Crosstalk Read online

  She texted him back, “I’ll do it right after the meeting,” and he responded, “Better not wait. Meeting could take awhile.”

  He was right. They immediately began making suggestions for how to adapt TalkPlus to make more than two conversations possible. The discussion lasted nearly two hours, resulting in them having lunch sent in and Briddey’s being able to fill out Dr. Verrick’s first questionnaire, even though it asked everything from her medical history to her food preferences, hair and eye color, and hobbies.

  She finished the form and refocused on the meeting to find Art Sampson saying, “I like the TalkPlus, but will it be enough to compete with this phone of Apple’s? I mean, we’re a small company. If the new iPhone is the paradigm shift everybody says it is, being able to talk to multiple people at once isn’t going to be enough,” and the meeting deteriorated into crosstalk as they speculated about what was on Apple’s new phone and discussed possible ways of finding out.

  Just send Suki over, Briddey thought, and was about to text Trent that when he texted her, “Hamilton wants to see me. I’ll call you after. Love you. Don’t forget forms.,” and left her to listen to the speculations, which threatened to go on forever.

  C.B. has the right idea refusing to go to meetings, she thought. She pulled up the second questionnaire, even though she doubted getting it in quickly would have any effect. When she looked up Dr. Verrick online, his client list included not only Hollywood celebrities but sports figures, royalty—he’d reportedly done Prince William and Kate’s—and the CEOs of a dozen Fortune 500 companies. She and Trent were lucky to have gotten on the waiting list at all, and Dr. Verrick wasn’t likely to bump David Beckham or the Sultan of Brunei for them. Just in case, though, she started through the questionnaire, which turned out to be a full battery of tests designed to measure emotional sensitivity, empathy, and couple compatibility.

  I’ll never be able to finish this today, Briddey thought, but by the time everyone at the meeting had finished discussing the likelihood that Apple was only bluffing and whether Apple was spying on them, how unethical that would be, and who they could get to spy on Apple, Briddey’d finished the tests, sent them off to Dr. Verrick’s office, and started in on her email, ignoring the flood of messages from her family.

  There were two from C.B., one headed, “What Would Hedy Lamarr Do?”

  So that’s what “WWHLD?” stands for, she thought. Of course.

  His email was linked to a long article about Hedy Lamarr’s accomplishments regarding frequency hopping, and his second one to a news story titled, “Iowa Man Dies from Hangnail Surgery Complications.”

  When the meeting finally got out at four, she was surrounded with well-wishers telling her what a great catch Trent was and wanting to know how they’d been able to get on Dr. Verrick’s waiting list. “We couldn’t even get on the waiting list for the waiting list,” Lara from Accounting told her wistfully, and Beth from Quality Control enthused, “The EED’s the best thing ever invented!”

  Could you tell that to my family and C.B., please? Briddey thought as she went back to her office, wondering what excuse she could give to get out of going to supper. A last-minute report due? A co-worker with a broken arm who she had to take to the emergency room? An outbreak of hantavirus?

  Whatever she told them, she needed to do it soon. It was already four thirty, and she wouldn’t put it past Aunt Oona to send Kathleen to Commspan after work to make sure she didn’t back out.

  Charla was standing at the door to her office. “These just came for you,” she said, pointing to a bouquet of pale pink camellias. “From Trent Worth.” She handed Briddey the card. “Longing for you,” it read, “and longing for the day when I won’t have to tell you that because you’ll already know. Trent.”

  “You are so lucky,” Charla said. “Nate never sends me—”

  “Any messages?” Briddey interrupted.

  “No, but your family—”

  “Call them back and tell them something’s come up,” Briddey said, walking past her, “I don’t care what, an emergency meeting or something, and I’m not going to be able to make it to supper,” and opened the door.

  On the whole clan. They were all there, including Aunt Oona in her tweed skirt and cardigan, her knitting in her lap. Mary Clare and Kathleen stood on either side of her, and Maeve sat cross-legged on the floor in the corner. Please, please don’t let them have heard what I just said, Briddey thought.

  “An emergency meetin’, is it?” Aunt Oona asked, her brogue even thicker than usual.

