Rob Walsh
The family meeting was called to discuss an email we received a few hours ago. We handed a printed copy of the email to our neighbor, Mulgrew, and asked him if he'd ever seen anything like it before. You could say that Mulgrew showed up for our family meetings because he lived by himself and didn't have a family of his own, but we wish there was a nicer way to say that, like what happened at Thanksgiving, for example, but nothing really stands out from our last Thanksgiving with Mulgrew, just the poor man eating quietly with the rest of us.
"You want me to read it aloud?" he asked.
We hadn't thought of that, but why not? "Thanks, Mulgrew."
He cleared his throat and began to read, but then he stopped reading and asked in the same way, like he was still reading from a sheet of paper and had no choice but to use these words specifically, if our daughter Rebecca was coming? My wife got up—we said nothing in reply, but she did get up—and the room grew quiet enough that you could hear her in the kitchen stirring instant coffee into a mug. Since it was instant coffee, only a few moments passed before she came back and set it on the table before him, the living room table; Mulgrew was on the couch and the rest of us, minus Rebecca, were assembled around this table with our own cups of coffee.
"Thank you." Mulgrew took a sip. "So did Rebecca receive notice of the family meeting?"
My wife replied to the effect that some things were Mulgrew's business and some things were not, and she's good at this, deflection, so Mulgrew nodded and agreed to move on and read the email. He cleared his throat again. What follows will be Mulgrew reading the email.
Attention Please,
My name is CARL SMITH from northern parts of LESHFIELD working with the above bank. After getting your contact via the web intelligent directory as Account Officer I discovered an abandoned sum in an account that belongs to one of our foreign customers who Died along with his entire family in 4th of June natural disaster where he lost his life. Unfortunately we learnt his supposed next of kin or attachment Died along side with him in the crash leaving no body behind to claim the money. It is therefore upon this discovery that I as head of this accounting department to make this business proposal to you and release the money to you as the next of kin or attachment to the Deceased for safety and subsequent disbursement since nobody is coming for it. Do not view this as been illegal but to help people like us that have no hope in life instead of the bank converting this much money to the funds of the bank because if you dont assist us the bank will lay hold on this money.
Hence, I am waiting for your reply in this respect for us to proceed while I give you ALL neccessary details, accordingly at: carlsmithXXXXX@XXXemail.com
Your partner and friend,
MR SMITH
Mulgrew looked up at this point. "What are you going to do now?" he asked us.
"We haven't decided."
"Did you contact him?" Mulgrew asked.
"Yes."
"That might not have been wise."
"It's ten thousand dollars," we said.
Some people do this all the time, lift their eyebrows way up, but it was probably the first time we had seen it from Mulgrew. "Come again?" he said.
"That's your cut. Ten thousand."
The room smelled like instant coffee now, like burned chocolate and tires, but nobody was commenting on the smell or acting like it mattered much. The only time Mulgrew fixed the coffee himself we had watched in horror as he used two parts water, one part crystals, a concoction we had no plans to ever drink again. But today we fixed it the same way. We did it Mulgrew's way. That was why the smell was so apparent.
Even so, we needed to be careful what we told him. Mr. Smith had warned us to be incredibly discreet lest the whole deal fall apart. All that Mulgrew had to do was courier the processing fee to Leshfield. There he would meet Mr. Smith and act as our representative for the transfer.
"Leshfield? Processing fee?" Mulgrew was obviously thinking this over. "Leshfield is rough country. How much is the processing fee?"
But first my wife had a question for Mulgrew. Was he scared of Leshfield?
"You know I'm not scared of anyone or anything," Mulgrew said, "and I do appreciate how your family is always including me in stuff. I'm just being cautious, that's all."
"We have always included you in stuff," we said, "because we like you."
"Well, I like you all too."
"With this money," my wife said, "we can do all sorts of activities we could never do before, and it goes without saying that you're welcome to tag along."
Mulgrew had some sort of dry-lip condition where he frequently swiped his tongue across them, but he tried to do it quickly so as not to draw special attention to himself. What did this reveal about him? We didn't know. We didn't know much about him. Mulgrew was a mystery. We had some idea of his time in the war, that he was a different person when he came back and that he no longer felt the old version of Mulgrew was worth answering questions about. Now, we didn't think that all people who fought in wars automatically deserved respect or special treatment. But to Mulgrew's credit he never asked for these things. Maybe he liked hanging around with us because we never pressed him for information but were content to focus on ourselves. He lived across the street, so occasionally we'd notice him chopping wood noiselessly in his backyard, we mean of course the wood made some noise when it split in half but he never grunted or anything, he just handled his business and kept reducing the wood to smaller pieces. We had never, in all the years we had known Mulgrew, heard him voice even the slightest expression of discontent. He accepted the world and did his best to carry on with things.
