Net Worth by Amelia Wilde
10
Mason
For once,Jameson’s early for something. He came home just before I went to sleep at three. Highly unusual, since he’s usually not here until we’re about to eat. Or until we’ve been eating for half an hour.
“Where is he?” he asks the server on his way through.
“The den, Mr. Hill,” she says.
“Cool,” he answers, and then he comes through with wide, what-the-fuck eyes. “What happened? Did you get in a fight last night?”
I don’t get up from where I’m sprawled on the couch with a pillow under my knee. It will do nothing to improve my mood. “I’m surprised you didn’t. Are you sure the entire NYPD isn’t about to burst in behind you?”
He rolls his eyes and flops into an armchair. Jameson might not have been up to his usual bullshit last night, but the bruise-colored circles under his eyes are evidence that wherever his mind went, it was rough.
My youngest brother pretends not to be looking at the photo on one of the built-in shelves surrounding the TV. An eight by ten of us in a simple white frame. My mother loved those lifestyle photo shoots where we stood by the front door or in the yard somewhere or on the beach where we were vacationing. In this one, we’re all gathered by the red door of the house. The three of us are barely contained by my mother’s arms, and my dad holds Remy, who’s three and beaming at the camera with her baby teeth and scrunched-up nose.
“Uh-oh,” Gabriel sings as he enters. “Mason’s going to be a nightmare today.” I give him the finger over the back of the couch. He grabs for my hand and misses. “Go too hard at the gym?”
“Whose apartment are you coming from? You smell like a flower shop.”
“No one’s apartment. I was in the flower shop.”
“Then where are my flowers?”
He snorts. “Why the hell would I bring you flowers?”
“For having to put up with your obnoxious ass.”
Gabe pretends like he’s going to hug me, and I scowl at him until he backs off with a laugh. My knee is a mess today. “So sensitive,” he taunts.
“At least I care about something other than my nightly fuck.”
“That’s because you don’t have a nightly fuck. And that’s a shame. It would improve your mood.” My brother drops into another armchair, and I just don’t care. My knee hurts. My head aches. I couldn’t sleep most of the night, after Charlotte left. Easiest to blame it on my knee. Easiest to lie on the couch and not move. “Where’s Remy?”
“Oh my god,” our sister says, like he summoned her with the question. “Oh my god, guys are such assholes.” She’s a blonde, irritated storm cloud this morning as she sits down on the other end of the couch with a huff. It’s an extra-long couch, but with me lying the way I am, she doesn’t have quite enough room. Even though she’s pissed, she’s ultra-careful as she slips her arm under my calves and slides her body underneath.
I let her do it. Not because it doesn’t hurt. It hurts like someone’s driving a fist into the muscle around my knee, making it pull too tight to bear. Fighting her on it would only make the situation worse. Remy studies my face while she slings her arms over my calves and stretches her own legs to the ottoman.
“Guys are the worst,” Jameson says. “Did you just learn this information today?”
“I grew up with you, so no,” she shoots back, but her mouth quirks with a smile. Jameson is her favorite. She won’t admit it out loud, but she doesn’t have to. “You’re the only ones I don’t hate.”
“Aww, Remy, out of everyone in the world? You’re cute.”
She scowls at Gabriel. “That’s what the guys in my Classics lecture say. That I’m cute. Never mind that I’m scoring the highest out of all of them. And they won’t shut the hell up. Every one of those boys is in love with the sound of his own voice. And then there’s the one who wants to take me out.”
“Who?” An echo reaches my ears at the same time as my own voice.
Not an echo.
My brothers, asking the same question.
“Who cares?” Remy rolls her eyes. “See? All you care about is what he wants. When are people going to ask the women what they want?”
“I don’t give a fuck what he wants.” I curl my toes, trying to relieve some of the pressure in my knee. Remy rubs absently at my shin. It doesn’t help, but it doesn’t hurt, either. “I want his name so I can kill him.”
“Get in line,” says Jameson. “You can kill him after I kill him.”