  “I’ll get some more chairs,” Briddey said, and went out to Charla’s desk.

  “I told them you were really busy—” Charla began.

  But they didn’t listen, Briddey thought. I know. I have the same problem. “It’s all right, Charla,” she said aloud.

  “Do you want me to go get them some coffee or something?” Charla asked.

  “No,” Briddey said, debating whether to tell her to come in in five minutes and remind her that she had to be somewhere. But she doubted it would work, and she had to get this over with sometime. Preferably without Charla listening at the door. So Briddey told her she could go home early and went back into her office to face the music.

  “ ’Twas a feelin’ I had that your work would keep you from coming to supper,” Aunt Oona said the moment she shut the door on Charla, “so we thought we’d best be coming here to talk to you about this LED thing.”

  “EED,” Maeve corrected her from her corner. “LEDs are those little light thingies. EED stands for—”

  “And how should I be knowin’ what it stands for when herself can’t be bothered to even tell her own kin that she’s after having it done? And with an Englishman!”

  “What Trent and I are doing,” Briddey said, “is having a simple medical procedure so that we can sense each other’s feelings and communicate better as a couple.”

  “Saints preserve us!” Aunt Oona said, crossing herself. “Communicatin’, is it? And since when did an Irishman need an operation for that? Or is talkin’ too good for an Englishman?”

  “No, of course not. The EED doesn’t replace other forms of communication, it enhances them.” Briddey launched into an explanation of how the EED created a neural pathway that made the partners more receptive to each other’s feelings, but Aunt Oona wasn’t having any of it.

  She folded her cardiganed arms across her ample bosom and muttered, “It’s unnatural, that’s what it is.”

  “It’s also positively medieval,” Mary Clare said. “Agreeing to be lobotomized just to please a man! What kind of message are you sending to your niece?”

  Apparently none, Briddey thought, looking at Maeve, who was messing with her smartphone, oblivious to the conversation. “It’s not a lobotomy,” she said, “and I’m not doing it for Trent. It benefits both of us.” But Mary Clare wasn’t listening.

  “It’s bad enough that Maeve’s constantly exposed to a popular culture full of weak, helpless females,” she declared, “but when it’s her own aunt! I spend all my time trying to protect Maeve from things that squelch her intelligence and independence—”

  “She means the Disney princesses,” Maeve said disgustedly, looking up from her phone. “Aunt Briddey, she won’t let me watch Tangled, just because Flynn comes to rescue Rapunzel! But sometimes people need to be rescued—”

  “You see?” Mary Clare said to Briddey. “She’s already bought into the notion that a girl should just sit and wait for a man to rescue her, that she’s incapable of rescuing herself.”

  “Because sometimes you can’t!” Maeve said. “Like when you’re tied up. Or turned into ice. And guys can need rescuing, too, like when the witch in Tangled kills—”

  “Hush now, childeen,” Aunt Oona said, patting Maeve’s arm. “ ’Tis not the moment for fairy stories. We’ve life-and-death matters to—”

  “It’s not a life-and-death matter,” Briddey said. “The EED is perfectly safe—”

  “O
h, and I suppose he told you that. And when did ever a word of truth come out of an Englishman’s mouth, I’d like to know. Lyin’ brutes they are—”

  “Trent is not a lying brute. Or an Englishman. His family’s been in America for generations.”

  “As has ours. And are you sayin’ that we’re not Irish?” Aunt Oona said, bridling. “And what’ll you be doin’ next, child? Changin’ your name from Flannigan and dyin’ your red locks brown? By the holy blood of Saint Patrick, to think that I’d live to see the day when the child of my own sainted niece would foreswear her heritage! ’Tis Irish you are, lass. ’Tis in your blood, and no good denyin’ it. Just as it’s no good denyin’ he’s an Englishman at heart—and a wicked, cruel, lyin’ heart it is. Blackguards and seducers, the lot of them. If you’d find yourself a good Irish lad—”

  “It doesn’t matter who Trent’s descended from,” Kathleen said. “It’s the person that counts.”

  Thank you, Briddey thought.

