38. I See What She Did There
I SEE WHAT SHE DID THERE
BEFORE
Because my father never imagined I would demand a lawyer, much less have access to one like Brody’s mother, he didn’t properly prepare. Also, Beatrice Huntington, who still feels as though she owes me for the whole appendectomy thing, is just that good.
She clears a half day for negotiations, which she approaches as though it’s a traditional divorce.
(“Honey, I only became an attorney so I could get paid to punish bad men.”) As someone whose time and expertise is her livelihood, Beatrice makes demands I never would have thought to ask for.
She negotiates two fixed monthly allowances for my mother and my sisters (one that doesn’t diminish unless there are demonstrable changes in my father’s income, and which is meant as ongoing alimony for my mother, and another that’s predominantly child support, and which decreases each time one of the girls turns eighteen).
The numbers she demands are staggering to me, tripling what we’ll have access to, on a monthly basis.
Beatrice argues for the establishment and funding of separate 529 accounts, so none of my younger sisters will ever need to worry about college tuition.
She starts with what sounds to me like an absurdly high monthly request and then allows herself to be bargained down to $6,000 monthly contributions starting immediately, which, given the very small shift in Brody’s posture, makes me wonder if it was what she’d been aiming for from the beginning.
She explains that charging my mother rent would be counterproductive.
(“If she pays you rent, it’ll get taxed.
Wouldn’t you prefer to just lower the alimony by a little?
”) Then she gets my father to commit to fixed rent for everyone in Lucas’s mother’s apartment complex.
(“Such a run-down property, unlikely to be truly revenue-generating, so you might as well write it off as a loss. Good publicity, that Beinan Zhao is a man of the community, trying to preserve neighborhoods, if it ever leaks.”) My father finally snaps out of his trance when she asks him to agree to a dedicated annual budget of $50,000 for potential fixes to the complex.
But at that point, I can’t even tell how much Beatrice really wants .
. . versus what she is pushing for just for the hell of it.
In writing, my father commits to never investing in, influencing, or ever partnering with any business venture Lucas Murray is part of.
My favorite? Something I’ll never quite understand?
She gets my father to bicker with her over holidays.
My father’s never shown a smidge of interest in getting to know Wren or Harper.
I doubt even Aurora remembers the last holiday with our father, but somehow, she gets my father to argue that yes, dammit, he deserves to spend every other Christmas with his younger daughters.
I feel as though I’m gaining a window into the man my father might have been, if only he’d allowed himself to be around people who challenged him, who knocked on that false bravado he puts on.
She is flipping through notes I didn’t even realize she had, am not even sure I was there to witness her taking, when she furrows her brow just a little.
“I almost forgot . . .” She puts the notepad down and crosses her legs, temporarily drawing my father’s attention.
“I believe you’ve indicated that, should a merger happen—”
“The Zhao-Huang merger will be happening.” My father’s tone is immediately belligerent, reacting instantly to Beatrice’s phrasing, that small hint of doubt. He employs females as assistants who sometimes become paramours, and I wonder if that’s why he consistently underestimates Beatrice.
Or perhaps he was always this bad at business. Maybe in my youth I never really observed if there was a gap between what he taught and what he actually . . . did.
“Of course there will be a merger,” Beatrice soothes. “It’s just the timelines of potential acquisitions—”
“It’s a merger.”
The more agitated my father becomes, the more Beatrice soothes and cajoles, making it seem as though she must have misunderstood the difference between words like acquire and merge. As if she had skipped that class.
At Princeton Law.
“My understanding, however, and I’m truly no expert, is that timelines can vary widely. Wildly. Would you expect Lorelai to take over as soon as the merger is complete? Or would you allow her to finish school first?”
“Of course she can finish first.”
“But if the merger happens right away, or if Lorelai starts to struggle in some of her courses, if she were to drop out—” She taps the pen she’s not using against her temple, which I would think is nothing .
. . except I’ve seen Brody signal that way, when we were teaming up for Counter-Strike.
“Gosh, Brody, did I forget to tell you about Timmy Hoffsteader? You remember him?”
Brody is nodding, taking a break from the notes he’s only pretending to take, because he’s already gotten permission to record the meeting to transcribe later. “Timmy was class president, we all looked up to him. What happened?”
I’m grateful, suddenly, for the years of not reacting my father has grilled into me. Because there is no way this isn’t staged.
“Well . . .” Dramatic pause. “Timmy was at Harvard, but you remember how he was always going out and meeting interesting people.” Another pause, a quick glance at my father from beneath her lashes. “He was very liberal and—”
“Can we get on with it?”
Beatrice pats her perfectly made-up face with her exquisitely manicured nails.
“I’m sorry, of course I would never mean to imply that Lorelai would be like this, and Caltech is such a nice, quaint little school, more like a family than anything else.
But I was just remembering, poor Timmy got himself involved with a truly terrible girlfriend he met somehow, somewhere, so then before anyone had the chance to talk him out of it, he dropped out of Harvard and now he’s waiting tables while taking Intro to Marketing at community college.
” Brody’s mother looks around expectantly, her eyes wide.
“I just mean, if Lorelai starts to struggle with everything, wouldn’t you want her to curtail a few of her classes, or if she’s truly needed to help with anything on the potential merger side, would you prefer she pause her degree—”
“Lorelai’s always been a fine student.”
“Of course,” Beatrice soothes. Waits.
My father shifts a little, clearly conflicted, mentally calculating how much it would hurt, to not have that story in his back pocket. He finally huffs out, “She can take as long as she wants. Take any classes she wants.”
And yes, I see what she did there.
“That’s so generous of you.” She has Brody taking notes, because nothing will be finalized. “And Lorelai’s job will be guaranteed?”
“What?”
The way Beatrice wields her words makes me want to be an English major.
“I mean as parents, we always hope our children will rise to the challenge. But if, and I’m sure you’ve trained her well, but if Lorelai struggles, is her position guaranteed for a certain amount of time?”
My father considers the words for a moment, and I do wonder whether he has an inkling. “I reserve first right of refusal on whether or not to hire Lorelai, and she gets thirty days’ notice, like any of my employees.”
Beatrice smiles as if my father is being generous, and because my father never stops to think about the potential ramifications, this is the agreement that is signed.
The official wording is that I can stay in school for as long as my grades are above a 3.8/4.0 and as long as I’m advancing toward a degree at a top-ranked university.
And yes, this is the moment I decide to apply to graduate school.
Because the contract never said when I had to stop. Just that my father had the right to hire me as soon as I stopped advancing.
Brody—and even his mother—hugs me afterward.
There’s a verbal agreement stipulating that my engagement to Tatum Huang, a man I still haven’t even spoken to since this all began, will be announced a week after worlds.
And for now, my father and mother will remain married, because apparently, such separate maintenance agreements are not only legal, they’re “not rare,” according to Beatrice.
(“I’ve worked out several, mostly for women married to Chinese businessmen.
I wear a short skirt, put on my Elle Woods ditz, and clean house. ”)
Lucas’s investors, Lucas’s family, even Cal, Stan, and their not-porch, are all safe.
My mother and my sisters are taken care of.
What more could I ask for?