and you’re in deep shit. Here’s the payback, sport. No car to drive until I see a big change.” Mike reached up to the visor and punched the garage door closed, then got out of the car. They faced off over the top of the Porsche as the garage door slowly went down.
“How am I supposed to get to practice?” Mickey said, his voice distinctly whining. “How am I supposed to get to school?”
“We live in a great city with public transportation. Use Muni. Use your friends. Your mom and I will drive you, when it’s convenient for us. You can walk. Ride a bike. But your idiotic decision just cost you a big chunk of your freedom. Get it?”
“Yeah. Great. I got it.” Mickey headed for the door but not before Mike heard him mutter. “Asshole…”
“You boys stop it,” March said, half annoyed and half laughing. Scott and Phillip had invaded her kitchen and were tossing a wooden pepper grinder back and forth like a football, first over her head, then holding it out to her, acting contrite, only to snatch it back when she reached for it, crowing and using the granite island to block her from getting to them.
“Aw, Mom,” Phillip pitched the grinder to Scott and scooted around the island. “What happened? You used to be quicker.”
“She’s getting older.”
“Scott!” She stopped where she was, hands on her hips. “Give me the grinder.”
“Nah.”
“I’ll tell Renee you let Tyler eat dirt.”
“Don’t believe her, big brother. Mom never breaks a promise. Over here.” Phillip stood behind her, all six feet two of him, his shaved head shining from the recessed lighting, his long arms in the air waving like an open receiver.
March jammed her elbow into his ribs.
“Ouch! Ma…” Phillip waved a yellow dish towel. “That’s a foul.”
“You knucklehead. I guess that’s what I get for saying hand me the pepper.”
“Is that what you said? We thought you said hand-off the pepper.”
“You always were a lousy liar.” She pulled out a small pepper bottle from the spice drawer. “You boys can have your toy. I’ll use this.” She hammered a bottle of seasoned pepper over the Caesar salad a couple of times, then looked up just as Mickey came out of the garage and stalked toward the kitchen, head down, looking guilty and sullen and angry. Her stomach sank.
Mike followed on his heels and paused in the kitchen doorway. One quick, pointed exchange and a nod told her everything with the police was okay.
She put her hand around Mickey’s neck and kissed his cheek. “Hey. Rough day.”
“Yeah…”
“Good work, numb nuts,” Phillip said, then turned to Scott. “Look at that. He gets himself arrested wearing a company sweatshirt. Next time you’re going to do something stupid, wear Burton.”
“Phillip!” March said.
“I was only joking. Trying to lighten things up for him. The kid looks like he’s going to cry.”
Mickey spun around, the skin on his neck and face instantly bright red, eyes still moist, and pinned his brother with a hard look. “Good thing I’m not wearing your SkiStar logo, Phil, since everyone says your part of the company isn’t doing shit.”
For the longest, stunned few heartbeats, the room was dead quiet, the unspoken just spoken, and the family itself suddenly cracked in half. Two of her sons looked like junkyard dogs, facing each other and ready to pounce.
Scott grabbed Phillip’s right arm as he pulled it back, hand in a fist. “Don’t.”
Mickey started to move toward his brother.
“That’s enough, you two,” Mike said, stepping in between them.
March couldn’t move. Yes, the SkiStar division had been losing money for the three years, but there was a longstanding, solemn rule that the family only discussed company business together at the office and in the board room. Mickey might be seventeen, but he knew the rules.
In family business lines had to be drawn to separate family from profit and loss, especially when the company and the strong-minded, strong-willed Cantrells were all tied so tightly together, with every one of them having a stake in the business, in its red and black, and its future.
“The table’s ready, Mom.” Renee walked in with Tyler, started to give him to Scott, then stopped, looking around. “What’s going on?”
March handed her the salad. “Put this on the table for me, dear, and get the girls to come eat.”
Renee left, but not without exchanging a questioning look with Scott who said, “Come on, Phil. Get your wife and let’s eat.”
Mickey stood in the middle of the room, alone on his battlefield after trying to cause a war when no one else wanted one. He was confused, angry, embarrassed, full of young male emotions that needed blowing off. “Go wash up, Mickey,” Mike said, talking to him as if he were ten years old without realizing it.
Mickey scowled at Mike, turned away and walked toward the heart of the house. “I’m not hungry.”
Mike started to go after him but March placed a hand on his shoulder. “Let him go. He needs to work things through and get the salt out of those wounds of his.” Through the wide kitchen archway, she watched her youngest run up the stairs.
“He’s trying to pick a fight with anyone he can,” March said. “Did it work?”
“Close, but not quite. Not with me, anyway. And he called me an asshole. Phil almost took the bait, though.”
“Mickey’s embarrassed. He can’t control his emotions.”
“He’d better control his impulses pretty damn quick or I’ll show him what an asshole I can be.”
“Mike. Come on. That’s not how you do things.” “I took the car away. No driving till he changes his attitude.”
She had seen the tears glistening in her youngest son’s eyes. Times like this were when she remembered that not even for a reflection without a wrinkle would she want to be seventeen again. March picked up the dish of lasagna. “Come on. Let’s eat.”
Four hours later, Mike flipped the light on in his wine cellar carved into the bowels of the three-story house, found the bottle he wanted from the racks and headed upstairs to their bedroom. In the corner of the sitting area, near an original slate fireplace flanked by mahogany bookcases, he’d had a private bar installed. Over the years, for birthdays, Father’s Days, Christmases, his kids made certain it was stocked with any and all the high-end wine paraphernalia.
He was just pouring the red wine into stemmed bubble glasses from