  “And he’s really hot,” Kathleen went on. “Plus, I love his car. I’d go out with him.” Which wasn’t exactly an endorsement given Kathleen’s track record with men.

  Mary Clare immediately pointed that out and added, “I just don’t understand the attraction to a man who insists on brain surgery as some kind of prenuptial. What is it you see in him, Briddey?”

  Well, for one thing, she thought angrily, he’s an only child, and his family never barges in without asking. Or blathers on about a country they’ve never been to. They believe people should mind their own business. And for another, his apartment has electronic locks and a doorman, and after we get engaged, I’ll be able to move in with him and finally have a little privacy. You won’t be able to come bursting in every time you feel like it and tell me what to do.

  But she couldn’t say that—Aunt Oona would have a stroke. And she obviously couldn’t tell them part of the reason she was in love with Trent was that he wasn’t Irish.

  He was the exact opposite of the scruffy, ragtag, irresponsible louts Kathleen dated and the past-their-prime, family-ridden “lads” Aunt Oona tried to set her up with—and the exact opposite of the jerks she’d gone out with before. He was neat and well dressed and gainfully employed, and he paid her compliments, took her nice places, sent her flowers. And didn’t sext other people.

  Is it so wrong to want a boyfriend who doesn’t leave you stranded at a convenience store in the middle of the night? she thought. And a life where people call before they come over and don’t constantly show up, uninvited, at your office?

  But she couldn’t tell them that either—and even if she tried, no one would hear her. Mary Clare was busy ordering Maeve to turn off her smartphone, Kathleen was saying, “Trent reminds me of someone, but I can’t think who,” and Aunt Oona was relating a premonition she’d had about Briddey having the EED.

  You’re always having premonitions, Briddey thought, annoyed, and they’re just as authentic as that brogue of yours. As far as Briddey could see, Aunt Oona’s psychic ability, which she called “the Sight” and claimed ran in the family, was limited to predicting that Kathleen’s boyfriends were “chancers and cheats,” which was a safe bet, and that the phone was about to ring. “Mary Clare’s goin’ to call,” she’d announce dramatically. “ ’Tis a feeling I have in my bones. It’s worried about Maeve she is.”

  Since Mary Clare was always worried about Maeve and called Aunt Oona at least twenty times a day to discuss her fears, this was hardly a feat requiring psychic powers. And the rest of the time her premonitions and “sensings” and feelings of impending doom were dead wrong. Including now. “ ’Tis a bad feelin’ I have about your having this DED, mavourneen,” she said.

  “EED,” Maeve corrected her without looking up from her phone. “ ‘DED’ is when you’re so happy it kills you. Can we go now? I’m really hungry.”

  “Of course you are, childeen,” Aunt Oona said. “ ’Tis well past time for tea,” and she suggested they go down to the cafeteria for a “wee bit of nourishment,” which would mean continuing their debate in full earshot of half of Commspan. And Briddey could imagine what Suki and the grapevine would do with that, so she agreed to go to supper.

  “And what about your emergency meetin’?” Aunt Oona asked.

  “I’ll cancel it,” Briddey said grimly and, in a last, desperate bid for escape, suggested she meet them there.

  It didn’t work. Aunt Oona insisted on riding with her, blathering the entire way about the virtues of that fine Irish lad Sean O’Reilly and saying, apparently without irony, what a pity it was that Mary Clare meddled so much in Maeve’s affairs. “Why can’t she just leave the poor childeen alone? Maeve doesn’t get a moment’s peace.”

  And once they arrived, they rehashed all their previous arguments against the EED over dinner, along with some new additions: that Trent had some sinister ulterior motive for wanting her to have the EED done, that it might very well be a mortal sin in the eyes of the Church, and that no self-respecting Irishman would ever do it—

  “That’s not true,” Briddey said. “Enya had it done with her fiancé. And Daniel Day-Lewis—”

  “And if Enya and Daniel Day-Lewis told you to jump off a bridge into the river Shannon, you’d be doin’ that, too, would ye?” Aunt Oona said.

  “I think she should,” Maeve said.

  “Jump off a bridge?” Kathleen asked.

  “Maeve, I’ve talked to you about the dangers of peer pressure—” Mary Clare began.

