Dirty Tycoons: King of Code-Prince Charming-White Knight

by Reiss, CD

  I flipped the picture. He’d handwritten the date and a note.

  We miss you.

  “I missed you too.”

  What had I been doing when this picture was taken?

  Against the back wall of the hall closet, I kept a stack of photo albums. I kneeled on the floor and fingered the spines, plucking out one of the middle. Hunched in front of the closet and opened it in the middle.

  My world had red brick in the background too. The factory closed. Daddy had given notice two weeks before, and the workers had set up a “locked doors party” onsite, celebrating what they couldn’t control. It had seemed like a bump in the road back then. Something to have a few beers and eat barbecue over.

  I put the picture of Chris and Lance in that timeframe.

  Downstairs, something shattered. I hurried to the kitchen to find Harper cleaning up a broken glass in bare feet.

  “Are you all right?” I pushed her away, taking the broom and dustpan. Her hair was greasy, her eyes were puffy, and her lips were bitten red.

  “I’ll get over it.” She hoisted herself onto the counter and got a new glass from the rack. She filled it, sniffling.

  My sister didn’t cry. I did all the crying for the family. Harper worked, studied, followed her curiosity down rabbit holes. Her spirit had been crushed. Something beautiful had been destroyed. I jammed the broom into the corners and edges of the kitchen as if I wanted to beat the glass out of them. My rage had its own mind, running my blood faster and hotter, contracting my muscles into tight, sinewy braids.

  “Where is he?” I asked, slapping the edge of the dustpan into the trash. The glass tinkled in.

  “He went back to California,” she said into her glass before she finished it, looking out the window. “It’s over. I have things to do now.” She put the glass on the counter and saw me for the first time since I walked in. She put her hands up as if warding me off. “Whoa, Cath. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay.”

  “I’ve never seen you look like that.”

  “Like I could kill him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I will. I’ll fly to California and find him and rip him apart.” I wasn’t going to kill him. I wasn’t going to shred him. But I wanted to, and I could get close enough by saying it. “Look at you. You’ve been crying.”

  “You cry all the time.”

  What a sad, sad accusation.

  “It’s a tension release. You’re crying over Taylor leaving, and I’m going to kill him.”

  She picked her glass up again and filled it. “It’s not his fault. I broke up with him.”

  “Why? You liked him.”

  She took a long drink. “I love him.” Her face scrunched as if she was ready to cry all over again. “But he was ready to give everything up for me, and I can’t live with that. I can’t live with holding him back.”

  She broke down in tears, slipping off the counter and into my arms. I took her glass and put it safely on the counter while holding her. My beautiful, genius sister. The one who was supposed to go anywhere and do anything, she felt unworthy enough to be unhappy rather than bring someone else down.

  “You wouldn’t have, Harper. That’s…” The idea was absurd, ridiculous, unjust. I kissed her head as it shook against my shoulder. “Are you wiping your nose on my shirt?”

  She nodded against me. “I have to do laundry anyway.”

  I gave her a paper towel. She took it and stepped into another hug. I stroked her hair and leaned against the counter while she sniffled in my arms.

  “Can I tell you something you don’t want to hear?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “You need to finish college, Harper. Not to make yourself worthy, because you’re the best woman I know. But because you need to be the person you were meant to become. I did it here. You can’t. The world needs you to do that.”

  She leaned away from me, leaving me with an empty, cold place where her sadness had been. She honked into the paper towel and folded it in half so she could blow her nose again.

  “The world needs you too,” she said, sniffing and wiping the sides of her nose.

  “Maybe.” Outside, a car pulled down the driveway. “But you need to think about college again.”

  “I will.”

  We both looked out the window. Reggie’s Chevy was driving so slowly into the garbage cans that they tipped but didn’t fall before he stopped the car.

  “What is he doing?” Harper asked.

  I looked at the clock. It was only ten minutes after noon. “I think he’s been drinking.”

  I went out the side door before Harper could reply.

  Reggie got out, letting the door open so hard it bounced halfway closed again as he came toward me like a man barreling into a bar fight.

  “Reggie!”

  He put his hands on my face and his mouth on mine. He tasted like beer and desperation, and when I pushed him away, he grabbed me tightly so I couldn’t get away.

  The klonk was preceded by a whiff of wind and followed by Reggie’s grunt. He was off me, and Harper stood a foot away with the top of a metal garbage can in her hands. Reggie had been thrown against the side of the house, bleeding from the head.

  “Jesus!”

  “Don’t you do that, Reginald,” Harper shouted. “I’m mad enough to take you out, drunk or not.”

  Reggie’s response was a series of sharp ahs and moans. He stumbled trying to get up. “Why’d you do that?”

  “If I gotta tell you…” Harper wielded her garbage can cover like a knight carried a shield.

  “I was just trying to…” He took his bloody hand away from his skin. “Jesus.”

  “I’ll get you some ice,” I said, still tasting his beer on my tongue.

  “It’s bleeding!”

  “And a towel.”

  “Catherine, you know I didn’t mean anything by it, right?”

  He came toward me, but Harper got her backswing ready, turning the shield into a weapon.

