My brother looked me up and down. He must’ve sucked on a lemon that left his face like that right before he walked over to our lovely chat. “I’ll tell you what…” he said, “…you swing your vote our way, and I’ll make sure we rent space to a decent, moderately priced, men’s suit chain and see to it that you get a twenty-five percent discount.”
I smiled and continued, not bothering to trade personal jabs with my arrogant half-brother. “I wasn’t quite finished with my story. Then you find out that the soil underneath the building you just tore down is contaminated with lead and a whole list of other toxins. That it will cost you upwards of a million bucks to clean it up, not to mention building delays and dealing with the DEP. Now that the mall is out of the question, you want to sell the property to another nursing home company that is interested in building a new facility on the site, and you have no plans to disclose what you’ve found to the buyer.”
“Don’t be naïve,” my father scolded. “This is the business world we’re in. Not some tattoo parlor where you decide not to mar the skin on a drunken girl’s ass because she isn’t in the right frame of mind to have that rose she’s always wanted tattooed on her left cheek. It’s caveat emptor—buyer beware—we have no legal obligation to coddle a buyer.”
“No legal obligation. What about an ethical one?”
“You’re being ridiculous. Do you know how much money we all stand to lose if we are forced to keep this land and go through with this cleanup?”
“It was the company’s mistake in buying the land without testing the soil. It’s the company that should pay for it. From what I heard, the nursing home that sold you the property had an environmental study done before they built the place sixty years ago. They’d have no way of knowing what seeped into the soil from the surrounding gas stations over the years. And if you would’ve kept the property a nursing home—like you told the community you’d planned to—the issue wouldn’t have reared its ugly head either.”
My brother buttoned his jacket and looked at our father. “I told you it was a waste of time to try to make him understand business. You can take the tattooed boy out of the hood, but you’ll never take the hood out of the boy.” He turned to me. “With this type of loss, and the way I’m sure you’ll run the other businesses Grandfather left you into the ground, you’ll be back to tattooing criminals in no time.”
I winked at my brother. “Not the drunk ones. Remember, I’m the upstanding brother who believes in not tattooing roses on their asses.”
Luckily for me, the secretary called the board meeting to order. For the next two hours we all sat around listening to my father and brother bullshit everyone. I had to hand it to them. They spun such a good tale, for a minute, I almost believed that voting with them to endorse the sale without disclosing the property contamination was in the best interest of the community.
We broke for a break before the formal vote, and I went outside to have a cigarette. Oddly, it was easier to breathe with nicotine-laced, thick smoke filling my lungs than it was in that fancy boardroom.
On the way back to the meeting, I found my brother down a quiet hall with a woman. I almost didn’t notice it was him, seeing as his entire face was buried in the woman’s neck—a woman who wasn’t his wife. Such a piece of shit.
He strolled into the meeting at the last minute chatting with a board member and wearing his usual smug smile. I’d seen the board member a few times. I remembered she was the heir to some fortune her dead husband had left and had a British accent—Maribel something was her name. They both took their seats, diagonally across from each other, and the meeting resumed. Not having gotten a good look at the woman from the hall, I really hoped it wasn’t her, and he wasn’t screwing a board member.
“Alright, let’s get this over with,” my father said. “This is a public vote. The secretary here has everyone’s voting power on his laptop, so all we need to do is hear a yay or a nay on the sale. He’ll tally up the results when we’re done.”
The secretary then proceeded to call off names and people voted.
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”
“No.”
After the fourth member voted no, I looked over at my brother. He didn’t look at all concerned. When it was my turn, my father shot me a look of disgust for voting my conscience.
Every member voted no, until we got to the one remaining vote, aside from my father and brother—the woman who walked in with my brother. She looked over at him before casting her vote. Fuck. Her eyes hooded and, upon closer look, her swollen lips confirmed she was the woman from the hall.