A Broken Cup Read online

  How was I going to get to Dad’s house/Mike’s house/a hotel/the funeral home from the airport? I’d have to call my brother. What had Mike meant by saying I was the executor? Was I getting anything in the will? Was there a will? Shit. I knew nothing. I wished I had someone to talk to; oh wait, no, no, I didn’t. And then I really did doze off.

  When I woke, we were landing and touched down with a bounce or two. Beside me, I heard the man swear in some alien language. If I’d been awake enough, I’d have probably done the same thing. The older lady next to me giggled. I swear to God she did! She laughed at us.

  It was dark out, and I hadn’t eaten anything. I was a half-drugged, half-asleep, pissed off nervous wreck and probably dehydrated as well. I got my bag and headed outside to where I could see my brother when he came to get me, except, of course, I hadn’t called him yet. I stopped at a Starbucks, which probably wasn’t the wisest thing that late at night, but more caffeine seemed like just the thing I needed most right then. And a scone. And a cookie. I was starved. It was half-dark there, and I switched on the phone, swiped to Mike’s name, and pushed call.

  When he picked up, I said, “It’s me. I’m at the airport. Come get me.”

  He answered with, “Fuck. Go stand somewhere I can find you then. Like under the big number seven. Can you find that?” (Followed by what I inferred was a silent, but fervent, asshole.)

  I almost snarled, “What are you driving!”

  “The big white one!”

  Like I’d know what that was, but just the same, I finished my food, went to the bathroom, washed my hands thoroughly, stared at myself in the mirror.

  You can do this. He can’t kill you. You’re an adult.

  Then, like an obedient child, I went outside to stand under the giant number seven. I should have asked him how long it would take. I hadn’t even asked him if it was convenient. I hadn’t even said please. What was wrong with me? Did I expect him to leap out of the car and punch me? Ha-ha. Yes, yes, I did. And then he’d probably tell me to stop hitting myself. Oh, the memories.

  Of course, it started to rain. Did I mention this was Seattle? No? And that my brother lived just north of town, which meant twice as long, since SEATAC was on the south side? And where would I have him take me? I hadn’t even booked a room! What was wrong with me?

  I was a dripping, sodden, nose-running mess when a big white car pulled up. I reached out, opened the door, and got in.

  “Where to, bitch?” a voice growled.

  “Any fucking…uh…where?”

  Something wasn’t right. Something niggled at my nerves, my senses. My brother smoked, for one thing. This car smelled clean. My brother sometimes had B.O. This guy was…slowly I turned my head. This guy was not my brother.

  “Oh shit!” I stammered, my heart pounding.

  Had I just blundered into some stranger’s car and insulted him as well? But…I’d called my brother. I saw the name Mike. You can’t mistake that for some total asshole stranger, although my brother would, of course, have called me a bitch.

  The car pulled over, and the driver’s head turned until he was looking right at me. His hair was dark, his eyes shone blue even in the dim light. He was angry, that’s why, I figured.

  “Who are you, and why do you have Merry’s phone?”

  “I—what?”

  Ohhhhh, myyy God. Merry’s phone. I’d never given it back to her, had I? And right then, it rang, as if a devil had summoned it.

  “Give it to me,” my driver snarled.

  “Who is this? Merry? What? What the? What cat! Yeah, you can talk to him!” He passed the phone back to me.

  She was laughing, and I knew that laugh. It was Merry, my new neighbor, who had lent me her phone. Whose phone I now had. I could see the number she was calling from, and it was mine. The person who was calling was listed as me.

  “Oh, my God,” was all I could say. “I’m so sorry!”

  She continued to laugh. Was she drunk? I looked, horrified, back at the driver. I held the phone out between us so we could both hear her laughing hysterically.

  I pulled it back toward me as the car was flooded with blue and red lights. “Merry? Do you have my phone? I thought it was…where did you get it?”