"Did this Carl Smith give you a phone number?" he asked.
"Mr. Smith? We have an address. The plan is to send our representative to meet him at that address in Leshfield tomorrow. We could think of no one we would rather have represent this family than you."
This was when Rebecca walked in. First, she was not supposed to dress like that.
We don't want anyone to imagine the pushed-up parts of her body, so we'll say nothing about what she was wearing except that Mulgrew, nevertheless, seemed to like it, and bowed slightly when Rebecca came in, an oddly respectful gesture to make to a bratty teenager. "It's nice to see you," Mulgrew said. "Your parents called me over," Mulgrew went on, "seeing as how they needed my aid with a mission, a trip to Leshfield as representative, and, well," he blushed and looked down at the floor. Mulgrew wasn't the sort to boast about himself. But he couldn't help at least trying to present his best self to Rebecca. Another conflict was that he valued his role in our family and wanted the family to function properly, which is why he also said this to Rebecca: "You should be on time for family meetings."
"My mouth is really sore," she announced, "from kissing so many guys tonight."
"Go directly to your room," my wife said wearily, "shut the door, think about everything we have been saying to you repeatedly throughout the years, and please try to find some clothes that don't make you look like a pirate."
Later that night, while we were working out the finer details of tomorrow's mission with Mulgrew, Rebecca came downstairs again. Now she was wearing a shirt that had once belonged to me. I didn't know what happened to that shirt. It disappeared years ago. It was big, from the time when I was bigger. But it was not big enough to be the only garment a person has on. My wife chased her back upstairs.
And there sat Mulgrew, trying hard not to watch Rebecca ascend the stairs in that shirt alone. I was watching Mulgrew, seeing if he would break and look up at Rebecca's behind, which I had no interest in as a father. And I really would like to commend him and say publicly that I respect the struggle he went through that day. I knew then he was the perfect man for this mission.
"Are you sure you can handle it?" we asked after we had gone over the plan a few times. I grabbed his arm firmly and said into his ear: "By this time tomorrow you'll be ten thousand richer, my friend."
It was by far the most intimate moment we had ever shared; I could feel him kind of trembling through his stiff canvas jacket and for a second I thought I had crossed some line, maybe I had gone too far and Mulgrew, reflexively, was going to break my arm or something, because who really knows with guys like him? But what happened was entirely different. Mulgrew grabbed my arm exactly like I grabbed his. Clasped it, you could say. And he made a solemn vow that he would not let us down.
This was Friday night, and back then the Friday night TV lineup used to be a can't-miss event. As soon as Mulgrew left we took our places before the TV. The shows we enjoyed on Friday night would often become the basis for the conversations and concerns of the following week. These shows, unlike the gory and off-color programming nowadays, held valuable lessons. For example, if you invite a few friends over when your parents leave town, it'll almost always turn into a huge party and during the chaos something irreplaceable will break or go missing. If you choose the wrong bill in the darkness and leave a twenty under you child's pillow, she'll expect another twenty every time she loses a tooth. If you set a ten-year deadline to realize your dreams or give up on them and work really hard during the final two weeks, great things can still happen. Even though such lessons always stay with you, looking back, nobody can remember what happened on television that night.
But we can all remember being very worried about Mulgrew.
Let's get something else out of the way before we reveal what happened to Mulgrew. We know what you're thinking about the email. You've probably received a number of similar emails and discarded them and blocked the senders. But please remember that this was long ago. This was back when nobody had seen emails like this before. There has to be a different standard for cases like ours based on the time period, and also the fact that we needed the money for family-related expenses.
Nobody could have been expected to doubt Mr. Smith, but that didn't stop Rebecca. She was bundled up that morning in a loaf of heavy sweaters. It was too much, what she was wearing right now, payback for the hard time we'd given her last night. Rebecca always took things too far. She even had on these old-fashioned glasses that made her look like a prim, unhelpful librarian, like Ruth, for example, not that we expect everyone to be familiar with Ruth.
"I can't believe you're sending him to Leshfield," Rebecca said that morning.
We were obviously worried about Mulgrew. That's why we told you about what happened with our shows, and outright stated that we were worried. But when Rebecca behaved this way it was better to just calmly take a sip of your coffee or orange juice and continue reading the newspaper.
She said, "Can't you see there's something totally fishy about all this?"
