Chapter 8 Mack
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 it had been 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 to just 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, but someone might 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.”
“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, I am the 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.