“We did. We walked him, we took him out in the yard about a million times. I don’t know what got into him.”
Mack knew exactly what had gotten into Gulliver. This was revenge pissing, because his beloved mommy had gone away and left him for five whole days. Each of the irregular patches of newly stripped wood that dotted the front hall and the family room was a pointedfuck youin response to Gulliver’s abandonment. Although, as usual, it wasn’t the dog that Hailey blamed.
“I can’t believe you put bleach on a wood floor,” she was telling her mother. “The whole downstairs is going to have to be sanded down and refinished. And I’m not exaggerating, it’ll cost twelve grand if we’relucky.”
“I’m so sorry.” Pammy was crying now, actual tears, and Mack was desperate to get out of the room. He was edging toward the basement door when things took a turn for the worse.
“I also had a little issue with the girls’ laundry,” Pammy went on, obviously no expert in self-preservation. “I put some of their things in the dryer, and the little sweaters just shrank right up. I’ve never seen that happen before—”
“Which sweaters?” Hailey’s voice was now monotone, and Mack wondered if her parents knew what that meant, whether they knew that now was the time to run for the hills. “How many sweaters?”
“Well... quite a few. I thought I would get them ready for the colder weather, and—”
“You shrank all their knitwear?” Pammy’s flow of tears indicated that this was the case. “Oh my God, Mom—” Hailey closed her eyes and clamped her mouth shut in exactly the same way she had when Mack had backed into the corner of the garage the day they’d moved into the house. He felt for Pammy, he really did, but he wasn’t about to open his mouth.
“Your mother was just trying to help.” It was Eddie who finally asserted his status as the paterfamilias. “Now you listen, young lady, we won’t be talked to that way. We’ve been busting our butts looking after the girls and that damn dog, cleaning up this house, runnin’ around all over God’s green earth doing errands for you, organizing your mess. You show a little respect.”
Mack was fascinated to see shame spread across his wife’s features. This reaction had never been his experience when it came to calling Hailey out. He felt a strange surge of protectiveness; her obsession with the house and the sweaters and everything else in their daughters’ little world wasn’tquiteas selfish as it seemed right then.... Surely Eddie must understand that his daughter just wanted her own daughters’ lives to be perfect, even if most of her priorities were all wrong? Surely Eddie too must feel some pity at the way Hailey was mourning each teeny, tiny sweater that Pammy was now setting down in front of her in a kind of twisted self-flagellation?
Still, this wasn’t Mack’s fight... or maybe it was. He had just taken another step toward freedom when Eddie turned on him too: “And you’ve got plenty of goddamn money to fix that floor. It’s disgraceful, the pair of you. Leaving big checks lying around. Careless.”
Mack’s eyes went to the pinboard above the kitchen desk. There was an empty tack next to a picture of the girls from the Fourth of July.
“Where’s the check that was here?” Hailey had clocked the bare spot on the wall too, and she didn’t sound angry anymore. She sounded something else entirely.
“I deposited it for you.” Eddie shook his head. “And I get that you’ve been successful, but that’s disgusting, Hailey. I don’t care how rich you are, you put your money in the goddamn bank.”
* * *
There was no way that Mack was going to walk into National City Bank and start a big thing. “It’s your name on the check anyway,” he told Hailey as they sat at one end of the kitchen island, eating greasy Chinese takeout. He waited for an explosion, something that would at least end the conversation—Pammy and Eddie had fled for home and left him in the hotseat—but that didn’t happen.
“It was your name on the first three checks.”
Monotone. Mack was in dangerous waters. “If we go into the bank,” he said carefully, “it’ll flag it to them. They’ll start asking questions we can’t answer, when probably no one would have ever paid attention. Why go looking for trouble?”
“Looking for trouble? Have you lost your mind? This is a lot of money. We can’t just sit back and do nothing and spend money that we have no idea—”
“Fine, you do it!” Maybe Mack would explode this time! “Do whatever you want. I’ve got other things to worry about. Iamabout to lose my fucking mind—”
“Shut up!” Hailey got up and swung the kitchen door shut, nearly crushing Gulliver in the process. “You’ll wake up the girls. Obviously I’m sorry about your mother—how many times can I say it—but we have got to figure this Sunshine Enterprises thing out.Now.”
“It’s not just my mom. I’ve got shit at work—”
“You’ve got shit at work?You’vegot shit? You’re not even at work. You’re home in your sweats all day doing God knows what, because giving a few lectures and hanging out with twenty-year-olds issooofucking stressful.”
Mack stared at Hailey’s mouth as it yelled, at the thin line of her lips. He didn’t pity her at all now, and she looked old when she screamed at him like this—how could he be married to a woman so old? It was hard to believe this was the same person that had been with him in the pool two days ago, in that red swimsuit. That was the problem with Hailey; she could morph in front of his eyes. Lately there was something about her that made Mack think of a racehorse: from afar, she was fierce and capable and beautiful, and he was increasingly in awe of her. But up close, he saw way too much of the whites of her eyes and the flash of her teeth, and he spent a lot of time worrying about when she might suddenly decide to kick him.
Mackenzie Ewing was not like this. None of his students were. To a man (and a woman), they wereconstant. Always wanting to hear what Mack thought, always patient while he worked out just the right way to say it. And Mackenzie had been the best of them, the brightest spark. When Mackenzie smiled, Mack smiled, and when she called him Big Mack, or waved across the quad, when she brought him flat whites before his lectures, when her papers shone with his own ideas reshaped and perfected, when she sought him out at his home and marveled at all of his books and his house and his kids who wereso,socute!, all of this made Mack’s life and career feel like exactly what he’d dreamed they could be, back when he was the one who was fresh and new in the world. He might not be rich, he might not be powerful, but by God did Mack Evans’s tutor group worship him. He was a god, he was a guru, he was the Hunter S. Thompson to a gaggle of baby Johnny Depps.
“I’m in trouble at work,” Mack told Hailey flatly, and felt a medium-sized thrill as that took the wind from her sails.
“What kind of trouble?”
“The department thinks I’ve been inappropriate with the students.”
Hailey waited until he had no choice but to carry on.
“It’s the gatherings,” Mack said, and it went without saying that Hailey had told him so. Years before, she had railed against Mack’s clandestine Covid meetups in their backyard, had asked him and then begged him and finally commanded him not to assemble a bunch of teenagers in a pandemic for something as unessential as reading Shakespeare around a fire pit, but Mack had fought his corner and he had won. He had seen his students’ gray skin and dead eyes staring back at him over Zoom, had watched them grow quieter and a little bit less young each day, and he would have risked almost anything to reassure them that the rest of their only-just-beginning lives wouldn’t be (couldn’t be!) confined to the dismal walls of a dorm room. (And that was when they were lucky enough to be allowed on campus.) All those kids needed was a little taste of what lay in store for them when this was all over, and Mack had made his best offering: weed, wine, words. Repeated every six weeks or so. Hailey had stayed away.
