I sigh, getting impatient at him for not just letting me get him drunker so I can sneak out, call my mom and then come back in here to break whatever humiliating news she has to share.
“In the shot glass is mostly Irish whiskey,” I tell him, “but Irish cream is mixed in for flavor. The beer is Irish beer. Which one changes depending on what you ask for and what a particular place has, but they call it an Irish car bomb because—”
“All the stuff in it’s Irish,” Mason says, finishing the thought. “Okay,” he says. “I just drop the shot in the beer and drink it all?”
“Yep,” I tell him. “You’ll want to do it fast, though. You don’t want that cream mixing with the beer too much before you drink it or it’s not going to be the most pleasant experience in the world for you.”
It sounds believable. It may even be true.
“Okay,” he says. “Here goes.”
He gingerly places the shot glass above his beer and takes a few long, deep breaths before dropping it in. The shot hasn’t even hit the bottom of the beer glass before he’s drinking the mix down.
Mason takes a breath about halfway through, but he manages to finish it all in a respectable amount of time.
He sets the empty glass down on the bar a little too hard, causing the shot glass inside to clink loudly, attracting the attention of the bartender. Mason wipes his mouth, saying, “Wow.”
“Right?” I respond. “How’d you like it?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s a bit hardcore for me, I think, but I’m glad I tried it at least.”
“Great,” I tell him, “order up another one. I’ve got to pop over to the ladies’ room.?
? Almost as an afterthought, I add, “I should probably see what my mom wanted, too.”
He apparently doesn’t think this is nearly as big a deal as I know it is, so he just says, “Okay,” and leaves it at that. As I’m walking away, I’m a little relieved when I hear him ordering another drink.
The ladies’ room thing was a total front, so while Mason’s back is turned, I slip out the front door of the bar and make sure I’m a decent ways down the block before I pull out my phone. I enter my mom’s number and make the call.
“There are some things we need to discuss,” mom answers.
“Hi, mom, haven’t talked to you in a while,” I scoff. “Things are all right, thanks for asking.”
“I’m sure you’re attempting to make some sort of point, but we don’t have time for that now,” she says.
“What did you do?” I ask.
She gasps like all upper-class criminals gasp when they’re accused of something they’re guilty of doing. “I am shocked that after not speaking with one another over such an expanse of time, you would just assume that—” she starts.
I interrupt. “Could you skip ahead to the part where you tell me what you and dad are in trouble for this time?” I ask. “I’m kind of in the middle of something here.”
“We are your family!” my overdramatic mother cries with that lilt in her voice, just at that crucial moment. If I hadn’t heard that same lilt every day growing up, I might just buy her indignation. “What could possibly take precedence over your own flesh and blood?”
“Mom, I really don’t have time or patience for you right now, so if there’s any way the two of you could just figure out your own mess and leave me out of it, that would be fantastic,” I tell her.
“There are some things we’re going to need to discuss over the coming days,” mom says. “If you had answered your phone when I called, we could have gotten it out of the way today, but John’s gone home for the night.”
“John” is Johnson B. Witherton VI, Esq., the Butcher/Weese family attorney. More exactly, he’s head of their legal team. All told, their cadre of lawyers now into the double digits. Dad got mom lawyer number ten for their twentieth anniversary.
This is my family.
“What did you do and how bad is it?” I ask. “Are we talking about quietly paying a fine and maybe donating a courthouse or are you in real trouble?”
“They think we were trying to swindle people!” mom exclaims. “Can you believe the impertinence?”
That’s bad. That’s very bad.
It may not sound like much, but she just detailed the exact position she and dad are in right now. “They” is the police. “They think” means they have mom and dad dead to rights. The swindling thing is self-explanatory, but the fact that she used the word “people” instead of “someone” means that there is more than one charge, possibly more than one complainant.