Chapter 6

Over the next weeks there was a lot of activity at the Callaway manse.

First of all, beginning on the first day she was with us, Sheila worked out on those infernal exercise machines with Mom and me. Given that she was just skin and bones at the time, neither of us could figure out what she was using to move the dumb things, but move them she did. Mom just shook her head in wonder but said that no one alive had the determination that Sheila had. And she was — and is — right.

Now being able to see for the first time, the quality of Sheila’s schoolwork really soared. In just a few weeks she was taken out of 10^th grade math, put first into 11^th, then into AP 12^th. She just seemed to intuitively know it all. The same thing was true of hard sciences. In English and history she stayed in classes with me, but added 11^th and 12^th grade English, too. She was taking three English courses at once. While most kids took four major courses and a few took five, Sheila was taking seven and breezing.

I have to confess that she forced a change in me, too. Don’t get me wrong: Neither she nor anyone else ever said a word to me. But I thought about the incredible suffering this girl had gone through just to be able to go to school, so I guess I figured I could take it more seriously, too. The result? I added another English course to be in another class with her and a chemistry course. Yeah ... Me ... Taking a hard science. What is this world coming to?

Her work was utterly brilliant. I can’t comment on the math or science, but I sure can regarding her work in English. Every piece of her written work was a thing of beauty in terms of both its content and presentation. Let’s just say that our English teachers exhausted the thesaurus’s list of synonyms for “outstanding.” Just a little work with her resulted in me writing in coherent English for probably the first time ever.

Was that all? For Sheila? Hah! If I didn’t mention it before, behind our house is a full-bore Olympic swimming pool, 50 meters long by a full 8 lanes wide. It only took a few lessons from Mom and she was boiling up and down the pool, even joining mother in her “swimming to Michigan” routine. For those of you who don’t understand the reference, going back to the first day the pool went in service, periodically Mom would just start going up and down nonstop. I guess I might have made some crack to the effect, “Why don’t you just swim across the lake to Michigan?” and it stuck. (We live in Deerfield, Illinois, on the north side of Chicago, in case I didn’t mention that, either. And directly east across Lake Michigan from us is ... Michigan!) Anyway, that’s what the two of them did. And in perfect form, too.

Finally, Mom was constantly feeding her and I could almost see her body coming back. As it did, her incredible beauty that I knew was there became apparent. Sheila was just drop-dead gorgeous!

But did Jim see it? You’ve got to be kidding! He continued to let Suellen lead him around by his balls while being utterly blind to the incredible beauty he had beside him at home. What was truly strange was that after every date with Suellen he would come into our room and fuck me. Then Sheila would go down on him to lick off our combined cum and send him off to bed. The two of us would finish the night off by eating each other.

Incidentally, when I said that Jim would fuck me, that’s the correct word. In spite of what Mom had done to him, whenever he came home from a date he was so hot and bothered he just had to get his rocks off. I will say he honestly tried to warm me up — thankfully that really doesn’t take very much — but the poor guy was usually in such agony he just needed some release.

There was one more thing that soon took on significant importance: Sheila continued to resist anything Mother or Dad wanted to do for her. Occasionally I would see her making entries in that little notebook she had, but that was all, and I never attached any significance to it.

Then one Thursday night we were sleeping in bed wrapped in each other’s arms. Now, though, instead of hugging skin and bones I was hugging a body that was essentially a physical duplicate of my own complete with the most perfect pair of tits in the world. (And even after three children, they’re just as perfect today as they were then.) Anyway, sleeping together each night was for me a small trip to heaven. Occasionally our lips would meet and we would exchange kisses in our sleep. I would shift slightly on the bed and feel Sheila’s perfect nipples moving on my body. Sheer heaven!

But that night I was awakened by the sound of Sheila weeping. I guess she must have been having a vivid dream, because I heard her mutter, “I’ll never be able to pay it all back. It’s too much! The interest is killing me...” Slowly she subsided — I guess the dream or nightmare had ended — and she went back into a deep sleep. Normally I would have forgotten all about it, but this time I didn’t.

The next morning Sheila stayed in our room working on an English paper while I went out to the kitchen for breakfast. As I told Mom what had happened I suddenly made a connection between what Sheila had screamed the night before and her little notebook.

When I told Mom, she called out to Sheila telling her to get her trim little ass into the kitchen ... and bring her notebook with her.

Sheila came into the kitchen looking like a girl going to the principal’s office facing expulsion. She was so damned cute!

“May I see that notebook, please?” Mom demanded.

I’m sure the fact that it was private never occurred to the girl. She just handed it over.

Looking through it Mom murmured, “My God... !” As she went through the pages — there were a lot — she just shook her head in disbelief. Finally, without another word, she passed the book to me and strode out of the kitchen.

