"It's my life, too, David!" Emily said from the door. "The store is my business as much as yours! Why do you keep forgetting that?"
David Merriam leaned awkwardly against the diminutive dressing table. He and his wife stood as far apart as they could in the cramped space, but it wasn't far enough. Emily's arms were folded, her fists balled tight. Her anger needed much more room than the cruise ship cabin afforded.
"And now.... You just don't ask Grandad for money!" she said. "I thought you knew him better than that. How long do you think he's going to be mad at us? I could have told you this was exactly the wrong thing to do. And in front of the others! Did you stop to think that maybe I didn't want my brothers to know we're going bankrupt? Did you stop to think that maybe I didn't want to wave that bit of private business under my cousin's nose? David, you could have asked me first!"
"I'm sorry. I just thought--"
"No, you didn't. You didn't think. There are some things you just don't bring up with Grandad. Now we're going to be the black sheep this year. You made things worse."
"Grandad might change his mind, Em." David knew this wasn't likely. Aldrich Spence had grown very quiet and very cold when David had started talking about how bad business was lately. "I didn't ask him to just throw some cash our way and bail us out. I only suggested that a loan--"
"You just don't ask Grandad for anything. If he wants to, he gives, but you don't ask. You know how he is!"
"I'm sorry. I lost my head and we're out ten thousand dollars. I was stupid. Okay?"
"It's not the money! David, it has never been the money!"
"What do you want me to say?" It came out sounding much more like a challenge than he intended.
Emily stood glaring at him for a moment. "This is getting us exactly nowhere." She opened the door.
Emily was gone before David could say, "Em, don't--"
For a moment, he considered going after her, but what would be the point? They needed to have a fight, he needed to let her take his head off because she was right, right, right. But the cabin was impossibly cramped, and the rest of the ship was too public.
David pulled down the cabin's folded bed and sat on the edge of it. He looked at the porthole. It was a fake. Theirs was an interior cabin, and the little round window above the bed looked out on nothing but a panel of steel six inches away. It seemed appropriate. Six inches was about how much breathing room David felt he still had in his life.
It was his own fault that Emily was so angry. He had always said that they were co-managers of their store, Merriam Games, but it was true that he'd done too many things without asking her. Impulsive things.
Some of his decisions had turned out to be good ones. He bought a huge shipment of a trading card game called Castles Fantastic. The cards featured colorful artwork, and the game that went with them was fast-paced and fun. Better still, from a retailer's perspective, the game was easier to win if a player owned many, many cards. David knew, as soon as the distributor showed it to him, that Castles Fantastic would be an enormous hit.
To Emily, it didn't matter that he'd turned out to be right. He had tied up the store's capital for Castles Fantastic without asking her. Then, still making decisions without her, he had ordered a huge lot of the game's second edition just about the time the fad was dying. He neglected to restock the store's usual steady sellers--backgammon boards and Monopoly and mystery games. Merriam Games ended up with a storeroom filled with trading cards he could hardly give away.
And it wasn't just this one time.
The store was deep in debt now. That was how he preferred to think of it. The store owed a lot of money, though of course the signatures at the bottom of the loan agreements were his and Emily's.
There was a sharp rap at the door.
"Em?" he said. "Emily?" But the rap just sounded again, hard and quick.
David opened the door to meet the icy glare of Emily's grandfather. In a voice too loud for the carpeted corridor, Aldrich Spence said, "I believe you have something that belongs to me."
"Something that belongs to you?"
"My watch, damnation!" The old man leaned forward on his silver-headed cane. "You know just what I mean. There were just the seven of us in the lounge when I had my watch out on the table!"
"The hunting watch? Weren't you wearing it?"
"Don't play with me! You were there! You watched what I was doing!"
David remembered. Sanford, Emily's younger brother, had asked to see the antique. Spence had removed the watch from its fob and put it on the table for him. Spence had handed it back, and then David remembered seeing the watch lying on the table as Spence turned to ask Emily to get another Rusty Nail from the bar.
"It was on the table," David said.
"I forgot it. I do forget things. But I'm not quite the old dotard you apparently thought I was."
)