  “It was under your stove! I went over to your house to get cat food, and Posie led me into the kitchen and started pawing under the stove! I reached under, thinking his favorite cat toy must be there, and it was, along with half a dozen dust bunnies, a dead cockroach, a mouse—for fuck’s sake, don’t you ever clean?—and your phone! I turned it on, thinking it was mine, but…” She broke down laughing so hard, I could hear Poseidon—Posie—meowing worriedly in the background.

  Then I looked back over at my not-my-brother.

  “I just picked him up at the airport, sir,” he said politely to the police officer.

  “What for?”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Is that right?”

  I nodded vigorously.

  “Well, you can’t park here. Move along.”

  The officer left, and we looked at each other, with Merry’s happy chortle echoing out of my, I mean, her, phone. He reached over, and I handed him the phone. I couldn’t apologize any more. I could crawl under an overpass and die, but not say another word. Besides, I was hungry again, and now I was almost an orphan. All the ingredients needed for a good pity-party.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, but he was saying the same words at the same time, so we ended up smiling briefly at each other.

  After an interminable minute, I sighed and opened the car door. As I fumbled around for my bag, a hand caught mine. When I looked up, he was shaking his head and smiling. He closed up the phone, shutting Merry off in mid-cackle.

  “Don’t get out. I’m Mike, Merry’s ex. She explained the whole thing to me. I’m sorry about your father. You’ve just come all this way from Hawaii. Did you eat on the plane? Do you want to get something to eat?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, yes. I mean I’m starving. I’m Russell. I called Mike because that’s my brother’s name. I’ve been so stupid. But then, my brother always makes me feel that way.”

  I thought I heard Mike say, I have a brother, too, but we were pulling back onto the highway by then.

  We were quiet. I finally asked about what he was driving.

  “This one is the 1979 Corvette-based limo. There’s a ton of them around. I own this one. I also rent a tangerine Lamborghini. That one is really popular. I have a couple of others I’ve picked up. My dad was a car collector. When he died, I kind of got the ones my brother didn’t want. He was an idiot and didn’t know the value of old and unusual. You should see the…Oh, I could go on and on. I don’t mean to bore you. It’s my living and my hobby, I guess. What about you?”

  “I take pictures of fish. And surfers. And anything anyone will pay me for. A couple of times, I’ve dived to look for cars, both times the drivers were still in them. Not so pretty, but insurance companies pay good money when they have to.”

  “Awesome. What else, if you have time for anything?”

  “Don’t laugh, but I foster kittens. I have a cat, one I just couldn’t give up. His name is Poseidon. Your friend, well, and mine now, Merry, is cat-sitting him. She calls him Posie and blames him for the phone mix up. I’m babbling, aren’t I? I’m the one who threw it across the kitchen and then forgot about it.”

  “Is it okay to laugh now?” Mike said. And our gazes caught and held.

  “This is too weird,” I said. “I can’t keep calling you Mike. Do you have a nick-name?”

  “Promise you won’t laugh?”

  “No!” I laughed, and he did, too.

  “My brother gave it to me. He used to call me Midget, or Idjet for Idiot, you know. Then when he realized that my name was Michael Grant, so my initials were MG, and there was a car called an MG Midget, well, it just stuck. I hated it, but I’m still Midget or Midge to some people.

  “Midge being one of Barbie’s friends ba
ck in the day.”

  We pulled into a parking lot, parked, and walked into a quiet bar somewhere in downtown Seattle. We sat and ordered, beer and burgers. He was apparently a regular, and I just had what he had, too tired to do any thinking. Then my, her, the phone in my pocket, rang. It was Merry.

  “You had a phone call. Someone called Michael. He asked who the hell I was and where the hell you were.” Then, of course, she broke up laughing.

  I turned the phone so this Mike could hear her.

  “He wants you to call him immediately so he knows what your plans are, and to ask for Michael, not Mike. I told him I wasn’t your answering service, and he could go cuckold himself, but I don’t think he understood it.” More giggles, turning into very unladylike guffaws as she stammered out the rest. “I told him it would be another twenty dollars to get into the sexy part, and then he hung up.”