I opened the notebook and looked at the first page. There was listed the very first meal Sheila had eaten with us ... along with her estimate of its price. There was even an item for the rinky-dink little notebook itself! My eyes widened as I saw an entry of $10,000 for laser surgery on her eyes and $50,000 for the removal of the infernal contraption from her vagina. It was all there! Every item of clothing, every meal she had eaten ... Everything! Even an entry for rent, sharing my room! And all were priced. Moreover, there were monthly entries for interest on the total to that point calculated at 20% per year, along with a running total of the accumulated debt.

At that point Mom came back into the kitchen with what I recognized as a bank statement. With her eyes flashing sapphire sparks she ordered Sheila, “Read the balance showing on this statement, young lady. It’s recent.”

With her hands shaking, Sheila did. When she saw the balance her eyes widened. “It says the closing balance is $127,577,403.19.” Then she just looked at Mom and winced when she saw the fire in her eyes.

“That,” Mother announced, “is just our grocery money. Do you understand? Sheila Katherine Callaway, what am I going to do with you? Did you know that your father recently had an IPO — initial public offering — of shares in our company? We sold 10 percent of the company — we used to own it all — for three billion dollars!” Mom had started to calm down a little by this time but continued, “Now, young lady, you’re smart, particularly in math. If 10 percent is worth three billion dollars, what’s 100 percent worth?”

“Thirty billion dollars,” Sheila replied in the smallest voice I had ever heard.

“And 90 percent of that is how much?”

“Twenty-seven billion dollars.”

“And, little girl, that’s not all of it. Not by a long shot. You see, I have a few bucks, too. As Katherine Cornwall I made very good money. Far too good for what I did, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, I made a terrible mistake a few years ago. I mentioned it to a couple of friends in New York. Could they just leave me alone with my money in a collection of CDs and savings accounts? Them? Hah!

“They had to have a competition. They took my money, split it in two pieces with each managing a half. I’m sure you’ve experienced making a wish on a wishbone. Ever wonder what the wishbone feels like while it’s being pulled apart? Well that’s me. I’m the damned wishbone. Those two turkeys don’t give two hoots in hell about the money. They just use it — my money! — to keep score. Well, that money is now somewhere north of $5 billion.

“Now, Sheila Katherine Callaway, is money a problem for this family?”

“No, ma’am,” Sheila replied softly. “I guess it really isn’t, is it?”

“The hell it’s not!” Mom exploded. “It’s a big damned problem! But the problem is getting rid of it, not getting it. And you, young lady, haven’t been holding up your end at all. Do you help your poor mother unload any of it? Hell no, you don’t! Instead you fight me tooth and nail if I even try to spend five bucks on you. Now don’t you, you selfish girl? Admit it!”

“Mother, I’ve said this often to Sam but I’m not sure if I ever told you or Dad. You have given me love to an extent that I didn’t know even existed in this world. You have made me the happiest girl alive. Because of that, you are welcome to anything I have or ever will have, including my beating heart.

“If anything should happen to either of you and you need a heart transplant, I want you to take mine. I will give it joyfully. I’ll want to be fully conscious and on a cot beside you and feel the scalpel and then the bone saw cutting into my body to remove my beating heart and put it in yours.”

Tears were flowing from Mom’s eyes as she whispered, “You would really do it, too, wouldn’t you?”

Then she brightened and it was like the sun coming out. “That being the case, just where on your scale of pain does spending a few dollars rank compared to donating your heart? Do you think you could possibly survive the trauma?”

With that, Mom took Sheila’s notebook from my hands and began to tear out pages. When she had removed all the pages Sheila had written on, she proceeded to tear them into tiny bits. Finally she gave the notebook with its remaining pages back to Sheila with the comment that she might use it to keep track of assignments or something. Then she pulled out a checkbook, scribbled a check and gave it to me.

“I don’t trust your sister with money, Sam. I want you to take this down to the local bank and see that an account is opened for your sister at once. Clear?”

“It’s very clear, Mom,” I replied with a grin.

As it happened, once again we didn’t have school. I don’t remember the particular reason — usually I never did know — but I think this one was a state teachers’ convention. Anyway, no school.

The two of us went back to shower and dress. After eating breakfast, we went out to where a company limousine was sitting in the drive waiting for us. Off we went to the local bank. Only in the car did I take a look at the check mother had written. It was for $5 million, made out to Sheila K. Callaway. Knowing that the local bank was small, I could see that this was going to be fun.

Truly, I guess we were dressed for the occasion. Sheila was wearing the lovely suit she had worn to court, only it had by then been altered to fit her now-luscious figure. With it she was wearing the pearls she had worn that time, only this time Mom made it very clear they were now hers and to please keep track of her own damned things. I was wearing a very similar suit in sapphire blue that matched my eyes, too.

Anyway, we marched into this small local bank and I announced we wanted to open a new account. When the guard indicated a New Accounts desk, I told him that the size of the account warranted the president’s attention. If he wasn’t in the bank, the next most senior officer present would have to do.