* * *
“This can’t be good.” Hailey was on her hands and knees, peering at the concrete floor in the basement. “Look, this one is like two inches wide.”
“They’re outside too,” Mack said. “I noticed them this morning on the back walls. The bricks are actually splitting. I thought it might not be a big deal, that it might be only a surface thing, but then I figured I’d better check the inside—”
“We’ll just have to call the builder,” Hailey decided, leaning back on her heels. “I mean, the house isn’t even a year old. It’s not like it’s anything we did. Simeon will just have to deal with it. He probably gets stuff like this all the time.”
Mack was silent, and Hailey knew he wouldn’t be volunteering to make the call. Mackhatedbuilders, especially Simeon, whom even Hailey had to admit was kind of a know-it-all. After a few contentious snags in the construction process—some ill-fitting patio doors, a kitchen island that was the wrong height—Mack had cut off all contact with Simeon’s team and had refused to make any decisions about the house whatsoever. It was around that time that Hailey realized—too late—that Mack hadn’t wanted to build the house at all, that he had zero interest in moving on from Lakewood. And now, because of the standoff between Mack and Simeon, the interior door from the kitchen to the garage had been stuck for three months, and so, even though they’d paid for an attached garage with a heated floor and custom cabinetry, they still had to brave the elements every time they wanted to get in the car.
Hailey left Mack there on his knees and went into the furnace room. She flipped on the bare overhead bulb and peered at the walls. The cracks were smaller in here, but they spread out along the concrete block like a massive spider’s web. There was also, she saw now, a huge split in the floor near a drain that was supposed to prevent damage in the event of a water tank leak. The concrete had moved so much that the still-shiny drain cover had come loose. She looked at the door to Mack’s office and felt another blast of rage.
“How could you not have noticed this in here?”
“What?” He appeared in the doorway, cowering like a little kid.
“You walk through here every single day, multiple times. How could you not notice this?” She pointed (manically, even she would have admitted) at the drain. “This isn’t like a small thing. You didn’t see this?”
“Oh, so this is my fault too? It must be so hard for you to go through life dragging an asshole like me behind you. You just can’t wait to—”
Hailey pushed past him and ran up the stairs. Both sets, all the way to their bedroom. She slammed the door and locked it, then stood in the big bay window looking out into the darkness over Lake Erie.
When the builders had first laid the floor in this room, before the staircase had even gone in and you had to climb a ladder to get up here, this view had made the house feel like a fortress. A precarious one at first—this was all their money; would these piles of bricks and wood actually turn into a real-life, grown-up house? But the view saw her through any doubt. The idea that people out on the lake—on dinner cruises or sailboat charters—would look up and see the light in this bedroom at night and think,Wow, what a spot. Can you imagine living there?just as Hailey herself had once done from her father’s back seat, kept her going through financial freak-outs and Mack’s indifference. It was this room that she thought of while she hunched over briefs at midnight in her office downtown, surrounded by an ocean of dark offices and deserted parking lots, and this spot she aimed for on the long, traffic-congested drive back from her parents’.
On the day Simeon’s team had formally handed the keys over, Hailey and Mack had made love in this window, and then on the built-in ottoman in the middle of the dressing room, among the custom cabinetry that would soon be home to shoes and clothing that had only ever known overcrowded closets and plastic IKEA crates. They’d moved on to the master bathroom and run a bath to see if they both fit in the tub (they did!) and, giddy with new homeownership, forgotten there would be no towels. They pulled their clothes back on over damp skin gritty with construction dust, but it had been worth it. It was still worth it, Hailey thought. She loved this house. It would never let her down.
Hailey sank onto the bed and pulled her phone from her blazer pocket. For the thousandth time that day she checked her messages for David Rainier’s name. When there wasn’t anything from him, she felt nothing. She knew his neglect of her own message (long ago confirmed delivered and read) was binary. He had used her and then ghosted her, and all she could do was hope that this was the worst of what he had in mind.
22.
