I Thought You Were Dead (7 page)

“They were bigger,” Stella said. “It was more important to me to be the nice one. And maybe it's not my place to say, but I always thought you were the nice one too. That's why we get along.”

He reached across and scratched her beneath the ear. She leaned into it.

“There's nothing wrong with being omega,” he said. “It's the people who are humbler than thou who bug me. Besides — that wasn't what the real fight was about. That was just when I got my hackles up.”

She looked puzzled.

“These,” Paul said, reaching across again and grabbing Stella's fur behind her collar.

“That's my neck,” she said.

“Hackles are the feathers on a chicken's neck.”

“Do I look like a chicken to you?”

“Horripilation, then,” Paul said. “The way your fur rises when you're trying to look tough to avoid a fight. To scare the other dog off.”

“It doesn't sound to me like you were trying to scare your brother off,” Stella said. “It sounds to me like you were trying to make your brother mad. If you didn't want to make him mad, you would just have eaten the cookie. It wouldn't have killed you.”

“All right already,” Paul said. “Next time, I'll eat the cookie.”

“So what was the real fight about?” Stella asked.

“Money,” Paul said. “About which I couldn't care less, by the way. He had us all over for Sunday brunch after church because it was my nephew's birthday and they didn't want to reschedule the party. He has this huge house in a very wealthy neighborhood in Edina. It's very intimidating.”

“But of course, you couldn't care less,” Stella said.

“It's just different,” Paul said. “His neighborhood is full of lawyers and bankers and doctors. They make more money than I do.”

“So why don't you become a lawyer or a banker or a doctor?” she asked.

“That horse left the barn a long time ago. It's like you were saying,” he told her, “about roles. I like what I do, but I never know what I'm doing next. It's feast or famine.” His literary agent, Mauricio Levine, was good at encouraging Paul to keep a cheerful outlook. “Just remember what Churchill said: ‘The secret to success is learning how to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.' ” Maury had brought Paul his first big break, a chance to finish
Windows 95 for Morons
when the original author died suddenly of what Maury called “an unrelated illness.” Paul still wondered how it could have been related. They needed to come up with an option book. Paul suggested
Love for Morons
, but unfortunately the publisher already had a husband-and-wife team working on it who'd been married and divorced four times, to each other, which Paul had to agree was hard to top. The editor finally suggested
Nature for Morons.
“These things are golden, but finish it quick so you get paid, because I think the publisher is going out of business,” Maury advised. “That's publishing,” he added.

“With Carl, there's no famine. It's all feast,” Paul continued. “I'm not saying he hasn't earned it. He works really hard. Probably too hard.”

Paul's brother had always pushed himself, “always biting the candle off at both ends,” as their mother had once said. He never slept, always training for something, a marathon, a 10k, a half Ironman. His clean good looks, kind eyes, and gentle manners had won him plenty of East Coast girlfriends in college, though when he finally hooked up for good, it was with Erica Stephenson,
a fellow Minnesotan in the same law school class at Yale. As a Yale undergraduate, Carl had striven mightily to be accepted in the right circles, invited to the right parties, granted access to the Old Boy network. Yet when his fiancée said she wanted to practice law in Minnesota, to be near her parents, Carl gave up any thought of signing on with some high-powered Boston or New York or Washington, D.C., law firm. Paul wondered if Carl regretted his decision. No one would ever know it if he did.

“You work really hard too,” Stella said. “I think you should be paid as much as a lawyer or a doctor.”

“I couldn't agree more,” Paul said. “I'll bring it up at the next meeting. Be glad you never had to get a job.”

“I live with you, don't I?” she said. “That's work.”

“Lucky for me, you're a working breed,” Paul said.

“Half,” she corrected him. “My other half is sporting. So what was the fight about? What about money?”

