Randall watched his father select sugar cubes with engraved Georgian tongs, an heirloom since the days of his great, great, grandmother who had lived in the 1700s. That was the story, anyway.

He bristled as the elder Randall dropped three of them, surgically, one at a time, into the teacup, also old, but not Georgian old.

“More cream, Mother?” his father asked.

The old woman flicked her wrist across her space at the table and grunted. It was her way of saying no.

She lifted the teacup with a tremulous hand.

“Dad…she’s going to spill it,” Randall grumbled.

His father wiped his sloping mustache and goatee with a napkin and then laid it carefully on the left side of his plate.

“No she’s not.”

The old woman, barely containing the tempest in the teacup, finally brought it to her lips and sipped. She did not spill.

“You were saying?”

Randall managed to get out ‘Hotel Le Blanc’ and ‘Manhattan,’ but just barely before Bess, the resident cook and cleaner, burst through the dining room door. The broad woman, skirting forty-five to sixty, hustled up his father’s and grandmother’s plates before pausing by his side, the hefty girth of her hip brushed against his sleeved arm.

“Mr. Randall, you barely touched your scones and eggs,” she scolded.

“He says he’s not hungry, Bess,” his father interrupted. “But, I guarantee he’ll stop at a drive through as soon as he leaves. He loves grease.”

Bess scooped up the plate, perspiration glinting above her lip and on her brow.

“Is there anything else I can get you, ma’am?”

The old woman flicked her wrist and grunted.

“How about you Mr. Carr?”

“No. Thank you Bess.”

“Mr. Randall?”

“No.”

Bess bustled back through the dining room door.

“Why do you insist on belittling me in front of her?” Randall snapped.

His father chuckled.

“I embarrassed you?”

“Yes. You did.”

“Then it’s your fault for being a slob, number…”

“A slob?” Randall protested.

“Yes. A slob.”

“So slobs wear Perry Ellis?”

“Slobs eat slop. Hamburgers. Pizza. French fries. It doesn’t matter whose name is on their collars.”

His father sipped from his teacup. It was almost a slurp, but not quite.To Randall it was fingernails on a chalkboard.

“Number two, you shouldn’t care what Bess thinks. She’s the help. How many times must we have these conversations?”

“Conversations? This is what you call conversation?”

“Yes. You were talking about your vanity project in Manhattan. The one you want me to pay for.”

“It’s not a vanity project, Dad. It’s a legacy project. For us. For Carr Corporation,” he insisted.

“Legacy?” his father scoffed. “You might as well donate all of my money to charity. Because that’s what legacy is. A money sieve!”

Randall pursed his lips as he was prone to do when displeased.

“You don’t get it, Dad. And I shouldn’t expect you to. Because you’re small time. A small time slumlord.”

He raised an index finger to his defiant but recessed chin.

“That’s your legacy. But, I want better.”

The elder Randall stared at his son, his unblinking blue eyes turned black, his face mottled red.

“Why you ungrateful piece of …”

“That’s enough!” the old lady shrieked, startling them both.

They were her first words in months.

Then, as they watched stupefied, the matriarch summoned the dehydrated revisors of bygone vigor and rose from her chair like a cumbersome phantom, pulling on the tablecloth, her teacup and saucer crashing, shattering, while the rippling fabric carried her son’s teacup and saucer to the floor as well.

“Mother!” her son cried, his stupor broken, as she slipped through his outthrust arms and landed awkwardly on her hip, entangled in the overturned chair.