I quite nearly had put the invitations in the mail for the annual Christmas party. I was not twenty feet from the mailbox, close enough to see the ice crystals that had formed over its surface that afternoon. My phone rang which prompted my first thought and that was to rush to the box and shove in the fifty invitations to our Christmas party so that I could answer the phone.
The ice on the sidewalk caused me to put that thought aside and at least see who was calling before I busted my ass to answer it. I tucked the box under my arm and looked at the phone. My breath fogged over the phone display when I lifted it to look at it, it showed Jamie, my sister was calling.
"Hey sis." I said trying to suppress my shivering voice.
"Hey Greg." She said with a hint of stress. It wasn't the stress that tipped me off though, it was the fact that she called me Greg. Jamie usually addressed me as 'little brother'. Funny since I was roughly the same age as her and certainly not 'little' in comparison.
"What's up Jamie?" I asked with a tone that told her to spit it out.
"I don't know how to say this..." she paused "...are you sitting down?"
"I'm outside at the mailbox freezing my ass off sis, what's up?"
"Okay." She said. "I'm at Bakers right now..."
Baker's is a trendy lunch spot that the downtown execs called their second office around lunch time.
"Honey, I'm sorry to tell you this, this way but I'm looking at Susan right now getting very friendly at a back booth with that slimy divorce attorney that's on television all the time -- what's his name -- Marty McCall."
I couldn't speak. I nearly found a place to sit right there on the sidewalk.
"Greg, I didn't know you and Susan were having problems."
"I didn't either." I said. "What do you mean friendly?"
Jamie paused.
"What do you mean friendly Jamie?" I tried to say without shouting.
"He's got his hand up her skirt."
What Jamie wasn't saying was that she was the only person in the place that could see what they were up to. They didn't pay any attention to her because she was sitting partially behind a divider and had her face behind a laptop computer. Jamie also omitted the fact that this slime-ball was fucking my wife with some object.
"Should I do something?" Jamie asked in a voice that was strained even more.
My mind was trying to digest what I was hearing.
"Show me!" I said as if answering the thousand dollar bonus question on a game show.
"What?"
"Show me. Your phone has video. Send me as much video as you can get. Do it!" With that I hung up.
The box slipped out from under my arm and landed in the frozen grass next to the sidewalk just as a trash truck eased by on the street. I picked up the package and launched it between the two men riding on the back of the truck and into the pile of filthy rubbish. Gold foil lettering, red ribbon and all. Party cancelled.
That was one year ago. Jamie sent me the video that day we talked. I shake my head every time I hear her words in my head 'getting friendly'. She was trying to protect me. Marty was fucking Susan two ways to Tuesday with a dildo in a secluded quiet corner of the restaurant. Since Marty had face recognition from being on t.v., he was a local celebrity. No doubt his entrance that day went something like this:
"Good day Mr. McCall." The manager would say.
"A very fine day it is Curtis and happy holidays." He would say with a broad smile. "I'd like a nice quiet table in the back for me and my guest today."
With that, Marty McCall would extend a warm handshake to Curtis. That one handshake would make Curtis richer by a hundred bucks and ensure Mr. McCall and his guest had no one else seated near them.
My sister Jamie had a similar deal. She was an executive vice president for a corporate development company that owned a good chunk of the city. It also happened to own the building that this particular restaurant was in. It didn't cost her anything to get seated in her quiet place in the back. Anything she ordered was put onto a tab and picked up by the company. Susan was oblivious to this. She was a self absorbed type of person. She saw Jamie once a year at the Christmas party, and didn't really pay attention even then.
Since the Christmas party a year ago, Jamie had gone on a fitness binge for stress relief and had the girls worked over by a top rate surgeon. If Susan even saw her she would have just written her off as an aspiring suit trying to climb the ladder. Not a thirty something from the top of the ladder.
Jamie is my half sister. We were born literally days apart. Our father was President of Eaton Enterprises, a large import company for heavy machinery. While at home, father got friendly with mother and conceived yours truly. Days after while traversing the globe in the company jet, Jamie was conceived when father fucked his mistress/personal assistant Cassandra at thirty six thousand feet over Beijing. I have no doubt father would have provided well for Cassandra and the baby, but as fate would have it, Cassandra died in childbirth.
I cannot imagine the conversation that took place between my mother and father but my mother stuck by him and they took Jamie as their own. Jamie was born first and then I came two days later. Jamie wasn't told of her mother until she was eighteen but she hugged mother and thanked her for being her mom. We have one older brother, Stan and one younger sister Gale. Eighteen months difference on both sides. They both live in other cities but we stay in contact as much as possible. I was looking forward to seeing them at Christmas.
Father provided well for all of us. He stressed the importance of a good education and wrote the checks to back it up. Father was a smart and shrewd man. Jamie did well for herself in business and business law at Harvard as did I. Where Jamie is more into business, My job as executive council for a defense contractor focuses on international and government law. Stan the man became a CEO himself like father and little Gale is a surgeon.
For some reason, only us boys married. Both married, both divorced.
