All You Could Ask For A Novel - By Mike Greenberg Page 0,107
it was.
That feeling. The nervous gnawing in the pit of my stomach, the slap in the face, the redness in the cheeks that followed. It had been a really long time but now it was back. Because, like I said, you really never do get out of high school.
“Well,” I said, “I guess she really does remember me.”
“You never told me about that,” Samantha said. She sounded hurt, and I understood. Not because she had the right to know anything she wanted, but because she felt, as I did, that we shared everything. Only I hadn’t shared this.
“It just didn’t seem relevant anymore,” I said. But that wasn’t true, not at all. When your father goes to jail it is always relevant, even if you live to be a hundred. “Do you want to know the story?”
“Only if you want to tell me,” Samantha said.
“I don’t want to tell you at all,” I said, “but I will.”
Samantha frowned.
“That came out wrong,” I said. “I mean it isn’t a lot of fun talking about it, so I never do, but it’s important to me that you know I’m not keeping anything a secret.”
“Katherine, you don’t—”
I cut her off. “Sit back and relax,” I said. “It’s not a quick story.”
The story is about my mother’s brother—Uncle Edward—who was an enormously rich man and a total cretin. He made his money in real estate, buying decrepit buildings, throwing out the poor people who lived in them, tearing down the buildings, and putting up town houses. It’s perfectly legal, and I suppose you could argue he was improving neighborhoods, but I always wondered where all the poor people went. I asked him about it one time, and only one time.
“Who gives a shit?” was his reply.
That’s why I never asked again.
My father worked for him, in a management role that left him a lot of free time, so my dad was always around when I was a girl, which was terrific. But it was pretty obvious he didn’t love his job, and the summer I turned eleven I found out why. We were at my uncle’s house in Southampton. We visited once per summer, not more and not less, and it was clear my parents never enjoyed themselves, but I certainly did. The house was sensational. It had a pool and a trampoline and my cousins had a playroom bigger than our house. I used to love it there, until the day I discovered the air vent.
It wasn’t actually me who discovered it. My eldest cousin showed it to me. His name was Richard, and I thought he was cool because he looked a little like John Travolta and because he smoked. Richard showed me an air vent in the downstairs playroom where he could sneak a cigarette, blowing the smoke into the air duct. It was genius, and utterly cool.
That year when I turned eleven, I decided I wanted to try it. I knew where to find cigarettes, my uncle kept his on the kitchen counter, and I knew where to go to smoke them. I can still remember my heart beating as I snuck two cigarettes out of the pack and tucked them into the waistband of my sweatpants, then tiptoed down the stairs. There was no one in the playroom. My father and my uncle were the only ones in the house and they’d locked themselves in my uncle’s office, telling me they needed to talk in private and were not to be disturbed.
I slid open the vent that covered the air duct and stuck my head inside, but before I could strike a match I heard voices. They sounded tinny, with a hint of echo, but I recognized them immediately and was easily able to make out what they were saying.
“You’ve never treated me with respect.”
That was my father.
“Don’t make a fool of yourself.”
That was my uncle.
“After the way you’ve treated me all these years,” my father said, “if you think I’m going to get you off the hook you must be out of your mind.”
“Let me tell you something,” my uncle said. “You’ve been riding this gravy train for years. This is the first time I’ve ever asked you to do anything and you will do exactly as I tell you.”
“Or else what? Are you threatening to cut your own sister and her family out of the business?”
“No,” my uncle replied. “That is not what I’m threatening.”