Free God-Shaped Hole by Tiffanie DeBartolo Page A

three of them walked the grounds, Elise took me up to her closet to show me one of the new dresses she’d been given for an upcoming movie premiere. The garment was long, red, skin-tight, and had a strange green stitching around the neck and hem. It looked like a bloodstained mermaid, but I didn’t have the heart to tell that to Elise; she was so riveted by it. She wanted to know if I would make her a bracelet and necklace to match.
    “With star sapphires,” she said. “I don’t care how much they cost, I just want my accessories to be as unique as this dress.”
    “It’ll be a challenge,” I said. “But I’m sure I can whip something up.”
    Chip and Elise had a cook and a servant, and we ate in the dining room on the good china: roasted chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, romaine lettuce with rosemary vinaigrette, and fancy Italian wine. Jacob told Chip it was the best wine he’d ever had, and my brother immediately went off on a ten minute-long tangent about the year it was bottled, the region it came from, how rare it was, and how much the local hot spots charged for it when you ordered it there.
    “I ship it in, right from Chianti,” Chip said, mistakenly assuming he was impressing Jacob. “You’re only allowed to bring in a certain number of bottles a year, you know, so consider yourself lucky.” Chip’s gruff, I’m-better-than-you snort shook the table. Jacob laughed along with Chip in a fake, Great Gatsby , old-money sort of voice, obviously mocking my brother. I was the only one who picked up on it, and I had to put my napkin in front of my mouth to hide my amusement. When Jacob took another gulp of his wine, I had visions of him squirting it like a fountain through his teeth. I’d seen him do that in the shower—he had quite a projectile range. I was disappointed when he swallowed.
    Dessert was a heavenly concoction of ginger-flavored crème brûlée—the highlight of the evening—and I contemplated sneaking a ramekin of it into my purse—an idea motivated by the quick fantasy I had that centered around my new roommate spreading it all over my body, then licking it off. The way in which Jacob slowly lapped it from his spoon told me he was thinking the same thing.
    We were having coffee and brandy in the living room when my mother asked Jacob about his family.
    “Tell us more about the Graces,” she said.
    I was about to order her not to pry into his life when Jacob cut me off and proceeded to give my mother a spiel I didn’t follow at all. Apparently when he’d told her his last name that afternoon, she’d asked him what his father’s first name was. He said Thomas, and my mother assumed that meant his father’s name was Thomas Grace. What she didn’t know was that Jacob went by his mother’s last name. He was no relation to this Thomas Grace guy, a man whose social calendar my mother followed by reading Town and Country and W . Evidently, Thomas Grace was some big Internet mogul, owned a Renoir, attended every important gala in New York City, and had been recently divorced.
    “Where is Thomas Grace now?” my mother asked Jacob.
    “Oh, he’s off on his yacht, cruising around the Greek isles for the next few months,” Jacob said.
    He was making the whole damn thing up, of course, and I assumed I finally knew why my mother liked him so much. She thought he was a dot-com kid. She thought I’d hit the jackpot.
    “Why did you do that?” I asked Jacob on our way home.
    “It was funny,” he said.
    “It was not funny.”
    “Then why are you laughing?”
    I tried to curtail my level of entertainment. “How am I going to explain this to her, Jacob? Now she really is going to hate you.”
    “Tell her my father and I had a falling out and we don’t speak anymore. That’s not exactly a lie. By this time next year, we’ll be gone and she’ll never know the difference.”
    “Oh, yes she will. You don’t know my mother. She’s going to hound you until you invite her to the weekend