  Mike reached over and turned off the phone. “What a devil. I couldn’t stand her sense of humor. Actually, I may have given up on girls in general. I don’t know. Women just have to be right all the time, you know? They’re all crazy. I’m taking a break from them. Oh, here, you better call your brother Michael, and I can just be Mike now, that’s good!”

  Our food came, and in between eating, I called Michael and told him my phone had been stolen but I’d get back to him in the morning.

  “No, I don’t know the name of the hotel,” I said.

  “The Four Seasons, of course,” Mike said in a very haughty, deep voice, loud enough for my brother to hear. He hung up again. I yawned. “You’re staying at Chez Mike tonight. If that’s okay with you.”

  I nodded and yawned again.

  Mike said, “‘Silence is better than unnecessary drama. I like how you handled him, and I’m not even Buddhist.”

  On the way back to the car, he hugged me, and I hugged him back. There was silence later, sort of, but I’m not telling.

  * * * *

  The next morning, Mike made waffles, and we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast.

  “I’m at your service today and tomorrow,” Mike said. “I’ve been fielding phone calls for Merry in between getting your phone and her phone to forward the messages and calls on their own. I think you’ll be getting your calls today, and she should be getting hers. Gee-shush, she has made friends already, and they want her to work overtime, so thank God that’s done. She also said she loves some of the selfies on your phone, and under penalty of death, we are not to look at hers. I already did, of course.”

  Mike poured coffee for both of us. “Your brother has already called twice this morning, and I told him I was not your secretary but that for another twenty dollars…and he hung up. I hope I didn’t get you in trouble.”

  Personally, I didn’t think Mike sounded too sincere, but I grinned anyhow. I loved it when Michael got his due, although I’d never been able to do it, myself. At my age, I was still afraid of him. Go figure.

  “Well, first, I do have to go to his house, and then to the funeral, but I don’t want to keep you from your job. I can’t pay you for all these trips.”

  Mike leaned over and kissed my waffle-laden mouth. “Mm, syrup,” he said. “No pay; drop that idea. I’d like to think we’re friends.”

  “At least friends!” I laughed, thinking about last night.

  “Um, how soon do we need to be there?” Mike asked me, swirling his finger around in the syrup left on my plate. He then put his finger in his mouth and sucked the sweet juicy syrup off it. It was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.

  “Maybe not right away,” I replied.

  I hadn’t really appreciated where he lived before, as it had been so late, and I was tired. But now as we left, I saw the house. He had the third floor of an old Victorian, up in the Capitol Hill area. No view, so it didn’t break his budget, he told me. But it came with several parking spaces, both beside the house and behind the house where there used to be stables. He always kept one or two of the limos he owned there.

  “The rest I keep at the airport. I know a guy who lets me park them at the back of his rental lot.”

  I had to grin. What fun it must be to drive around in those beautiful cars. I even recognized some of the names and history and terms from the days I used to be interested in classic automobiles. Then I got into photography and didn’t have money for cars other than one big enough to haul my equipment in and old enough and ugly enough to not get stolen. Back home, we called that type of clunker a Maui Cruiser. I had special locks and safety features added. My fun came in the water, not getting there and back.

  Speaking of fun in the water; more on that later. We had views of Puget Sound, a lake, and a ship canal, all beautiful sparkling water with mountains off in the distance, and ferry boats going to and fro. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the hills. I’d never liked them whenever we came here as children, either, but Dad worked a lot, and Mom refused to drive in the city, so we didn’t come often as a family. I’d come with the swim team for meets sometimes and tried to sit near the front of the bus, although that had its terrors, too. The view going downhill, for one. I started to laugh.

  Mike smiled at me and kept driving. I’d told him my brother’s address, and he knew the way without directions. We were going down one of the steep hills, maybe Columbia or Madison.

  “The funniest thing I ever saw here,” I said, “was after one of the Pride Day parades. I think I was sixteen. I was waiting to catch a bus home and coming down this very hill. Right in front of me were the Seafair Pirates in their ship on wheels. I couldn’t believe how fast they were going, and all of us at the bus stop cheered and yelled arrr and huzzah. It was so much fun. It seemed like everybody loved everybody, at least until I got home.”

