Chapter 2
two
ZACH
I know everybody’s name.
Not as a trick. I actually know them. Gayle runs the front desk at Snowden Ridge and her boy plays hockey and he’s better than she lets on.
Rudy runs the lifts, he’s been at three of our properties, and I moved him twice because he asked me to.
Dolores has done the linens since before I could drive and she still calls me Zachary Lee like I’m about to be in trouble.
My grandfather was like that. James Wright knew every housekeeper in a hundred-room motel by name, and he told me that if you can’t manage that much, you’ve got no business owning anything.
So it’s a funny thing to sit with, that the one name I didn’t say out loud this week was Shayna Lemont’s.
I was going to tell her at the bottom of the road.
That’s the truth. I had it lined up. We’d come off the highway. Lydia had her shoes off, feet up on the dash, which she does and then denies doing. I had the whole speech ready. Hey, so, heads up, the Lemonts are all coming this year, Shayna too, Jill talked her into it.
Easy. Nothing to it.
Then we came around the last bend and my wife put her hand flat on the window like a kid at an aquarium.
You have to understand what she looks like when she does that.
All the worry drops straight off her face and there’s just this — I don’t have a word for it.
She made that building. She hauled beams out of a barn in a snowstorm and cried about it, which she thinks I don’t know, and every time we come around that bend she forgets to be careful.
And I thought, I’ll tell her inside.
So I didn’t say it. I put my hand back on the wheel and let her have the last bend.
She’s asked me about it more than once over the years, and it’s always the same story every time.
Shayna and I started young and were on and off together a long time. The on parts were loud, volatile, hot and wild. The off parts were louder. Everybody had an opinion. Her mother had a favorite version of us and my grandmother had another one.
And then I called it. I was over the back and forth and Shayna had a taste for drama I was no longer interested in. It never felt like she was truly where I’d end up, but every time we’d go off again, I’d get too lonely or she’d miss me too much, and then we were like reluctant magnets.
I called the two of us over nearly six months before I ever laid eyes on Lydia Ferris in a warehouse in Denver, holding a clipboard and arguing with a freight guy about a chair.
We’re friendly now. I text her on her birthday, same as I text about nine other people. She sends me something unhinged every Christmas. I was in Denver in the spring. We had lunch. She talked about her mother for an hour and I picked up the check.
None of that is anything. I’ve never once thought about any of it twice.
It’s never come up with Lyd, because there’s never been a day when it needed to.
My grandmother had me moving my grandfather’s desk before I got my coat off.
“It’s in the room you told me, Gran.”
“It’s in the wrong room and you know it’s the wrong room.”
“I don’t know that. It looks like it’s in the right place to me.”
“Zachary, darling, you haven’t the foggiest clue where it’s meant to be. Now lift.”
So I lifted. Magda Wright stands about as high as my sternum and I’ve never won a single argument with her in my life.
At the end of the week she signs this company across to me in front of the family and the partners and half of the Denver office, which is a formality, since I’ve run it for years.
It doesn’t feel like a formality to her.
It’s the last thing of his she’s holding.
That’s why the Lemonts come. Dan and my grandfather started buying land together back when neither of them had anything, and there is not a property in our portfolio that doesn’t have a Lemont signature on some piece of paper in it.
You don’t not invite them. It would be like not inviting the mountain.
And where Dan and Jill go, their daughter goes.
I’m good in a room.
I’m not being cute about it. It’s the one thing I’ve got that isn’t inherited. Put me in a room full of strangers and I’ll have every one of them by the end of the night. I like it. I’m not going to pretend I don’t.
Lydia hates a room like that, so I don’t drag her through it. She finds herself a corner and somebody kind to talk to. I go do the work. Later we get in the car and she tells me every single thing she noticed, and she’s always right about all of it.
That’s how we run. It’s worked for us.
I was barely into the great room before Dan had me by the shoulder and my cousin Petey started in about the boat, and somewhere in there I let go of my wife’s hand.
Simon Gold was up on a chair when I came through, which is roughly where Simon lives.
He’s Lyd’s person. He was her person before I turned up and he’ll be her person after I’m in the ground, and I’ve never once been jealous of that, which I gather makes me unusual.
It probably helps that he’s had at least a handful of different boyfriends since Lydia and I first met, so I’ve taken that as my cue not to worry.
“Zachary.” He didn’t get down. “Tell your wife the picture’s crooked.”
“The picture’s crooked,” I said, and kept walking, and got called something unrepeatable in front of my grandmother.
After the desk was firmly where it needed to be, I found Lydia in the hall before dinner and put my arms around her and said what I’d been thinking since we came around the bend, which is that she made that building.
She went quiet against me the way she does.
Then I asked. I always ask, and maybe I shouldn’t but it’s so hard not to. Not when I think about it all the time. She says not yet. I say okay. Then we both go on with the evening carrying it with us like this shared little not-secret.
I want a kid with that woman so badly it embarrasses me.
I don’t say that part. She’s got enough on her.
Upstairs, with my tie in my hand, I got one more shot at it.
She was at the window in her slip with her dress over her arm, watching the headlights come up the switchbacks. I opened my mouth to say it, looked at her back, and closed it again.
“What?” she said, to the glass.
“Nothing, baby.”
She held my eyes in the glass a second longer than she needed to. Then she went back to the headlights.
I watched the door for the rest of that hour.
Shayna came down before Lydia did. She looked well. She looked the way she always looks, which is like somebody’s about to take her photograph. Brown hair pinned up, the fire catching the red out of it. She hugged my grandmother and said something that made Magda laugh out loud twice.
And I stood there with a beer I didn’t want, working through a set of questions no man should have to ask himself.
Whether Lydia would come down before dinner or after.
Whether Jill would get to her first. Whether it was better if I was standing next to Shayna when it happened or across the room from her, Which is the kind of thinking you only do when you’ve already done something wrong.
Then my wife came in.
She stopped in the doorway and I watched her take in Shayna’s form, and I watched her whole face contort into something that was instantly smoothed over into something else lighter. A mask.
She looked for me.
I was already looking at her. I’d been looking at that door for an hour.
And I stood there and let her cross that room on her own. I couldn’t figure out how to go to her without turning it into something, and every second I waited turned it into more of something, and I waited anyway.
I should have crossed the floor.
Dan got to me first, and I let him.