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“Eli’s here, he’s the one that reminded me about the bean stuff you like.”
“Thanks, Eli. Did you get the tofu?” I joked.
“One time. I pointed to the wrong menu item because I was on the phone, and I’ll never hear the end of it,” he said as we laughed at the memory of his face when he cut into a block of jiggly, pale bean curd and took a bite absently. He had stopped short of wiping his tongue off with the napkin but just barely.
“Any one of the lot of you could have ordered for me or asked the waiter to come back in a minute.” He grumbled.
“There’s no tofu here, at least not in the container I opened first. I’m not sure who all this food is for but it’ll last for days probably. Anyway, I’m coming back into the office tomorrow. I have had all of this I can stand.”
“How long since you had a temp?” Eli questioned sternly.
“Since noon yesterday. It’s already more than twenty-four hours. I’m officially on the mend and ready to come back to work.”
“I think you should rest another day,” Drew said.
“You are such a mother hen,” I told him.
“She’s not wrong,” Eli put in.
“Three out of four Burns brothers would agree,” I laughed.
“That’s right. Gang up on me. See if I send you Chinese food next time you get the plague,” Drew said good naturedly before we hung up.
Truth was, I missed them all. The banter and the inside jokes and the easy friendship. I felt like I belonged there, and I contributed to the company. The scheduling was flawless, the office ran smoothly, and the famously cranky printer even sent and received the occasional fax for me.
Talking to them made me feel better, happier. I was excited to get back to work, and couldn’t wait to be in the office, in the thick of all that activity and snapping back at the jokes and feeling that energy we shared.
“Synergy,” Eli had supplied once when I tried to describe how it felt working there with them. “It’s when the combination of factors or people or companies fits so perfectly that it creates something greater than the sum of its parts. Synergy is so overused in corporate speak, but in reality, it’s a feeling, a sense of rightness, and it’s as rare as it is beautiful.”
Maybe that explains why I laid out my clothes for work the next day like a kid excited to see their friends on the first day of school.
2
DREW
Even though I’d seen Agafia Liubov’s TED talk about how the deprivations of her youth in Chisnau and the oppression she witnessed inspired her to activism, it was still impressive. It was only slightly distracting that I had to hear it in my brother Ty’s voice because he was serving as her interpreter.
If Eli had become the translator instead of Ty, he’d have memorized the whole talk so he could deliver it in English with the exact expression and intonation Liubov used in her native Romanian. Being Ty, though, he was listening and interpreting off-the-cuff. Capturing the moment is how he described it. She was speaking from the heart, after all, not reciting a lesson, so if he’d memorized the TED talk by rote it would lose the spontaneity of her word choice and anecdotes. She’d had an awful childhood, from the sound of it. It made me grateful to be an American and to have grown up with the parents we had, despite the fact they’d died young.
Mom and Dad had moved us around on military bases as kids because of Dad’s job. When I was seventeen, he got sick. It wasn’t even six months till he was gone. I’d planned on being an Army man like my dad all my life, but the Marines had the best signing bonus, so I wrote my name on the dotted line and deposited ten grand in my mom’s checking account. That left her with one less teenage boy to feed, plus I would be able to send money home.
Jake and Eli went into the Navy, but Ty became a Marine like me. Except he wasn’t in munitions, he took the foreign language track and worked as an interpreter. Which was how we got here, to the packed ballroom of a fancy hotel in DC where my brothers and I were contracted to provide security for a foreign dignitary. In this case, the award-winning writer and activist who was speaking on stage while my brother repeated her every word, switching it from Romanian to English so quickly it seemed like a magic trick from where I stood.
It was a major draw to visiting VIPs choosing our firm. If they didn’t travel with an interpreter, they could use our in-house expert unless they spoke an obscure language. The perk of getting to attend these events while working was nice as well. I stood at the emergency exit, arms crossed, alert to my surroundings. I kept an eye on Liubov onstage and scanned the room, alert. It was second nature by now, and I liked watching over people.
The protestors were thick outside the hotel when we brought her in a staff entrance. Most of them were out front for maximum media exposure, but a handful of clever ones had made their way around back with their signs and ugly shouts. She had written about the privations of her childhood under a vicious dictator. That shouldn’t have been controversial, but she’d made some impassioned political statements in an interview which made her a target.
She had spoken out against voter suppression and some of the things she said were clearly not run by a PR person first. I wasn’t saying she was wrong, just that she needed some training in how to avoid making inflammatory statements in the media. We kept an eye on her, cleared a path through the crowd and at one point, Jake whispered to her fiercely and gripped her gloved hand to stop her from flipping off the protestors.
He tried to cover it as offering his arm so she didn’t slip but he was really just covering her impulsive obscene gesture. You’d think a frail looking seventy-five-year-old foreign national who probably didn’t weigh a hundred pounds would be more reserved in a crowd of protestors calling for her death, but apparently being circumspect didn’t come with age in this case.
After her speech, she did some Q&A. I glanced at Ty who gave me a nod. She gave a vehement answer, totally incomprehensible in Romanian but I saw Ty, who always translated so fluidly and quickly that it appeared effortless, appeared to hesitate and think it over. He cleared his throat, “The esteemed writer Ms. Liubov suggests that we in the United States overhaul our election system before we disenfranchise enough of our populous that the ignorant minority seizes control and—” He swallowed and seemed decide, “destroys the moral fiber of the nation.”
Liubov shook her head in disappointment at my brother and thanked everyone in broken English before leaving the stage. We clustered around her and I clapped Ty on the back. “You can’t water down the message, dude,” I said.
“It’s not that. I don’t want someone trying to stab her on our watch and if she keeps shooting off her mouth about America like that, I’m not optimistic.”
“I think you got the point across,” I said wryly.
