Page 53 of The Grumpy Billionaire

I head in under the green canopy.

Sully, our gray-haired bulldog of a doorman, is right there, pulling open the door with a giant smile. “How’re you doing, Stella?” he asks.

“I’m okay, Sully,” I say. “How about you?”

“Dandy as candy!” he says like he always does.

* * *

Mom textsme a picture of a massive zucchini she managed to grow. I give her shit because there’s nothing next to it to show its scale. I make her put a shoe next to it and send the picture again.

She calls, and we talk about her plans for making three loaves of zucchini bread.

“By the way,” I say, “do you remember how I asked you and Dad not to have Hugo write that letter of recommendation? Do you remember that? Because imagine my surprise when I find out that you went ahead and asked him anyway.”

“Did Hugo tell you about this?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “You know I didn’t want you to ask him, and you went ahead and did it, and I’m pretty upset about it.”

“What? Well, we had so many conversations…” Mom says, putting up the old confusion smokescreen.

“I need to know I can trust you when you say something. And you need to trust me. I said I didn’t need it, and I didn’t need it.”

“But maybe you did. Clearly it was competitive enough that you didn’t get the job in the end, even with Hugo’s help.”

“Actually, Hugo’s letter wasn’t helpful at all. Like not at all.”

“You’re not blaming what happened on Hugo, I hope,” she says.

I pick up Chester the owl and turn him over in my fingers. I definitely blame Hugo, but that’s between Hugo and me. Also, I can’t think of anything that would cement my position as family fuckup more solidly than all of the unkind things that golden boy Hugo said about me. “I’m saying I wish you would’ve listened to me.”

“I apologize,” she says. “Though a letter from somebody of Hugo’s caliber is a real feather in your cap, and he’ll always want to help you, contrary to what you seem to think. Of course Charlie didn’t want Hugo to write a letter for his job, either—he was very fixated on getting that teaching position on his own merits. Well, you know, Charlie can be sensitive about Hugo taking up so much of the spotlight and all of that.”

This is something I never heard her say before. Hugo definitely grabbed way more of the spotlight in school, though even in our family, Mom and Dad worked with him a lot to help make the most of his talents, and later on, to win scholarships.

Is it possible they worked with Hugo more than they worked with Charlie? Thinking back, it does seem so. I always thought they were just trying to balance out Hugo’s loser parents. Did Charlie have feelings about it?

Right then I remember the big news: “Mom, do you know anything about Hugo being allergic to pineapple?”

“No, Hugo loves pineapple,” she says. “He used to love my fruit salad.”

“That’s what I thought, but people here are telling me that he’s deathly allergic to it. Everyone at the office says he’ll keel over if he so much as looks at a pineapple.”

“Allergic? Why wouldn’t he have told us?” Mom says. “Some people do develop allergies later in life, but I’d think he’d tell us.”

“Right? He’s worked here for over a decade, and to hear the people talk, he’s had the allergy the whole time.”

“Poor Hugo. He should’ve told us! Why wouldn’t he have? Though he always does go out of his way to be the perfect guest. Helping to clean up without even being asked. Always looking for ways to lend a hand.”

“He does have a perfectionistic streak,” I say.

“More like he doesn’t want to wear out his welcome. You know, I don’t think he ever really got a decent meal from Jeremy and Mara.”

I nod. The shittiness of Hugo’s party-hardy parents is a favorite topic of Mom’s to this day.

“The way they’d carry on, it was a very chaotic environment,” Mom continues. “I never felt it was my place to tell the Joneses how to raise a boy, but I always made sure Hugo knew he had a place at our dinner table.”

“I think you made a huge difference for him,” I say. It’s what I always say in this conversation, and it’s one hundred percent true.

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