Most kids look up to Spiderman. Superman, too. Or they love Antman, or maybe Ironman, if they like comedy. I think I dressed up as each of them one year or another. But if I’d been interested in actually becoming someone else as a teenager, I’d have been Uncle Bentley.
I knew those superheroes were fake. Batman had the most chance of being real—he was just a rich guy with cool toys. But Uncle Bentley really was a rich guy, and even if his parents gave him a pretty good start, he earned a lot of his money himself.
That’s why, when I notice something strange with Grandmother’s accounting, I decide to ask him about it. It feels pretty strange to arrive at Saga, a Michelin star restaurant on the top floor of the 70th Pine Street tower, and tell the hostess I’m meeting Bentley Harrison. “For business,” I clarify.
If her smile’s a little patronizing, I can’t really blame her. I doubt most business people say they’re here ‘for business.’ As she leads me through a beautiful dining room, I can’t help noticing the green marble tables and the luxe, peach velvet dining chairs. But not even the decor in the beautifully appointed dining room can compare to the view of downtown New York City.
Uncle Bentley stands and smiles when he sees me coming. “You found it.”
“This place is nice,” I say.
“I helped Kent restructure,” Uncle Bentley says, “as a personal favor. It’s the only truly amazing restaurant where I never have to wait to be seated, even on short notice.”
“Well, I’m impressed.” We both sit.
The hostess hands us menus. “Your server will be here shortly.”
“The food’s so good that sometimes I forget why I’m even here when I come for business,” Uncle Bentley says. “Maybe you better tell me what’s wrong now.”
“You have to keep it confidential,” I say.
Uncle Bentley smiles. “You know what I do, right? My initial consults are always strictly confidential.”
“Well, I’m not saying we want to hire you.”
He laughs. “I’ll still treat this as an official consult, which means it’ll be free to you, and it’ll remain confidential, whatever you decide to do afterward.”
That’s a relief. “Okay, so we asked Grandmother to help with Elizabeth’s shelter.”
“She said no.” Uncle Bentley doesn’t even look surprised.
I nod. “Even though it’s kind of Richmond Steel’s fault she’s losing it. I mean, I guess technically it’s her parents who decided to sell it, but now she’s going to have to find a new place. In the interim, she’ll have to surrender all the animals she’s currently housing to shelters where they will probably kill them. And then she’ll have to completely remodel any new place she finds to be a shelter—it’s not like there are lots of shelters up for sale. Anyway, Grandmother wouldn’t help, which I should’ve expected, but I was looking into the company’s accounting anyway, hoping there might be more charitable funds in some of the subsidiaries.”
“She’s training you?”
I nod. “I was searching through the different categories, looking for charitable funds allocations, and I noticed something else that seemed quite high in various places.”
“Okay.”
I pull out some papers I printed off and splay them on the table. Of course, that’s when the waiter comes to take our order. Once we’ve gotten that out of the way, Uncle Bentley dives right back in. “Okay, what did you find?”
“It’s standard practice for large companies, when they’re expanding, to rent equipment, right?”
Uncle Bentley shrugs.
“But it looks like no one’s even checking what has been rented from one department to the next. I noticed that there was a forklift, for example, that was rented for the build out of a shipping office eight years ago.”
“Okay.” He clearly wasn’t expecting to be discussing a forklift.
“I selected a few examples of the rentals I happened to find and track down.”
Uncle Bentley looks confused.
“I’m going somewhere with this. Bear with me.”
“Okay.”
“After the construction was complete, the forklift was taken from the shipping office in Rochester and moved to another location—a manufacturing branch in Buffalo—eighty miles away.”
Uncle Bentley blinks.
“The shipping office is still paying rent on it—in Rochester. And the rent’s not insubstantial. It started out as just under three grand a month, but instead of being depreciated, the rate has gone up. Now it’s $4200 a month. They’ve been paying rent on that forklift for over eight years, and they haven’t even had it at their location for at least four according to the assistant manager I spoke to.”
“Okay.” Uncle Bentley looks more interested.
“Meanwhile, the manufacturing branch is happy. They have a forklift that retails for $45,000 new—and they didn’t have to spend a dime for it. Their assistant manager proudly told me that they’ve been maintaining it perfectly. And get this—he thinks it’s owned by Richmond Steel. They did confirm there’s a rental sticker on the back, but they never noticed it. That’s what the manager said. He’d never even noticed it.”
