“For goodness’ sake, don’t get twisted out of shape,” Gunther said. “You don’t have to pay rent as long as you stay here, because the estate should pay for the upkeep of the house, and you get a monthly check from Mom’s will. So what’s the urgency?”
“Look here. Get off your damned high horse. I got debts, and a lot of ’em.”
Gunther resisted shrugging his shoulder, because he really did care deeply for his brother, but he knew from experience that if he tried to help Edgar, he’d go right down with him. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “Stay in touch.”
Three days later, Gunther drove Shirley to the Baltimore / Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, where he parked and handed her bags to a porter. “I want you to stop fretting about Edgar and that will. He’s the oldest, and he should be leading
us
. If he’s broke, it’s because he spends his income on weed and gambling.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do, and quitting his job was the most stupid thing he could have done. He’s a first-rate guitarist, but how many places are there around here for even the best jazz musician to work?”
“Can’t he work in Baltimore?”
“I suppose he can, provided he hasn’t bombed out in every place that employs jazz guitarists. Stop worrying. Mom babied him till he became useless, and now you’re threatening to take up where she left off. He’s thirty-six years old, and if he gets into trouble, he has to be man enough to get out of it.” He hugged her and kissed her cheek. “Call me when you get to Fort Lauderdale.”
Shirley knew that she made too many excuses for Edgar. She’d done it to protect him from their father’s wrath, although she knew he probably deserved whatever Leon Farrell meted out. When their mother died suddenly after falling from a ladder, their father began to ignore them, giving them a home and food and not much else. She and Gunther worked their way through universities with the help of scholarships. Edgar refused to struggle through college, and after he finished high school, he worked for a famed Baltimore musician in exchange for guitar and piano lessons, widening the rift between himself and his father.
She boarded her flight, grabbed one of the flimsy red blankets, wrapped herself in it, and settled in a window seat. As soon as the cabin door closed, she slid down in her seat and went to sleep. Weak coffee, assorted other beverages, and pretzels held no interest for her.
“I hope you’re not planning to sleep all the way to Fort Lauderdale,” a deep baritone voice said, announcing the presence of a seat mate.
She didn’t open her eyes. “If at all possible, I am,” she said, and turned so that she faced the window. In her opinion, if a man traveled alone, he forgot the truth and his principles the minute he stepped on a plane. Besides, she had no intention of spending two hours and forty-seven minutes of her life on a “friendship” that had nowhere to go.
She awoke when the plane touched down at Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport, took out her cell phone, and called Gunther. “Hi. The plane just touched down. Any word from Edgar?”
“None. I will communicate to you whatever happens here as soon as I know it. So don’t tie yourself in a knot over this.”
“I hear you. I’m sailing day after tomorrow, and with almost thirteen hundred people dropping their problems on me, I won’t have time to think about Edgar. I’ll be in touch.”
She found her town house as she’d left it. “This cathedral ceiling is great when I’m not tired,” she said to herself as she climbed the carpeted stairs to her second-floor bedroom. It occurred to her that following a week in wintry weather, the Florida heat immediately depleted her energy. After separating the clothes that would go to the cleaners and those scheduled for the laundry, she changed into a jogging suit and went out to buy milk and a few other essentials.
“Where you headed now?” her next-door neighbor asked as she stepped out of the house. “You sure do lead an exciting life.”
“I suppose some people would call it that, but it’s so stressful that I sometimes have to remind myself to breathe. Mrs. X can’t find her little girl, who walked away while mummy was playing the slot machine. Miss Y ordered breakfast in her room and had to wait a whole twenty minutes for it. Mr. J is furious because he can’t bring onto the ship the case of liquor he bought onshore. Some big shot doesn’t like his seating arrangements for dinner and wants to sit at the captain’s table. But the seats at the captain’s table are all taken. I could keep this up for an hour.”
“Yeah, but it’s still glamorous to me. When are you leaving?”
“Day after tomorrow, but I’ll be on ship from tomorrow evening. I’m not really complaining, because I love my work. Just setting the record straight.”
She completed her shopping and as she returned home, she heard the ringing telephone, dropped the small bag of groceries on the floor, and raced to the phone. “Hello.”
“Hi, sis. This is Edgar.”
“I know. What’s up?” She had an eerie feeling, because Edgar never phoned her and rarely called her “sis.”
“Look, sis. I’m really in an awfully tight spot. I need three grand, and if I don’t get it this week, I’ll be in serious trouble.”
She sat down and took some deep breaths. “I’m not wealthy, Edgar, and my mortgage eats up over a quarter of what I make every month. If I lend you three thousand dollars and if you don’t give it back to me by the end of the month, things will be extremely difficult for me.”
“I’ll give it back to you in two weeks. I swear it. The easiest way will be for you to give me your password.”
She jumped up. He had to be kidding. “Edgar, I said I’d lend you the money. I did not say I’d lost my mind. I wouldn’t have given
Father
the password to my bank account.”
“But I need the money
now
.”
“I’ll send it to you by wire and for two weeks only. Get busy and find that will.”
She’d never dreamed that she would speak that way to her older brother, but she suspected that he wouldn’t have sounded so frantic if he didn’t have gambling debts. She hated gambling. On every cruise, one or more passengers on the ship came to her begging for transportation home, having gambled away every cent they had. She went out and wired the money, but she had a feeling that she would never see it again.
Two hours before the
Mercury
was due to sail for the Mediterranean, Shirley sat at her desk, frantically urging a messenger to get to the boat with the asthma drugs before the ship left shore. Why would a woman with an asthmatic child leave home without his medicine? It should have been the first thing she packed. She sent an officer to the gangplank to make certain that it wasn’t raised before the messenger arrived.
