been looking for an excuse to get rid of for months. Then about two days after we roll out, they’ll say, Sorry, your figures weren’t quite what we were expecting after all, which will be true—they’ll be bigger, but never mind—and afterward CapCities will go off and buy Shanghai the way they wanted to, and everything will be fine. When it’s all over, I’ll send you the clippings.”
There was a brief silence. Maybe the clippings thing was taking it a little too far, Dev thought. The silence stretched. Finally his dad said, “The only reason you know all that is because Jim told you.”
Absolutely right, Dev thought, and that’s why you’re pissed—you didn’t get to tell me first. Which it’s not your job to do. Why do we have to have this same conversation every day with different words? “That’s what he’s paid for,” Dev said. “And he’s one of the best in the business, or at least that’s the delusion that the Wall Street Journal has at the moment. So you relax, because Jim and I have it set up so that it’s gonna be easier for somebody to obtain a controlling stake in the moon than in Omnitopia. Meanwhile, where’s Mom? She said she was going to call yesterday evening, but I thought maybe she got busy.”
“She’s in the hospital,” his dad said, with what sounded to Dev like barely concealed triumph.
“What?”
“For tests. Her back was acting up again.”
“Oh, God,” Dev said. “Do you know when’s she going to be out?”
“This afternoon. And you’d know, too, if you’d just concentrate a little more on staying in touch with her instead of playing the high and mighty corporate executive—”
Which I couldn’t play hard enough for you five minutes ago. I just cannot win, can I? “This afternoon?” Dev said. “When did she go in?”
“This morning—”
“So she’s not in the hospital, she’s at the hospital. At the clinic—”
“Oh, well, if you’re going to play semantics games with me—”
“Games are what it’s all about, Dad,” Dev said, in a voice intended to sound carelessly cheerful. If it was vengeance for his father trying to throw a fright into Dev over something relatively minor, at least it was a petty vengeance. “Who taught me to play hard? And speaking of games, you still haven’t RSVP’d for the big switch-throwing ceremony.”
“Uh,” his father said. “Well, I don’t know, it depends on your mom. If she doesn’t feel like going—”
“I understand completely,” Dev said. “Try to let me know by tomorrow night, okay? Otherwise I’m going to have to give your VIP seat to some minor head of state, and they’ll brag about it afterward, and then I’ll have to buy their country to put them in their place. It’d put a dent in my liquidity, and we can’t have that, can we? Gotta go now. Bye-bye.”
Dev punched the off button, and just stood there for a moment looking at his phone. Then he swore under his breath. Why do we always have to be doing this to each other? He thought. I know he loves me but he has such strange ways of showing it. Dev had trouble remembering any time in his life when the two of them hadn’t been at each other’s throats about something: when he first caught the gaming bug from his mom as a child, when he ditched his (dad- pleasing but ultimately unsatisfying) English lit degree program at Penn State to go study computer science at MIT, when he went on to finance his degree independently after his dad refused to pay for it . . . Endless introspection on the subject and one interesting but inconclusive bout of analysis had left Dev with plenty of theories about The Dad Thing, but no certainty. Are we just two control freaks banging heads? Or is this a liberal-arts-versus-science argument? Dev’s dad’s three degrees were all in the humanities, and his retirement from his emeritus professorship at Penn, though often threatened, never quite seemed ready to happen. Or are we just having some kind of sublimated town-and-gown fight? This was Dev’s favorite theory at the moment, since his huge financial success had taken none of the edge off his relationship with his father, and had for some time made it rather worse. Now his dad’s routine anger seemed generally to be shifting into what read as angry pride. Who knows, maybe it’ll just be pride someday. . . .
Naaaah.
He sighed and speed-dialed his mom, hoping she was someplace where