And Uncle Bentley looks bored again.
“Okay, this matters, because they’ve had this forklift for 100 months now, and it was a year old when they got it. So really, it would have retailed for somewhere around $37,000. And the company has spent over four hundred and twenty thousand dollars on it. And counting.”
Uncle Bentley freezes. “You’re kidding.”
I shake my head. “And in about three more hours of research, I found four and a half dozen more rentals just like this. Excavators. Dump trucks. Skids. Boom lifts. Saws. You name it, we’ve been renting it, long term, and if we’d just bought the equipment, we’d have paid ten times less. On the other hand, I also identified some machines that were purchased and are just sitting, entirely unused. For most of the rentals, they aren’t in the same location as before, so no one even knows how to return them, and they just keep paying the rental cost to the rental company—it presumably gets approved simply because it was a line item on the budget in the prior year so it’s not questioned.”
Uncle Bentley whistles. “If you extrapolate your sample so that it’s a company wide figure?”
“Yep.” I hand him a paper. He got there faster than I thought. “That’s what this document shows. Hiring a single person to manage the rentals and heavy equipment used company wide, assuming they’re competent and can run basic numbers, would save Richmond ninety-six and a half million dollars a year on rentals alone. That doesn’t even get into whether they should sell used equipment and whatnot.”
Uncle Bentley swears loudly, right as our food’s arriving.
The waiter looks shocked.
“Sorry, Harry,” Uncle Bentley says. “Just got some news.”
“Nothing to do with the food.” Harry sets our plates down and sighs dramatically. “Good news, I hope,” the waiter says.
“Oh, yes,” Uncle Bentley says. “I think our little boy wonder here will delight his grandmother when he tells her what he just told me.”
The waiter beams. “Then maybe he should pay for dinner, no?”
“Nah,” Uncle Bentley says. “I’ll still pay. No reason to break your bank before your grandmother’s showering you with praise.”
“Can you look over the numbers I ran to make sure I didn’t miss anything?”
We spend the appetizer, the soup, and the main meal confirming the steps I took. Bentley finds two small errors, but it doesn’t change much. Eighty-eight million and change in savings instead of ninety-six. Still a pretty big catch.
“How’s it going with Elizabeth?” Uncle Bentley asks.
I want to tell him the truth—that I’m not really dating her. I think that he, of all people, would understand why I need a cover to keep Grandmother happy, but I can’t do it. I swore I’d keep the fake dating a secret from everyone. “I like Elizabeth well enough, in spite of the fact that she’s one of the rich women Grandmother wanted me to date, but my ex-girlfriend reached out to me, and she wants to get back together, and now I’m conflicted.” I’m surprised at how true that feels.
Uncle Bentley arches one eyebrow. “Because she found out you’re rich now?”
I shake my head. “No, Lisa didn’t know. I had to tell her—and she knows it’s not a sure thing. I told Lisa that Grandmother hasn’t decided whether to write me into her will and bring me into her life or keep going on as she was before.” I sigh. “To be honest, I’m not even sure I want to be part of her life.”
“Is that why you haven’t told your parents?” Uncle Bentley’s frown looks a little disapproving.
I can’t really blame him. “They barely found out I got fired,” I say. “And I wouldn’t have told them that Lisa dumped me, but Bea blurted it out.”
“When did you stop talking to them about things?” Bentley sets his fork down. “They have pretty good advice—better than mine in a lot of areas.”
“I know.”
“But?”
“But. . . You didn’t see their faces when I said I didn’t want to be adopted. I’m worried that when I tell them my grandmother’s alive—”
“They’ll be happy for you, like they always have been.”
“You sound pretty sure,” I say. “But they might be hurt, too.”
“If they are, they are,” Bentley says. “But hiding it from them will definitely hurt them.”
I think about that for the rest of dinner, and on my way home, I text Elizabeth. WHAT TIME IS THE REAL ESTATE AGENT TOMORROW?
FOUR LISTINGS—4, 4:45, 5:20, AND 6 PM. ARE YOU PLANNING TO COME?
I THOUGHT YOU WANTED ME? Although, now I feel kind of dumb. It’s not like she needs input from her fake boyfriend. Was I just looking for reasons to see her?
