Queen Mom Rules novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Fake
At her parents' ruby anniversary Marlena's gift is laughed off as fake and she is introduced as the phone girl; she takes it back and tells her father Pine Street is hers.
My mother held up the box I had given her and laughed so the whole ballroom could hear.
"Look at this, everyone. Marlena brought me a costume."
A hundred guests at the Lakeshore Club turned their heads.
It was my parents' fortieth anniversary, and the theme was rubies.
I had spent four months finding the gift inside that box.
My seven-year-old daughter Junie stood beside me in her yellow dress, holding my hand.
My mother lifted the necklace out of the velvet and let the stones swing under the chandelier.
"It's glass," she said. "Anyone can see it. I wear the real one."
She touched her throat, where a ruby necklace sat on her collarbone.
"These rubies have been on my neck since the day my mother-in-law died," she said.
A few women laughed politely.
"Mom, look at the clasp," I said.
"Oh, I don't need to look at the clasp, sweetheart."
She turned to the crowd and spread her hands.
"This is our Marlena. She's always been the sweet one. She answers phones for some delivery company."
My sister Cassidy giggled into her champagne glass.
"Tell them, Marlena," my mother said. "How many calls do you take a day?"
"A few."
"A few hundred, I bet! And on that salary she buys me a mall kiosk necklace. It's the thought that counts."
She handed the box back to me.
Somebody near the bar said, "Bless her heart."
Junie's hand tightened in mine.
"Mom," she whispered, "that's the one from the picture in your room."
"I know, baby."
"Grandma said it's fake."
"I know what she said."
I looked at the necklace in my hand.
On the back of the clasp, in letters so small you needed a lamp to read them, were the words O.K. 1951.
Those were my grandmother's initials, and she was my father's mother.
She had worn this necklace in every photograph I loved.
When I was twenty-seven she died, and my mother told me she had left me nothing.
I had believed that for seven years.
Then in March I opened an auction catalogue at my desk and saw the necklace on page forty.
I paid one point four million dollars for it that afternoon.
I did not tell anyone, because nobody in my family had asked me a real question since I was twenty-seven.
My father walked up with a plate of tiny crab cakes.
Albert Kettering is sixty-four years old, with a white mustache and a hardware store vest he wears under his tuxedo jacket for luck.
"Marlena, honey," he said quietly. "Don't make a scene. Mr. Brannigan is here tonight."
He tipped his head toward a tall man by the window, a man in a charcoal suit who was watching our corner of the room.
I knew that man.
I had refused to sell him my company three times.
"He's thinking about extending my loan," my father said. "I need tonight to go smoothly."
"Dad, I gave you the real necklace."
"Honey. Please."
He would not look at me.
He looked at the crab cakes.
I closed the box.
The click was quiet, but my mother heard it.
"Oh, don't be sensitive," she said. "Leave it on the gift table. Somebody will take it home."
"No," I said.
My mother blinked.
"I'm sorry?"
"I'm taking it home. It's not a gift if you don't want it."
I picked up Junie's coat from the chair.
My mother's smile came back, thinner than before.
"Where are you going? Your father's toast is in ten minutes."
"We're leaving."
"Over a necklace? Honestly, Marlena, this is why you never get ahead."
Cassidy leaned toward the nearest cousin and said, loud enough for me to hear, "She can't stand it when anyone has nice things."
My father put his plate down.
"Please, sweetheart, I can't lose this loan. Everything I have is tied up in those five stores."
I stopped in the doorway of the ballroom with my daughter's coat over my arm.
"Dad," I said. "Who holds the note on the stores?"
"What?"
"You said you can't lose the loan. Who holds your mortgage?"
He frowned.
"Some fund. Pine Street. I've never met anyone from it. They bought it from the bank in the spring and left everything alone."
"Yes," I said.
The ballroom had gone very quiet.
"Dad," I said, "Pine Street is mine."
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