Chapter V
Pepper
Four years go by fast after this incident because Olivia does not speak to me if she isn’t obliged. The warm demeanour fades to a cold stem of a dead flower. Her blouses are buttoned up to her neck like a nun, her headset is absent, her skirts go to her knees, high heels are replaced with sensible footwear, and pantyhose shield her legs. She doesn’t tell me I can go home, she doesn’t fed-ex me things, and she lets everyone swarm me with non-sense. For the first time in thirteen years I am running my empire again. One day, I see a cheap band on her finger. I am unsure if the tacky thing is an engagement or a wedding ring, but she resigned, and she gave me a message before she left. “Samantha called” followed by a local address and a date.
On the date I appeared at the address, finding it to be a grimy diner. I see her immediately, but she disappoints me. She’s alone and old, though she’s smiling. Her courteous mouth is false but I am ecstatic. I sit and order eggs and toast, she already has tea in a chipped mug. I offer to buy her breakfast, and she declines.
“Where is she?” I ask.
“Who?”
“My daughter.”
“Our daughter is at home. That’s what I came to see you about.”
“I thought you remarried and moved to Europe…?”
“Hmm? If we lived in Europe I couldn’t eat here every day.”
“You…live here?”
She peels opens an artificial sugar packet and stirs it in her tea.
“Yes,” she says plainly, and it shatters me. I shake. I want to cry. “I divorced him pretty quickly-like you. I came back right after that. That marriage didn’t last more than a few months,” she grins at me, as though I find this funny. She has crows feet. “I came back and lived around here, and found another man…” she pauses and tries to think of what came next.
“Here? This slum?” I say and people turn to me with dirty looks. I hush and whisper, “my daughter lived in a dirty, crime infested hole?”
“She still does, and she’s happy. Oh, but when we got back, she wasn’t even a year old, and she contracted a disease from overseas. It was hell, she almost didn’t make it.”
My daughter almost died?
Here, a waitress set down my breakfast. I picked up the pepper and absentmindedly sprinkled it on my sunny-side-up eggs.
“I divorced the local bunion after a year or so too. Married my next guy from my work place, but he was a lawyer so he took me for what little I had. Then came the better of the bunch-”
“So you’ve been a serial bride in the city all this time? Toting her along?”
My hand was squeezing the peppershaker tightly. If I didn’t, I was apt to punch her.
“I tried to find you in the phone book, Internet searches…but you had been changing your name…”
“Oh yes. But there wasn’t a need to find us. We knew where you were.”
“She knew?”
“Of course. She fell into the “feminist-save-the-earth-and-all-the-babies” group. She doesn’t particularly like what you do for a living, Mr. DiMarco.”
All I could do was close my eyes tight and exhale. The thick glass cracked in my hand, pinching my palm. But it just wasn’t enough.
“You made her hate me.”
“Not at all. I let her know who you are. She chose not to see you.”
“Samantha,” I said, opening my burning eyes, “what do you want?”
She put her mug down and played with the tea bag.
“My career is taking me elsewhere.”
“Where?” I ask.
“Just away,” she says and leans back in the booth. “I think she wants to stay local. She’s seventeen now, so she’s still in high school-”
“For now.”
My palm is warm and wet between the glass that is giving out under the increasing pressure.
“College. Ivy league university. Money. My money. What does she want to be?”
She tries to act caught off guard and puffs her lips.
“Ah, well, environmental scientist, maybe political scientist…”
“Expensive fields. So you ignore me-”
“No, we didn’t-”
“Ignored me and now you want to dump her on me. You’re unemployed now, I can tell.”
“Well,” she leans forward, staring me down. “What will it be? It’s not too late to bond with your precious daughter…”
I pierce her down with a glare sharper than a diamond scalpel. I examine her worn face caked with cheap makeup. She hasn’t been able to afford her “age-defying” make-up and potions or her surgeries. Her mascara is clumped and her eyeliner is tacky. She’s old. So am I. The puppy is old and so is the cat. My daughter is seventeen, and I’ve been saving her first tricycle in my closet.
My hand extends and my fist turns downwards. The metal lid plops in her tea, startling her, followed by the stream of pepper and bits of broken glass. I open my hand and flex off all the little bits into the mug while she just stares wide-eyed and amazed. Silent. Blood drips, droplets of my being, into her beverage.
I get up and go home.
I pull out my tape recorder and start over. I start at chapter “eye” and call it The Empire, and start four years ago, and speak until right now.
Tomorrow I’m going into the office to change my will and put up arrangements. A truck will come and clean out my closet and it will all be donated to a charity. I want three million dollars for my offspring’s education in whatever she wants. If Samantha will actually leave the country, then her daughter will be an emancipated minor for a year. I’m thinking of giving Olivia a call to see how serious she was about resigning. I need a third party between myself and the minor. When I retire or otherwise die, she’ll inherit my empire and transcend me. She can continue to run it as it is, or run it into the ground in the name of a Utopia she will lead.