Chapter 20
20
It’s not until three days later, when taking advantage of another insomnia-inspired late night, that he catches the hole in the accounts.
With the stress and the lost sleep and the way the Forever Memorials rep seems to be haunting the Chapel’s halls more frequently than any of their visiting ghosts, he’s on high alert in case he messes something up purely by virtue of being too zoned out to catch an input error, going through everything with a fine-tooth comb before he hands it off for approval. He’s on his third pass on the monthly profit and loss report, the cup of coffee at his elbow congealing into the sunken place that comes after room temperature and Sappho dozing under his desk, when his eyes snag on a set of numbers that don’t look right.
Ezra frowns at the report, scrolling back through the input tabs, then hunts around on Mom’s desktop until he finds the reports from the last few quarters, neatly organized by month. He’d known the place has never really been cash rich, and it’s not like he’s an accountant, but even his crash course in financial reporting was enough to send red flags—or at least orange ones—waving in the back of his head. He prints out this month’s report, then the previous six months’, highlights all the cells with the weird totals, then shoves them into a folder and bends to look under his desk.
“Hey, girlie,” he says, and Sappho picks her head up to look at him. “We’re gonna go for a walk, come on.”
It’s after eleven, and the house is dark and quiet when he lets himself in through the back door. He unclips Sappho’s leash to let her trot up the stairs, no doubt heading straight for Ezra’s empty bed. Ezra drapes the leash over the banister and follows, trying to keep his steps quiet so he doesn’t wake Dad or Becca on his way to Aaron’s room, muscle memory kicking in at the last second to keep him from stepping on the two creaky steps that made sneaking out as a teenager such an absolute pain in the ass.
Ezra makes his way down the hall to Aaron’s closed door. He puts an ear against it for a moment, making sure he only hears snoring and not anything weird—he’d made that mistake once in high school, and never again—before pushing the door open, picking his way across the floor, and dropping all his weight on the side of the bed without preamble or warning.
Aaron flails awake with a strangled, half-slurred “Whathefuck,” then promptly falls out of bed, hitting the floor with a jarring thud.
“What the fuck, ” he says again, clearly more awake now, then recoils when Ezra reaches over to turn on his reading lamp. “ Ow. Ezra?”
Becca’s voice, sleepy and annoyed, drifts down the hallway. “Aaron?”
“He’s fine,” Ezra calls back. “Go back to sleep.”
Aaron blinks up at him, bleary-eyed and radiating disgruntled confusion. He looks as exhausted as Ezra feels. “What—” he starts again, and Ezra shakes his head, pulling the folder of printed reports out of his bag and handing it to him.
“We need to talk,” he says. “Meet me in the kitchen.”
Ezra has a pot of coffee brewing by the time Aaron slumps into a chair at the kitchen table, looking like he’s aged ten years since Ezra walked out of his room. He puts the folder on the table, stares at it for a long moment, and then says, “Do you think Dad knows about this?”
“That you’re about twice as financially screwed as you thought you were?” The coffee maker beeps shrilly. “You’d know better than me.”
Aaron takes the cup Ezra passes him, running a hand through his hair. It flops back over his forehead, sleep rumpled and overdue for a trim. He opens the folder and flips through the pages before setting them down and rubbing his eyes. “How did this happen?”
Ezra shrugs. “My best guess? Dad’s been charging clients wholesale prices across the board—if that—and still trying to keep up with expenses, and that stopped being sustainable…several staff cost-of-living and merit raises ago.”
“ I deserve a merit raise,” Aaron mutters. “God. No wonder Forever’s been circling us like vultures. You know Caroline Lawrence was here four times in the past two weeks?” Ezra raises his eyebrows. He had only caught her twice, one of those when Aaron was none too gently steering her out of his office, both of them looking like they’d just lost an argument. “How are we even paying the bills now ?”
“I have no idea,” Ezra says. “I mean, they’re being paid—most of them are purchase orders or on autopay anyway—but if you look at the accounts receivable—”
“Yeah. There are transactions with names and dates that don’t match up to invoices, bank transfers from accounts that don’t line up with any of the accounts we have on file. And you couldn’t find anything in Mom’s files?”
Ezra shakes his head. “I looked, but Mom’s system isn’t exactly user-friendly.”
Aaron looks up from the printouts, frowning. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know, that she’s got thirty-something years of institutional knowledge and she labels her files in ways that don’t make sense?”
“Seriously? You can’t figure out how she organizes, and that’s why we’ve got God knows how many months of undocumented income on our books?”
