Page 17 of Your Every Wish

“What are you looking for? For God’s sake, you don’t actually believe there’s a key in there, do you?” I swear Kennedy’s lost her mind. The way we rushed out of Misty’s . . . well, it was rude.

“Where’s your envelope?” Kennedy says as she frantically sorts through the contents of her own envelope for the fourth time since we got home. “Please tell me it’s here and not in San Francisco.”

I rush to my room, knowing that it’s here . . . somewhere. I tear half my chest of drawers apart searching for it, then find it in the bottom of my suitcase.

“How do you think she . . . Misty . . . even knows about the envelopes?”

“Don’t know, don’t care. Give me that.” Kennedy swipes the envelope out of my hand and practically tears it open.

“If it’s not in yours it’s not in mine.” I point to the documents she’s now spreading across the coffee table. “See! Same papers. Same everything. There is no key, Kennedy.”

She’s separating each paper, methodically sorting through the contents of the envelope the same way she did hers.

“Even if there’s a key, so what? We don’t even know what it goes to.”

“A safe-deposit box. Don’t you remember? Townsend said Willy left us the contents of his safe-deposit box. Well, where is it? Where’s the contents?”

“It was part of the cash we got. The four thousand.”

“What if it wasn’t? What if there’s more?”

“There’s not.” I plop down on the sofa and huff out a breath. “I need to tell you something.”

Kennedy ignores me and continues sifting through the pages, shuffling through them like they’re a deck of cards. She’s back to patting down the envelope as if there’s a secret compartment in there.

“Will you please listen to me?” I try to get her attention but she’s so intent on finding this mysterious—and nonexistent—key that she’s lost to me.

She whacks the envelope on the table once, twice, and three times for good measure, then goes back to her own envelope.

When is she going to get it through her head that there’s no key? No safe-deposit box. No pot of gold. By the time Willy Keil died, he was destitute and doing ten years at a federal prison in Lompoc.

She’s back to my set of documents now, sifting through the letter Townsend included in our paperwork, presumably looking for clues. The small white envelope the letter came in is next. She runs her hand inside, searching every crevice.

All at once, her expression changes and she starts banging the envelope on the table until a small golden key drops out. My mouth hangs open.

She hurriedly returns to her letter and envelope, performing the same ritual as she did on mine. But there’s nothing.

She turns to me, suspicion burning in her eyes. “Why was the key in yours and not in mine?”

“I have no idea. What does it matter? You found the key, Kennedy! You found the freaking key!”

“What do you know, Emma? What are you keeping from me?”

“Nothing. I had absolutely no knowledge of the key. None whatsoever. I didn’t even believe it existed until you found it.”

“And let me guess. You have no clue where to find Willy’s safe-deposit box either.”

“Nope. But Townsend will. Let’s call him.”

This doesn’t seem like a good time to tell her about Willy’s insider trading and last known address. No, I’ll save that for later.

Kennedy rummages through her purse for her phone and taps out Townsend’s number. “Hi, this is Kennedy Jenkins. Is Mr. Townsend available? It’s kind of an emergency.” She holds up her phone. “I’m on hold.”

I can hear Muzak in the background. “Love Me Do.”

I can tell when Mr. Townsend comes on because Kennedy cups the phone to her ear and moves to another room. She probably thinks I’ll race ahead of her to the safe-deposit box and clean it out. Jeez. I guess if I had a mother like hers, I’d have trust issues, too.

My own mother is a saint. Well, a saint but not perfect—she snores like an asthmatic dog, is disgustingly neat, and never met an appointment she wasn’t late for, but a wonderful person who would never steal from anyone, let alone her own daughter.

She raised me single-handedly, working her ass off to put herself through dental hygienist school, so she could support us.

We may not have owned a house or a new car—Mom drove a used Honda Civic with more than 200,000 miles on it—or nice furniture, but we got by.

What Mom couldn’t afford, Grandma and Grandpa Tuck made up for, like my orthodontics (at least Mom could finagle a professional discount) and college education. They weren’t well-to-do either but had just enough to help out where we most needed it.

