“Maybe he can finally move her up here. I couldn’t stand to be that far away from you, it’s hard enough with you all the way in Cleveland and your sister leaving us behind—”
Hailey’s sister Lyndsey had moved to Dayton, which was, to Pammy, like moving to Siberia. It took three hours and half a tank of gas to get there.
“Mack’s mother doesn’tknowshe’s far away, Mom. She doesn’t know anything.”
“That’s a little harsh, sweetheart.”
Hailey let it go. She was eager to change the subject. Her mother was a bloodhound when it came to secrets, and Mack was really going to Florida to try to find out about his father. Eighteen thousand dollars was a lot of money, when you thought about it, and it had been gnawing at Hailey even as it flew out of their bank account. Mabel’s school bill would have made a big dent in their savings if it hadn’t been for this present from the Father Fairy, but Hailey didn’t like the idea of being beholden to a Mafia don, even if he was technically family. She was a member of the Ohio bar, for God’s sake, and she wanted reassurance that Mack’s dad was just a harmless old con man trying to settle his affairs before he croaked. That way she could spend his money in peace and guiltlessly use it to replace the bonus that there was probably no chance of this year.
Finally,finally, after hours of chipping away at him, Mack had caved and agreed to investigate further. Then he’d gone too far in the other direction, and now he was taking himself off to Florida. Why he couldn’t just make a phone call, why he had to buy a plane ticket and fly all the way to Jupiter just to ask a couple of people a few questions, was absolutely beyond her. Maybe it was his last hurrah before his classes started again.
It was then, sitting on her mother’s porch getting drunk on Kool-Aid, that Hailey realized that for the first time in the history of their relationship, she didn’t actually knowwhenMack was going back to school. He’d always made a big deal of counting down the last days of summer, and in the week before all the students came back to campus, he would insist Hailey take a day off. He’d buy Cedar Point tickets so they could spend a day riding roller coasters and eating crap, then maybe he’d take her to a concert at Nautica. But this year he seemed to have abandoned tradition.
Maybe, Hailey thought, he was finally starting to grow up.
7.
In 1965 the Bratenahl Development Corporation began the construction of two fifteen-story apartment blocks, the first high-rise residential buildings in the state of Ohio. Bratenahl Place was to be a mecca for modern city living: one tower would house not just condominiums but also shops, a restaurant, a hairdresser—amenities that meant Bratenahl residents would no longer have to venture into the mean streets of Cleveland proper for their basic needs. The second tower would consist entirely of rental apartments, making the Bratenahl brand accessible to the (almost) common man.
In the heart of a country still newly enamored with the suburban lifestyle, the towers were not an immediate success. They sat, mostly unsold and vacant, for years. Everyone panicked: the architects sued the contractors and vice versa, the BDC imploded, the shopkeepers went bust.
There’s only one reason those towers are thriving today: the selfless effort of a wealthy widow and Bratenahl lifer named Gertrude Britton. Gertie had lived at 10316 Brighton Road, then upgraded to the colossal 11801 Lake Shore Boulevard until that house burned to the ground in 1950, and then, finally, settled in the eleven-thousand-square-foot “Carriage House” at 11 Hanna Lane. Her philanthropy and contribution to the community knew no bounds, and for decades she bailed out the failed Bratenahl Place complex, even, so I’ve read, going so far as to pay for the lights to be left on in the empty apartments at night so that no one would know just how empty they were. Her deep pockets bought the towers time until the world caught up with this vision of the good life.
You might argue that a donation to the Salvation Army would have been more charitable, or maybe the sponsorship of an inner-city school,but I disagree. If you can get past the god-awful exteriors of the Bratenahl Place towers and focus on the majestic lobbies and the airy apartments looking down over tennis courts and landscaped grounds, you will appreciate the true nobility of Gertrude Britton’s contribution. She was nurturing that most American of sensibilities: Dream it, build it, worry later about how much it costs. Or, from Gertie’s perspective: Keep the money flowing, and eventually they will come.
That’s my plan too.
8
Mack
Irene Weigand had lived a hundred yards from the beach for forty-odd years, but sitting in her living room, you’d never have guessed it. There were no boat paintings or mounted starfish or carefully preserved conch shells, just dark, heavy damask curtains, thick rugs, black lacquered furniture, and gold-trimmed everything. Mack tried to picture his mother here; it would have been almost twenty years ago now since Leonora had last sat at the card table in the corner, playing bridge with her friends and drinking martinis. Irene was drinking one now, even though it was nine on a Tuesday morning, and so Mack had allowed himself the beer she offered him. From the other room, he could hear the hiss of Irene’s husband’s oxygen machine.
“She was gorgeous, your mother,” Irene was saying to him in a raspy smoker’s voice. “Really a light in my life; my Ron’s been sick for so many years, and she was a tonic. We loved her, my friends too—all us old biddies. Don’t know why she put up with us.” She laughed, and so Mack did too.
“It broke my heart, what happened to her,” Irene continued. “But it’s so good to see you looking so well, Malcolm. I hope you don’t mind me saying, but she’d be proud of you. I hope seeing her wasn’t too hard.”
“Well, I kind of see her every week,” Mack said. “On Zoom... On the computer.” But ithadbeen hard yesterday, harder than he’d thought it would be. His visits had gotten fewer and farther between over the years, and seeing up close his mom’s papery skin, her thinning mouth, the lines that had set in around her eyes, had left him nearly choking on the unfairness of it all, at how his mother could still be aging, could still be inching toward death without even getting to be alive. And the urge he had, primal and juvenile, to shake her, to scream at her tojust wake the fuck up, was as strong as it had been in the days after her stroke. He chugged half his beer at the memory of it and wondered whether Irene would offer him another one.
“Well, thanks for letting me come by. I won’t take up too much of your time—”
“Don’t be stupid, kiddo,” Irene said, hoisting herself from her chair and wobbling across the huge room—her condo took up an entire floor of the building—toward the kitchen. “I love seeing you. I hear you’re a professor now? Tilda told me you’ve been very successful. You’ve built yourself a big new house? I wish Leonora could see it.”
“Yes, things are going well.” Mack sat in silence with his lie until Irene returned with the beer. “I’m writing a book too, actually,” he told her. Another lie, butsomeonemight as well think he was a success. Maybe Irene would tell his mom about it; maybe it would reach Leonora somehow, deep in the recesses of her broken mind, and make her proud. Neither woman would ever have to know he wasn’t really writing anything, that it had taken him nine years to dribble out two thousand words.
“So, Mrs. Weigand—”
“Irene, please.”
“Irene. The nice folks at Sandy Hollow told me that you are the executor of Mom’s trust. I’m sorry you’ve been saddled with this all these years, I had no idea. I would’ve taken over if I’d known it needed monitoring...”
“That’s probably not a bad idea, you know, Malcolm. I may not look it, but I’m getting up there. I mean, I’m almost fifty.” This time Mack laughed in earnest, and he stopped himself from making a joke about the strong Florida sun just in time. The beer was going straight to his head.
“So ah, are you in direct contact with him,” he asked her, “or does the home do that?” Sandy Hollow had flat-out refused to share Mack’s father’s contact information. They’d had to get the trustee’s approval before they would even tell him who handled his own mother’s bills. He had been shocked to hear Irene Weigand’s name.
“Direct contact with who?”
“My father.”
