Show Her The Money. Stephanie Feagan
I stuck with it. She didn’t. After a few years of taking orders from managers twenty years younger, she ditched the firm and went out on her own.
She’s wildly successful, and it was really very nice of her to offer me a mercy job. I was appreciative, but moving home and working for her was honestly, truly, the worst possible thing I could imagine.
Too bad I had absolutely no choice in the matter.
I called and said I’d do it. The next morning, I put the loft up for sale, packed what I could into the Mercedes SUV and headed west, waving to Dallas in my rearview mirror.
As I drove back to the town I’d sworn never to live in again, all I could think was what a miserable failure I’d turned out to be. In spite of my devotion, my marriage had crashed and burned. I’d lost a great job because I tried to do the right thing. And I was about to take a mercy job with my mother. How pathetic was that?
To top it all off, I had a notice from the IRS in the day’s mail. I was going to be audited.
I didn’t mind so much. It gave me something different to obsess about.
Midland sits three hundred miles west of Dallas, rising twenty-four stories out of the flattest land on the planet. The twenty-four stories is the tallest building downtown and it’s joined by other wannabes that make the skyline pretty impressive, from ten miles out on the highway. It’s called the Tall City, at least by locals. Everyone else calls it the armpit of Texas, or “that town where Baby Jessica fell down the well.” After George the Second got elected, they hung banners from the downtown light poles with a photo of George W. giving the thumbs-up, and a line beneath him that says, “Midland’s Rising Son.” They are real proud of George and Laura in Midland. Even the three Democrats.
I couldn’t stop thinking of Dallas’s trees and lakes and lush, green grass as I drove that last ten miles into Midland. The landscape around the Tall City is anything but lush. In fact, I’ve often wondered if they did a little bomb practice around Midland before they dropped the Big One on Hiroshima. The loftiest plant life is maybe four feet tall. Mesquite. Lots and lots of mesquite. Some cactus, a little sage and a very wee bit of some thin green stuff that looks like the hair on Charlie Brown’s head. Midland is not scenic.
Still, it has a certain charm, especially within the city limits. All that oil money buys a nice town. Mom told me once, there are more rich people per capita in Midland than anywhere else in Texas. Maybe America. I believe it.
I drove into town and went straight to my mother’s house, a zero-lot line in a small, gated community. It pained her to spend the money, but she had a certain image to uphold. Or so she said. I think she secretly craved a real house, in a ritzy part of town, and that’s exactly what she got. The place was big, with four bedrooms, decorated in luxurious fabrics, dark mahogany and old-world paintings. Very British Indies. She has a pool in the back, and with the August heat rising off the road, I’d been thinking of that pool since Abilene.
It wasn’t until I got to the door that I realized I didn’t have a key. So I got back in the car and drove downtown, to Mom’s office, located in the old First National Bank building, the one that’s the tallest. It’s had so many owners and names over the past twenty years, ever since the oil bust of ’85, nobody knows its actual name. Everyone just calls it the Old First National Bank Building.
Mom’s office is on the fifteenth floor, and her reception area is similar to her house, with beautiful mahogany, plush fabrics and recessed lighting. Mom can be so tight, she squeaks when she walks, but she spends the bucks when it comes to her professional image. Mom says, look successful and you’ll be successful. Guess she’s right. Mom makes a lot of dough.
I walked into the office and saw a pretty, young woman with light brown hair and pouty lips manning the reception desk.
“May I help you?” she inquired cordially.
“Hi, I’m Pink,” I answered, walking close to her desk, glancing at her name plate, “and it’s nice to meet you, Tiffany.” I stuck my hand out and she shook it, then said a little breathlessly, “I think your mom’s been expecting you. Go on back.”
“Thanks.” I turned and headed down the short hall toward the big hall that houses a small conference room, five offices on each side, then opens up into the bull pen, where the lower staffers have cubicles. Mom’s large office is at the end, generally a mess, with stacks of files all over the place.
I was halfway there when she popped out of one of the side offices and waylaid me. “Pink! You’re here!”
She pulled me into the conference room across the hall, we hugged, then she held me away from her and did a quick inventory. “You’ve lost weight.”
“I’ve been a little stressed.”
“Of course you have. I’m sorry, baby.”
Sympathy from Mom has never been ample. Much like rain in Midland; infrequent, longed for, but given sparingly. I swallowed back the giant lump of Pity Party tears in my throat and managed to smile. “Thanks, Mom. And thanks for the job.”
She waved away my thanks and said pragmatically, “You need a job and I need someone to work in my new forensic accounting department. It’s almost cosmic, the way things worked out.”
“Forensic accounting? I thought your practice was solely tax prep.”
“It was, up until a month ago. I hired an MBA named Sam Weston. He was with the FBI, and I hired him as soon as he retired.”
“The FBI?” My voice sort of squeaked on the “FBI” because I was so surprised. An FBI guy, working for my mom? “What’s he going to do, exactly?”
“Trace assets in divorces, testify in court, look into bad oil deals, and things like that.”
I was beyond surprised and almost shocked. Mom is hip and modern in a lot of ways, but old school when it comes to business. Forensic accounting sounded very glam for someone like my mother. “And you want me to work for Sam?”
“That’s the plan.” Mom looked like she did the year she gave me a calculator for Christmas, when I was thirteen. I wanted a padded bra and I got a calculator. “Isn’t it exciting?” She looked ready to whoop it up and start clapping.
Compared to her penthouse enthusiasm, my excitement was in the basement, but I was definitely grateful she didn’t expect me to do tax returns, because I’m not a tax accountant. I’m an auditor. Not the sort of auditor the IRS hires to scare the hell out of people. Not the sort who pokes around a company, looking for pilfering employees. Most people think companies hire us to seek and destroy embezzlers.
They’re wrong.
All we do is look over the financial statements and make sure the company isn’t lying their ass off so people will be suckered into buying their stock and the price will go through the roof and all the Big Dog executives can make off like bandits when they sell their stock options. Companies can’t claim to have oil reserves worth eighty bajillion dollars when really they have maybe forty or fifty million bucks worth. They can’t claim to have a few measly million dollars of debt, when in fact, they owe so much to every bank on the planet, even God couldn’t bail them out.
As an auditor, it was my job to make sure everything was clean and tidy at the companies I audited. If things weren’t clean and tidy, Lowell Jaworski put his foot down and demanded things get fixed, or he’d write a bad opinion and every investor out there would dump their stock. All in all, a pretty good system. Until the Marvel Energy fiasco.
Nothing was clean and tidy at Marvel Energy, but for fifty million dollars worth of consulting income, Lowell decided he didn’t care. Which unfortunately signaled the ending buzzer for my career as said auditor.
Now, Mom was opening a new career opportunity for me, and maybe I wasn’t as over the moon about it as she appeared to be, but I was glad to have a job doing something useful, something I had a prayer of understanding. The myriad tax laws were my worst nightmare. “I’ll do my best,”