Ezra flinches. “Just because I’m picking up her slack doesn’t mean I’m Mom, ” he snaps. “ I didn’t make this mess, I’m just trying to help clean it up. As usual.”
“Spare me the martyr routine,” Aaron shoots back. Ezra’s halfway out of his chair—he can find another way to pay the rent, he’s been doing this long enough and it’s late and he’s tired —before Aaron’s shoulders slump, the fight leaving him as quickly as it came on. “Stop. I’m sorry. You’re right.”
Ezra sits back down, but he keeps a hand on the table, ready to push himself up again. Aaron puts his face in his hands, letting out a long, unsteady breath.
“Damn it,” he says. “We’re going to have to talk to Mom.”
—
They end up at the park by the waterfront, as close to a neutral territory as they can find.
This close to sunset on a warm spring day, it takes them an extra ten minutes to find parking, the sky fading multicolored shades of orange and pink by the time they leave Aaron’s car and make their way up the sidewalk. Ezra snaps a photo almost without thinking. The setting sun over the skyline is pretty enough to break through the exhaustion and crankiness that’s hovered over him all day, and he has it posted on Instagram before he’s even realized his fingers are moving.
Someone grabs him by the back of his shirt collar and yanks sharply, and Ezra almost drops his phone, trying to flail out of the grip. “Relax,” Aaron says, giving him an amused look as he lets him go. “Just trying to keep you from walking into the street.”
“I would have stopped,” Ezra says, wrinkling his nose at him like that will conceal the pounding of his heart. The light at the crosswalk switches to a walk signal, and they step off the curb together. “Probably.”
“I’ll remind you of that when you’ve got your legs crushed under some Whole Foods mom’s Prius,” Aaron deadpans.
The folder of spreadsheet printouts feels like a loaded bomb in Ezra’s messenger bag. The mysterious transactions seem to go back months, none of them with the documentation they should have. He’s pretty sure they don’t have some kind of shadow benefactor—it’s not that kind of business, community organized or not—but Ezra doesn’t need an MBA to see that without those deposits, they’d be in the red every month. Far enough into the red that they’d be beyond screwed if they disappeared.
If Mom knows what that money is and where it’s coming from, they can figure out what to do next. If she doesn’t…
Ezra’s not sure what they do if she doesn’t.
They find a visible enough spot on the steps leading down to the water and sit down together, out of the way of the worst of the foot traffic. Ezra’s phone buzzes as he sets his bag down, and he taps the notification absently, stilling when he sees the comment on the photo he’d posted outside the car.
@with_bells_jon pvd skyline posts with no filter??? love to see it.
“Still playing hard to get?” Aaron says, far too close.
“Jesus, will you let me breathe ?” He shoves at Aaron’s arm until he stops peering over Ezra’s shoulder to look at his phone. “And I’m not playing hard to get, things are just…weird right now.”
“Right. I guess it can’t be hard to get if you guys already—”
Ezra snaps his head up, abandoning his attempt at writing a reply. “We didn’t— Who told you—”
“Like you didn’t just confirm it for me?”
“It wasn’t…” He has a brief, horrifying flashback to being sixteen, when Aaron caught him in the bathroom trying to use Mom’s foundation to cover up a hickey on the side of his neck. “It’s not like—a thing . And it didn’t go that far.”
“Ew,” Aaron says, grimacing. “Please spare me the details. I have to work with the guy on a regular basis. I don’t need any scarring mental images when I’m trying to have a conversation about chevra logistics.” He cocks his head to one side. “Why isn’t it a thing? I thought you guys were…I don’t know, clicking or whatever?”
Ezra hesitates. “It’s just…It’s not a good time.”
Aaron gives him a long, thoughtful look. It’s a look that reminds Ezra uncomfortably of Dad. “He’s a good guy, you know. You could do a lot worse.”
Ezra shakes his head. “It’s not me I’m worried about.”
Aaron frowns but abandons whatever he was about to say when something behind Ezra catches his eye. “Incoming,” he mutters, and straightens up just as Mom bustles her way into Ezra’s line of sight, takeout cup in one hand and an overstuffed tote bag over her opposite arm.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” she says, setting everything down with brisk, obviously forced cheer. “I got caught up in a checkout line, and then my phone died.” She kisses the top of Ezra’s head before he can even think to tell her not to, then does the same to Aaron. “Have you been waiting long?”
