Holiday Wishes

You know how there's good luck and bad luck? And then there's the bad luck that gets all gussied up in fancy clothes and expensive shoes pretending it's good luck? That's the kind of luck that came knocking on my door on a rainy and cold November day. "Heather James?" the man at my office door asked. I examined him carefully before I answered. He was in his fifties, I guessed, but his solemnity of manner made him appear older. Much older. He wore a black suit that fitted like it had been made for him--it probably had been--a subdued silk tie--definitely not the two for twenty dollar kind--and a blindingly white shirt, with initials on the cuffs. I could see how he'd made it past the receptionist without fuss or announcement. "Yes?" I answered, standing from behind my desk, kept spotlessly clean for just these events. Not that this kind of event had ever happened before. In over twenty years, no client had ever come to my office. I didn't do clients, I did paper. And calculations. The occasional e-mail and even fewer telephone calls. "Ms. James," he said, holding out his tanned hand, shooting his wrist from beneath the starched cuff, the wrist embellished with a discreet but obviously real gold watch. My impression of him, already at the top end of our client scale, moved upward. His portfolio, his tax planning, had to be one of our largest. So why was he inmyoffice? It was immutable practice for clients to be seen in the office of our senior partner. Four or five times the size of mine, it contained leather furniture, mahogany tables,realart--I glanced over at my poster of Canaletto'sView of the Ducal Palace in Venice--and an executive washroom which I snuck in to use, always before the cleaning staff had arrived to clean it, on the many late nights when I was the only one in the office. I shook his bone-dry and polished hand and waited. "You are Heather James?" I nodded. "Might I see some identification?" I frowned, but remembering the stories I'd heard from my associates about some of our clients, I complied, handing him my driver's license without looking at it myself. I knew I looked like a troll under a bridge, my hair flattened on my head, my face pasty and my eyes lost in my head. I never looked at my license. Or the photo on my passport. Partly because the photographs were hideous and partly because I didn't want the reminder of how old I was. How old? Forty-five. Still single. Still saving for that retirement fund in lieu of dating. He perused my license, handed it back to me and nodded. "Your mother's name?" This was beginning to feel like a call from my credit card company. But I'd neither lost nor overused my credit card-- I never carried a balance, I'm a tax planner for God's sake. It was zero. As always. Paying interest on credit cards was a complete waste of money, money that could more properly reside in my retirement fund. I answered anyway, "Donna. Donna Luongi," using her maiden name because I'd somehow gotten into the credit card company mode. "Do you have proof of that?" Weirder and weirder. But I'd bought into the first weirdness and now my curiosity--usually well under control--was out of it. Control, that is. I turned to the locked fireproof filing cabinet beside my desk and pulled out my personal file. "My birth certificate," I said with a flourish. "See." I pointed to my mother's name. "Right there." "Ms. James, did you ever meet your Great-Aunt Francesca?" I didn't know I had a Great-Aunt Francesca. "She was your grandmother's baby sister." I didn't know my grandmother. Or any other of my mother's relatives, for that matter. They were all dead before I was born, or at least that's what my mother told me. Their deaths were followed by my parents' when I was twenty. I nodded and waited for the next revelation. This conversation had definitely moved out of the credit caAustin, Kate is the author of 'Holiday Wishes ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373881208 and ISBN 0373881207.