Odalys Reyes-Marchetti explained it to her at a conference table in October.
I asked to be there and Odalys said no, and she was right, and instead I sat in the car in a parking structure for ninety minutes.
Danica came down after and got into my passenger seat and sat there for a while.
Then she said: “They told me it was a gift.”
“I know.”
“They said it was because I’d stayed close to the family.
That was the phrase, Imara.
‘You stayed close to the family.'”
“Yeah.”
“They made it a reward for not being you.”
She put her face in her hands.
“And it was my own money.”
The christening party was in November.
They went ahead with it.
That is the part people find impossible and that I understood immediately: my parents had invited a hundred and forty people to a dockside luncheon at the marina four months earlier, and my father is a man who would rather be sued than be seen canceling.
By then Odalys had filed.
Shareholder oppression, breach of fiduciary duty, and a demand for an accounting — which is the boring one and the one that actually wins, because a court can order a company to open its books and once the books are open, everything else is arithmetic.
They had been served in September.
They came anyway.
So did I.
I want to explain why, because it was not for revenge and it was not spontaneous.
Odalys advised against it.
Theo asked me not to.
I went because of a sentence my grandfather said to me in that yard when I was fifteen and sweeping shavings for two dollars an hour.