  “You’re drunk.” I started for the side door.

  “You want his money, don’t you? You think he can take care of you.”

  I didn’t have to answer him. I didn’t owe him an explanation of my feelings or actions.

  “Sit down, Reggie.” Harper swung a plastic chair behind him. “Before I give you a concussion, sit.”

  He ignored her. “He can’t. You know he lost all his money right? He’s got nothing.”

  I felt a few things at once.

  I was sad for Chris. I knew how hard he’d worked.

  But it didn’t reduce my attraction to him. It increased it.

  Why?

  Why would it even matter?

  Leaving the side door behind, I stood in front of Reggie and pushed him gently into the chair Harper was holding still.

  “Reginald, I’m sorry you feel rejected. I know it hurts. I hate that you’re hurt and I hate that I hurt you, but I don’t hate it enough to lie to you. Don’t kiss me again. Ever. Drunk or sober. Ever. I’m going to call Johnny to bring you home.”

  I stomped into the house, and Harper was right behind.

  Before the door closed behind her, Reggie shouted, “You’re a whore, Catherine Barrington. A fucking whore!”

  “Oh, fuck this,” Harper started back out, but I grabbed her arm.

  “Leave him be.” I closed the door and locked it. “He’ll regret it when he sobers up whether you concuss him or not.” Picking up the wall phone, I dialed Johnny and Pat’s house.

  “He did, you know,” she said while the phone rang.

  “He did what?”

  “Chris’s hedge fund lost a bunch of money. Something like seventy-three point four six percent of its value.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I mean, guys like that are never totally broke. He probably has a billion hidden away.”

  “Still don’t care.”

  “Hello?” Johnny’s voice came over the phone.

  “Hey,
Johnny, are you on shift this afternoon? Reggie needs to get picked up and poured into bed.”

  Johnny agreed to fetch him. I hung up and prepared an ice pack.

  Someone was going to deeply regret kissing me, and I wasn’t sure who.

  Chapter 25

  chris

  Marsha’s office was bright white, bedecked in fresh flowers and sunlight. I sat on the white-leather-and-chrome chair, and she sat across from me. Elbows on her white wood desk, she steepled her fingers. She had two huge rings on each hand and matching bangle bracelets. Her right eye squinted in my direction, and that side of her lips curved into a smile.

  “We all had a feeling you two went back there,” she said.

  “Grounds keeping had its privileges.”

  “And you need it set up by tonight?”

  “I’ll pay for the service and tip whoever has to do extra work to get it done.”

  “You bet you will.”

  “I need access and privacy.”

  “We aim to please, Mister Carmichael.”

  We shook on it. As she led me to the door, she said, “She’s worked hard for everyone else over there. It’s nice to see something good happen to her.”

  “I may not be all that good.”

  “At least Harper won’t have to hit you over the head.” I must have taken too long trying to put her meaning together, because she explained without me having to ask. “You didn’t hear?”

  “I just saw her.” What possibly could have happened?

  “Gossip travels fast around here.”

  She untangled the grapevine on the way to reception. Reggie had gone to the Barrington house to make Catherine his, and when she refused, Harper had done something completely expected and bashed him over the head.

  I made light of it, and Marsha promised to have the club set up for me by nightfall.

  Everything was going fine, but it wasn’t. It was terrible. I didn’t know how long I stood in that front garden, staring through a rosebush, asking myself what the hell I was doing. I’d disrupted everything.

  A bit of yellow was visible at the base of the bush. I reached through the leaves and thorns. A tennis ball. You were supposed to throw it back, but no one was playing nearby. The kid who kept the grounds would take it back to the pro shop and toss it in one of the coach’s baskets.

  The pro shop window was manned by a young woman in her teens. I held out the ball.

  “Can you toss this in a basket?” I asked. “I found it in the garden.”

  “They’re locked up. You can keep it or leave it here.”

  I put it on the counter. “Is Irv around?”

  She looked puzzled. “Irv?”

  “He was… who’s the manager?”

  “Oh! You mean the last manager? He died in…” She counted on her fingers.

  She told me the year, but it didn’t register. Irv was dead. The guy who’d given all the poor kids jobs. The guy who’d witnessed my first kiss with Catherine. Gone. And I didn’t even know. I should have known.

  “Sir?”

  “Right. Well.” I took the tennis ball off the counter. “Thanks for your help.”

  I walked back to my car in a fugue, clutching the yellow ball in my fist.

  No matter what happened in Barrington, no matter how I walked away, no matter how long I stayed, or my success on a mission I couldn’t even define, I couldn’t leave things worse than when I came. I couldn’t leave things undone, unsaid, broken.

  I had to face Catherine about everything, and I had to face the town I’d abandoned.

  Nothing about Barrington was the same as when I’d left, but maybe some things hadn’t changed. On a Friday afternoon, payday, anyone who wasn’t working would be at Walter’s for burgers, beer, and pool. Or not.

  I drove there on autopilot. Walter’s still didn’t have a sign out front, and the parking lot still smelled sour and dusty. Johnny’s motorcycle with its sidecar sat in the lot out front, next to Kyle’s prized Harley. I parked next to Orrin’s pickup truck.