OF COURSE I DO. GLAD YOU CAN MAKE IT.
I like her text message, and then quickly, before I can chicken out, I pull up another message and text Mom and Dad. DINNER TOMORROW? 7?
Mom replies immediately. WE’D LOVE TO SEE YOU! WHAT DO YOU WANT TO EAT?
ANYTHING, I text back.
STEAK IT IS. After fourteen years, Dad still hasn’t gone vegetarian, and Mom still seems not to mind. He makes a lot of jokes, but he grills a mean veggie burger. His portobello mushrooms are edible too, usually.
Now I just have to prepare myself to tell them. Tomorrow morning, I’ll tell Grandmother what I found in the numbers, and tomorrow night, I’ll tell Mom and Dad that I discovered a grandmother I didn’t realize I had.
I’m not sure why both things feel like such big deals. I’m sure Bentley’s right. Grandmother will be happy to save money, and Mom and Dad will be pleased for me.
Right?
Right.
Only, I decide to go by my apartment before heading back to Grandmother’s. If I show up at Mom and Dad’s house in these ridiculous clothes tomorrow—designer labels hanging off everything—they’ll start interrogating me immediately. When I unlock the front door of my apartment, I walk right into a kicked hornets’ nest.
“—was your fault for being such a jerk,” Bea says. “Easton was being nice. If you hadn’t challenged him to arm wrestle you and acted like you had no idea what you were doing—”
“I said I was good at it.”
“In that sheepish, gosh-shucks, I’m a country kid way that you do.”
“I said what I said, and if he couldn’t see that—”
“Online, they have this thing. They call it ‘Who’s the Jerk.’ And Jake? Tonight, you were the jerk, and I was embarrassed to be there with you. I’m sure Emerson was embarrassed too.”
“That entire party was full of a bunch of jerks and chumps, and he fit right in. I told you he wasn’t like us.”
I close the door quietly, but my foot hits the creaky tile.
Jake turns around slowly.
“I’m not like you?”
Of all the kids Mom and Dad have fostered, the one who causes the most problems has always been Jake, hands down. He picks fights. He lies to people. He fleeces them out of their money. And now he’s the richest one of all. He’s had not one, but two really big movies that opened to a top box-office slot.
But he’s still a complete jack-hole.
“You think you’re better than us. You always have.” Jake grabs a kitchen chair, flips it around backward, and straddles it, his eyes daring me to argue.
“I just came to grab some clothes,” I say. “I don’t have the energy to fight.”
“I thought you wanted to get Lisa back,” Bea blurts, “but you have a new girlfriend?” Her eyes are shuttered—which means she’s hurt.
“I am going to get Lisa back,” I say. “But—” I can’t tell her the truth either, not without invalidating my deal with Elizabeth. Only, if I don’t explain, I sound like a jerk. “Or, maybe I will. She did tell me yesterday that she wants to get back together.”
“Wait, so now you’re dating two girls?” Bea looks sick, stepping away from me to lean against the wall. “Really, Emerson?”
“Maybe we’re more alike than I realized.” Jake’s eyes glint. “Bravo, brother. Didn’t think you had it in you.”
“I’m not dating two women,” I say. “I—I thought—my grandmother wanted me to at least go out with a few people she knew, and Elizabeth was one of them.”
“And now you can’t decide?” Bea asks. But it sounds like she’s saying, “And now you’re a terrible person?”
I groan. “It’s not that I can’t decide. It’s complicated. Elizabeth’s losing her animal shelter right now, and it’s kind of our fault.”
“Our fault?” Bea asks.
“Not our as in the Fansee family,” I say. “Our as in Richmond Steel. They’re buying the building—”
“You’re trying to get your grandmother to save the shelter by telling her it’s your girlfriend’s?” Bea’s eyes light up.
“I already tried that,” I say. “It didn’t work. Grandmother turned us down flat.”
“Oh.” Her shoulders slump again.
“But I’m going to help Elizabeth look at new places tomorrow, and I just couldn’t dump her the second Lisa showed up.” I shrug. “I’m—I guess I’m confused.”
As I say the words, I realize they’re true.
“Lisa wants to get back together now?” Jake asks. “Now that you’re rich, you mean.” The same thing Bentley says.
“It’s not like that,” I say.