“We’re fine,” Aaron says, just coolly enough that her smile falters. It hits Ezra, maybe a moment too late, that this might be the first time they’ve seen each other since the seder. “You’re not that late.”
“Right,” she says. She looks briefly at Ezra like she’s hoping for solidarity. Ezra raises his eyebrows back at her, and she steels herself before turning to look at Aaron directly.
“Aaron, honey,” she starts. “I know the last few weeks haven’t been—”
“Absolutely not,” he interrupts, and she breaks off immediately, the click of her teeth audible as she closes her mouth. “You’re not going to do this now after a month of avoiding my phone calls and sending me half-assed apology emails instead. You either aren’t ready to admit you fucked up or you still think you’re somehow justified, because otherwise you would have been willing to talk face-to-face way sooner. We’re only here having this conversation because we have to clean up the mess you left behind. And I’m not talking about Dad and Becca.”
Mom deflates. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll—I’ll help however I can, and maybe later we can…” Aaron’s face darkens, and she presses her lips together. “Okay. I understand. Tell me what’s going on.”
Aaron nudges Ezra, and he pulls the folder of printouts out of his bag and hands it to her. “These are the profit and loss statements from the last four quarters,” he says, watching her face carefully as she puts down her cup and opens the folder. “You’ve been logging multiple transactions a month, every month, for at least a year—and those are just the ones we found. No account information, no invoice attachments, no client names. It’s like you’ve just been transferring money out of thin air.”
“I pulled the bank records, so at least we know you weren’t just making up transactions with no money behind them,” Aaron says, leaning forward. He’s not a big person, just tall, but he knows how to look intimidating enough if he wants to. “But that means you’ve had an income source that isn’t in any of our files, that Dad and I didn’t know about, that you’ve basically been funneling into the operating accounts to keep the business from going down. Which means that if those suddenly stopped —say, because the person running the transfers fucked off to—”
“Aaron,” Ezra warns. He puts a hand on Aaron’s shoulder, and Aaron breaks off with a sucked-in breath, his mouth tightening into a flat line. He sits back with a huff.
Mom is watching them both. She runs her fingers down the line of highlighted numbers on the page in front of her, and then sighs. “I meant to tell you when you were a little older,” she says, closing the folder and resting her hands on it. “I wanted to wait until you were a little more established in the job, until I had more of an idea of—well, of who you were going to take after, I suppose.”
Aaron narrows his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Your father is…” Mom begins, and then stops. Sighs again, and pushes her glasses up and off her face so that she can rub her eyes. She’s quiet for a moment, as if collecting her thoughts.
“Your father cares about what he does.” Her tone is measured, not unkind. “And there are some parts of his work that he’s very, very good at. He understands what people need when they’re grieving, what they need to find closure and meaning and comfort. He understands the rituals and the history and the traditions. He has a brilliant way of making sure that every person who walks into his office leaves feeling like they’ve been cared for in a way that doesn’t make them feel like they’re the wrong kind of person, or the wrong kind of Jew. I might know how to network a group, but your dad’s the one who knows people. I’ve always admired him for that.”
She pauses, fingertips drumming on the cover of the folder. Ezra waits. He knows there’s a but coming.
“But,” she says, perfectly on cue, “he doesn’t have a head for the business side. And that’s not his fault, really. The funeral industry as a whole is—well. I don’t need to tell you.”
She doesn’t. They’ve been listening to rants about the corporate funeral industrial complex from Dad—and before that, from Zayde—since they were still in booster seats. Frankly, Ezra’s more than a little surprised that a representative from Forever Memorials had even gotten through the front door, let alone made herself a recognizable fixture. “He’d do everything for less than cost, if he could, because he’s a wonderful person, but—”
“But that doesn’t exactly cover payroll,” Aaron says.
Mom shakes her head. “It would barely cover inventory,” she says, and the wry almost smile in her voice sets off a wistful ache through Ezra’s chest. “Your grandfather knew that. He always had a good sense for people. He set up a rainy day fund of sorts—a decent mix of investment accounts, liquid assets, that kind of thing.” She looks down at her hands. “He gave me access to all of it before he died. He told me—” She laughs, a little damply. “He said I had a good head on my shoulders, and he knew I’d keep your father from running the place into the ground. It won’t last forever, though. Especially if nothing changes in the way your dad runs things. I’ve been doing my best to replenish the accounts anytime there’s anything spare, but…”
Ezra glances at Aaron, only to find his brother already looking back, his face a complicated mix of fondness and grief. He knocks their shoulders together and gets the faintest smile in return. “You didn’t tell Dad, though.”