After the birthday party, Carl had told Paul he wanted to have a word with him in his office. Carl's home office featured an exquisite L-shaped rosewood desk console, with the biggest computer monitor Paul had ever seen. The walls were decorated with all the various awards Carl had won over the years, beginning in kindergarten. Carl's athletic trophies sat atop the bookshelf, along with photographs of Carl, exhausted, crossing finish lines with his arms up in the air and his red armpit hair showing. Paul was surprised to see that his brother had bought ten copies of
Windows 95 for Morons,
with one propped upright on display atop a Stickley bookcase.

“He said he and my dad had been working on a living will as a way of avoiding estate taxes,” Paul told Stella. “My dad wants to give his money to his children while he's still alive, not to the government. If you die, the government takes a huge chunk of your money so your family can't have it.”

“I'd like to bite the ass of whoever thought of that,” Stella said.

“You're not alone,” Paul said. “Anyway, after he retired, my dad started playing the stock market and changing his investment strategies. Rolling stuff over, whatever that means.”

“Even I know what
roll over
means.”

“Different kind of
roll over,
” Paul told her. “Carl said it looked like my dad was going to gift each of his kids with a little over three hundred thousand dollars.”

“Is that a lot?” Stella asked.

“It is to me,” Paul said.

“You want all the money you can get, right?”

“Sure,” Paul said, “though they've done studies that prove people with a lot of money aren't any happier than people who only have a little.” She gave him a tilted quizzical look. “It's human nature. You just always think you want more. And then you get more and that makes you want more still. It's better to be content with what you have.”

“Well, duh,” Stella said.

“That's your nature,” Paul said. “For humans, it's harder than it sounds. I had a bit of a falling-out with my dad a few years ago on this very subject. I called home to ask for a loan because Karen and I had gotten into some financial trouble. I was making the do-what-you-love-and-the-money-will-follow argument, and my dad said, ‘Sometimes you need to think of somebody other than yourself. Sometimes you do what you have to do for the people you love, particularly when doing what you love isn't working.' He saw me as a failure. Needless to say, I never quite got around to asking for the loan.”

“Needless to say.”

“I don't claim to be Mr. Financial Genius,” Paul said. Stella gave him a look that he ignored. “That doesn't mean my brother has the right to exclude me from the decision-making process.”

Paul explained that Harrold had, in the process of drafting a living will, granted Carl durable power of attorney. Carl told Paul, in his office, that he thought it would be a good idea, given the present uncertainty, to postpone the disbursement of the living will in case something bad happened to Harrold, some worst-case scenario where they needed the money to pay for extended care. Paul had countered that the point of a living will was exactly to prepare for worst-case scenarios, and that if their father had another stroke and didn't survive it, the money would go to pay the estate taxes, which was exactly what Harrold didn't want.

“He made it sound like I was being greedy. Or cold.”

“But you're neither of those things,” Stella said.

“Thank you,” Paul said. “That's why it hurt. Then he dropped the real bomb. He told me he was going to fire Arnie Olmstead, my father's broker. Arnie'd worked with my dad all his life. He goes to our church. They used to carve balsa-wood totem poles together when we were all in Indian Guides.”

“What's Indian Guides?”

“It was this YMCA program where white guys dress up and pretend they're Indians,” Paul said. “Fathers and sons. The point is, Carl was using his power of attorney to take over my father's investments.”

Carl said he would have told Paul sooner but Paul had never shown any interest in such things before. That was true. Carl lectured him about how the market had changed with the Internet, how more information was available now than ever before and more people were playing the market who didn't know what they were doing, which meant more volume, higher highs, lower lows, a faster, more volatile roller coaster, and more passengers who weren't wearing their seat belts. Paul read the paper every day but usually skimmed the business section. He knew the market had been wacky, records set every month, with catastrophic
corrections and new Black Fridays ever looming. Carl's argument was that Arnie Olmstead was behind the times and unable to react were something drastic to occur. “We have a responsibility,” Carl had said. Carl's plan was to manage their father's investments online, where you could make quick trades without having to pay huge brokers' fees. “Everybody's doing it,” he said. He intended to keep everybody informed. “Just let me watch over things for the time being. If you have any doubts as to my ability, you're free to examine my records anytime you want to.”

