Chapter 2 Mack
Mack
The mail, always a highlight of Mack’s day in the summer months, was mostly of a financial nature.
There was a letter from Duke University’s Annual Fund, begging him to make a difference and donate now, and helpfully pointing him in the direction of an app that would make doing this easier.
Mack read that he was the missing piece of the alumni puzzle, which was a shame, because he would have to remain a hole in the thousand-piece collegiate landscape: he was (unfortunately) living in every cent of his disposable income, having blown a small fortune on marble countertops, luxury bathroom fixtures, and hand-painted wallpaper.
He took the identical letter addressed to Hailey and balled them up together.
Mack had been expecting this. Betsy Wakefield had been pretty gracious when he sliced his golf ball through her great room window, all things considered, even though she’d been hosting a party when he sheepishly presented himself at her front door, still holding his five iron.
One of her guests, a woman Mack vaguely recognized from the Shoreby Club pool, had an angry red oval blooming right between her eyes, and for a second Mack feared the worst—Hailey was right, he never should have been hitting golf balls in such close proximity to the neighbors.
He could’ve killed this woman. Then he noticed red swelling down the side of another lady’s jawline, and, in the living room, an ice pack being held to a forehead.
This surely must have been the most powerful drive he’d ever hit, to go through a window and still ricochet like that.
He could’ve made the PGA tour after all.
“It’s a Botox party,” Betsy had whispered, her finger to her lips. “Shhh, don’t tell anyone.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” Mack told her, and it had been. He hadn’t even told his wife, who, Mack thought as he surveyed the freshly Botoxed faces more carefully, must’ve been the only neighbor not invited. Not that he was surprised.
He tucked Betsy’s expensive note under his armpit.
The final piece of mail was a brown envelope with one of those clear plastic windows for the address, and it must have come straight from the golf gods, because it more than made up for the damage to next door’s window: It was a check for $5,000, from a company called Sunshine Enterprises, Ltd.
, and it was made out to him, Malcolm P. Evans.
Mack turned the thin paper—pretty much a relic in this day and age—over in his hands. There was only the machine-generated check, with a bar code and some serial numbers. No statement, no return address. The postmark was from Newark, New Jersey.
As he ran through the list of their pensions and investments in his head—and unfortunately for Duke University, it was a very short list—Mack felt the tightening of something deep in his ribs.
He had no idea what kind of business Sunshine Enterprises was in, but already, in the brief seconds that had passed since he opened the envelope, Mack had formed his suspicions about its provenance.
He had also decided that he was damn well going to deposit this check, if, given how long it had been since he’d dealt in anything but Venmo and direct deposits, he could even remember how to do it.
He had a vague notion that Hailey kept the checkbook and deposit slips in the desk drawer in the kitchen.
He stuffed the check in his back pocket and padded through the cavernous front hall in his socks.
In the kitchen he bypassed the $2,000 coffee maker—it had been broken since their second morning in the house—and made himself a giant travel mug of instant.
He took two quick finger scoops of peanut butter, polished off half a tub of blueberry yogurt using Mabel’s dirty spoon from breakfast, and made his way downstairs.
He had three hours before he had to pick up the girls from camp and a lot of ground to cover.
As an assistant professor of English at a college that was famous for science and technology, for Mack summer breaks meant occasionally checking his emails to remind himself that the mothership did in fact still exist. But this summer was not like other summers.
This summer Mack was going to be conscientious.
He was going to polish his lesson plans and lectures until they shone, like the serious academic that he was.
That would show them, those doubters at Cleveland Tech.
That would shut them up once and for all.
Down in the basement he passed through the lushly carpeted playroom, stepping over Lego and Hailey’s vintage My Little Ponies, now among his daughters’ most prized possessions.
He closed the door to civilization behind him as he passed into the underbelly of the new house, through the exposed, still-gleaming pipes and the giant hot water tanks.
On the far side of the boiler room was the raw wooden door to his office.
The big inhale for the sigh Mack was about to give brought three scents to his nostrils as he stepped into his lair.
First, the routine skunk of the marijuana that he was growing on the sill of the high, narrow window (just a single sickly plant, not enough to land him in prison but sufficient to allow him to cling to the last vestiges of his adolescence).
Next came the not-unpleasant odor of sunbaked dachshund.
He’d left Gulliver snoozing in here earlier this morning, shut the door on him, and forgotten about him entirely.
Which explained the third smell: on the concrete floor under Mack’s desk there was a big puddle of fresh dog piss.
He had neither the time nor the materials to clean it up with; he was already six minutes late for his Zoom. Carefully placing a foot on either side of Gulliver’s urine, Mack sat down and logged on.
“There he is!” An unnaturally white set of teeth filled his screen, then sticky pink lipstick, a mouth encased in deep lines. “I said to myself, I said, he’s a good boy. Mack Evans wouldn’t forget about lunch with his mommy, no sir. He never forgets. You got a sandwich?”
