“All of us?” I ask.
Michelle looks embarrassed.
“That would have surprised me,” I admit. Not that I have any interest in visiting with the Rice family.
“How would you feel about the three of us hanging out until you go?” Michelle asks.
I cock an eyebrow in surprise. “No Georgetown?”
She smiles. “No Georgetown.”
Brittany seems to be enjoying the fact that her parents are being civil. It’s been a long time since she’s had a chance to hang out with the two of us. For her benefit, I smile back at Michelle. “I’d like that.”
“I saw a news report about Hank Fraser’s testimony,” Michelle says while her eyes linger on me. “The man’s turned out to be every bit the snake I pegged him for.” She’s referring to my former boss at Sphinx Financial, who is on trial for fraud relating to the financial shenanigans that precipitated the fall of the firm. Even I’ve been shocked by how brazen some of Fraser’s scheming and scams were. Michelle had proven a far quicker study of him than I was. While initially charmed by his easy manner and solicitousness (hadn’t we all been?), she’d begun warning me that Sphinx was hurtling down the tracks toward derailment even before the first whispers of alarm began to circulate within investment and banking circles.
“You’re right,” I admit, grudgingly acknowledging to myself that I’d been willfully ignorant in matters related to Sphinx—all too happy to grasp the brass ring Fraser dangled before my nose. I scrambled up the corporate ladder to dive into the muck of privilege and obscene perks we’d all happily wallowed in like swine rollicking in sewage. Many of us were still skimming along atop a sea of drowning shareholders when the good ship Sphinx finally turned turtle and precipitously plunged beneath the waves.
“I knew Fraser would hang you out to dry to save his own skin,” Michelle adds. “Who knows what other mischief that man is capable of?”
Is she warning me that Sphinx may yet come back to bite me on the ass once again? I was eventually cleared of wrongdoing by separate Congressional and SEC investigations, but the stench of Sphinx continues to trail behind me.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
She gives me a knowing smile above the rim of her wineglass as she takes a sip. “You can be a little naive at times.”
“Me?” I ask facetiously. It’s no secret that I was a babe in the woods at the time of Sphinx. Probably still am, I suppose.
She smiles, but it fades quickly. “I hadn’t trusted Fraser for a long time before things went sour. You knew that. Your association with that man frightened me.”
“And I wouldn’t listen to you.”
“Things could have been so different,” she says softly, perhaps even wistfully. “I was so angry with you for not listening, for not seeing what was happening.”
“Angrier than I realized.”
She nods. “Which only made me madder.”
Is it possible I was once again so absorbed in what was happening to me that I made myself unavailable to those around me? My mind tracks to Papa and Mama. Do I count this failure number three? Four? Five? Will I ever be there for a person I love when he or she needs me to be?
“I’m sorry, Michelle.”
Her appraising eyes burrow deeply into my soul before her hand slides across the table to squeeze mine. “Maybe I wasn’t as supportive as I could have been.”
I turn my hand over in hers and give hers a return hug. The spell is broken within seconds when a voice from the fringe of the dining room thunders, “Michelle!”
I wince when heads throughout the room turn as one toward the assault on the tranquil atmosphere we’ve been enjoying. A heavy hand cuffs my shoulder seconds later.
Prescott M.F. Rice III, the self-proclaimed “Oracle of Vesey Street”—where he once ruled the roost at an investment bank with world headquarters in Manhattan’s World Financial Center—steps into my field of view. Rice made his bones as a young Wall Street investment banker with the takeover and pillaging of a venerable old company whose time had come and gone. With the support and connivance of institutional investors, he had swooped in and plucked control of the company from the bewildered family before they knew what hit them. The sycophant business press had breathlessly marveled at the naked chicanery as Rice stripped the company of assets, saddled it with a mountain of debt, and peddled it back to investors in a public offering. This “radical” new business strategy was actually nothing more than typical corporate bullshit iconography: produce a steaming pile of shit, slap the moniker “Daisy Fresh” on refreshed packaging, and then turn the marketing shysters loose on an unsuspecting public. The same scam also worked well on the mortgage-backed securities and similarly toxic financial derivatives Rice peddled in the new century. He escaped the 2008 financial crisis unscathed, but left a trail of heartbreak and financial ruin in his wake. What a great guy.
“Tony!” he booms, thrusting a meaty paw to within a few inches of my chest and holding it there until I rise to shake it. My ex-father-in-law is a man of privilege whose years of overindulgence have left him with an overstuffed belly and sagging jowls.
“Hello, Prescott,” I say.
“Haven’t seen you in a while, boy.”
So, “boy” replaces “son,” which served as a substitute for Tony when I was married to his daughter. I like it no better—especially coming from a racist bastard who’s never been shy about denigrating the worth of Black folks. We both know how low a blow he thinks he just landed.
I turn to an aristocratic woman who is, as always, impeccably dressed and coiffed, a trait she passed along to her daughter. Unlike Michelle, however, this woman of sophisticated appearance and stately bearing has the brains of a gnat. Also unlike her daughter,
