“I don’t know what to say to that, except that this is beyond crazy.” Mack stood too quickly, almost knocking over a potted plant on the table next to him. “I have to pick up my kids.”
* * *
Sitting in the car outside Gigi’s day care, Mack let his mind wander to places he had banned it from going. It sprinted straight for Mackenzie Ewing, on the porch swing of his old house in Lakewood, saucerlike eyes blinking up at him from underneath a bobble hat, small hands in fingerless gloves clutching a red wineglass. God, he’d loved that house, how his students congregated there, how it made them see him as one of their own, how they felt relaxed and safe, hugged in the smoke of his homegrown marijuana.
Yes, Mack had broken a few rules. But he’d done it for their sake, for his students, to show them that being an adult didn’t have to mean selling out and turning into some corporate dick. You might not get rich, but you could spend your life smoking weed and teaching Hemingway and discussing the meaning of it all on a winter’s night, if you were brave enough to make that choice. (The only flaw in Mack’s own personal version of that plan had been when he married someone who insisted on living in Bratenahl.)
Once Gigi was safely buckled in her car seat, Mack picked his way toward Shaker Heights, where he joined a long line of cars that cost as much as his annual salary. A ridiculously young-looking teacher nodded Mabel toward him, and she collapsed into her booster seat with a sigh.
“How was school today, Mabie?” There was no answer she could give that would bring him joy: If she loved it, it only meant that someday he’d have to break it to her that they couldn’t afford it, and that they’d have to move away because Daddy was a pariah. If she hated it, he would be equally devastated that they’d paid $24,000 for her to be miserable.
“Fine,” Mabel said.
“What did you do?”
“Some stuff.”
“Okay.” He knew Hailey would push enough for the both of them, make Mabel recount every single second at Shaker School for Girls before she was allowed to eat her dinner.
“I did Play-Doh,” said Gigi, though no one had asked. “What did you do today, Daddy?”
“Some stuff,” Mack said, and he turned up the radio, let an inane preschool song paralyze his brain cells. The drive home passed in a blur, so much so that he almost rear-ended Betsy Wakefield as she made the right-hand turn into Magpie Court. She noticed; she waved her hand at Mack in a not altogether friendly gesture. He had maybe been tailgating. They pulled in their respective driveways, and she rolled her window down.
“We meet again!”
“We do,” said Mack, though to him the morning was a thousand years ago.
“I keep meaning to talk to you and Hailey,” she said. “We should carpool. Silly to both drive, now that the girls are settled in.”
Mack looked at Mabel in the rearview mirror. She was sucking her thumb, hair disheveled, eyes drooping. He couldn’t abandon her to some strange lady’s car, not when everything was still so new and daunting. He felt an overwhelming instinct to draw his family in close—even Hailey, who would require a careful grip.
Besides, give it another week and Betsy Wakefield wouldn’t let her daughters anywhere near him.
“Uh, yeah. You probably should text Hailey. I just go where she tells me to.” Mercifully, they were interrupted by the babysitter pulling up behind him, here to fulfil her goddamn contracted hours. Mack waved and pulled the rest of the way into his driveway.
The babysitter’s arrival was now the low point of Mack’s day. He wondered what Hailey had told Chenise about reducing her hours, about him being home when she was there. He hated the overlap; it made him feel the way he had when he was a scruffy teenager in a dollar-store hoodie, and the manager of the local 7–Eleven would stare him down like the theft of a Twix might crumble his entire convenience-store empire. Mack did not steal candy, and he didn’t give a shit what Chenise got up to with his kids, either, as long as they were happy. Chenise hadn’t picked up on his apathy; even all the way down in his office, Mack could hear her singsong voice, and he always had the sense that she was performing for him.
He said an awkward hello, and then numbly let her take over. He heard talk of fruit snacks and playing in the yard and then the three of them disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Mack in the front hall. He picked up the mail from the floor, saw the thin brown envelope, recognized what it was at once, and tore it open: Sunshine Enterprises again, $25,000. But it wasn’t the climbing amount that sent Mack’s heart rate soaring, it was the payee: Hailey J. Evans, Esq.
12.
Hailey
Ijust thought we were on track to sort this thing out,” David Rainier was telling her. “And I said to myself, let’s get it done. Keep the momentum going.”
Hailey had been googling him again when he called to ask her for a drink, not three hours after their meeting. He was on a hot streak, to be sure: she read about recent deals in St. Louis, in Orlando, in Barcelona—the guy must never sleep, and yet he was making time for her. This was a good sign, and besides, how could she turn down a drink with him, and miss a chance to get to know the enemy? He’d chosen a cocktail bar in Tremont and insisted on picking her up at her office and driving her there. When they were seated, Hailey ordered something called the To Kill a Tiger; it tasted strong and tropical, and it hit her like a tsunami.
“So I—”
“I don’t usually—”
Hailey laughed, and he blushed, and...What was she doing here?“I was about to say that I don’t do a lot of drinks meetings,” she managed to say. “I’ve got little ones, younger than yours even.”
“How old?”
“Three and six.”
“Sex?”
