The Bank of Maya
The maître d’ at Lee Bernard greeted me by name and slipped the hundred-dollar bill I pressed into his palm into his jacket pocket without looking at it. He knew me because I came here often with clients. My family was too absorbed in their own reflections to notice the staff treated me like a regular.
I was twenty minutes late. I had just come from a meeting with a publishing executive in Midtown where I had closed a ghostwriting deal for a former vice president worth two million dollars. My family thought I wrote greeting cards and scraped by on rent money.
They did not know I owned the boutique publishing firm that had produced three number-one bestsellers in the past year alone. I walked toward their table and felt the familiar knot tighten in my stomach. They looked like a spread in a luxury lifestyle magazine.
My mother, Patricia, wore a Chanel suit that cost more than my first car. My sister Khloe shimmered in a silver dress better suited to Instagram than dinner. And Brad, Khloe’s husband, sat with his arm draped over the back of his chair, looking like a man who believed he owned the room.
Brad came from old money, or so he told everyone. In reality, his family’s shipping business had been sinking for years and he was surviving entirely on appearances and my sister’s trust fund. The table was covered in excess.
Two tins of Osetra caviar. A seafood tower. Three empty bottles of Château Margaux.
I did the math instantly. The bill was already pushing five thousand dollars. “Who is paying for this?” I asked, reaching for a piece of bread.
My mother took a long sip of wine. “We are celebrating, darling. Brad just closed a massive deal.
A condo complex in Brooklyn.”
Brad adjusted his silk tie. “Game-changing, Maya. Not that you would understand high finance.
Still renting that shoebox in Queens, right?”
I took a sip of water. “Actually, I wanted to talk about money. The roof on my apartment is leaking.
The landlord won’t fix it, and I need emergency repairs. I was wondering if I could borrow five thousand dollars. I’d pay you back in six months.”
It was a test.
I had made two million dollars that afternoon. I could buy the building if I wanted to. I just wanted to see if, after five years of silently funding their lives through the trust fund my father left, any of them would help me with a fraction of what they had spent on tonight’s dinner.
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