The Heir by Paul Robertson

took her a few seconds to get her breath back. “A billion dollars?”
    “That’s right. That’s not an M, it’s a B. You have hit the jackpot, cupcake. Call your momma and tell her she was wrong. No, I think I’ll call the little rapscallion myself.”
    “It’s all ours?”
    “To the last brass farthing. If you invested a billion dollars in the bank, do you know what the interest would be? Two hundred thousand. Per day. You could even have hard feelings against the old man for being stingy, with the paltry thirty grand a month he was giving us.”
    “What are we going to do?”
    “If we keep on a budget and don’t spend too much, we’ll manage somehow. A billion dollars isn’t what it used to be, you know.”
    She took a deep breath and we both calmed down. “That’s not what I meant. Oh, never mind. Are you all right?”
    I wasn’t. A billion dollars weighs a lot, and right then I was feeling it all. “I want to get to bed.”
    “Come this way.” Mama Katie took command.

6
    Tuesday morning I went running. I do it for exercise and I don’t push myself, but that morning I set a world record in the four mile Run Away From Your Problems event. Katie was still asleep when I left, and was just coming down to breakfast by the time I came back in.
    “That was fast.”
    “Paparazzi. You have to sprint to keep ahead of them.”
    “Really?”
    “No.”
    She was waiting when I came back down from my shower, and we ate together. We always eat breakfast looking out over the garden.
    “What are you doing today?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I want to meet more of the people who worked for Melvin. And I want to catch Nathan Kern before he goes to Africa tomorrow, to talk about the foundation. That’ll be dinner out again tonight.”
    “Could we have him over here?”
    Our house could use the blessing of his presence. “Yeah. I’ll have Pamela set it up. It’ll be friendlier, in case he has hard feelings about not getting Melvin’s wad for the foundation.”
    I finished breakfast, and Katie was still there watching me. “Did you see Angela yesterday?”
    “We had lunch downtown,” she said. “It was very nice.”
    “Does she know what she’s doing with her life?”
    “No.”
    “She has no money worries.”
    “She’s very lonely. And she’s afraid to make friends.”
    “She should be. She’s a rich, single, lonely sitting duck.” Besides, she didn’t know how to make a friend. She never had.
    “I told her we’d take care of her.”
    “I guess we have to.”
    “She had a husband. Now she’s by herself, and she never has been before.”
    A little kitten in the deep woods. I’d never get the adoration from Katie that Melvin did from Angela, and I’d hate it anyway. Maybe when I was older. Maybe for my second wife I’d pick an Angela.
    “We’ll take care of her,” I said. “We’ll assign you to watch her, and I’ll keep Eric under control.” Who needs kids? “Maybe we could set her up with Nathan.”
    Katie’s eyes lit up. “What an idea, Jason. I’m going to think about it.”
    “Katie, I was joking.”
    “But still . . .”
    “And they could adopt Eric. They could be the parents he’s always wanted.”
    “Now, that’s being silly. When are you seeing Eric again?”
    “I’ll call him today.”
    I didn’t. It was a long day and I was being very conscientious regarding my many responsibilities, which involved mainly sitting upstairs in my little office and talking on the phone to people whose names were on lists that Fred Spellman and George Elias had given to me.
    I left the house to meet with Stan Morton of the newspaper and television empire. We talked about his daughter Natalie, whom I hadn’t seen since Yale, except at my wedding and then at hers. She was married to one of Stan’s vice presidents, but I was sure that this morning, she was thinking about the fish that got away. It wasn’t her husband’s fault that he wasn’t the richest man in the state.