Mom went without a whole lot just to make sure I had new school clothes, birthday parties, dance lessons, summer camp, and all the other expenses growing children cost. It’s not as if Willy helped financially. I was lucky if he remembered to send me a Christmas card during the holidays.

When he left, he slammed the door firmly behind him and never looked back. I was stunned to learn that he named me in his will, stunned that he even remembered me at all.

By the time I was in high school, I barely thought about him.

Sure, there were times when I wondered what it would be like to have a dad and do all the things that a girl does with her father, like Giants games, fishing trips, daddy-daughter dances (not really a thing in San Francisco) and building tree-houses together.

But I did many of those activities with Mom.

The fact is that growing up in a single-parent home isn’t all that unusual.

Mostly my feelings toward Willy Keil were resentment.

Not for deserting me, but for deserting Mom.

To this day, I’m not sure she ever really got over it until a few years ago when she met Sam, the sweetest, most reliable man on the planet.

Together, they’ve built a wonderful life together and Mom finally has a lovely home she can call her own.

With Willy it was one of those whirlwind romances. She was just eighteen, barely out of high school when Willy swept her off her feet.

He’d moved to San Francisco from the Midwest (Illinois, I think), and got a job working at a car dealership, hawking new Mercedes-Benzes.

According to Mom, he could sell encyclopedias to Sergey Brin.

He was that gifted. When he would sell a car, he’d send out twenty promotional fliers to the customer’s neighbors.

When that didn’t work, he made cold calls in the 415, 510, 650, 408, and 707 area codes, hyping a sale or special promotion.

Within two years, he was selling ten cars a month.

Not long after, Willy joined a new dealership that specialized in exotic sports cars.

Soon, he was making close to $400,000 a year in commissions, more money than he’d ever seen in his life.

He grew up in a rural town, dirt-floor poor.

When he was ten, his father ran off with a young waitress who worked at the local diner, leaving his mother to oversee their twenty-acre farm.

She died two years later from ovarian cancer, leaving him and his brother to be raised by his grandmother in Chicago.

His grandmother worked as a secretary in a Catholic church by day and cleaned offices at night to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.

To help out, Willy went door to door, selling magazine subscriptions.

But what Willy was best at was gambling.

At the age of fourteen he used some of his subscription money to bet on the New York Yankees to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1977 World Series.

The Yanks defeated the Dodgers four games to two and took home their first series championship since 1962.

Willy never forgot it.

Two years after he and Mom were married, the year they had me, he started his own business, Keil International Auto Sales, a wildly successful wholesale car distributor, securing hard-to-get vehicles for dealerships throughout the Pacific Northwest.

But he never stopped dabbling in sports betting, his one true love. He was so good at it that he set up a clandestine bookmaking business, catering to some of his wealthiest clients. Mom hated it, fearing that Willy would be arrested, and they would lose everything.

He was and he did, but that would come later, long after he and Mom had broken up.

No, Willy assuaged Mom’s fears by secretly selling Keil International Auto Sales, moving to Las Vegas, where gambling is legal, and having an affair with a showgirl—Kennedy’s mother.

From there, things get hazy. What I know is that he became a professional gambler and built a prosperous bookmaking business that catered to celebrities and sports stars.

Not long before his prison stint, his company joined forces with Sports Analytics, a network of sports bettors, handicappers, and investors who used a computer-analysis approach to betting.

After that he was inducted into the Sports Betting Hall of Fame.

And then a few years ago, he was popped for insider trading.

One of his clients, a board member of Spordell, an athletic-wear manufacturer, tipped him off to a pending merger with Nike, a deal he made millions on.

Willy was fined all the money, and then some, and sentenced to ten years in federal prison.

It took a lot of digging on my part to gather the information on my illustrious father because the case didn’t receive much publicity in the press. White-collar crime, unless it’s of the scope of Enron or Bernie Madoff, rarely does.

Kennedy is back, an exasperated expression on her face. “He says he already cleaned out Willy’s safe-deposit box and the contents are part of the four thousand dollars we received. ”

It takes everything I have not to tell her I told her so.