Diamond Girl Read Online Free Page A

of Kells, and he was clearly crazy about me, in as much as Daddy could be crazy about anything. Mother might have been feeling in the clear until the horrible news that her oldest child had a debilitating, incurable life-long, life-threatening illness. Any natural woman in my mother’s position would have been upset, and she was. My Aunt Georgia didn’t hesitate to point out that there had never been a case of juvenile diabetes in the Kelleher family yet, and so the only conclusion that could be drawn was …
    ”Well, darling, what else can we think? And poor Kells, so hard on him, his little girl, and this on top of having no son. I don’t know, I can’t imagine what he must be feeling.” Aunt Georgia, a true Kelleher by birth, and even by name, was not a subtle woman, and despite seven failed marriages, she still believed that everyone enjoyed hearing her opinions.
    My mother wasn’t subtle either. She was the daughter of a large Kansas meat packing family, and by that I mean that both my grandparents worked in the Spam factories there. My mother had made it out of Kansas and onto the pages of Vogue by dint of some serious good looks and some even more serious ass-kicking abilities. Her marriage to my father was a step up of almost unprecedented social climbing and she knew that, as a Kelleher wife, she would have to spend her entire life pretending to be as genteel and unworldly as one of the British Royals. Because she was not a born American aristocrat, she was forever banned from talking or acting in any honest way. If she did, eyebrows in New York would raise, Spam jokes would be made and once that starts, a disgraced New York trophy wife can end up pretty quick in a New Jersey McMansion ordering her spring wardrobe off QVC. It crippled her nature of stone-hard bitchiness and made her interactions with my aunt, a 'real' Kelleher, excruciating. 
    But from one iron-hard bitch to another, she was smart enough to recognize the truth of my aunt’s observation and wonder what indeed her husband was feeling and, worse, what might he be planning.
    In families like mine, there aren’t really pre-nups in the way people think of them today. As in the case of the Hearst family, or the Hunts, dozens of years ago the reigning head of the family sat down with a friendly group of twenty or so trust lawyers and built a wall around our family money so that strangers, i.e. people who married in, couldn’t get much of it. The way it works in our family is this: stay married to a Kelleher and, if you outlive one of us, you might get some very serious change. For example, my great uncle’s fifth wife, Bonita, who was twenty and a kennel worker at his estate, married him when he was eighty-two and he left her a flat billion dollars. My cousins contested it but the jury, not understanding why or how they saw themselves as destitute on their own half billion dollar trusts, sided with the lucky servant and now she is richer than many born Kelleher’s, though not those on Daddy's side of the family. Conversely, marry and be divorced by a Kelleher, and you might end up living in a kennel yourself, because once our trusts go into effect, they are impossible to break into or take much from. It would require an act of Congress to do so, and let me tell you, Congress is very fond of our family.
    Knowing this before she married my father hadn’t stopped my mother from betting on herself. I’m sure, going in, she planned to be the perfect wife. Maybe she even convinced herself that she loved him. He is very loveable, at least I think so. But once in, she lost sight of how she got in. She must have been dazzled, stunned, at just how much money there was. Want a plane? Why not buy and gut a 737, and cover the seats with extinct rhino and polar bear skins? Want a diamond? Well sure, all girls love diamonds, but if the current Kells’ wife wears a diamond, it can’t be any old diamond, because by virtue of her wearing it, it will forever be