Chapter 6
SIX
WIL
“How long do you think I need to stay?” Kap asks in a low voice. We’re standing in Chanelle’s enormous, pristine white kitchen, not a crumb or small appliance to be seen—drinking Michelob Golden Draft Light from sweating bottles. “The guys are waiting for me at The Cabooze.”
“You’re a Greazy Meal fan?” I ask. The Cabooze is a smoky Minneapolis bar not far from here.
“What’s a greasy meal?” Kap replies. I’m the only person in my family who’s into music, and it shows.
“Not a greasy meal. Greazy Meal. They’re the house band on Sunday nights.”
He shrugs. “I’d rather go home and play video games, but at least I have an excuse to leave this party early.”
“Maybe I’ll meet you over there later.” I barely see Kaplan anymore, and as annoying as he was growing up, I like my kid brother.
Dad and Chanelle moved to this mansion on Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis five years ago.
At that time, she issued us all an open invitation for what she calls Sunday night lunch: sandwiches on thick slabs of sourdough from a nearby bakery piled high with deli meat and cheese, tons of sides, and a buffet of bakery items. The food is good.
The company? Not so much. My favorite Sunday night lunches are when Dad and Chanelle are at their timeshare in Mexico and Sunday night lunch is canceled.
It’s not that I have anything against Chanelle. Except, of course, for the fact that she’s not Mom.
Chanelle’s been the new Mrs. Wilshire for almost seventeen years, and she’s not so much an evil stepmother as one who tries too hard.
She met Dad at the corporate office, another slap in Mom’s face considering how much she’d sacrificed to help him build the company.
Chanelle worked in human resources of all departments, and she loves to tell the story of how she fell hard for Dad at her very first executive meeting.
Dad invited her to lunch after the meeting and the rest was history.
The ink on the divorce papers was barely dry.
I guess you could say I’m not a fan of workplace romance—yet another reason to not let myself get tangled up with Abbey, as much as I might enjoy the act of entanglement.
After the divorce, Mom moved us to live near her parents in Wausau, Wisconsin.
I was ten, Kap eight, and Kelsey twelve and about to enter her banshee teen years.
Mom worked at the hotel my grandparents own until she met Gregory a few years later.
My siblings and I moved in with Dad and Chanelle and her two sons, Alec and Drew, the summer before Kelsey started at Schilling.
Kap and I were still in high school, and that’s when I started working at Hometown—as many hours as they’d give me, so I could avoid being part of Chanelle’s harmonious, Brady Bunch-inspired blended family.
I try to dodge these Sunday night lunches as much as possible, especially after a week like this one. But today is Kap’s birthday, his 25th, and Chanelle insisted on throwing him a party. A party he didn’t want. He’s even less of a fan of the second Mrs. Wilshire.
So far, I’ve avoided Dad, who’s in the midst of a lengthy conversation in the great room with Alec, no doubt offering unsolicited and unwelcome advice. The Twins game is on, but I’ll sacrifice watching the game if it means I don’t have to talk to Dad.
“You can’t leave your own birthday party early, man.” Andre, Kelsey’s husband, joins us in the kitchen and grabs a Mich Golden from the refrigerator. He’s a tall, lanky Black man with thick-framed glasses and cornrows. “I need to start bringing my own beer. This tastes like watered-down piss.”
“Chanelle made Dad switch to light beer.” Kap snickers. “She’s worried about his expanding waistline.”
“You should at least stay until we eat,” Andre says. “You don’t want to piss off boss-man.”
“What’s he going to do, fire me?”
Of course he wouldn’t. It’s a point of pride that all of his children—including Alec and Drew—work for Hometown Electronics in some capacity, although I’m the only one at a store and not the corporate office.
“You still work there?” I ask. “I haven’t read any articles in the Business Journal about you revolutionizing any processes lately. I thought maybe you’d been let go.”
“Fuck off.” Kap slugs me in the arm. “How are things going with your merch rotation, Jefferson? Heard you bombed an eval.”
“You fuck off,” I volley back. The mention of the eval makes me think about Abbey and how she came in like gangbusters her first week.
That woman knows her stuff—about music, yeah, and movies, but she’s also quickly picked up on department procedures.
So far, it seems like this was a good hire, and maybe she will be the one to help us pass the next eval.
She’s fun and beautiful and yes, sometimes I still think about what might have been, but then I remind myself that she’s my employee and she’s off-limits and I don’t want to be like my father.
I give Kap the finger. “Why don’t you try stocking a cycle and see how you do?”
“Can you two act like grown-ups?” Andre says, then changes the subject. “Hey, I’ve got some questions about your grandfather.”
“Jefferson A. Wilshire the second?” I ask. JW, my grandfather, is mostly remembered for his coke habit, his affairs, and an embezzlement scandal at his law firm.
“He was kind of a dick,” Kap offers. I bark out a laugh. Kap barely knew the guy. He died of a massive stroke when we were still in elementary school. His reputation as a womanizing, manipulating cheat, however, has lived on.
“Nah, not JW,” Andre says. “I know all about JW, believe me. I want to know about your other grandfather. Your mom’s dad.”
“Huh,” Kap says. “What do you want to know?”
Andre started his Hometown Electronics career as a Loss Prevention team captain during college at the U of M, then inventory manager at Woodlake. After he graduated, he moved to facilities management at the corporate office.
“We see him what, once or twice a year,” Andre says, “and at the New Year’s Eve gala. But I guess I want to know what he’s like in general. And what he’s like to work with as the president of the board. The history of the League, that kind of thing.”
Kap gives me a look. “You want to field this one?”
The Hometown League has never been Kaplan’s thing, but I love it.
Mom’s brother, Uncle Howard, has Down syndrome, and she started the nonprofit, initially through Hometown Electronics, to provide him and others with disabilities with a place to belong—and play baseball.
Howard knows more about baseball and the MLB than anyone I’ve met, including Dad.
Hometown Electronics is still a major sponsor and has helped the nonprofit start a league in each of its major markets.
I spend most of my spare time in the spring and summer volunteering with the Twin Cities league, which irritates Dad to no end, of course.
I’m sure he’d rather that I spend my free time going over P Kelsey has been putting him off and putting Hometown first. He’s even offered to give up his career to stay home with the babies.
She makes more money than he does, and probably always will.
Dad’s got his sights set on her taking over the company, and more power to her.
I might have his name, but I’d never want his job.
“Holy shit!” I say.
“Keep your voice down, man. We’re not telling anyone yet, not until she starts to show.”
I bark out a laugh. Knowing my sister, she’ll find a way to control the expansion of her body while still manufacturing a fully formed infant who will emerge from the womb having already scored a perfect 1600 on the SAT and gotten into Harvard. “Of course you’re not.”
“I knew you’d get it. If there’s anyone who knows your sister as well as I do, it’s you.”
He’s right. For all our differences, and the fact that she can be a class-A bitch, Kelsey and I have always been close, especially during the latchkey years after the divorce when Mom was at work.
We learned how to make boxed macaroni and cheese and frozen pizzas and eventually graduated to basic recipes like minestrone soup and chicken parmesan.
Those first months in Wausau, before we knew anyone else, we were each other’s best friend.
“To my complete and utter dismay,” I say, “yes, I know her well.”
He snorts. “I know I don’t have to ask you to keep this to yourself. We’ve been working out a plan—you know, like how long will she take maternity leave? Who will take care of the baby after she goes back to work?”
“I thought you were going to quit to be a stay-at-home dad,” I remind him.