“Honey?” Shannon asks, stoking my cheek. I’m frozen, back to that day as I watch Marie take my dad down verbally.
Without warning I grab Shannon and kiss her, hard and furious, the blood rushing through my ears and crescendoing, like a set of stringed instruments all warming up at the same time, in harmony. The low rumbling invades my mind and now my arms pull Shannon against me, hands in her hair, my tongue tasting her.
She pulls away, lipstick smeared, eyes blazing. “We are at work!” she rasps. “Whatever’s going on inside you,” she adds, softening but still furious, “I understand you’re—“”
I kiss her again.
The door opens and in storms Jason.
“Oh, my God, is that my father?” she hisses, wiggling out of my arms. I can’t think. Can’t strategize. Can’t calculate or plan for whatever contingencies keep coming. Her family is like a giant game of human Whack-a-Mole. No matter how many times you think you’ve made them disappear, they just keep popping up.
It’s easier to just kiss her.
“I knew it,” Jason says. Shannon’s kissing me back now. We’re completely hidden behind the bookcase, and if Marie and Dad realize we’re still in the room, they don’t give any sign of it.
I pull away and look on the shelves.
“What are you doing?” Shannon asks, mouth red and boobs bouncing with heavy panting.
“Looking for whisky. We’re going to need it.” No decanters. No flasks. Just a very dusty set of Samuel Pepys first edition Harvard Classics. Not getting inebriated on that any time soon.
“Now, this is just ridiculous,” Dad announces, walking around the front of his desk in a confrontational manner. “Who in the hell are you?” he asks Jason.
“They’ve never met?” I whisper to Shannon, who really looks like she could use that whisky.
“My mom...my dad...yelling at the owner of the company where I work...” she mutters in short phrases.
And your future father-in-law, I think.
“Jason Jacoby.” Jason glares at Marie, who is combing over him from head to toe. Jason’s dressed in a suit and tie, clean shaven and has a nice, new haircut. He looks like any other businessman in his fifties.
Except I’ve never seen Jason dressed in anything other than jeans.
“I’m the husband of the woman you’re fucking,” Jason declares, eyes right on my dad.
And Shannon’s eyes roll back. She falls against me in a dead faint, slumping to the ground, her skirt riding up her thighs and her hair mashing into the Persian carpet next to the bookcase. Great. I’m about to propose to Scarlett O’Hara. Fiddle-dee-dee.
I’m pinned to a small table next to us and gaping at her. I’d faint, too, if my father accused my boss of fucking my mother.
This is one of those moments where you decide which kind of man you are.
One who cowers behind a bookcase in your father’s office while your future father-in-law accuses him of fucking your future mother-in-law?
Or a grown-up who goes out there and tries to mediate.
That’s right. I grab a pillow off the leather chair nearby and place it on my lap, gently moving Shannon’s head onto it and settle in.
This could be a while.
“I had no idea Becky was married!” Dad roars.
Oh.
“Becky? Who the hell is Becky? I’m talking about Marie!” Jason shouts, matching dad’s volume.
Shannon’s eyelids flutter, her soft eyebrows bending down in consternation as she comes to. I’ve never seen her faint before, and while I know stress can do that to a person, having her drop like a sack of potatoes in the middle of this fiasco just feels like a giant joke.
Let’s take inventory for a second here:
1. Marie has invaded our workplace.
2. She’s lecturing my dad for being a jerk after my mom died.
3. Dad just revealed he’s porking his admin, which is against company policy (Shut up. I am not a hypocrite. Shannon is not my direct report.).
4. Jason has barged in and accused my dad of schtupping his wife. The wife who dated my dad long before my oldest brother, Terry, was a twinkle in anyone’s eyes.
5. Shannon fainted, with her face in my lap and not in the fun kind of way.
6. Everyone’s screaming at each other and all I want to do is put my mother’s ring on Shannon’s lovely finger and make sweet love to my fiancée.
There’s the recap.
Not one bit of that makes sense except for the last part, and as Shannon sits up and looks wildly around the room, her hands cold and shaking, we hear:
“Out! Both of you! Before I call security!”
That’s Marie shouting. Shannon and I jump to our feet and race around the bookcase to find Jason and my dad on the ground in their suits, wrestling.
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter.
“She’s mine!” Jason grunts as he gets Dad into a messy wrestling move. I take it Jason learned how to fight in the streets in south Boston. While we three McCormick boys learned fencing and boxing at Milton Academy from instructors who competed in the Olympics, Dad was a street kid, too. A Southie street kid.
Two Southie guys on a thirty-year hiatus from a brawl? This could get interesting. If nothing else, they both have middle-age paunches to work around, and while I know Dad has gym-toned arms, Jason’s been doing his own yard work for the last three decades.
And they seem to have checked their civility in the same place where their common sense is hiding.
“You—” The rest of the filth that comes out of Dad -- a stream of invective aimed solely at Jason, Jason’s mother, Jason’s genitals, and stretches back about six generations -- is a product of Dad’s Irish-Scottish heritage. Mostly his Scottish heritage, because Scots don’t forget anything when it comes to insults.