  Maeve ignored them. “If Aunt Briddey has the EED, she’ll find out what he’s like inside,” she said. “Like in Frozen, there’s this prince and Anna thinks he’s really nice and in love with her and everything, but he isn’t, he just wants her kingdom. And he tries to kill her.”

  “Which is another reason I don’t want you watching Disney movies,” Mary Clare said. “They’re entirely too violent!”

  “They’re not violent!” Maeve said violently. “What I meant was, sometimes people are different on the inside from how they are on the outside, and if Aunt Briddey has the EED, she’ll find out what he’s really like and won’t like him anymore, and she’ll find a different boyfriend—one who’s nice.”

  “She can do all that without goin’ under the knife,” Aunt Oona said, and started in on the dangers of “operations” as experienced by various Daughters of Ireland. “Sean O’Reilly’s cousin went in for an operation on her bad leg, and they cut off the wrong one!”

  I should have asked C.B. to put that SOS function on my phone, Briddey thought. I could really use it right now.

  Her phone rang. “I’m sorry to bother you,” Charla said, “but C.B. Schwartz just called me here at home and asked if you got the ideas for the phone he sent you this morning?”

  Thank you, C.B., Briddey thought. “Yes,” she said. “No, that’s okay. I’ll be right there.”

  “You don’t have to go in to Commspan,” Charla said, bewildered. “He just wanted to make sure you got them.”

  “I understand. Right away,” Briddey said, and hung up. “Sorry, I’ve got to go,” she told the family, putting on her coat. “There’s a problem at work I’ve got to go check on.”

  They insisted on going out to the car with her. “When is Trent making you do this EED thing?” Mary Clare asked.

  “Late summer,” Maeve said.

  “How did you know that?” Briddey asked her.

  “It was on Facebook.”

  “Late summer,” Aunt Oona said musingly. “Good, then it’s a good bit of time you’ll be havin’ to think it over…”

  For you to try to talk me out of it, you mean, Briddey thought, and drove away musing, After I’m married to Trent, I’ll never have to suffer through one of those supper interrogations again. I’ll move in with Trent and instruct the doorman to keep you and the rest of the world out and finally get some peace and quiet.

  As soon as she was out of sight, she pulled over to call Charla and explain her behavior. The family hadn’t waste
d any time. There was already a text on her phone from Aunt Oona telling her about a Daughter of Ireland’s nephew who’d died from an operation on her varicose veins, and one from Kathleen, saying, “I just realized who Trent reminds me of—Kurt.”

  Kurt was a previous boyfriend of Kathleen’s who’d pledged undying love and then made off with Kathleen’s credit cards. Briddey deleted both texts and tried to call Charla but got kicked to her message box. I’ll call her when I get home, she thought, and as soon as she reached her apartment, she took out her phone to try again.

  It immediately rang. I’ll bet Charla checked her call log, Briddey thought, and answered it even though it was Trent’s ringtone.

  Mistake. It was Mary Clare. “We just got home, and now Maeve’s locked herself in her room,” she said.

  If you were my mother, I’d lock myself in my room, too, Briddey thought.

  “She put a sign on her door that says, KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU, MOM. I MEAN IT.”

  That sounds like the sign on C.B.’s lab door, Briddey thought. “Well, at least she’s asserting herself, and you don’t have to worry about her having ‘squelched girl syndrome,’ ” she said.

  Mary Clare ignored that. “What am I going to do? She could be doing drugs in there. Or watching snuff videos.”

  “Her favorite movie is Tangled. She’s not watching snuff videos.”

  “You don’t know that. She’s so precocious, and she’s been spending nearly all her after-school time on her phone or her laptop. And I read an article that said her generation’s computer skills are so advanced over their parents’ that it’s impossible to understand them, let alone control them. Do you know how to install a nanny cam?”

  “No,” Briddey said firmly. “I’ve got to go. Trent’s on the other line.” She hung up. Her phone immediately rang again. If this is Aunt Oona…she thought.

  But it was Trent. “I’ve got great news,” he said. “I just talked to Dr. Verrick, and the EEDs he was scheduled to do in Paris got canceled, which means he can move us up.”