What was it friday?

For as long as I can remember, Sybil has been playing the stock market like Gordon Gekko. When I was a child she would pace the house on the cordless AT&T phone while asking her stock broker for up to the minute quotes, writing the figures down in one of those address books a bank would give out free. She literally would do this from 9:30 to 4:00 during the summer. No clue how she kept track of this crap when she was working.  If I asked her to go anywhere it had to be after the market closed.  It wasn't like she actively trading, she just had to know how much more she was worth than my father at any given second. She had her net value down to the eighths.  Even with modern technology, Sybil still relies on the old school method of bothering some hapless twenty something all day on the phone. In between calls to brokers who aren't sick of her or haven't realized she isn't going to use them because their commission is too high, she likes to call her credit card company to see what charges have posted. It's always nice when she calls me during her downtime to tell me about the nice guy working for Bank of American she just talked to who lives in South Carolina.  "Did you know Jews live down there?" she will tell me authoritatively.

When I was a kid Sybil asked my brother and I for stock tips. I'm not sure if she did this because she wanted us to feel important (unlikely) or was looking for ways to distract us because we wanted to use the phone. My brother gave her Microsoft which she still owns to this day (God bless you inheritance) and I gave her Toys R Us. Lewis's logic was based on P/Es and yield, mine was based on the fact I wanted to go to fucking Toys R Us. 

Knowing I was directly responsible for some of my mother's money, I became obsessed with asking her what the value of the stock was at all times. There was this one time she was on the phone and I was screaming, "What was it friday", over and over again.  I did this all the time until one day the stock skyrocketed. I was pumped.  I saw the future and the future was toys! As the stock began to move, Sybil only had one thing to say.

"Shit, I should have bought it."

She never bought the stock I picked figuring I was an idiot child and there was no way it could perform well. Little did she know, Christmas was coming and toy stocks were prime for a move. She could have made some great cash if she listened to me even if my logic was based on nothing. I'm not sure why she bought the stock my brother chose. It could be that at 12 he already cultivated the look of her current hapless broker; stained khakis, mild hair loss, and a penchant for coughing as he read the newspaper, but it also could have been she liked him better.