My Kind of Town
My Kind of Town
Lockbox of horrors
>> Queen's Medical Center"I'll give Christian X.O. St. James this much," Quinn Ah Sun was saying. "This new book of his ..."
His former cousin and now fiancee Lily Ah Sun helped him out. "'Jesus Was An Egoist: Dying Was the Best Thing for His Future.'"
"He's come up with the perfect religion for our times. He's preaching what people are already doing -- they're first and nobody else counts."
"I like what you called them -- the Church of Latter-day Egoists," Lily said with a giggle and squeezed his hand.
"I don't mean to preach, Lil, but to see my cousin saying that the most important thing in life is him and his needs, well, it got to me."
"That's actually a good thing," she said, leaned down and kissed his cheek.
"At least Laird going off to Afghanistan to teach Christianity and capitalism to the mujahadeen is a good thing for you. As I recall, you recently gave your dad a proposal to reorganize the Soap Company, with you as the head. Now that Laird's declined the offer to take over and your dad's had the heart attack, I'd say this puts you in pretty good position."
"It should, but it'll never happen. It's not just that I'm a girl, Quinn, it turns out that I'm not even his real daughter, remember? Even with all the money I've made for him with Ola Essences, he'd never trust me to run the whole company. Not in a thousand years."
"Somebody's going to have to run it."
"Well, I can't worry about that now. First things first, I still need to have that little conversation with my mother."
"And I need to talk with my dad." She kissed his cheek.
"We're getting close to the truth, Lily."
He touched her chin, gently drew her lips to his. The kiss lingered.
"We're getting close to a lot of things!" Lily said when they came up for air. "And the sooner I get some answers from my mom, the sooner we can do some of the mister-and-missus things I want to do."
Which sounded good to Quinn.
And so Lily went off to find her mother and ask questions that Grace Ah Sun never wanted to hear asked, and certainly not out loud. Some of those questions Grace had also shared many years ago, but stuffed them into the little lockbox in her brain where things too awful to ponder are banished.
Returning to her husband Sheets' bedside in the cardiac unit after checking on her son Lance and learning he was much improved and being moved out of the ICU, Grace couldn't have guessed that Lily was about to rattle her little lockbox of horrors open.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com