“I ate already,” Mack said, as the lips were replaced with an extreme close-up of a sun-leathered bosom bursting out of white polyester. Mack shifted in his chair and felt dog pee seep into the inside edges of his socks.
“Okay, well, we’re having Subway over here today,” the bosom said, and was swiftly replaced on the screen by a turkey sub wrapped in logoed paper, thrust toward the camera. “You look so handsome, Mackie. You got some sun on ya. You been playin’ a lot of golf?”
“Only in the backyard.”
“And how’s the house?”
“Still good.”
“And Hailey and the girls? I was thinking the other day, Mabel and Gigi must be getting so big. I’d love to see them sometime.”
“Yeah, we could do that. It’s just a little tricky . . .”
“I know.” The sandwich disappeared from view as Mack’s screen flashed with industrial ceiling lights. “Look Leonora, there’s your boy. Look how handsome he looks today! You’re a lucky lady, to have a good-lookin’ kid like this one.”
The camera came to rest on his mother’s thin figure, propped up in her adjustable bed. Her hair was immaculately styled as always, her face empty as a swimming pool in deepest winter.
“Hey Mom,” Mack said, as Tilda settled down with her sandwich on the edge of the frame. “You’re looking well. That yellow housecoat really suits you. Mabel chose it, did I tell you that? She likes yellow too.”
Leonora Evans said nothing, and Mack went quiet for a minute too.
He was thinking about the color yellow and how, the last time he’d seen his mother alive and well, she’d been wearing a yellow sundress and even he—even her own teenage son who took her for granted every single day of her life and basically thought of her as part of the furniture—even Mack had noticed how beautiful she was in that yellow dress that day.
Now he knew it had been a premonition: early the next morning, home from college on spring break, he’d found Leonora bent over double with a headache.
Another day after that and his mother was gone, in everything but the most basic, biological sense—an aneurism had stolen everything but her ability to breathe on her own. She had been forty-nine years old.
“She smiled today.” Tilda was a good nurse; she had a sixth sense about when to break Mack’s silences. “I noticed she really likes the Everly Brothers. You know, ‘Wake Up Little Susie’? We’ve been listening to it during our exercises, and it’s twice now that she’s smiled. She’s a big fan.”
Mack very much doubted it. His mother had liked the Who and Led Zeppelin, had been at Woodstock and then at Studio 54, before she’d followed Mack’s father down south to Florida.
But Mack wasn’t about to burst Tilda’s bubble; she was too important to him.
She gave up her lunch hours so Mack could talk into the air, sent him updates peppered with nursing-home gossip.
Leonora was her favorite patient, she’d told Mack, and he hoped like hell that it was the truth, since his mother lived thirteen hundred miles away from him, in the Sandy Hollow nursing home in Jupiter, Florida.
(We can’t talk to my one grandma, Mabel had told another child once, because she lives on another planet.)
Tilda was also discreet. She’d never asked him why, as the only living relative of a woman in a permanent near-vegetative state, he didn’t move his mother closer to where he lived.
Mack leaned sideways to pull the check from his back pocket and in doing so placed the ball of his right foot squarely in the middle of the dog pee. “This is a weird question,” he said to Tilda, while making a silent vow to take Gulliver to the pound, “but has she had any visitors?”
“Only Mrs. Weigand,” said Tilda. “Every Tuesday, like clockwork.”
“Mmm.” Irene Weigand had been part of his mother’s bridge group, all of whom were much, much older than his mom.
Irene must be pushing ninety by now; the rest of them were presumably all dead.
His mother had kept herself to herself down there in Florida, but she had loved bridge and apparently elderly retirees too, even if she never got to be one.
Irene Weigand didn’t interest him, though.
Not now and not ever. “No one else, huh?”
“Nope,” said Tilda. “Same time on Friday, Mack?”
“Only if it works for you.”
“You know it does. Have a good week, Mackie.”
“You too, Tilda,” Mack said without thinking, and then, “Goodbye, Mom.”
He ended the call, set the check from Sunshine Enterprises on his desk, and then reached down with one hand to peel the wet socks off his feet.
“You little asshole,” Mack said to Gulliver, who had wandered over to inspect his handiwork.
“You can’t hold it in for like two hours?
” Mack’s coffee was empty, so he took a can of Dr Pepper from his mini-fridge and clicked through his emails while Gulliver sniffed at the discarded socks in disgust.
Seven fresh emails since this morning: one from a former student, two from Mabel’s new school with forms to fill out, two from Hailey with dates for his diary (as if he kept one, as if he wanted a trip into the ninth circle of corporate hell).
And finally, two emails from the English department, though neither of those was the one he was looking for, the one he needed.
Mack was waiting for the email assigning his tutor group, the email that would give him the names of the six students he would guide through the highs and lows of their English major experience at the Cleveland Institute of Technology.
The one that meant the department had made up their minds to trust him again.