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“If the shoe fits, Marj.” I turned into the parking garage of my building. “I’m about to lose you,” I warned her. I wasn’t–the service was just as good down there as it was in my penthouse- but I wanted a reason to get off the phone before she went back to the topic of the Ferrari.
“The Ferrari had better not be for Jake,” my older sister said, unfooled. “Because I think you know how pissed I’d be if you got my twenty-five-year-old kid whose brain is still developing a fucking Ferrari.”
“He’s twenty-five,” I objected. “When you were twenty-five, you had a kid. That’s way worse than a Ferrari.” I drove onto the private floor of the parking garage, the one with the private elevator bays. I should have just had the Ferrari delivered to Marjorie’s house this weekend and then pretended like I knew nothing about it. My sister would have seen through it, though, and besides, I’d leave acting to the professionals in this town. I wanted to get my nephew a Ferrari, so I got him one.
As I parked and got out of my own luxury car–a Mercedes S580–I realized Marjorie hadn’t said anything for a while.
“Fuck, sorry,” I muttered, the dots connecting. When Marjorie was twenty-five, she had a one-year-old and a husband and some crazy idea that she had found happily ever after. She deserved it. Our parents had died in a car accident when she was twenty-one and I was fourteen and suddenly she was juggling college and raising a teenager, but then she met Bryan Marks, and for the next seven years, life was pretty damn good.
But by the time she was twenty-nine, she was an orphan and a widow.
Another car accident.
And I’d gotten Jake a fucking Ferrari.
“I’m not crying,” she said, but the words were sharp and brittle.
“And I’m not an asshole.”
“No, you’re definitely an asshole.”
I walked over to the elevator, but I shook my head at the concierge. I actually might lose service in that metal box, and I had to patch things up with Marjorie first. I was shit at apologies, but I offered what I could.
“Fine, I’ll take the fucking car back and get him an iTunes gift card or something really shitty like that. Worst he could get is a papercut from it.”
“No,” Marjorie said. “Bring the car.”
I raised my eyebrows, surprised. The concierge straightened, thinking the expressions was directed at him. “Bring the Ferrari?” I clarified.
“Yes, the Ferrari.”
I frowned, wondering if this was a trap of some kind. Marjorie wasn’t particularly diabolical, but I hadn’t seen her in a few months. Maybe she’d changed.
“I have to go but let me know tomorrow what you want me to do with the car,” I said. I nodded at the concierge, and he pressed the button to summon the elevator. “I can sell it. Trash it. Doesn’t matter to me.”
“No, bring it,” Marjorie said. “Definitely bring it.”
* * *
When Marjorie didn’t change her mind by Friday, I had the car delivered to her house. I even had them wrap the giant, tacky red ribbon around the hood. Might as well, right? There’s no downplaying a Ferrari anyway. Then I got to the party early to make sure it was perfect.
Marjorie came out to stand beside me while I was circling it, my face right up to the shining black body.
“Are you sniffing the car, Dom?”
I spotted the tiniest smudge. Buffed it out with the microfiber cloth I’d brought. Then I straightened up and gave Marjorie a one-armed hug. “Come on,” I spread my other arm out, encompassing the car. “Admit that you love it.”
Despite our tragic and shitty history with cars, Marjorie and I both loved luxury, however it came. She held herself back more than I did, as evidenced by the shitty Nissan currently parked in her garage, but she loved it all the same.
“I love it,” she admitted easily, walking away from me to circle it herself. She held up her hand, and I tossed her the microfiber. She bent over, buffing out another nearly invisible smudge. A satisfied grin unfurled across my face. My sister was hooked. Jake was going to lose his shit.
My nephew was driving down from San Francisco for his birthday weekend. His high school friends started to arrive, and all of us ended up congregating in the driveway. I made sure they gave the car a wide berth, but I understood why they wanted to be basking in its glory. Hell, it was making me want a Ferrari and I’d been a Mercedes loyalist for almost two decades.
Bryan, Jake’s dad, had bought me my first one. A shitty, broken down, 2005 SL-Class. They practically paid him to haul it away, and then we’d spent months restoring it.
“Quality is worth the work,” he’d told me. “Don’t ever go cheap and easy.”
The memory of Bryan’s face was starting to fade. I could really only picture him clearly as a photograph. Too young and too happy in his wedding picture with my sister, one arm around her waist, the other around my shoulders. Now, though, a slice of memory came through, sharp and crystal clear. Oil smudges on his forehead and cheekbone, his wide grin, his white teeth, his blue-gray eyes just starting to crinkle in the corners, handing me a wrench. Both of us crouched on the floor underneath the chassis. Me, scared as shit because didn’t Bryan know this was a whole fucking car we were about to mess with? Him, so confident. So sure, just like my sister, that everything was going to be fine.