“I sure hope this isn’t an omen,” she said to herself. “I don’t need problems with any more frantic mothers.” She dialed Gunther but didn’t get an answer. The routine lifeboat drills had begun, and she was about to give up hope that the messenger would arrive in time.
She answered her phone. “Public relations, Ms. Farrell speaking.”
“Alphonse here. I have the medicine, and I’ve just given the captain the all clear.”
She let out a long breath of relief. “Thanks. Somebody ought to take that woman in hand. She didn’t want to give up her cruise, so she took a chance that the medicine would get here before the boat left. If it hadn’t, that child could have died. I’ll see how long it is before she comes to ask me if the medicine arrived.” She dialed Gunther again but to no effect and made a mental note to call him the following morning.
At the moment, Gunther had to deal with his own mini-crisis. He sat on a high stool in Crosby’s Bar looking at his girlfriend. She’d had only one sip of that martini, but she was behaving as if she’d drunk two of them.
“You don’t have to do what that lawyer says. Where’s the evidence that your father made him the executor of his estate? A year from now, he could have spent every penny your father left.”
He pushed back his rising anger. “At the age of ten, I went to Donald Riggs to get transportation to school and lunch money when my father conveniently forgot about it. I never knew whether he charged Father for it or took it from his own pocket. I do know that if he wasn’t honest to the marrow of his bones, my father—who counted every penny twice—would not have kept him as his lawyer.”
“How can we get married if you don’t get what’s coming to you? I want us to sell that house and build a modern place.”
“That house belongs to Edgar and Shirley, as well as to me.”
As if aware that she’d made a big error with that comment, she broke her gaze from his, sipped the drink, and looked back at him with slightly lowered lashes. “Honey, you know I’m always thinking about your well-being and what’s due you. I don’t concern myself with anybody else.” She pushed the glass away. “Come on. Let’s go home.”
He assumed that by “home” she meant her apartment, and he knew what that implied.
“I love my apartment,” she said as they entered it, “but I miss the fireplace we had at home. When we build our home, I want fireplaces in the living, family, and dining rooms.” He said nothing, because he knew the house in which she said she grew up, and, to his knowledge, it didn’t have one fireplace.
“Have a seat in the living room,” she said, went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of pinot grigio, two stem glasses, and a bottle opener. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
He sat there wondering when he had asked her to marry him and couldn’t recall the time. He did know that she had begun mentioning it casually and had gradually spoken of it as if they had a formal agreement. But he hadn’t made up his mind, and until he did and until he asked her in plain English and she agreed, he didn’t consider himself engaged. Minutes later, she returned wearing a red jersey jumpsuit that showed a good deal of her beautiful breasts, and in spite of himself, his mouth began to water.
“Honey, you didn’t open the wine?” she asked in a voice tinged with petulance.
“My mind was on other things.”
“You’re not serious,” she said. “I’ll have to do something about that.” She handed him the bottle opener. He opened the bottle and poured wine into their glasses, all the while thinking how sweet her nipples tasted. He got only a few sips of wine before, without warning, she took his hand, put it into the bodice of her jumpsuit, and rubbed her nipples with it.
“I’ve been thinking about this all day,” she told him, and rubbed his genitals.
“Oh, hell!” he said, capitulating to his rising passion. He pulled one of her breasts from its confines, bent his head, and sucked it into his mouth as she began to stroke him with increasing speed and pressure.
She tugged at his belt, unzipped him, and took him into her mouth. Then, like a satisfied cat that had her mouse, she looked up at him and grinned. “Want some more?” she asked him.
She knew him too well, but he was damned if he’d give her the satisfaction of behaving as if she could do with him as she pleased. He lifted her as he stood, unzipped the jumpsuit, and watched her slither out of it. Then he put her on the sofa and worked her until she clawed and screamed her release, but he wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing he enjoyed it and pulled out, flaccid and proud of it.
“What happened there?” she asked him after she collected her wits.
“Look,” he said. “I try to be a gentleman. You wanted it, and I did my best.”
She tried to sit up, and he moved, accommodating her. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. No more, no less. Sex doesn’t solve every problem, Lissa. In fact, if there’s a problem, sex can worsen it.”
She sat on the floor with her back against the sofa. “I didn’t know we had a problem.”
He wasn’t going to comment on that. Brushing dirt under the rug had never made sense to him, and he tried not to engage in it. At first, he’d been practically stunned by Lissa’s directness, and, later, her wildness in bed had captivated him. But as he got to know her, he realized that, for her, the word
relationship
meant little more than sex and the right to make demands on one’s partner. He adjusted his clothing and faced the fact that he was not one bit pleased with himself.
“How about I fix us some ham, eggs, and toast?” she said. “That’s about all I have in the house.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think so. I’d better get on home.”
“Why? Don’t I always make it nice for you? Besides, you have to make up for that trick you just pulled.”
He didn’t have to do anything. “Slow down, Lissa. I buried my father three days ago. Remember?”
“Oh, dear. I’m so sorry. That explains it. I don’t have my head twisted on right. If you think you have to regroup, honey, that is certainly understandable. Call me when you get home. I need to know you’re there safely.”
“Thanks,” he said, but he didn’t promise to call her. Indeed, he was almost certain that he wouldn’t. He had to get his life straightened out. He’d been so involved with his software firm and its myriad problems that he hadn’t focused on his private life and hadn’t realized the inroads that Lissa had made in it. He wasn’t a man to allow life to happen to him, and if Lissa was counting on that, she’d better wake up.