Oh Holy Christ! I never heard of such a thing! Who the hell would be so callous as to think that? I just wrapped her in my arms and held onto her, rocking her like a baby. “I love you! You’re just a little banged up. I still love you. You’re going to get better.” I just repeated this stuff over and over until she calmed down.
“Now, can we talk?” I asked. She nodded silently. “Okay. I guess I understand. You can’t have any more children, so that makes you less of a woman?”
She nodded. “Yes! Doesn’t it!? Didn’t you want another child?”
I shrugged and smiled. “Yes, but that isn’t going to happen. That has nothing to do with how much I love you. If you want another child, we can always adopt, I suppose.”
“No!” she said, shaking her head. “It wouldn’t be the same. I mean, unless you wanted to.”
I shook my head, too. “No, it’s not the same. We’ve already got three great kids. You were woman enough to make them. Are you worried I won’t find you attractive any longer?” Marilyn averted her face and wouldn’t answer, so I knew that was part of it. Partially this was my fault, since the exercise routines she did with me had kept her weight down and she looked a whole lot better this time than on my last time. I wrapped my arms around her again. “Right now you look crappy because you’re crying and upset. I don’t care about the scars or bruises. You’re supposed to look lousy right now. Give it a few weeks.”
“You’re sure?”
I breathed a sigh of relief. She was starting to sound normal again. “Okay, let’s give it a few weeks. You’re a mess right now. If the scars don’t heal nicely, we can find a plastic surgeon to work on them.”
“A plastic surgeon!”
“Sure, why not? Maybe he could work on the scars, if there are any.” I just shrugged again. “Seriously, if you need to see a doctor for that, or for anything else, we’ll take care of it. I know we can’t do anything until you heal, but you’re still my wife and I still love you. We’ll get you through this. Maybe you should see somebody, you know, a psychiatrist or therapist or something.”
That got me an amused snort. “Like Hamilton did?”
“Like Hamilton didn’t! Maybe he would have turned out differently if Mom had let him be seen by a doctor.”
“Maybe we should both go,” she told me.
I just nodded. “Maybe. Let’s wait a few days, see how things go.”
It turned out that we didn’t end up seeing a therapist. Over the next few days, Marilyn kept healing, and she spent as much time healing me. After about a month, she felt well enough that she very nervously reached over to me one night in bed. The lights were off, and I guess that made her feel somewhat safer. It didn’t matter. Carl Junior had been going without for a month, and he quickly responded. We made love twice that night, once with her on top, and once with me on top, and that seemed to convince her I was still interested in her as a woman. That was getting ahead of myself, though.
Chapter 94: Family Business
Over the next few weeks we all started healing. Charlie wore an elastic bandage on his arm for a couple of weeks before the X-rays showed his arm wouldn’t fall off. He wasn’t all that impressed, however, since he wanted a big bandage and a really cool scar to show off in school, and he didn’t get either. Boys! Holly and Molly had hardly anything wrong with them, and were just fine.
I took the rest of that first week off and played nursemaid and cook. By the following Monday I had worn out my welcome. Once Marilyn could move around easier, she threw me out and told me to go to work and get out of her hair. I left her my Cadillac and took the 380, promising to pick up a couple of car seats for the twins. Next weekend we’d go car shopping for her and pick up another mom bomb.
One night I sat down with my wife after the kids went to bed. I had with me a copy of my will, as well as a copy of hers. “I want to talk about these,” I told her.
“What?”
“Our wills.”
“Oh! Feeling a little more mortal these days, Carl?” she teased.
I nodded, but wasn’t feeling all that humorous at the moment. “Aren’t you?”
Marilyn shrugged. “Maybe a little. What’s on your mind?”
“Well, right now you and I are each other’s inheritors. If I die you get my money and if you die, I get yours, remember?”
“Well, considering that all the money is in your name, I’ll do better bumping you off than you will bumping me off,” she laughed.
“I’ll keep that in mind. I’m taking all the sharp objects away from you.” Somehow I wasn’t too worried. Marilyn might talk me to death, but that was her most dangerous ability. “The thing is, when we wrote these, it was right after we got married. I was nowhere near as wealthy as I am now. I mean, you didn’t even know how much money I had, did you? These are just really standard wills.”
She nodded. “Yeah, so? What’s the problem?”
“What if we had both died!? It all goes to the kids, right? I am worth a billion dollars! Do you want little kids to have a billion dollars to play with?”
Marilyn looked at me curiously, but then her eyes slowly widened, and I could see the chipmunks inside pedaling furiously as she started thinking it through. Nobody had ever heard of Paris Hilton yet, but there was always some jet set kid with Daddy’s credit card and more money than sense in the tabloids. However, nobody had the kind of money that our kids would get if we bought the farm together! The closest I could think of was Gloria Vanderbilt, who became a multimillionaire at the age of 18 months, and ended up in years of court cases and custody battles.
“Wow! I mean, I never thought of that! What do we do?”
It was my turn to shrug. “I’ve been thinking about that, but you have to agree with me. Right now Tusker and Tessa are named as the guardians of the kids, and I don’t see changing that, do you?”
“No, they’d be real good,” she agreed.
“So, if the kids are being taken care of, I was figuring I’d just give it all away.”
Marilyn stared at me. “What? Give it all away? Give away a billion dollars?”
I grinned back at her. “Sure, why not! It’s not like we can take it with us, right?” My wife just stared at me with wide eyes and an open mouth. “Okay, maybe not everything, but at least ninety percent. If we leave them ten or twenty million apiece, they’ll be able to do whatever they want in life, and that’s not even ten percent of my holdings. Marilyn, you really don’t understand my money. I make more in a day than we spend in a year. If we bought a half dozen vacation spots, and jetted from one to the other, we still wouldn’t begin to touch the money we have. Let’s give it all away, do some good with it!”
She just stared at me and shook her head in disbelief. “This is crazy!” she replied. “You’re serious? You would give away a billion dollars?”
“Probably more. We’re only 33 right now. What if we live to our sixties or seventies? At some point we’ll be some of the richest people in the world. Just how much money do our kids need? There are very few good things I can think of that would happen if the kids became instant billionaires!”
“Holy shit!” she exclaimed. Marilyn shook her head. “I need to think about this!” I nodded sympathetically. It was a lot to take in. “Want a drink?”
“Sure.” I got up and followed her into the kitchen. I was wearing my regular slacks and a Hawaiian shirt. Marilyn had on pajamas under her heavy robe. She was still on the mend, and we hadn’t gotten around to testing out how well the stitches were holding, so she wasn’t trying to get me drunk and have her way with me, not yet, at least. She sat down on a bar stool at the island and looked at me expectantly.