“This is why I never tell you anything,” Remy teases. She segues into a story about a group project with Jameson and Gabe needling her for the name.
I don’t hear any of it.
If someone treated my sister the way I treated Charlotte, I’d lose my mind.
I was only half-joking when I said I’d kill that motherfucker for harassing Remy about a date. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to protect her. Even if she hadn’t been my responsibility since she was seven, with her mess of blonde hair and her lanky limbs and her obsession with digging in the dirt, I’d still be this way about her.
The possibility of an apology, of ending things with Charlotte, floats into my mind and dies a hasty death. I don’t want to apologize to her. I don’t want to step back.
Revenge is the whole point of this enterprise.
And, like the goals I set at the office, this act of retribution has been carefully calibrated to get the Van Kempts where they’re most vulnerable. It’s too perfect that both of their biggest weaknesses are all wrapped up in one another right now. Charlotte and the company. The company and Charlotte. I’ll wreck one and profit from the other.
In order for me to do that, she needs to come back.
I pick up my phone from my lap and send a text. An order for flowers to be delivered to one Charlotte Van Kempt, along with a note.
The chef sends her assistant with breakfast trays, and Remy shifts my legs gently off her lap so I can sit up and get a plate together.
“Do you remember when we used to do this in Brooklyn?” No idea why I ask the question while we’re all leaning over the coffee table, avoiding collisions with each other’s hands to put fruit and omelets on plates.
“No, because we didn’t do this,” Gabriel says. “We had plastic plates and Eggo waffles.”
Jameson adds melon to his plate. “I like Eggo waffles.”
“Everyone likes Eggo waffles.” Remy leans back on the couch. “I don’t know if I remember the first place. Was it the one with the balcony?”
“No. That was the second one. Or the third,” Jameson says. “You spent all your time digging in plants we kept on the balcony. The Brooklyn apartment was a real shithole.”
“The one with the balcony was just before the house.” Gabriel stabs a strawberry with his fork. “It was such a pain in the ass to get that place.”
He’d just turned twenty when I got us into the house. It took both of us on the mortgage because none of the landlords wanted to believe I owned a business at twenty-two. It had been a string of sleepless years for a revolving door of reasons. If it wasn’t the nightmares, it was the ever-present pain in my knee. If it wasn’t the pain, it was the never-ending difficulty of getting Phoenix off the ground. If it wasn’t Phoenix, it was trying to make a home for my siblings while the world spun out of control.
Gabriel was the one who recovered the quickest—or the one who seemed to, after our parents died. Jameson regularly lost his shit. But he would pull it together for Remy, whose grief seemed the most unpredictable. Some days she seemed fine. Like our parents had been distant relatives. Like she hadn’t wanted to sleep next to our mom every night until she was five.
Other days, she was not fine.
“I remember that prick,” Jameson says around a mouthful of omelet. No complaints today. He makes the face he uses to mock the jackass we had to meet with every hour of our lives for the five weeks it took to close on the house. He puts on a ridiculous voice to imitate him. “Son, are you sure you can’t convince your father to co-sign? It would speed things up with the underwriters.”
Gabriel stabs his fork into a strawberry. “He really thought we were lying.”
“I bet that guy’s nervous about running into Mason to this day,” Jameson says.
“What? Why?” Remy’s been focused on her plate, her mind elsewhere. She glances over at me. “Where was I during this?”
“You were there, too. We couldn’t leave you with anyone, so you came to all the meetings when we had to bring in documents and sign papers. What the hell was that book called? It was a mystery book, with pictures. Puzzles to solve in the book. All of it took place near the Pyramids.”
“The Curse of the Lost Idol.” Her nose scrunches with her laugh. “I still have that.”
“You loved it so much you missed Mason’s first death threat.”
Her eyes go wide. “You did not threaten a mortgage broker.”