  * * * *

  “Father has gone absolutely bonkers,” the boy who opened the door said to me.

  Behind him I could hear shouting and crying and things breaking.

  “He has Gwen cornered in the kitchen, telling her she cannot go to the funeral dressed like that because what will people think! Come in, whoever you are.”

  The tall young man, who must be my older nephew Jacob, looked us both up and down like we had just entered a gay bar or a meat market. He had very expressive eyebrows and was dressed all in black. His feeble attempt at a goatee was the only thing that marked him as the age I knew him to be: sixteen. I couldn’t tell if it was fear or amusement in his eyes.

  It did make me stop and think. Did I really want to go in there? (No.) Did I really want to expose Mike to this madness? (It had been his idea.) And then, the bolt from the blue: nobody here was going to entertain me as the Important Visitor from Far Away, but maybe I could make things better for the kids. It was quite a mind-opener. In fact, my mind did a complete one-eighty about why I was even here and how selfish my former outlook had been. Wow. Mike and I exchanged a smile and entered my brother Michael’s house.

  I should add that his house was very nice, in a ritzy upscale section of town, and must have set him back more than I made in a decade. A minivan and a small sports car were in the driveway when we got there. Luckily, he had a semi-circular driveway, and there was plenty of room left for the big old 1979 Corvette-based limo I’d already been in. It was a beauty and very quiet

  Quiet was, of course, not the word for inside his McMansion.

  Jacob gestured for us to follow him into the kitchen. Over his shoulder, he said, “I’d introduce you, except, you know, he’s busy shouting.” He had the cutest smile, with one eyebrow lifted to go with it.

  “You cannot go in the nightgown, and don’t tell me it’s what all the hippies wore to Woodsmoke or Woodstick or whatever! You are not a hippie. You are a fifteen-year-old girl, and no daughter of mine is…” My brother finally looked up and noticed two men and his son in the kitchen. “Oh, hello, well, goddamn it, you finally got your fat ass over here. Who’s this, your, no don’t tell me. I don’t want your lifestyle flaunted in front of my innocent, perfect, that is, my, my children.”


  He was only three years older than me, but he looked ten or fifteen years older. He’d gained weight, and his suit was not cut right. Maybe it had been thirty pounds ago. He couldn’t have been a cheap man with this house and two cars in the driveway. Maybe it was the only black one he had.

  Brother Michael cleared his throat and ran a hand through his immaculate (but thinning) hair. His other hand he used to point at the pouting, standing tall and firm, rebellious daughter, who if I remember right, was barely fifteen. “You! Go change immediately! You’re not getting in my car looking like that!” He had the nerve to snap his fingers at her.

  I watched, smirking, as she raised one eyebrow, turned, and left the room, or as Elvis would have done, left the building. And she did leave the building, shutting the door quietly behind her, with a smile that sent daggers father-ward.

  Jacob looked on proudly. If he’d been wearing suspenders, he’d have put his thumbs underneath them. “I taught her everything she knows.”

  My brother scowled at him. Jacob turned and followed her outside.

  As soon as the door shut behind him, I was overwhelmed with feeling like a child again. My brother had always managed to make me shrink, to make me feel wrong, somehow. This was not the time or place for it, but all I wanted to do was cry and go hide in my room. Of course, my room was three thousand miles away, I was an adult, and did not want to shame myself in front of this jerk. This jerk who had just done to his children what he had always done to me. Only, to my shame and pride, they were not crying.

  My sister-in-law swept into the room. She herded the three younger children before her like a flock of chickens. She was scowling. The children were not. One boy looked clean and neat, like his father, only not fat and ugly. The twins, both girls, were complete opposites. One was dressed in a pink tutu and satiny top, holding a magic wand that looked more like a wand from Hogwarts than a castle, but still. The other was togged out like a pirate.