“Her car was repossessed?” I asked, flipping through the dossier.
“Just last night,” she said with a snort. “You definitely need to bring that up.”
“Yes, because nothing says you care about a woman like rubbing her uncle’s illegal dealings in her face,” Garrett interjected.
“I thought you weren’t going to be helping?” I reminded him snidely.
“I’m not,” Garrett said. “I’m here to be entertained by your epic failure.”
“Way to be a supportive family member.”
Garrett went back to his tablet. I wasn’t sure what he was doing; Garrett always had some scheme or other going on. He was supposed to be working on how to finally break up our father, Leif’s, polygamist cult and free our sisters. Knowing Garrett, he was probably fixated on some inane problem, however.
Last week, he had been insistent that the only restaurant in Harrogate where he would eat seafood was not, in fact, serving shrimp from the Georgia coast as advertised but was instead serving shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico. He had co-opted Svensson PharmaTech lab rats to figure this out for him.
“If you’re not helping, you need to leave and stop coming in here and stealing the food that is for my employees.”
“What employees?” Garrett scoffed, not looking up from his tablet. “You literally have a fast-food worker here on his second shift.” He pointed at Calvin, who was covered in batter and bits of fried chicken. The toddlers were fighting over which one got to lick the grease off his shoes.
“Meanwhile,” Garrett continued, “Meghan has the Holbrooks working for her.”
“They’re no match for you, Hunter,” Karen cooed.
That did get Garrett to look up. He gave me a cold look. “Tell your campaign manager to go fetch some coffee. I would speak with you in private.”
“He can’t just tell me what to do,” Karen insisted. “I don’t work for you, Garrett.”
Garrett unfolded himself from the chair he had claimed as his own. “Correction,” he said in a clipped tone, “I control the purse strings, and especially after Hunter wrote a fifty-thousand-dollar check to the Intimate Pickle, thereby unleashing an LSD epidemic on Main Street, I now am solely in charge of the money. I decide how much is allocated to this campaign, I sign your paycheck, and I determine if whatever inane event you and Hunter have concocted will be funded. I am the financial god of this office. And I will speak to my brother alone. Now. You can either fetch coffee or spin in circles outside on the sidewalk while you contemplate the meaninglessness of your existence.”
Karen looked to me for backup. As if I was going to cross Garrett when he was in a state.
She huffed, grabbed her purse, and stomped out.
Garrett snapped his tablet cover closed. “That,” he said once the door had slammed shut, “is not working for me.”
I ran a hand through my hair.
“None of this,” he continued, “is working for me.”
“Greg wanted to do this mayor campaign,” I reminded him.
Garrett’s lip curled. “Since when do you let Greg yank your leash?”
“We need to push our latest development through. Besides, you’re the one who is always complaining about how Meg is ruining the city and passing stupid laws. Remember the straws?”
“Yes,” he said impatiently, “but you aren’t supposed to be the mayor. You are supposed to be the consort to the mayor.”
“Mayors don’t have consorts.”
“This is a small town.”
“That is irrelevant.”
“You’re supposed to engage in pillow talk with Meg and make her think my ideas are her ideas.” Garrett gestured between us. “We need a degree of separation. If you just get up there and start pulling levers and breaking things, then there are too many eyeballs on my plans.”
“And what do you want me to do?” I sighed, finally deciding enough had been enough and breaking up the brawl that was going on in the corner among the triplets over Calvin’s shoes.
“You need to declare a family emergency and drop out,” Garrett insisted.
