With one joint between his lips and the other tucked into his front shirt pocket next to his Zippo, Mack grabbed his five-iron from the corner. He pilfered a bottle of wine as he passed through the kitchen, briefly registered the shock on his sister-in-law’s face at the sight of him, and stomped toward the eternally jammed side door to the garage. He kicked it twice with his socked foot, which hurt like hell, and then—with ash an inch long dangling on the end of his joint—he began to bash at the doorknob with his golf club. He only stopped when the bottle of wine started to slip from the crook of his elbow.
He abandoned the side door then and veered toward the front hall. He could hear splashing in the bathtub upstairs and Pammy’s low murmur in the background, but Mabel was still out on the landing. She gaped at him, pressing her cheeks through the banister. “Daddy, are you smok—”
“I’ll be back in a minute, baby,” he said through the side of his mouth. “You go get a bath.” He almost dropped the wine again as he closed the front door behind him. He stuffed his feet in the muddy Sauconys and fumbled in the dark garage for his bucket of golf balls.
The temperature had plummeted. The freezing air mixed with the smoke in his lungs, and Mack had never felt more ferociously alive as he stood on the frozen grass in his backyard. He whiffed his first shot completely, but on his second swing the ball disappeared into the black, starless night. He strained his ears for a splash, but no sound came.
Hailey had let this prick into their lives. She had kissed him and had sex with him and then she had lied. About him, about the money.
Hailey knew exactly where that money came from!His throat threatened to collapse from all the punches it was taking.
Mack snuffed out his joint and sliced a shot into the fence between their yard and the Wakefields’. He heard the wooden panel crack.
Good.
Who did this? Who fucked someone’s wife and then sent them money and weird letters and—he glanced down at the light in his underground office window. He’d left the letter out on his desk.
And why all the goddamn red stamps? FINAL NOTICE? The guy was taunting Mack, that’s why.
Mack hit another shot out into the lake; this time he did hear the splash.
This guy thought he could tell Mack what to do. He’d sent Mack money, as if Mack were some needy college kid, like Mack was eighteen again and all on his fucking own. Had Hailey told this guy Mack was broke? What else had she told him?
His next ball went left, over the fence on the other side and probably onto the road. Fortunately, there was no scream, no smack of breaking glass. On his backswing though, Mack had seen Eddie and Pammy Byers in Mabel’s bedroom window. What a show he was giving them!
The real kicker was that this prick Hailey was screwing was just like every frat boy Mack had ever known: loaded, entitled, smug in the knowledge that life was just a good time when you had money to back you up. When you had your own brand-new Toyota Forerunner at sixteen and your parents’ ski lodge in Jackson Hole and as many private golf lessons at the country club as you could ever fucking dream of...
Mack’s next swing sent the ball rolling along the ground like he was playing croquet, and then somehow his bucket was empty.
He leaned his club against his fucked-up house and chugged at the wine bottle. He was freezing, but he couldn’t go back inside now, not while everyone was still here.
He decided to go for a walk. Who cared if it was nighttime? Who cared if it was November? Who cared if nobody went for walks around Bratenahl except geriatric sneaker magnates?
Mack knew what this David guy was, he realized as he got to the end of the driveway. Mack had cut his teeth observing David Moneybags’s type of privilege. West Palm Beach High School had been a melting pot of mega-wealthy kids and the offspring of masseuses and cleaners, and people like himself, who fell somewhere in between. Mack had worked his ass off to get into Duke, had had a four-point-something GPA, had founded a literary society, and by sixteen had a poem published inThe Paris Review. For his last two years of high school he had single-handedly run the school newspaper and founded a reading program at a nearby homeless shelter. And in between all this, Mack dragged rich people’s golf bags around Bear Creek Country Club and refreshed off-season water glasses and bread baskets so that he wouldn’t have to live completely off Leonora’s hard-won salary. With all of that effort, he had just about managed to squeak in Duke’s door, begging and pleading for financial aid, for federal loans, for a last-minute golf scholarship. He had elbowed his way into a banquet of debt, among the engineers and the future neurosurgeons with 1600s on their SATs.
Then there was Nicholas Flack. Nick Flack’s house looked a lot like Mar-a-Lago, Mack knew. He drove a Porsche 911 to school and he sat in non-AP classes in his rolled-up $75 Abercrombie khakis earning mostly Bs, from what Mack could tell. His grandfather had founded one of the biggest insurance companies in the country; his uncle was a senator.
Nick Flack got into Duke too, even though he hadn’t even graduated with honors, and even though five other more qualified kids in their graduating class had been rejected.
Mack stumbled past the Magpie Court gate. What good was a damn gate if there was no one there to man it? He tossed his wine bottle at the useless guard hut, heard it smash on the pavement.
Good!
Yep, Nick Flack had bought his way into Duke—perfectly legally, with school buildings and Mommy and Daddy’s tax write-offs—and now Hailey had screwed him.
(Okay, not Nick himself, but someone just like him.)
Hailey was supposed to know better than this. She was supposed tobebetter. But all along, she’d just been waiting for her chance with a Nick Flack. Mack hated her then, and yet somehow ached for her too, like he had never ached before. He had to fight the urge to run home and shake her until she could tell him that it wasn’t true, that it hadn’t happened, that of course he had misunderstood, that she was still who she had always been.
Instead, Mack staggered left out of his development, away from the lake. There were no cars, and out here the streetlights were just the plain old kind, instead of the new, very-old-looking kind.
He wandered, past leafless November trees and houses with light peeking through drawn curtains. Occasionally he saw headlights in the distance, but only until he turned off the main road. His head had started to hurt, so he took out the other joint and watched the end of it spark to life beneath his nose.
Always,alwaysMack had tried to do the opposite of what people like Nick Flack and David Whatever-the-Fuck-His-Name-Was had told him to.
They said:Be a banker, dude, you’ll make a shit ton of cash, and Mack had not done it.
They said:Go ahead and play around on your wife, dude, everyone does, and Mack had not done it. (Even though apparently everyone thought he had!)
