Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [166]
Fiona has just finished telling me about a lead she thinks Ben has on a buyer for my apartment.
“Someone who already owns one apartment in your building, I think,” Fiona says, piercing a rippled dumpling. She furrows her brow. “Or maybe someone from work. I forget. You’ll have to ask him.”
The kids sit on booster seats, eating macaroni and cheese with their fingers, Chloe between my father and Fiona and Carlos next to me.
I pick at my grilled chicken salad. It’s raining now in earnest, and outside the window I can see people rushing down Murray Avenue, umbrellas raised. A man trailing an old-fashioned shopping cart behind him and a young mother wheeling a stroller, its tiny occupant completely encased in plastic, approach each other from opposite directions. They meet just outside our window, and I watch as they lower their respective umbrellas and embrace.
“You know, we never even had a housewarming party,” Fiona says. “With Richard being sick and all. It’s bad luck not to have had at least one party there. Let’s throw you a going away party.”
“I’m not going,” I say.
“It’s your party, you have to go,” Fiona says, laughing as Chloe picks a piece of dumpling from her plate.
“No, I’m not going.”
Is there ever a single moment of clarity, when everything comes together, when drums sound, bells ring, lightbulbs glow? If I were directing a movie of my life, I’d be tempted to bathe the people outside the Eat’n Park window in a soft, apricot glow, close in on their quickening steps as they run forward to meet each other. The lowering of umbrellas, the spray of rain on the glass, the way the woman had stepped delicately around the stroller and laid her hand on the man’s arm as she moved to embrace him. But it was actually a perfectly ordinary moment. The truth, I realize, is that I made up my mind a while ago. It was as if I’d written it down on a scrap of paper, shoved it in a drawer, and forgotten about it, only to happen upon it some time later, the message in my handwriting something I’d always known but didn’t quite remember writing down.
My first call is to Jerry Fox. I need to tell him to tear up the signed contracts before I change my mind again. My cell phone begins beeping ominously just as his secretary tells me he’s in a meeting. As soon as I finish telling her to have him call me immediately, my phone dies completely, which means I have to get home to my charger before he calls me back.
I fly up the stairs to Ruth’s townhouse, Carlos and Chloe in tow. The three of us burst in through the open screen door. “I’m not going. Stop. Forget about it.”
Ruth is pacing in the dining room, her cell phone cradled to her ear. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you!”
“My cell phone died. My charger is at home,” I tell her.
“Here, plug it into mine,” Ruth says, fishing her phone charger out of the drawer of the buffet. “Wait a minute, what do you mean you aren’t going?”
“I changed my mind. I don’t know. I realized that it’s unfair of me to take Chloe away from everything she has here. Our lives will be so much more difficult. I’ll never see you, or Richard, or my dad and Fiona. Or Ben. I’ll miss you all. I like writing my column. There are a million reasons.”
“Thank God,” Ruth says, clicking her cell phone shut and clutching it to her chest. “That’s what I was trying to tell you,” she says. “I found something. In the documents.”
“What are you talking about?”
Ruth leads me over to the dining room table. “I assumed eventually I’d be able to nail down the source of all the capital used in the projections.”
“You mean where they are getting the money? I thought they were getting it from me. You know, the investors.”
Ruth hesitates. “It’s not exactly that simple—or at least it shouldn’t be. The source of capital really refers to AEL’s investment strategy. They have to have some way to grow the money enough to cover the projected returns, right? Take a look at the number of investors and the payouts. Twenty percent returns in thirty days, pretty atypical even for high-yield