Mabel was sold immediately, Gigi not so much. “That tree is horrible,” she told Hailey. “It’s naked.”
“Think about it though, Gig. Santa Claus will be so proud of us for giving this tree a home,” Hailey said, “that he’ll probably leave you even more presents.”
“And hey,” said Mack, her coconspirator, “there’s about three feet of bare trunk at the bottom, so plenty of room to stack them up.”
He was doing okay today, looking brighter and less like he should be committed, but this was only because Hailey had a secret: in the rush to the tree farm, she had not told him about the phone call from the police detective bright and early this morning. The detective who had told her with much annoyance that David Rainier had been in Switzerland for the holidays, that he had expressed what seemed like genuine shock at being questioned about a robbery—or sort of a robbery—in Bratenahl, and that it was pretty likely that Hailey had pointed the finger at the wrong guy. Nor did this detective appreciate her trying to work out exactly how angry David had been at being accused; he was clearly not as worried about Hailey’s job security as she was.
As if that weren’t enough, about a half hour later, while Mack was searching for the bungee cords to tie the tree to the car, the man himself had finally,finallysent Hailey a message. Seeing David Rainier’s name on her phone took her breath away. It was a huge block of text, and her brain buzzed with possibilities even as she skimmed through it.
Hailey, I am sure you are aware that I have paid my Clarke & Straus tab. Rebekah’s tab. I now consider this matter closed. I have no interest in continuing communication, and I will seek legal advice if you contact me again, either directly or through spurious accusations. I regret the consensual personal interaction between us, as do you, as evidenced by your previous voicemail. But that’s precisely what it was: consensual. I can’t help how my wife feels about it, any more than you could control your husband’s reaction were he to find out. I trust this is the end of this matter. Good luck in all you do.
It was a clear threat: Leave me alone or I’ll tell your husband. He wasirritatedby her; all he wanted was for Hailey to go away so he could get on with building his city, and that’s what scared her the most. David Rainier was a jerk who had seduced her to prove a point to his wife, or maybe just to get laid, but the sickening feeling that she had been fighting for so long—that he had nothing to do with Sunshine Enterprises—was growing stronger by the minute. At the very least, it was impossible that David himself had been rifling through their house not forty-eight hours ago—did that make her feel better? With his money and his connections, he was a terrifying enough opponent, but without him in the picture, Sunshine Enterprises was almost otherworldly.
She studied Mack as he positioned the tree on the roof of the Cherokee. He was smiling, really smiling with his eyes and lots of teeth, and she should have been relieved to see it but... it wasn’t fair.Hehad cashed those checks, he had burned down a goddamnedbuildingand hurt a child, and now look: he’d just about escaped scot-free, while Hailey had almost drowned in guilt, thinking she’d opened the door to this nightmare.
But she hadn’t. There was no one else Hailey knew who would do this to them, who would send large amounts of money and bogus invoices and deranged threats. Mack was the dodgy one, the one descended from a con man, the one with no family, the one with mysterious benefactors like that old woman in Florida. Mack was the one who lusted after debutantes and had probably pissed off all kinds of rich people.
Lie down with dogs, Hailey’s father had told her when he’d caught her in bed with that quarterback of ill repute,and you’ll get up with fleas.
Too right. She checked the buckle on Gigi’s car seat and slammed the car door shut, narrowly missing Mack’s fingers.
“Hey!” he called out, but it wasn’t because she had nearly maimed him. He had been peering into the back of the car. “Are the bungee cords in the back seat with the girls maybe?”
“Oh God,” said Hailey. “Oh shit. I set them down.”
“Set them down where?”
“On the kitchen counter.”
He turned to look at her, and then he closed his eyes, and Hailey was surprised to see his mouth curl into a slow smile. He was laughing at her, or at both of them.
“Maybe they have some rope here they can sell us?” By the time she had finished her sentence, Mack had begun trotting back to the little hut where they had just paid forty-five bucks for the world’s ugliest Christmas tree.
Mabel and Gigi were already aware of the issue when Mack reappeared empty-handed, and so both were more than ready to cry at the thought of going home with no tree.Even this, Hailey thought,even this I can’t get right.
“We might have to come back,” she was telling the girls gently, but Mack would not admit defeat.
“Ladies,” he said to them, “Tree-y wants to ride inside the car with us. That’s what he told me.”
“Tree-y?” Hailey said as Mack opened up the back of the jeep. “Tree-y? Aren’t you supposed to be a writer?”
“Shut up, and make room for Tree-y,” Mack told her, and together they shoved the gangly tree in through the back of the car, until the top of it poked through the back seats. Then they kept on shoving, and pushing and twisting and bending, until Hailey finally had to climb into the back seat and pull Tree-y’s armlike branches out over Mabel’s and Gigi’s laps.
“He’s hugging us!” Mabel cried as Mack and Hailey, sweaty and laughing, shut the trunk and got into the front seats. “Look, Tree-y is hugging us!”
Mabel and Gigi, with their rosy cheeks and Santa hats and car seats literallyinsidethe Christmas tree, could not have been happier that Hailey had messed up and forgotten the cords. The whole car was already covered in needles and probably sap too, but it smelled like pure Christmas.
“Everybody hug with Tree-y!” ordered Gigi, and Hailey felt Mack’s arm reach across Tree-y’s head between them, and wrap around her back. She twisted in her seat, and reached out her own hand through the tree toward Mabel’s knees. Her other hand found its way over the top of Mack’s shoulders and around the side of his neck, coming to rest between his warm skin and the smooth nylon of his coat. As they all leaned into Tree-y’s prickly embrace, Hailey inhaled the pine scent, and with it she got a hint of Mack too—detergent and toothpaste and the books in his office and Gulliver and—justhim.
“Tree-y likes this family,” Gigi declared. “He said tomethat he likes us very much.”
“I do too,” Hailey said, and in spite of everything and even though he didn’t seem to notice, she kept one hand on the back of Mack’s neck the whole way home.
* * *
Because of his scrawny trunk, Tree-y leaned dangerously in his stand. They decorated him anyway, with all but the handful of ornaments that Mabel and Gigi took off into the study to play with. The downstairs playroom was a wasteland; Hailey still had the headache from the drills that had blasted up the concrete the day before. The section that Concrete Guy had excavated to get samples from could have been the Sahara for the amount of dust and silt that was spread around.
Mack was on the sofa drinking eggnog from the carton, and Hailey was pondering the best way to tell him about Rainier, the best way to let him know that she was not to blame. He had to get it right away, she knew, or she would kill him, no matter how good he smelled. If Mack didn’t take over this weight she’d been carrying around with her for months, if they had Christmas pretending everything was just fine and Sunshine Enterprises somehow miraculously went away—and she wanted it to, she did—but then Hailey was still left in charge of the bills and the debt and... she would strangle him. She would. With the damn bungee cords she’d left on the kitchen counter.