She shakes her head. “No one knows except our accountant and the executor of your zayde’s will. It would have broken your dad’s heart if he thought Zayde didn’t believe in him.”
Aaron lets out a short, breathy exhale of a laugh. “Of course.” Mom looks up at him. Aaron meets her eyes and smiles, a lopsided, unhappy twist of a thing. “Because the last thing you’d ever want to do is break Dad’s heart.”
—
Aaron drives him home.
Neither of them talk. The air in the car is thick with tension, both of them stewing in their own thoughts, and the tight-lipped look on Aaron’s face is enough to keep Ezra from any attempt at conversation.
It’s not even that he’s angry. Fine—it’s one more lie Mom told, one more secret she kept—but it’s just been thrown on the pile. Ezra can’t even blame her for it without drowning in hypocrisy, because it’s not as if he hasn’t been keeping secrets of his own.
So why does he feel like the ground’s been pulled out from under his feet?
Maybe, he thinks, it’s because he thought that even if he walked away, the Chapel would always be there if he ever decided to go back. Maybe it’s the idea that it might not be, the realization that the threads tying it to their family are more frayed than the ties holding the family together.
He’s still stewing in it, uncomfortable and unmoored, when Aaron pulls the car to a stop in front of Ezra’s apartment. Ezra gathers himself back into the relative shape of a person, rolling his shoulders as he straightens up and unbuckles his seatbelt, and Aaron turns in his seat to watch him, expression wary.
“You gonna be okay?”
Ezra attempts a smile. “I’ll be fine. Thanks for the ride.”
Aaron eyes him for another moment, like he’s considering turning the car around and driving right back to the Chapel instead. Then he sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and gives Ezra a Yeah, I get it, but what can you do? look that’s so much a mirror of Ezra’s own exhaustion that it almost makes him laugh. “Text me when Mom sends you the accounting stuff,” he says. “Otherwise I’ll just stress about it all night.”
He says it casually, but his eyes are serious, and Ezra hears the undercurrent of concern that slips into the words.
Let me know that I don’t need to worry about you.
“I’ll hound her if I don’t hear from her by ten,” Ezra promises, opening the passenger door. “You’ll have it as soon as I do.”
Everything’s under control.
It’s impulse, more than anything, that makes him pause outside Jonathan’s apartment. There’s music playing, muffled but audible through the door, with just enough bass that the vibration of it buzzes against his skin when he reaches out to touch his fingertips to the wood. He wants, with a sweep of chest-clenching desire, to be on the other side of it, in the easy quiet of Jonathan’s arms, soaking in his presence.
Jonathan’s still a stranger to him in more ways than not. Half the time they’ve spent together has been in silence, the only sounds rushing water and the chant of millennia-old liturgy. How many conversations have they had with actual substance, not just logistics small talk made while Ezra spirals through all the ways he’s been lying through his teeth just by omission? How—
God, why is he here ?
He can hear Jonathan moving around his living room, the hardwood of the floor creaking under every step, and Ezra’s fingers flex against the door, moving to knock. He presses his knuckles to his mouth like he can punish them.
The music is still playing, sweet and slow, building like a tide. Ezra closes his eyes and tries not to sway toward it.
The folder of printed spreadsheets in his bag feels like a pile of bricks. Tomorrow, he’ll spend the day on the phone, getting the records of every transfer, finding out how much has been spent, how much is left. He’ll sit with Aaron and they’ll come up with a way to tell Dad that it’s not just Mom who’s been lying to him for years, but his father, too, who’d died without telling him the truth. They’ll split the work the way they always have. Aaron will tell the story, will lay out the facts, will spin out the solutions. And Ezra will pick up the pieces that crumble before something else can be rebuilt, like waves washing away a sandcastle.
This is the part where he walks away. Where he goes back upstairs to where his roommates have been watching his dog for him, where he has the budding beginnings of a second family who seem, for some unimaginable reason, to want him to be part of what they’ve built. Where he sits on the floor by the couch and tells them everything about his grandfather’s secret bank accounts and the latest addition to his mom’s list of dirty laundry, while Ollie strokes his hair with a familiar hand. Where, after everyone says their good nights, he walks down the hall to curl up in his empty bed and call Nina until he can drift off to the sound of her honeyed voice as she weaves out a fantasy where they run away and no one expects him to fix anything.
He takes a breath.
He knocks on the door.