Salty Beans, Chapter 4

"An oldest son, the beloved one"

An oldest son, the beloved one, was off somewhere running things so the rest of the family could go nuts. Otherwise, retired patriarch Samson Huggins required those living close enough to the Green Perimeter, as the area was known, to come to dinner every Sunday.

A blazing chandelier illuminated the starched tablecloth, the silver, the crystal and china, the voluptuous, blood-red wallpaper, which belonged to another era. Small poached fish replete with tiny bones listed aimlessly in shallow, gold-rimmed dishes of tepid consommé, everyone’s favorite. Some poor fool stood in a dark corner squeaking on his oboe. He was the protégé of the lady of the house, Clarissa Huggins, who had him toiling on a series of godawful sonatas, for which she paid him even less than they were worth. Deep inside, he felt like a fraud and a thief. He knew he wasn’t any good. His boyfriend was like Lady Macbeth. His boyfriend was like, you get in there and play that oboe until your lips bleed! You’re on Easy Street. Boyfriend was like, I’m shucking oysters for a living over here. I shuck one bad oyster, somebody could die. Let’s say you wrote the worst oboe music in the world, which I just can’t ever believe would happen, sweetie. At least your oboe music isn’t going to kill anybody. Feel that freedom! Get that money!

But the home life of Jerry the oboist and Dean the oyster shucker are of secondary importance at best for the moment. Another person of little narrative interest at this juncture is the private security man, Connor “Ball Park” Franks, who stood in another shadowy corner to make sure no one else was—in Clarissa’s opinion—murdered.