Shopping for a Billionaire 4(16)
Author: Julia Kent

Chapter Nine

“Go on.”

“You want me to go on about rats?”

“Could you please connect the rats to James?”

“Isn’t it clear?”

“No.”

She sighs heavily. “The building was overrun with rats.”

Amy and I both shudder and gag. I shudder, she gags. Then we trade.

“And the only way to keep the rats away was with cats.”

“Is that where we got Chuckles?”

She snickers. “No, but Chuckles could be the baby of one of the babies of one of those old warehouse cats. There were so many.”

“Rat killer thrice removed,” Amy says.

“Get on with it. The James part.” I’m impatient. My life is hanging in the balance here. Amanda’s researching what the hell happened with Declan’s mother, who died in a most fragile way and one that could kill me, too. Meanwhile, my mother spills the fact that she once dated (slept with?) Declan’s father, and she’s blathering on about rats.

“So when he saw how we controlled the rats, he went to the humane society and adopted fifty cats. Set them loose in the building. Except he didn’t think about the stray dogs in the neighborhood.”

“Dogs?”

Mom’s laugh is infectious, and I study her profile. The years strip off her face and she looks like she’s twenty again. Sunshine frames her face and I hold my breath, enraptured.

“All these dogs started sniffing around the building, howling. They wouldn’t kill the rats, but they loved to chase the cats. We slept on these little pallets in the art studios and it reached a point where you didn’t know if a rat, a cat, or a dog was running over your body at 3 a.m.” She makes a funny frowny face. “Or if it was the residual effects of the hit of acid from that night.”

“Are you sure any of this is true?” Amy asks. “Maybe it’s all just an elaborate flashback.”

Mom whacks her lightly on the arm and Amy yelps with manufactured injury. “It’s all true. You can ask James.”

“I can’t ask James anything,” I argue.

“Sure you can. He’s still your client.”

“What about you and him? How’d you start dating?”

“He came to the building one day and was horrified to find that it had become a doggie hotel. The cats were in hiding, the rats were gone, and a ton of homeless women had followed the dogs who were so starved for attention that they curled up in everyone’s laps. There was one, named Winky—this cute little mangy Jack Russell terrier. That thing was smaller than some of the rats he managed to kill.”

“A rat-killing terrier?” Amy’s laughing.

“Mom! Dating!”

“He came over one day to assess the mess and I told him he had to take care of Winky’s vet bill. The poor thing had an infected paw from a rat bite. James thought I was crazy.”

“You are crazy,” Amy and I say in unison.

“James agreed.” She chuckles. “I got that man to take me and Winky to a downtown veterinarian who treated him with antibiotics and stitches, though. James paid the bill, then asked me out for dinner.”

I stop smiling. “When was this?”

“About a year before he married Elena.”

Elena. Mom knows her name. Mom knew all this time about Declan and played dumb. The sidewalk dips and cracks from old tree roots along the tree lawn, and I halt, one foot higher than the other on a slab of concrete. Being off kilter makes sense.

“You’ve been lying this entire time,” I blurt out.

“Not lying, honey.”

“Don’t call me honey! Declan called me honey!”

“I haven’t lied, Shannon. I just…didn’t tell you.”

“A lie by omission is still a lie.” Throwing that in her face gives me a certain satisfaction, because it was what she always said to us when we were kids and didn’t tell the whole truth.

She sighs and looks up at the sky. A massive jet leaves contrails that spread out like a zipper opening, white fluff filling in the space.

“You’re right. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

“All this ‘marry a billionaire’ and ‘you can love a rich man as much as you love a poor man’ crap has been because you regret being dumped by James McCormick a million years ago?” I snap.

Angry eyes meet mine.

“That’s not true.”

“How the hell am I supposed to know what’s true, Mom? I dated Declan. I brought the man to Easter dinner and you pretended not to know his mother is dead! A woman whose name you know because you dated his dad.”

“I had no idea Elena had died! I haven’t seen James McCormick in thirty years, Shannon. Aside from the society and business pages of the newspapers.”

“And Jessica Coffin’s Twitter stream.”

Her cheeks pinken. “He’s in there sometimes.”

I’m so livid that words turn into angry balloons in my head. I march forward, Mom and Amy rushing to keep up. We’re halfway around a giant loop we walk in my neighborhood, and if I have to spend one more second being patronized I’m going to scream.

“‘Marry a billionaire! Billionaire babies! Farmington wedding!’ Jesus, Mom, you’re one big, fat hypocrite.” I come to such a sudden halt that Amy slams into my back and squeaks.

“Does Dad know you dated him?”

“Of course. Jason’s the reason I broke up with him.”

Awestruck. I’m awestruck, and Amy looks like she’s just been hit by a bolt of lightning. Are we smoking? We should have tendrils of fine white smoke pouring up to meet the jet trails.

“You dumped James McCormick to be with Daddy?” I gasp.

“Well, he wasn’t the James McCormick back then. He was just an arrogant man who was hungry to make a deal and launch himself in the business world.”

A pink flower catches my attention. Then the drip of a lawn sprinkler. A dog barks in the distance once. Then twice. The pneumatic wheeze of a dump truck starting to move after being stopped at a red light fills my ears. This cannot be real. My mother cannot be telling me that—

“You mean he was the equivalent of Steve? Like, the 1980s version of Shannon’s ex?” Amy says.

Mom swallows, her hand fluttering at the base of her throat, eyes troubled. “I suppose so. I never thought of it that way, but yes.”

I slump against a giant, knotted oak, a triple-truck so gnarled and scarred it looks like it saw combat. “That explains so much.”