“So you wanted to be included, even though you don't have any money and you don't care about money and you don't know anything about the stock market,” Stella said. “I'm not trying to be critical. I'm just trying to keep things in perspective.”

“I appreciate it,” Paul told Stella. “I just don't trust him. I learned not to. I trusted him before and he screwed me. I swore it wouldn't happen again.”

“What did he do that makes you not trust him?” Stella asked.

“Where do I start?” Paul said. “Like the time I was at a party and Debbie Benson wanted to go skinny-dipping. That's where you take off all your clothes and go swimming. Usually at night after you've been drinking. It's supposed to be sexy.”

“It's not?”

“Not in Minnesota,” Paul said. “Not where there are mosquitoes the size of chickens. Plus the water was freezing cold, which has a nice effect on girls' bodies but not so much for guys, if you know what I mean.”

Stella looked puzzled again.

“Anyway, I was way past curfew when I got home because I'd been driving around the lakes for an hour so as not to reek of alcohol. I came in and my father was waiting up for me, and he said he wanted to know if I was taking pot. My mom was usually
the one who waited up, so I knew it was serious. I said you don't
take
pot, you
smoke
pot. He said, ‘Pot is a drug, is it not? And you take drugs.' ”

“Alcohol is a drug too, isn't it?” Stella asked.

“I guess it is, but you don't say, ‘I take alcohol.'”

“But you do say, ‘I took a drink.' ”

“I freely admit it was a stupid argument,” Paul said. “But I'm denying up and down to his face, saying I don't smoke pot and never have, and he pulls out a big old Baggie full of weed and asks me if it's mine. Which it obviously was, but I'd hidden it under a loose floorboard in the attic that you had to move six huge boxes just to get to, so no way anybody could accidentally find my stash. The only other person in the house who knew about my secret hiding place was guess who? Carl. He narced on me. In my own house. You don't do that to your brother. You just don't.”

They were home now. Paul helped Stella out of the car, lifted her up the steps, and set her down on the porch while he unlocked the front door. Inside, he turned up the thermostat, got a beer from the refrigerator, and sat on the couch. Stella took her place on the dog bed by the radiator. Paul picked up the remote control, then decided against watching television.

“I have to say,” Stella said, “I still feel like something else is bothering you. You have that guilty-conscience look.”

“A hangdog look?” he asked.

She'd never cared much for the expression.

“I think maybe I did a bad thing,” he told her.

“What did you do this time?”

He'd asked Carl, once their meeting in his office was over, if he could use his computer to check his e-mail and to see if he could get Tamsen online. She wasn't online, so he sent her a quick note to tell her that all was well and that he would call her when he got home. He even considered using his brother's phone to call her.
He needed to talk to somebody. He was trying hard to give his brother the benefit of the doubt; yet evil thoughts came to him unbidden. Did he need to protect himself, even if it was only a remote possibility that Carl was going to screw him somehow? Flipping through the Rolodex on Carl's desk, he found Arnie Olmstead's telephone number and decided he could at least give Arnie a call to get a second opinion. He needed a pen or a pencil to write the number down.

Carl's desk drawers were immaculate. The top middle everything drawer, which should have been stuffed to overflowing with miscellaneous crap, was instead neatly organized with plastic sectional dividers, every paper clip in its proper place. He found the pen he was looking for, but he couldn't resist further investigation. In a deep side drawer, he found what had to be every operations manual and appliance warranty Carl had ever received, stored in alphabetical order. In a drawer below that, of interest, in a protective clear Plexiglas case, was a baseball autographed by Harmon Killebrew, the former Minnesota Twins player who'd been a childhood hero of Paul's and apparently Carl's hero as well.