Excerpt: If I Make It Through December

Chapter 1

You know how there’s good luck and bad luck? And then there’s the bad luck that gets all gussied up in fancy clothes and expensive shoes pretending it’s good luck?

That’s the kind of luck that came knocking on my door on a rainy and cold November day.

“Heather James?” the man at my office door asked.

I examined him carefully before I answered. He was in his fifties, I guessed, but his solemnity of manner made him appear older. Much older. He wore a black suit that fitted like it had been made for him (it probably had been), a subdued silk tie (definitely not the two for twenty dollar kind) and a blindingly white shirt (with initials on the cuffs).

I could see how he’d made it past the receptionist without fuss or announcement.

“Yes?” I answered, standing from behind my desk, kept spotlessly clean for just these events. Not that this kind of event had ever happened before. No one came to my office. I didn’t do clients, I did paper. And calculations. The occasional email and even fewer telephone calls.

“Ms. James,” he said, holding out his tanned hand, shooting his wrist from beneath the starched cuff, the wrist embellished with a discreet but obviously real gold watch.

My impression of him, already at the top end of our client scale, moved upwards. His portfolio, his tax planning, had to be one of our largest.

So why was he in my office?

It was immutable practice for clients to be seen in the office of our senior partner. Four or five times the size of mine, it contained leather furniture, mahogany tables, real art – I glanced over at my poster of Canaletto’s Venice – and an executive washroom which I snuck in to use, always before the cleaning staff had arrived to clean it, on the many late nights when I was only one in the office.

I shook his bone dry and polished hand and waited.

“You are Heather James?”

I nodded.

“Might I see some identification?”

I frowned, but remembering the odd stories I’d heard from my associates about some of our clients, I complied, handing him my driver’s licence without looking at it myself. I looked like a g------, my hair flattened on my head, my face pasty and my eyes lost in my head. I never looked at my licence. Or the photo on my passport– even though I’d renewed it five times, not one of the photographs had been anything less than hideous.

He perused my licence, handed it back to me and nodded.

“Your mother’s name?”

This was beginning to feel like a call from my credit card company. But I’d neither lost nor over-used my credit card (I never carried a balance, I’m a tax planner for God’s sake). It was zero. As always. Paying interest on credit cards was a complete waste of money, money that could more properly reside in my retirement fund.

I answered anyway. “Donna. Donna Luongi,” using her maiden name because I’d somehow got into the credit card company mode.

“Do you have proof of that?”

Weirder and weirder. But I’d bought into the first weirdness and now my curiosity – usually well under control – was out of it. Control, that is.

I turned to the locked fireproof filing cabinet beside my desk and pulled out my personal file.

“My birth certificate,” I said with a flourish. “See,” I pointed to my mother’s name. “Right there.”

“Ms. James, did you ever meet your Great-Aunt Francesca?”

I didn’t know I had a Great-Aunt Francesca.

“She was your grandmother’s baby sister.”

I didn’t know my grandmother. Or any other of my mother’s relatives, for that matter. They were all dead before I was born, or at least that’s what my mother told me. Their deaths were followed by my parents’ when I was twenty.

I nodded and waited for the next revelation. This conversation had definitely moved out of the credit call pattern and into the unknown great-aunt dying and leaving me a fortune pattern.

“Francesca died almost a month ago,” he continued. “It took some time to find you.” The accusation in his voice was clear. Obviously, I should have kept in touch with Great-Aunt Francesca even though I hadn’t know she existed.

“You are her only living relative and her heir.”

“Oh,” I said, flabbergasted by this confirmation of the pattern.

Now, of course, he would tell me I’d inherited some decrepit old house in the middle of nowhere where I’d have to spend a year before it became mine to sell. I’d seen this movie before.

I contemplated the size of my retirement fund and grinned. The inheritance meant nothing to me except headaches.

“Do you know Francesca’s Ristorante downtown?”

Not at all the question I’d been expecting.

“I was there once,” I replied. “Too noisy for me.”

What I meant was that it was too Italian, too exuberant, too, well, too much of everything. Food and noise and music and people. Too much wine. Too much color. Too much excitement.

Not the kind of place Heather James, who spent her days and nights engrossed in spreadsheets, would go to more than once.

“You’re the new owner.”

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