  When I walked into the dark room, I felt like an outlaw riding into town. Conversations stopped, but the pool balls continued to roll and click. Faces were lost in shadow. Sunlight shot through the windows, bounced off the dust in the air, and was smothered in darkness before it could brighten the room.

  I felt something warm and wet on my fingers.

  Percy was licking them. I kneeled and rubbed behind his ears.

  “Look who’s buying the next round!” a young voice shouted. It was Damon. When I’d left, he was in fourth grade. I shook his hand.

  “You don’t need no more rounds,” Orrin said, leaning on his pool cue.

  “They still make burgers here?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Johnny said from the bar. “But the fryer’s been busted, so we get potato chips with it.”

  When I shook his hand, I saw Reggie at the other side of the bar with a rectangle of gauze attached to his forehead with a hashtag of tape. I slapped Butthead on the shoulder and gave Kyle a manly hug.

  “Thanks for coming this morning,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t be such a stranger.”

  I ordered a burger, and a beer appeared in front of me. I flipped a credit card on the bar and made a circle with my fingers, indicating I was indeed buying the next round.

  I wished I’d worn jeans. I was casual in a sports jacket and button-front shirt, but I should have worn a T-shirt. Sneakers, not shoes. Or work boots that I didn’t own, worn at the right foot, with a history of their own.

  “Really, thanks for coming,” I said to the bar at large.

  “Had to watch Catherine,” Johnny said. “Make sure you weren’t going to take advantage.”

  “Thanks for that too.” I sipped my beer.

  The pool game resumed, and though I didn’t expect Reggie to shake my hand or even greet me, he seemed isolated at the other side of the bar.

  “What’s up with Reg?”

  “His head got in the way of an object at velocity. Mrs. Boden taped him up. She was a nurse in the Korean War. Didn’t take no whining or crying from him,” Johnny said.

  “Should he be drinking?”

  “A concussion woulda set him straight. But here we are.”

  Johnny wasn’t going to tell me what happened, and I wasn’t going to admit I already knew. I wasn’t one of them anymore.

  “Here we are,” I said.

  “When you going back?” Butthead asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re pretty proud of you around here,” Johnny said.

  Butthead huffed. “He’s the only one who understands what the fuck you do.”

  “Quantitative trading ain’t that hard, asshole.” Johnny turned to me. “Ain’t hard to understand, I mean. If doing it was easy, this dimnut would have the scratch to drink imported beer.”

  “Fuck that,” Butthead said. “Buy American.”

  “See what I’m saying? Get the fuck out of here while you can,” Johnny said to me. “Place makes you stupid. I’d rather watch you make money from afar.”

  “What about Catherine?” I asked impulsively. I was tired of beating around the bush. “What if I took her away?”

  “You got my blessing.”

  “Everyone south of the train tracks would shit bricks,” Butthead added.

  “You’re south of the tracks, shithead,” Johnny mumbled. “What are you going to do the next time you can’t get antibiotics for your little girl? What are you gonna do when she’s not here to feel sorry for your dumb ass?”

  “She’s done enough already. If people don’t have their shit together, fuck ‘em. Goes for me too.”

  The bravado wasn’t lost on me. I’d entered adulthood with it. Walking into the biggest city in the world with a few hundred dollars in my pocket, ready to take over the world if that was what it took to win a woman I didn’t understand. I’d thought money was important to her, but it wasn’t. Never had been. Her people were important to her. Her tribe. I’d
missed the point entirely.

  I made eye contact with Reggie. He was still alone.

  “I still love her,” I said to Johnny quietly. “But I don’t want to just come in here and cause trouble for anyone.”

  “Trust me.” Johnny put his beer down with a deliberation that was punctuation. “We wouldn’t let anything happen to her she didn’t deserve one way or the other. But times are changing. Time she did too.”

  “What about you?” I asked as my food came.

  He launched into his kids. They’d gone to college and never come back for more than holidays. One thing that came through his story was how proud he was of that exact fact. They’d moved on.

  “You miss them?” I asked.

  “Every damn day.” With a tip of his chin, he ordered another beer. “Reg looks like he’s gonna have an aneurysm.”

  He looked fine to me, but I had to trust Johnny on that. I took my beer and left my seat, crossing from the cool kids’ table to the doghouse.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting next to Reggie.

  “Fuck off.”

  There was no reason to answer him, but I wasn’t walking away either. Not yet. I finished half my beer before he spoke again.

  “She needs someone who isn’t leaving.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Someone who appreciates her. Who isn’t thinking she’s someone she isn’t.”

  “You should know.”

  In my complacency, he had me by the collar and pushed against the wall in a second. He was an artist and I was a mathematician, but the threat of a bloody fistfight seemed very real.

  “She’s not decoration,” he said through his teeth. His eyes were lit by inner fire and his breath was soaked in beer.

  Hands appeared on his shoulder. Kyle. Curtis. Johnny, of course. They pulled him off me, but his grip had never been the primary tools of attack. Our eyes were locked like two pit bulls in a ring. I wasn’t letting him get pulled away any more than he was allowing it.