But a tiny part of me wonders whether it is like that. She got interested when she saw me wearing nice clothes, with an expensive haircut, and dating a gorgeous and well-put-together woman. It might not have been because of Richmond Steel, but it feels like it was thanks to the glow-up Elizabeth gave me.
A week or two ago, I wouldn’t have cared why Lisa wanted me back. But now. . . I’m wondering whether my original plan was really the key to happiness in my future. I mean, plans are great, but when big things change, sometimes the plan needs to be adjusted too, right?
“Well, we’d hate to keep you here too long.” Beatrice crosses her arms and frowns. “I’m sure you have way more important things to do and way more critical places to be.”
It’s nearly eleven, and I have a meeting with Grandmother at seven a.m. I yawn involuntarily and shake my head. “It’s not that. It’s just that I’ve been meeting with people and going over numbers all day lately, and then—”
“I’m sorry, Cinderella. Are you tired from attending so many balls? Or are the glass slippers hurting your feet?” Jake arches one eyebrow. “Because you’re not the only one with stuff to do. I have two zoom meetings with producers tomorrow. And Bea—”
She waves him off. “Stop, Jake.”
Jake scowls.
“Really,” Bea says. “We’re both really happy for you. We just miss seeing you regularly. I hope eventually you can move back into the apartment.”
“Yeah,” Jake says. “That’s what I wanted to say. I just miss you so much.” His lip’s twisted, and he’s clearly mocking me.
But I think that maybe, maybe he’s mocking me to cover the truth. “I’ve missed both of you.” I mean it unironically.
I also hate lying to them. I hate living with Grandmother instead of them, and I really don’t like that Mom and Dad don’t even know about it yet. “I’m having dinner at home tomorrow to tell them about all this craziness. Can you just keep quiet about it a little bit longer?”
Bea nods.
“Quiet?” Jake grimaces. “Dude, I already texted them some pics from the party, asking them if they like their Richmond Steel son or their movie star son better.” He holds up a peace sign and fake-smiles.
“He didn’t,” Bea says. “Ignore him.”
“I usually do,” I say.
But one thing Jake got right—I think one of the reasons I haven’t told Mom and Dad is that I don’t want to stress them out. . .but I also want them to like me the most. Jake’s always been the problem child, and I don’t want to take his place now that I’ve found some living family that’s difficult to deal with.
Jake has always seemed like the most obtuse person I know, but now I’m wondering how much truth there is to his outrageous words, and how much insight he masks with them. When I get back to the mansion, to my shock, Grandmother’s still awake. In fact, when I walk through the door, she’s pacing back and forth in her library, which opens right off the entryway.
“You’re finally here.” She’s frowning mightily.
“I’m sorry.”
Her butler bows stiffly and locks the front door after me.
“You should message us to let us know if you’ll be late.”
“I—I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t realize. . .” I don’t quite have the guts to tell her that I didn’t realize she expected a full-grown adult to check in with her about my arrival and departure times. “I’ll definitely be ready for the seven a.m. meeting tomorrow.”
“You’ll be ready—I’ll be exhausted.”
Before I’ve thought of a way to defend myself, Grandmother eyes my briefcase and shoulder bag.
“What’s all that?”
“It’s—I’m going to meet my parents for dinner tomorrow night, and—”
“Your foster parents, you mean?”
I sigh. “Yes, that’s what I mean.”
She huffs. “I’ll add it to the calendar.”
“I’m sorry you’ll be tired tomorrow,” I say. “But you don’t need to wait up for me in the future. I’m perfectly capable of managing my own life. I’ve done it for twenty-seven years now, all before meeting you.”
Her face flushes like I slapped her. “You’re living in my house. Here, we don’t go to sleep until everyone’s home safe.”
“Maybe I should live back at my old apartment,” I say. “My brother and sister were just complaining that they never see me.”
“Were they? Your brother and your sister?”
Everything’s making her mad right now. “Let’s talk in the morning. I’ve wrecked enough of your sleep already.”
“Once you’ve told me what’s in those.” She’s still eyeing my bags.
“It’s just clothing for my dinner tomorrow. Mom and Dad would find my new wardrobe. . .ostentatious.”
She shakes her head.
“And the briefcase—I have some papers to show you in the morning. I think you’ll be pleased.”