Eventually she stormed out, after which one of our smaller children said,
"It's like s-s-she's not even part of the same f-f-f-f-family anymore because she's nev-nev—"
No, that's not how it went. It would be easier to explain things the way we want to explain things if our family had gone according to plan and we had several children besides Rebecca. We want to be better people, is why we're telling you this. We don't want to mislead anyone. We want to face our mistakes. We want to look back at our lives and remove all the little extras and enlargements that people are always sprinkling everywhere, when they talk about the past. And we can promise that the earlier scene, minus the cute little boy, unfolded exactly as described, and that everything from this point forward will be true.
Mulgrew returned that night. But he didn't ring the doorbell like normal, healthy Mulgrew had always done in the past. He rested his head on the doorbell so it was one long continuous ring. Plus most of his body was resting against the door itself. This meant that when the door opened he came tumbling onto the foyer rug. He clawed at the hat rack and used it to regain his feet. Mulgrew was kind of a genius of concealing pain and making you think everything was fine, but not even Mulgrew could hide what he was going through right now.
"They didn't get . . . they didn't get . . ." he said.
"Mulgrew?" we said. "We can't hear you very well."
"They . . . didn't get a dollar, get, get a . . . dollar."
The satchel in his arms looked familiar because it was the satchel we loaded the processing fee into. He thrust it forward. We did NOT count the money right then but it looked like it was all there, soaked in blood so it would be very sticky when we eventually did count it. And when he thrust it forward, we saw the hole in his stomach. We have always been uncomfortable with guns, so won't say anything further about the hole. This also happened to be when Rebecca ran down the stairs and, in the largest blur of all, dragged Mulgrew to the hospital. We were left standing in the doorway with the blood-soaked satchel.
You see where all this is headed. Rebecca caring for Mulgrew at the hospital, bringing him soup and reading material, and Mulgrew telling everyone he was fine and leaving the hospital many days before the doctors would have liked.
Something must have happened between them. Mulgrew and Rebecca, not Mulgrew and the doctors.
It wasn't anything big and it didn't happen right away. A few years passed, and maybe it's easier to think of it like an implant in one of those science fiction movies that nobody knows is inside them until it's too late. How did they get married? Well, by springing that question on you we hope to replicate our surprise. They took care of all the paperwork before we could talk them out of it. Maybe we wouldn't have even attempted to talk them out of it. We never forgave ourselves for what happened to Mulgrew. Also, he proved something to us that day. For a long time his presence in our house had been kind of like a ghost it was harder to banish than let drift around and occupy the empty spaces, not that we believe in ghosts or think this is a great comparison, so maybe it's time to go a bit further and admit that we really just wanted to keep someone like Mulgrew in our pocket in case a dirty job arose. Either way, we'll tell you something else about that satchel. We never spent any of the money. We tossed it, almost immediately, into a closet. And there it remained.
The little-get-together was at Mulgrew's house. Not a reception, they stressed, just a little-get-together.
Mulgrew didn't have anyone attending from his side, but that didn't stop him from happily buzzing around refilling everyone's drink when it fell below halfway. When we got married twenty years ago we rented out a hotel convention center with a proper DJ and, well, it didn't matter if they were doing things differently today, they looked happy. We had been pretty sure Rebecca would do something called grinding, it was the only dancing we had ever seen from her. There was a little of that at first, but soon she rested her head on Mulgrew's shoulder and they swayed back and forth, as peaceful as anything you'll find elsewhere.
Time for the toast. Mulgrew stood up and limped forward, though his limp was getting less noticeable every day. He had a very special thing to say, he announced. Then he went quiet and looked really nervous up there. "This toast will not be complicated," he said finally. He looked at the glass he was holding and willed it to stop shaking. Then he raised the glass and said, "To my family."
There was a long pause. Everyone was waiting for Mulgrew to finish the speech. He was glaring at us—me—or maybe glaring is the wrong way to put it, I don't know, but there was such a bold intensity that I had to look away. I can remember a lot about this. I can remember feeling cold. Even my chair, I can remember how hard it felt beneath me, how it was somehow separate and different from all the other chairs. The pause continued until it was no longer a pause at all, until I—we—realized it probably never had been. Normally if the entire room has turned to look at the carpet or walls during a wedding speech, it means the speech did not go well. But that was untrue in this case.
Now we'll get to how the little-get-together concluded, the spindrift.
This part involves going across the street to our home and getting something from the closet. As far as we knew, nobody had ever done anything like this before. We passed the satchel to Mulgrew. Not a gift, not a dowry—we didn't know what to call it. Did it even have a name? We were thinking of it as spindrift. Maybe everyone has done something like this, we were thinking, where you try to correct a big wrong or mistake but can't elevate it to the term of gift or dowry or anything that would make you look good? We're not expecting spindrift to become a thing, a popular addition to the culture. Even if it does become a thing, we're not asking to be remembered for it.