The Price of Inheritance Read Online Free PDF

looked like strips of bacon. It was all worth it. I was terrified, but it actually happened. Twelve five. I’m in shock. But happy shock.”
    Without turning around, Alex kept his eyes closed and mumbled, “I’m so happy for you,” then fell immediately back to sleep. I wasn’t going to try to wake him up again. His snores, which sounded a little fake, signaled he was in deep hibernation, but I wasn’t about to sleep. So he didn’t have a marching band to congratulate me. Or even a hug. Anything really except some garbled sleep talk, which I forced out of him. I wasn’t the kind of person who needed her ego stroked and handed enormous gold trophies and monogrammed cakes. But still, a little congratulatory screaming and fainting with pride would have been nice. I grabbed his iPad from his nightstand and googled “Nicholas Brown Chippendale.” It was already on Twitter and the important art blogs. I knew that on Sunday, it would be somewhere in the New York Times Arts section. I would scrapbook it, laminate it, and possibly sleep with it under my pillow for the next decade.
    The next evening was Saturday, and quickly noticing that I was a tad pissed by his nonreaction to my big life-changing news the night before, Alex promised to take me to a celebratory dinner at my favorite restaurant in New York, Daniel, on East Sixty-Fifth Street.
    During our first few years in New York, Alex and I tried hard not to be together. He had dated a series of emaciated blondes who worked in marketing or magazines and he found them all fascinating. Or so he would always tell me when I’d run into him with someone I was considering dating. But no one ever really stuck besides me, and vice versa. We’d try dating the right people, spending a few months imagining them as our better halves, and then call each other after we realized they weren’t up for the challenge. Even when we weren’t officially together, Alex was always there for me as the essential New York plus-one, or if I just wanted a warm bed to sleep in, with clothes on or off. Were we crazy about each other, or were we just used to each other? It was a question I thought about a lot, but it didn’t keep me from calling him in the middle of the night, wandering to his house when I’d had too much to drink, or opening my door for him when one of his dates got a little too excited about his parents’ money. “State school gold digger,” he’d say pouring himself a scotch, which he’d brought with him. Sometimes I chided him, sometimes I ignored him, and other times I went to bed with him because it was what I’d been doing since high school. We had ease, and that often mattered more to me than romance.
    When Alex came up, he gave me a kiss and an Edible Arrangement, which I much prefer to flowers because flowers are just elegant vessels for bugs to enter your home and stay forever. I once had giant red ants invade my kitchen and I swear they rode in on a large, comfortable sunflower.
    I was happy. Happier than I’d been in months, years maybe. When we were outside, I started to do an adult version of skipping down the sidewalk. I had energy, life, joie de vivre.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” said Alex, speeding up to keep up with me, his stiff brown leather dress shoes creasing slightly at the toe.
    â€œI’m walk jumping,” I explained between bops along the sidewalk.
    â€œGood Lord,” said Alex, clearly still entrenched in his conservative New England ways. “Isn’t there some ADD medicine you can take?”
    The thing about Alex was that he wasn’t exactly comedian funny. Or funny at all. Actually, I once presented him with a drawing of a funny bone and suggested that he have it inserted by a doctor. He did not heed my advice. But he was very successful, was kind when no one was looking, and was incredibly sexy. Take-your-underwear-off-with-his-teeth sexy.