“Show me now.” She circles the room and sits down at her desk.
The butler bows and disappears.
“Show you. . .now?” I follow her farther into the library and walk toward the desk. “But it’s late. I can just go over it tomorrow.”
She points at her desk. “Now.”
“Um, okay.” I’m not sure why I’m so flustered. I was going to remove the errors Uncle Bentley pointed out, but it’s fine. I pull out the papers. “So while I was—” I clear my throat. I can’t really tell her I was digging through the files to try and figure out how much charitable giving they do. I certainly can’t explain that I was hoping to convince them to reallocate it to Elizabeth’s shelter. “I was learning about things, I happened to pull a file or two—”
“You should not be inspecting random files,” she says. “When we explained how the system worked, it wasn’t so you could go poking around.”
“I didn’t—”
“One single keystroke, and you could destroy the organization method. An errant save, and you could jumble things around, costing employees hours of lost time.”
“Right, but I’m an accountant,” I say. “I know how to use business programs, and I’m hardly going to start deleting files or saving them to the wrong pathways. But look, I think you’ll want to see what I found.”
She compresses her lips into a very thin line, but she’s not fussing more, at least.
“Okay, so this is just an example, but about eight years ago, the Rochester shipping office rented a forklift for the build out the expansion. And then when the build out ended, a few months behind schedule, they didn’t return the forklift.”
Grandmother’s scowl has deepened.
“But what’s more interesting is that the manufacturing office in—”
“Stop,” she says.
“Why?”
She sighs dramatically. “This company is massive,” she says. “I’ve been trying to show you the scope, but I think I may have failed.”
“No, it’s not that,” I say. “Look—”
“Emerson, the last thing in the world I care about is a forklift in Roanoke.”
“But the forklift’s not in Rochester,” I say, “or Roanoke either. It was moved to Buffalo, eighty miles away, and it’s not even on their reports or budgets, because the Rochester branch is still paying for the rental.”
Grandmother looks like she may be about to spit on me.
“I’ll cut to the chase.” I pull out my proposal—in the same format I had to make them at my old job—and slide it toward her. “Some of these calculations have shifted a bit, and I was going to clean them up. But the main point is still good—if we were to hire one single person to manage the rental equipment across all of Richmond Steel, which doesn’t even include Barrios Steel, which we acquired but haven’t integrated accounting for yet, we could save—”
“Emerson Duplessis.” She doesn’t call me Richmond like she usually does. She said Duplessis. Does she mean it as an insult? But why?
“Yes?”
“Who are these markings from?” She’s glaring at the top page of my proposal, where Uncle Bentley wrote down the two errors and we ran through the calculation to see the change. “It’s not your handwriting.”
“I think you know Bentley Harrison. He’s an old family friend, and I wanted to run this past someone before I brought it to you—”
“Because you’re a twenty-year-old accountant and you rightfully had no faith in your own abilities?”
I’m not sure what to say to that.
“Emerson.” She flattens her palms against the desk, letting the proposal flip back over until it just looks like a plain manila folder. “I know you’re eager to show me that you’re as good as your father was. I know you’re a bright boy. I can tell that much. But you’re very young, you went to an inferior school and earned a very inferior degree, and you’re way, way behind. Instead of desperately trying to sprint your way forward, please learn to take my advice and do what I ask, nothing more.”
“But if you would—”
“What I will do is forget that you made the grievous mistake of disclosing our confidential financial information to an outsider without my permission. I’ll forget that you breached your fiduciary duty as a temporary board member, and I’ll forget how enraged I am that you did it all after you signed a non-disclosure document.”
“But it was a confidential evaluation,” I say.
“Which you had no right to even undertake, since you’re not an agent of Richmond Steel.” Grandmother sighs. “I have competent people, and I’m a very, very good manager of this company. There’s a reason why we haven’t had a single unprofitable year in more than forty years running.”
“I’m not saying you’re doing a poor job,” I say.
Grandmother stares at me for a moment, and then she taps her fingers on the top of the file folder she’s probably going to throw in the trash. “I should probably revoke your access to the company files and remove you from the board tomorrow, but let’s just call this a warning. Don’t ever tell me that I’m not generous. Alright?”
There are many things I could accuse my grandmother of being, but ungenerous isn’t one of them. “I would never think that.”
If only generous was enough.