Unreliable by Lee Irby

Author:Lee Irby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

13

Only later at dinner we do learn that similar threats were simultaneously phoned into Chimborazo Park and the Museum of the Confederacy. Gibson discovers this unhappy news flash via Instagram while a waiter clears our table of dirty plates.

“What’s Chimborazo Park?” she asks, for once joining in on the conversation instead of keeping her eyes fixed on a small screen.

“It was a big Confederate hospital,” replies Dan. “It was actually very well organized and successful from a medical standpoint. In high school DJ volunteered there as a docent at the museum.”

Oh yes, I remember that being thrown into my face, as I skipped from crappy job to crappy job. But who’s laughing now? That’s cruel of me. DJ never asked to be my yardstick and rival. Like his parents, he’s never said a bad thing about another person, even when it was deserved.

“Who on earth would want to blow it up?” my mother blurts out, nearly knocking over her glass of wine as she wildly gestures her incredulity. “What’s the world coming to? What if Tredegar is closed tomorrow, too? What are we supposed to do? We booked the site eight months ago.”

“We’ll have the wedding at our house,” Mead claims in a deadpan. Serious proposal? Mock suggestion? Impossible to tell with him. No matter, my mother isn’t buying it.

“We can’t fit forty people in the living room!”

“Sure, we can. Second weddings are about taking chances.”

“I don’t want to clean the house on my wedding day. Oh my God, I think I’m going to faint.”

My mother is drunk. Normally no son would divulge an unsavory detail about his mommy, but in this case her inebriation will have consequences, and will change the course of my story. I don’t control these events…clearly the reverse is true. I’m the one being manipulated, followed, stalked, and threatened. Were it up to me, Leigh Rose and I would be on a plane bound for Paris and her lawyers would have already drawn up a prenup. As it is, I’m sitting at a big round table at the Tobacco Company, the bastion of Shockoe Slip, Richmond’s oldest hip area ushered in during the initial phase of yuppie gentrification in the late 1970s. Before becoming a restaurant and bar, the building was a tobacco warehouse and still retains the rough brick walls to prove it.

“Is your mom okay?” Paula whispers to me.

“I’ve never seen her drink so much,” I sheepishly admit, idly waving a fork at my steak, the first one I’ve ordered in about twelve years. The return of the carnivore perhaps heralds the arrival of a new version of self—one tough enough to take on Jeb Wardell and John Graziano. But the steak tastes horrible and I feel stupid for ordering it. I want to crawl under a rock and die. I’m grateful when the waiter removes the plate from my sight.

“It’s from all the stress. I can relate.”

“She’s going to be hungover on her wedding day. The something-blue will be her gills if she doesn’t slow down.

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