They performed their success. They worshipped at the altar of their own reflection.
Then, Grandma Evelyn began passing out the envelopes.
Evelyn was the eighty-year-old matriarch of the family. She sat quietly at the head of the table, wearing her trademark, simple red cardigan. Over the last year, my father and Marcus had begun loudly whispering about her “declining mental state,” treating her with the condescending patience one reserves for a toddler. They assumed she was senile. They assumed she was irrelevant.
She passed a thick, cream-colored envelope down the left side of the table, and then the right. I received the last one.
I opened the flap and pulled out a single, heavy-stock bank check.
I looked down at the slip of paper. My heart stopped.
Pay to the order of: Claire Whitaker.
Amount: Five Million Dollars and 00/100 ($5,000,000.00)
Before I could even process the ink on the paper, the table erupted.
Marcus had opened his envelope. He stared at his identical check, and then he threw his head back and laughed. It was a loud, braying, cruel sound. He laughed so hard he actually choked on his expensive wine, coughing into his napkin.
“Oh my god,” Marcus wheezed, waving the paper in the air. “Five million dollars! Grandma, did you find a checkbook from Monopoly? Are we buying Boardwalk?”
Brittany shrieked with laughter, slapping the table. “I got one too! This is hilarious!” In a display of profound, staggering disrespect, Brittany folded her five-million-dollar check into a crude paper airplane. With a flick of her wrist, she threw it directly into a crystal bowl of garlic mashed potatoes in the center of the table.