“No. No. It wasn’t like that. All he had to do was stand up,” Gabriel says. “Jesus, he was so pissed. That guy wouldn’t shut up about getting a co-signer, and he would get on the phone with our father if it would help, and on and on and on, until—” He puts his plate on the coffee table and frowns. More than frowns. His imitation of me, pissed as hell and ready to do something about it, is dead-on. I’ve seen it plenty of times in the mirror. Gabe gets up out of his seat and towers over Remy, who shrinks back.
“Oh my god,” she says.
“One more word out of your mouth,” Gabriel intones in a low voice that I assume sounds like me, “and I’ll walk. My first stop will be at the CEO’s office. He’ll fucking fire you himself.”
“You’ve seen him,” Jameson says to Remy. “You know what he’s like.”
I sigh. “I’m in the room, motherfucker.”
“And my second stop,” says Gabriel, still pretending to be me, “will be to your house.”
“I hope you didn’t leave your wife alone,” Jameson and Gabriel say together, and then the whole thing collapses into laughter. Gabe sits down again and pulls his plate back into his lap.
Remy grins. Jameson shakes his head.
Even I can’t help the grin that tugs at my lips. I watch the moment crest and fade with an ache in my chest that seems permanent now. It ebbs and flows but it’s never really gone. Remy moves her fork slowly over her plate. “I liked that place, I think.”
“You spent all your time digging in the yard.” It was why I’d gone to such lengths to get it in the first place. It had a yard, and it had a decent school for Remy, and even at eleven she knew what she wanted to be doing with her life. “We took turns dragging you inside for dinner. You were a treasure hunter. Always convinced you’d find something out there.”
“And I did.”
“That was garbage.” Jameson studies a bite of waffle on the tip of his fork.
“Those were antiques.”
They really were antiques. Glass bottles a hundred years old, from when the suburb had been more of an outpost. Everything had grown up around it. The house had changed hands again and again, its property value fluctuating with the years, and by the time we got there, it was verging on ramshackle. All the value was in the land itself. The location.
It was the first time Jameson had looked at a building on a lot and called it. He was about to turn nineteen with a wild, haunted gleam in his eyes. It was hell to keep him in school. To keep him from disappearing into the city and never coming back.
“Dad would have liked that place,” Gabriel says. He makes a show of looking around for the remote. It only takes him a second to find it next to the breakfast tray. He picks it up but doesn’t turn on the TV.
“Would he have?” Remy’s voice is quiet. Aching. It reminds me of the way she would ask questions after they died. Where are they, where are they? The middle of the night. My knee twisted up with pain. Holding her in the first shitty apartment in Brooklyn, the only one that would rent to us. My back propped up against the wall so she wouldn’t drown in her own tears. Jameson and Gabriel in the streetlight glow. He’s gotta lie down, Remy. They’re not here. They’re not coming back.
“Yeah.” Jameson’s not eating anymore. “He would have made it into one of his pet projects and driven Mom crazy working on it himself when he had the whole company to run during the week.”
I finally find the voice to speak.
“Not himself. He wouldn’t leave her for that long on the weekend.” Part of the reason they’re both dead now. “But he would have hired a separate contractor and asked for constant updates.” That’s how he was when we were growing up. Always consumed with one project or another. Multiple things on his mind at any given time. But he’d drop his phone for my mother. Just let it go. Down onto the tile by the pool or the asphalt on the driveway or the hardwood floor. Cracked so many screens like that.
“I miss,” Jameson starts, but then he blinks hard, like he’s just waking up. He puts his plate onto the coffee table, runs a hand through his hair, and walks out.
It’s the thickest silence. One crowded with heartache and emptiness. Those two things shouldn’t take up any space, but they take up all of it. All the air. A pressure around my knee tightens like a vise.
Gabe clears his throat. “I think we should watch the one you like, Remy. The one with all the maids.”
“Downton Abbey?”
“That’s the one.” He picks up the remote. The TV comes to life. “Mom would have liked it, which would have been terrible.”
Remy doesn’t take her eyes off the screen, but the corner of her mouth lifts. “How come?”
“She would have done the accent all the time,” I tell her. “It would have driven us crazy.”