You don’t hear much about it, but at the time of the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, other cities around the Great Lakes were burning too: Holland, Michigan, and Peshtigo, Wisconsin, also fell prey to dry conditions at the end of a long, hot summer. Cleveland was not so lucky.
Hear me out: Those Chicagoans—the same mix of scrappy immigrants and waywardMayflowerdescendants and budding industrialists that existed in Cleveland at that time—got a do-over thanks to Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. One collision of hoof and lantern, so the story goes, and all the crappy little houses and businesses that were clogging up theshoresof Lake Michigan back then burned up like kindling. Then, ka-zaam! Asnazzy plan for rebuilding, some creative zoning laws, and Chicago would be called, just a few decades later, Paris on the Prairie.
Cleveland, as you’ll probably have gathered, got no such reboot, having had to make do with smaller, isolated disasters and a river with a penchant for flammability—and is thus now known as the Mistake on the Lake.
Moral of the story: fire can be a good thing, children, if it’s used correctly. Sometimes you need to burn things to the ground to get them right where you want them.
23.
Mack
It was obvious that Gulliver couldn’t believe his luck. They’d been walking for fifteen whole minutes, on a route they’d never taken, with lots of exciting new places to pee. The dog’s little mouth was open, and even from his higher vantage point—higher than usual thanks to the thick, cushy soles of his swish new shoes—Mack could see tongue and teeth; it looked for all the world like Gulliver was grinning as he strode along the pavement. Maybe, Mack realized, if the little shit had more variety in his life he wouldn’t feel the need to—
There it was. Itwasmore of a shed than a garage, Mack had to admit. It was built of plywood, with a roof that looked like peeling sandpaper; it resembled some old military outpost. There was a narrow boarded-up door, and the windows had been covered over too. The grass around the structure was brown and dry, and Mack was sure the whole place would go up like a Christmas tree in February if you put a match to it.
Not that he was going to.
They strolled a wide circle around the little hut—there was broken glass everywhere—and though he tried, Mack couldn’t figure out which property the thing was part of. The houses were spread out back here; this land could easily have been owned by the township itself. There was a serious-looking power station box a few hundred yards away, with some dramatically illustratedDANGER! RISK OF DEATH BY ELECTROCUTION!notices pasted on it, but basically the area was a no-man’s-land. This shed blocked no one’s view, it wasn’t anywhere near the contentious beachfront, and there was absolutely no reason Mack could think of for anyone to want to burn it down. Someone was fucking with them, was all.
It was working, too. Hailey might be persecuting Mack and freezing him out and treating him like an imbecile, but the one thing he didn’t begrudge her was being freaked out. Who was this person that thought he could tell Mack Evans what to do just because he’d sent some money?
Even if it was kind of a lot of money.
He and Gulliver rounded their circle for home, both reluctantly. Mack was supposed to meet Simeon and show him the cracks in the house. The goddamn builder went by a single moniker, like he was the Cher of overpriced, Sims-inspired architecture. Mack had already run through the conversation they would have in his mind, in which Simeon would insinuate that this too was something any real man would be able to fix himself. A few months before, when one of Hailey’s closet doors had broken, Simeon had actually had the balls to ask why Mack couldn’t just replace the hinge himself and save Simeon a trip out to Bratenahl. “Sure,” Mack told him, “as long as you can cover my class on the foundations of American poetry this morning.”
Now Mack was going to have to play nice. Hailey was not interested in taking over; after their fight over the furnace room floor, she had sunk into some unidentifiable state of gloominess. It made Mack nervous; he could tell that she didn’t believe him when he said that nothing had happened with Mackenzie, but he also got the sense that she didn’t reallycare. He’d felt that there should have been more drama, more shouting, more accusations that he could deny, but instead they’d spent days in the kind of quiet that happens after a child takes a nasty fall and doesn’t cry, that vacuum of sound that signals the situation is serious.
Mack had found a way to break through though. That very morning, he had done something that he and Hailey had neither agreed upon nor even discussed: he paid his mother’s nursing home bills for November and December. Their bank balance was now minus $67.13.
