boyfriends bleed her dry—hence her current living situation with that dreadful Jake. And Lexi, well, Jules didn’t even want to think about how Lexi got by. And as much as her younger sisters had always resented her mothering ways, Jules hadn’t felt as if she’d had a choice. Her mother’s money would change her own life, no doubt, but it would completely transform theirs.

  Jules wiped her eyes with a wad of tissues from the glove box, pulled out her phone and launched the calculator. She knew that the inheritance money would be heavily taxed, but even if the government took half of the pie, it was a big pie by any standards. Eighteen million after tax divided three ways was more than six million for each of them. Six million dollars. Comfortable was one thing; six million was downright rich. Jules was confident that she could write a book—a decent one, even—for that amount of cash. As for her sisters, she couldn’t be sure. Certainly Brooke could break up with Jake, but could she run a half-marathon? She’d been a track star in high school, but ten years and quite a few extra pounds later, Jules couldn’t really see it. And what kind of “actual job” could a high-school-dropout party girl get?

  When Jules had graduated high school, every instinct in her body told her to get in her car, drive away and never look back. She’d been in Reseda all of her life and longed for a fresh start in a new place. She’d fought those urges, of course, because she still had Brooke and Lexi to think about. To her great dismay, her sisters hadn’t recognized her sacrifice. They accused her of abandoning them and begged her to stay at home, but she knew she couldn’t. Staying nearby was the best she could do.

  Jules found a room for rent in a crappy house around the corner from the one she’d grown up in on busy Wilbur Avenue. With no skills or education, she’d taken up dog-walking, which gave her frequent opportunities to check on her sisters as she strolled by. She wasn’t going to stick around forever, of course; just until her sisters had graduated, too, and were on their feet. While she was waiting, she managed to save enough money to enroll in a few classes at Los Angeles Valley College, and then she met Shawn. He, too, was just a part-time student, but he was planning to go to law school one day, and it was love at first sight. Shawn lived just on the other side of the freeway in Van Nuys, where he took care of his own sick mother. Blinded by love, Jules forgot all about her dreams of running away and starting over.

  Nobody could say that Jules didn’t try to keep her fractured family together. She’d kept tabs on her sisters the best she could, given them money when she had it and invited them for holiday meals and coffees out. Lexi had wanted nothing to do with her from the get-go—she didn’t need anybody, she insisted—but she and Brooke had been relatively close for a while at least. But even though she’d kept her mouth shut about Brooke’s weight and bit her tongue through a parade of bad boyfriends, Brooke would still accuse her of being just like Mom whenever they had even the tiniest disagreement. They drifted apart naturally, as people who think they have little in common often do, and Jules silently surrendered to it.

  Through it all, she had been the only one to put in the backbreaking work of maintaining a relationship with their mother. Lexi couldn’t be bothered and Brooke was bothered too much. So it was Jules who visited Juliana weekly, enduring her tirades alone and taking the brunt of the unhappy woman’s abusive anger on behalf of her sisters. Over the years Jules had racked her brain more times than she could count, trying to figure out where she’d gone wrong or what she could have done differently to make her mother love her, and she always came up at a loss.

  Seeing her sisters today, she couldn’t believe the women they’d grown into. Her once athletic and outgoing middle sister was a shapeless, timid frump, and her stunning baby sister looked and acted like a strung-out streetwalker. If Brooke would let her, Jules was pretty sure she could help her get back in shape and get rid of her deadweight boyfriend. As always, Lexi was going to be the wild card. Alexis, she corrected herself, firing up her car engine. Jules drove home on autopilot, lost in a tangle of memories and musings.

  “Well?” Shawn asked the moment he walked in the door. He’d just come from his three-hour ethics class, and he had dark rings beneath his eyes. “What did you get? Did you get the Caprice? I’ll bet your mom left it to you just to piss Lexi off.”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Jul
es said, throwing a container of leftover pasta into the microwave.

  “Let me guess. Brooke got the Caprice? That would make Lexi even madder! I’ll bet those two were going at it like a couple of cats in a bag.”

  “Actually, we didn’t even get to the Caprice. Are you ready for this? Apparently my mom was loaded.”

  “Loaded?” Shawn asked. “As in rich?”

  “Yup,” Jules said.

  “And I’m the King of Sheba.” Shawn laughed.

  “That is so weird, Alexis said the exact same thing! Well, she said queen, not king. But still.”

  “‘Alexis’? Did your wacky sister decide to revamp her trampy image or something?”

  “I know, Shawn, it’s nuts, but apparently my mom had millions of dollars—thirty-seven of them to be exact—and she left them to me and my sisters—”

  “You’re not serious,” Shawn said, his face a portrait of disbelief. After all, they’d spent a decade working their fingers to the bone and shopping at three different grocery stores each week to get the best deal on the cheapest cuts of meat. Now they were comfortable, by SoCal standards at least, but they had no padding, no savings, and no plan for the future.

  “I’m dead serious, I swear,” Jules insisted. “I mean, that’s what her attorney says, and he’s the executor. Oh, and that doesn’t include the condo. Or the Caprice.” She smiled at this last bit.

  “So you’re saying we are about to inherit”—he did some calculating—“somewhere in the neighborhood of ten million dollars?”

  “I think it’s probably closer to six million after taxes, but yes. With a catch.”

  “A catch? What do you mean, a catch?”

  “I forget what Mr. Wiley, her attorney, called them exactly, but they’re basically conditions. Things that Brooke and Lexi and I have to do before we can get the money. Oh, one of them is that Alexis has to go by her given name from now on. No more Lexi, ever.”