The Paradise Problem (5)

LIAM


There is a Safeway two blocks from my house in Palo Alto, which is great because of the convenience factor, of course, but it’s also terrible because every time I shop here, I fear I’m going to be caught on camera in the Weston Foods security room four hundred miles south in Irvine.

It doesn’t matter how much distance—geographic or emotional—I’ve put between myself and my family’s corporation, this is my one remaining childhood fear: that when the automatic doors part at any other supermarket, and I set foot inside, my perfectly groomed mother with her custom suit and not a hair out of place will receive an alert. Standing in front of a wall of screens in a security room, she’ll lean in, touching the tip of her manicured index finger to a tiny figure in the corner.

“There. Right there,” she’ll say into a walkie-talkie that feeds into my father’s earpiece. “I see Liam in the Safeway on Middlefield and San Carlos.”

It’s an absurd fear. Never mind that my mother never bothers herself with security footage, or that there are a million reasons I might venture into a non-Weston’s supermarket, including something as loyal as scoping out the competition. But this is the kind of paranoia a man lives with when his family business is the US’s sixth-largest grocery chain and has a decades-long beef with the fifth largest. It’s also the kind of paranoia a man lives with when he shuts his powerful father out of his personal life for years. (Never mind, too, that if my father really wanted to know what I do every day, he could easily find out. Raymond Weston is simply too narcissistic to imagine that the distance between us might not be his idea.)

But my instincts don’t care about logic. So when Mom calls while I’m at the register paying for a post-run coconut water, I abruptly tap my watch, declining the call, and look around me for cameras in view.

Calm your shit, Weston. I take a deep breath and smile at the woman at the register, pulling my phone from my armband to pay. It lights up with another call.

I press Decline once more and hold the phone to the payment screen in front of me. It doesn’t register, and I try again. The cashier is reaching over to see if she can get it from another angle when a text lights up my screen: William Albert Weston, answer my call or so help me I will fly to your house right now.

Well, shit, we can’t have that.

“Yikes,” the cashier says, reading the text with a sympathetic wince. “You’d better answer, William.”

Just then, my phone rings again.

With a resigned laugh, I answer the call on my watch as I try desperately to pay for my water with my iPhone. We may be in Silicon Valley, where everyone has fifteen devices on their person at any given moment, but I can still feel everyone behind me in the express checkout line glaring. I am absolutely that tech asshole right now.

“Hello?”

Her voice carries through my single earbud. “Liam? Finally.”

“Sorry, Mom,” I whisper. “Where are you?”

She pauses, confused. “I’m… at home? Where are you?”

“Just grabbing water at the Weston’s on Alma and University.” The cashier looks at me in confusion and I smile, waving her off. The lie was needlessly specific and likely won’t work anyway: the problem with AirPods is they pick up every noise in a room. I glare up at the high ceiling, wondering how much ambient noise is bleeding through the line. My parents began dating their freshman year in high school, waited until they’d graduated college before getting married, and then waited an additional five years before having my older brother, Alex. All this to say, Janet Weston has been in the family business since she was fourteen; the woman has spent so much time in supermarkets that she could differentiate the sound of a Safeway from a Weston’s even while standing at the 101 and 80 freeway interchange at rush hour. I have to get out of here.

Finally, my payment goes through. I snatch the water, wave off the receipt, throw an apologetic smile to the annoyed line behind me, and jog out of the store, ducking into an alley between buildings.

“What’s up?” I ask, like we both don’t know exactly why she’s calling.

I’m grateful for the time she gives me to brace myself; I hear the tidy click of her shoes and imagine her strolling out through the living room onto the terra-cotta tiles of the sunroom looking out over the Newport Coast. “I’m calling about Charlie’s wedding, sweetheart.”

I wince, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Of course. Can’t wait.”

“We all leave for the island next week, and your RSVP arrived yesterday. I’d really hoped you’d be RSVP’ing for two. We’ve reserved one of the five private bungalows for you.”

“You know how busy she is, Mom.”

“Which is exactly why she needs this vacation, darling.” She sighs. “Liam, honey, it looks bad if the entire family isn’t there. Vogue is coming to do a profile on Charlie and Kellan. Forbes is sending someone to interview your father. People will talk.” Mom pauses. “I hate to say it, sweetheart, but your father is getting strange about it, too.”

My stomach drops. “Strange how?”

“You know.” And I do, though I wish for once we could all just speak plainly with one another. This is as close as my mother will come to saying, Your father is beginning to think maybe she shouldn’t be in this family if she’s never around.