Once we reached the kitchen, my mother waved me away, saying, "You don't have to supervise, Ash. I won't take a bite out of her."
Zelda caught my eye and offered a smiling shrug that seemed to say,I wouldn't mind if you took a bite out of me.
Aaaaaand now I was thinking about scraping my teeth over her neck, her shoulders, her—oh, fuck me, I couldn't think about this in the middle of my mother's kitchen. Hell, I couldn't think about this while wearing thin shorts or with several hours of family time ahead of me. Or, hell, anywhere outside the blessed privacy of my apartment.
I returned that suggestive shrug with awhat are you doing to me?glare. She stifled a laugh and leaned in as my mother insisted on showing her something related to the wedding. While my mother unfolded a long sheet of butcher paper dotted with tiny stickers, Zelda tucked her hair over her ear and—oh my god, she'd bent her head and brushed back her hair and all I could see was the long expanse of skin extending from her neck to the thin strap of her top. Maybe I wasn't too disciplined, too private to gather up the woman who'd consumed my existence and nip at her neck while my mother complained about the science of seating charts. Maybe I could—
"Your father is in the den," my mother announced, punching a hole through a solid plan to maul Zelda here in the kitchen. "Spend some time with him. He's been interested to hear more about your travels this week. And let me be clear, there will be no business talk at the supper table."
"Only wedding talk," I said.
My mother shooed me away. "That's enough from you. Get all the work out of your system and leave us ladies be."
I ran my hand down Zelda's back. "Be careful with this one. She'll try to sell you raffle tickets for a church feast or convince you to join her the next time she hits up the flea markets."
"That doesn't sound problematic at all," Zelda replied. "I could get down with a good flea market."
"Would you get out of here?" my mother yelled in the same exasperated, put-upon voice she used when we would dump our backpacks, shoes, coats, and sports gear in a heap in front of the door. "Now, Zelda, I have to tell you about the specialty cocktails we have planned for next week. They're just adorable. Do you like Moscow mules? Because I've convinced my future son-in-law he does and that's why we're putting one on the menu."
Zelda gave me a quick wave and I forced myself to head in the direction of my father's den. The conversation we needed to have today was long overdue, and after the new business I'd secured last week, it couldn't be put off any longer.
The glass-paneled doors to the den were open as always and he was seated behind a heavy banker's desk, his silvery white head bent over a page of old-fashioned ledger paper, mint green with slightly darker green column lines. His left hand rested on his ten-key adding machine, the tape curling as it calculated sums.
This was one of the most familiar sights of my childhood, one I associated with home more than my mother's cooking or piling into bed with my siblings because we hadn't learned how to sleep apart until we were seven. It was the rhythmic clack of keys and the grunt of adding machine tape, the scent of dusty paper that lived only in this room, the wide ridge of my father's shoulders against his desk chair.
This was home to me.
And I had to go to war with my home.
That made it sound dramatic in gross, silly ways but my father and I couldn't agree on anything and we couldn't muddle along in that way any longer. It was the three-legged race from hell because I had none of the leverage but all the responsibility to get us across the finish line.
I rapped my knuckles on the door and waited for his acknowledgment. Interrupting someone engrossed in numbers by speaking words was rude. Almost as rude as speaking numbers.
He beckoned me inside with one hand, his other still consumed with keying in figures. It wasn't a power move. My father didn't do anything like that. He wasn't a shark and he wasn't out for blood. The truth was he lived with a singular vision for his accounting practice and when he'd invited me to leave my work at one of the world's leading firms to join him, he'd hoped I'd come around to share his vision. I should've known his willingness to move in new directions and accept change and do the things I proposed wasn't rooted in reality but deal-sweetening concessions he'd never intended to actualize.
I dropped into the chair positioned in front of his desk, a mauve-and-burgundy situation my mother gleefully collected from the side of the road one day. It was better now that she'd gotten rid of the fleas.
A ring of laughter floated in from the kitchen as I folded my hands in my lap. I wanted to sprint in there, tuck myself next to Zelda, and witness every laugh, every meaningful shrug, every glance. There wasn't a moment we hadn't shared since Denver and now…now I didn't know how to exist without herright there.
My father tore a strip of tape from the machine and stapled it to the ledger. He preferred paper to any accounting platform in existence. It was one of his most old-school quirks, one I accepted with gritted teeth and waning patience. There were tons of reasons it was better, safer, and smarter to store this work digitally but his ways were forged in fire. And it wasn't a matter of him coming up in an era when computers and accounting software packages didn't exist. They'd existed. They hadn't been the first line of defense back then but he'd learned his way around an Excel spreadsheet to be sure.
Regardless, he kept his work in handwritten ledgers which he handed off to his secretary to key into a software program so antiquated it was operated on a computer with a floppy disk drive. Since those files were technical dinosaurs, I couldn't translate or reformat them unless I wanted to do it all manually. And the process of hand tabulating followed by ancient computer processing was time intensive. This was a problem because my father also accepted every client who walked through the door, without concern for scheduling or capacity. He often didn't have the time which left me to make sense of the files I could only access from his secretary's computer in his New Bedford office.
Yeah, commuting between Boston and the southeast coast of Massachusetts whenever my father overbooked himself was fantastic. A really good time, ten out of ten, would recommend.
He loved to help out local businesses and I admired that, I really did, but the scope of work was limited to managing their books and filing tax returns. As far as my father was concerned, there was no reason to extend his scope beyond that narrow slice—and I wanted to do everythingoutsidethat slice. I wasn't looking to take over the world but I needed a job more challenging than repeatedly running the financial equivalent of an oil change to keep me going.
"You were in Colorado this week, right? Your mother mentioned something of that," he said after tucking away the folder in front of him. "What's doing there?"
"Fieldwork for the Thanapoulis LLC audit. Then, meeting with the CFO of Orculus Solutions about their upcoming audit which will require a good deal of time considering they've acquired nineteen entities in the past year. Last, I sat down with Shadyside Brewing about getting their expansion business. They're opening six beer gardens across the country."
His brows pinched together in his usual brand of confused contempt for my initiatives, he asked, "Why the devil would you want to do any of that?"
"Which part? I've been contracted for the Thanapoulis audits for three years. Orculus is an emerging biotech and conducting their audits will pay for my office space for theyear. And Shadyside is interesting and fun for me, not to mention setting them up to do business in four new states over the next three years and training their teams how to run those systems and manage local requirements will be hugely profitable for us. It's the kind of work that will grow us from tax returns and P-and-Ls to an organization with multiple deep revenue streams which is the reason we're having this conversation. That's why we formed this partnership, Dad."
"You're getting carried away again," he argued, waving me off as if I pulled this stunt all the time. I did, if you considered a once-monthly revisit to this stalemateall the time. "We don't have the setup for that. We don't have the staff and it's not the kind of work we do."
"It can be," I boomed, too frustrated to temper myself. "And Iamset up for it. I've been scaling up for this since the beginning. Remote staff, info tech resources, connections. Like I told you then, it's what we need to build the next generation of this business."
