Hanukkah 3
Upon hearing the request, Zach went to his first, standby response. "Hell no."
He could practically hear his mother's glare through the phone; amazing technology they had these days. He wondered if there was a "Jewish Mother" iPhone app out yet: iGuilt. "Watch your language, and I'm picking you up at the airport on the tenth. You're not getting out of this. Tabby is bringing her boyfriend over."
Oh yeah? Watch me. "Mom, look outside."
"No."
"Just do it!"
She rolled a sigh like a tidal wave. He heard her shuffle around. "OK, I'm looking out the front window, what do you mean?"
"What's it like outside?"
"What do you mean, what's it like? It's like how it is this time of year!"
He rubbed a hand down his face and cut a perfect line on the glass tabletop with the edge of a razor blade. "That means it's freezing cold."
"Well, yeah. We got some snow last week. That new family across the street still didn't shovel the front sidewalk, I don't know what they're waiting for. Someone to slip and fall and break their neck, I guess."
That statement earned another line. He had bought his parents a house—two actually, one being a summer home in the Hamptons—and a condo in Florida, and his mother insisted on settling them in a house within four blocks of his sisters. "Sorry Mom, nothing short of a subpoena is going to drag me out of St. Barth's right now. It's 80 degrees, sunny, beautiful, and I'm drinking rum made from some sort of endangered fruit hybrid—something." He let the humor slip out of his voice for a moment. "I have to work, anyway. They don't recognize Jewish holidays."
"But don't you have vacation saved up?"
He had to take a hard line, or else she was going to win this round, and the score had been tipped in her favor for too long. "I'll come after New Year's, I promise."
She was silent for a long moment. "Your father would really like to see you."
"I know, I'll see him after New Year's." His phone beeped; the crew was here, and there was a Portuguese supermodel in the mix. He couldn't miss out. "I gotta go, Mom. Love to Dad."
Zach ended the call before she could respond, and dropped his head to the table to snort up the white powder that would keep him going for another twenty-four hours. There was a party on the yacht, undoubtedly with the very best Columbian export, and if he didn't fuck that model before Kevin did, he'd never live it down.
Live high, live mighty, because life is but a dream.