“Uh...” Mack watched as Irene took a big slug of her martini. “Uh, I haven’t... Oh dear. I was under the impression that you were in touch with him over the years.”
“No.”
“I see.” She topped up her glass with a long pour from the gin bottle on the side table next to her. “Malcolm, I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your father is deceased.”
“What?”
“He’s dead. About five years ago. No, that’s not right—more like seven now. Heart attack, I believe. I only heard through a mutual acquaintance. I thought you would have known; just before she got sick, Leonora told me he’d reached out to you, so I assumed... well, I shouldn’t have assumed. I’m sorry.”
“He tried to make contact when I went off to college, but we weren’t ever really in touch.” Mack took another long chug of his beer. “It’s just—I never found an obituary. I mean, I searched for him online a few times.” What did it matter if one old lady knew he was a sad, fatherless snoop?
“He went by Warner Evers after everything that happened, you know; try that, and you’ll find it. He changed his name. Who can blame him? He was the most hated man in Florida for a good long while. I know people that lost a lot of money because of him. I’ve had calls from journalists and relatives asking about him over the years, and I only knew him casually.”
“I just don’t... Wow.” Mack was having trouble catching his breath. “So he left you to handle his estate? To deal with the money for my mom?”
The considerable wrinkles in Irene’s forehead deepened further. “What money? He ended up more broke than the Ten Commandments, far as I know. You did know that your father was a criminal, Malcolm? That he spent time in prison? That life caught up with him eventually, it always does. Leonora must have told you—”
“Yes, she did, but I thought... I always thought he must’ve kept some funds hidden, you know? Put something aside?” Mack was way past feeling any shame at the idea of his father squirreling away a few stolen millions. “I mean, how else could he have paid for Mom’s care? How did he set up this trust?”
And how in the hell did he just send me $18,000?Mack only just stopped himself from adding.
Irene set her empty glass on the marble tabletop; she was more than keeping pace with him. “Ah. I see how we have our wires crossed here, Malcolm. My fault. Your father had nothing to do with your mom’s trust. He was a penniless ex-con, if you’ll excuse me for saying it. No, I set up the trust. In fact, Iamthe trust.”
This couldn’t be right. Mack’s brain grasped desperately for the rope that it had clung to for years and years: this idea that his father, even though he was 100 percent grade-A asshole, had at least been their savior at the end.
Now Mack saw that this narrative had been entirely his own fabrication. A thousand dollars offered to a poor college freshman was not the same as two decades of medical care. Mack’s lifeline was no more substantial than a piece of string, and he could feel himself hurling down a cliff face with nothing to grab onto to break his fall. “Let me make sure I understand,” he said. “Are you saying that you’ve been the one paying for my mother all these years?”
“Well, yes. Me and the other bridge gals. But they’ve been gone a long time now, so it’s mostly been me. And Ronnie too,” she said, gesturing toward the room where her husband was presumably in a state not unlike Mack’s mother’s.
“Oh my God.” Mack leaned back in his chair, stared up at the pebble-dash ceiling, and fought like hell to recover himself. “I mean,thank you. I had no idea.”
“No, well, I wanted it that way. It was my great pleasure. Like I said, I loved your mother. And I was lucky enough to be in a position to do it. It was a gift to be able to pass it on.”
They sat quietly for a long minute, Mack’s mind still spinning. Was Irene Weigand Sunshine Enterprises then? Twenty years ago, it had been Irene that had given Mack his nest egg and sent him on his way, Irene that had paid for his mom, and now that she was getting up there, was it Irene slowly siphoning off her riches to him via those checks? She must have had a LOT of money not to miss hundreds of thousands on Sandy Hollow. Should he ask her point-blank? He had no choice, really, not if he was going to face Hailey. But Irene was on her way across the room again and Mack didn’t trust himself to stand, so he waited for an eternity while she got him another beer. (Surely the woman could afford someone to help her around the house?) By the time she got back, he wasn’t really thinking about her anymore, or about his mother or Sunshine Enterprises. As he accepted his third drink of the morning, Mack had become stuck on the fact that, once again, his father had utterly and completely let him down.
* * *
Hailey had gone quiet, but Mack knew this was only temporary, that she was formulating a plan of attack. They were in Lakewood, their old neighborhood, the girls and Gulliver racing ahead of them on the lakefront path. His wife had been so nice to him since he’d returned from Florida—she rubbed his back, she brought Starbucks down to his office in the basement, she even came home from work early a few times—and Mack had almost convinced himself that via his death his father had finally contributed something to his life after all. Then, after putting it off for as long as he dared, he’d had to tell Hailey about Irene’s request.
Hailey stopped by the steps down to the lake and squinted into the horizon, still silent. She would let this tension build and build until he broke open like a goddamn water balloon at a Fourth of July picnic, Mack knew she would. But he wasn’t some hysterical gold digger, he was an academic. He would focus on the issue at hand, one crisis at a time, alligator nearest the boat, etc. etc. etc. There were any number of metaphors that could save him now.
“We’ve just got to look at this the right way, is all,” Mack said to Hailey. “I got twenty-plus years of world-class care for Mom, for free. That was a good thing, but all good things come to an end.”
“This isn’t like summer camp or a honeymoon in the Bahamas, Mack. This is ten grand a month. How are we going to come up with ten thousand dollars a month? Do you have ten thousand dollars a month?”
He did not. His entire salary wouldn’t have covered Leonora’s nursing home, but he hadn’t had the heart to tell Irene Weigand that. He was doing so well, Irene had said to him after they had drunk most of the morning away and Mack still hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask her about Sunshine Enterprises. Mack was doing so well that Irene wondered, was it now possible for him to take over his mother’s care? Only because she was pushing fifty—that time Mack didn’t even crack a smile—and she needed to think about having enough to cover the rest of her life, maybe have a little something to leave to charity. As soon as he’d realized that she was serious about pulling her funds, Mack should have spilled his guts and told her he was losing his job and that it was his hotshot wife who paid for his fancy new house and he would soon have two kids in private school and there was no way, NO WAY, that he could afford to pay ten grand a month for his mother, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. It was partly the six beers he’d had by that point, and partly because he was focused on the realization that, if she was talking about cutting back on expenses, Irene couldn’t possibly have anything to do with Sunshine Enterprises. She was giving him less money (none), notextra.
He watched as Hailey worked this out now: Mack’s father was dead, Irene Weigand was off the list even before Hailey had known she was on it, and so—
“Who the hell has been sending us these checks, then? You’ve deposited eighteen grand, and we don’t have any idea where it’s from.” Even though it was ninety degrees, he saw Hailey shiver in the wind coming off the lake. “Girls, come back this way! Let’s go see Tai and Etta and the boys!” Hailey and Mack both took a sharp intake of breath as Gulliver passed within inches of Mabel’s scooter wheels. Hailey snatched him up as the girls flew back past them and tucked him under her arm.
“I don’t know. I’ll do some investigating—”
Hailey actuallysnorted, and Mack found he resented her standing there in her designer sunglasses and crazy expensive cutoffs, her Cartier bracelet digging into poor Gulliver’s side, thinking she was so much better than him. But he didn’t take the bait.
“Look, we can cover my mom for a few months, and then I can move her up here, somewhere cheaper—”
“Cheaper? She needs around-the-clock medical care. Did you even try to talk to this Irene woman and find out why—”
