Chapter 26 Mack
Mack
It was the irony that Mack couldn’t get over. He had never touched Mackenzie Ewing or anyone else, and here he was, about to swing for it, while this whole time Hailey had been the one playing around.
(Hailey!)
The betrayal hit him like a punch to the throat.
His wife—his difficult, cranky, hard-to-manage wife—had been at it with another man.
And he knew she’d done it, no matter how she tried to squirm her way out of that word he’d overheard.
Mack had not been born yesterday; there was no way that “screwed” was meant in the metaphorical sense.
He could tell from the tone of her voice, from the intimacy of her desperation.
From the guilt on her face.
“Let me make sure I understand this right. You screwed him, and now this guy’s paying us? Must’ve been good.” Mack wasn’t shouting yet, but he was close. “So what, you’re like a fancy prostitute now?”
He regretted this as soon as it left his lips.
Hailey was silent but hysterical, gasping for breath, and his outrage melted.
Really and truly melted—to his surprise, Mack found that he was crying.
Then he caught sight of the letter, and the dark cloud that threatened to swallow him whole became a tornado again, external and violent.
“What the hell—who is this asshole? What’s his name?”
Hailey shook her head, and the person shouting at her became not Mack but some stranger who had taken over his body: “I said what the fuck is his name! Tell me. Tell me, or I walk out of here right now and never come back. David something, isn’t it?”
He was surprised by how quickly Hailey caved in: “David Rainier.” Her voice was quiet and even in a way that did not match her eyes. “He’s Rebekah Rainier’s husband. He’ll stop now, Mack. I think . . . I think Sunshine Enterprises must be his fucked-up way of paying his bill. Please, let’s—”
There were footsteps on the landing, and then Hailey’s father called her name, and it was like a bucket of cold water had been poured over them. Mack took the letter from the bed and brushed past Eddie. Let Hailey try to explain the state of herself to him.
Down in his office, Mack took a pouch of tobacco and the jar of buds he’d been drying from the top shelf of his bookcase, and he rolled himself two fat joints. He lit one while he searched the internet for David Rainer.
(No, Rainier.)
Boy, could Hailey pick ’em. The guy had a real estate empire, a private jet, and a yacht. He looked like a total prick, and he had screwed Mack’s wife. Possibly multiple times.
With one joint between his lips and the other tucked into his front shirt pocket next to his Zippo, Mack grabbed his five-iron from the corner.
He pilfered a bottle of wine as he passed through the kitchen, briefly registered the shock on his sister-in-law’s face at the sight of him, and stomped toward the eternally jammed side door to the garage.
He kicked it twice with his socked foot, which hurt like hell, and then—with ash an inch long dangling on the end of his joint—he began to bash at the doorknob with his golf club.
He only stopped when the bottle of wine started to slip from the crook of his elbow.
He abandoned the side door then and veered toward the front hall. He could hear splashing in the bathtub upstairs and Pammy’s low murmur in the background, but Mabel was still out on the landing. She gaped at him, pressing her cheeks through the banister. “Daddy, are you smok—”
“I’ll be back in a minute, baby,” he said through the side of his mouth. “You go get a bath.” He almost dropped the wine again as he closed the front door behind him. He stuffed his feet in the muddy Sauconys and fumbled in the dark garage for his bucket of golf balls.
The temperature had plummeted. The freezing air mixed with the smoke in his lungs, and Mack had never felt more ferociously alive as he stood on the frozen grass in his backyard.
He whiffed his first shot completely, but on his second swing the ball disappeared into the black, starless night.
He strained his ears for a splash, but no sound came.
Hailey had let this prick into their lives. She had kissed him and had sex with him and then she had lied. About him, about the money.
Hailey knew exactly where that money came from! His throat threatened to collapse from all the punches it was taking.
Mack snuffed out his joint and sliced a shot into the fence between their yard and the Wakefields’. He heard the wooden panel crack.
Good.
Who did this? Who fucked someone’s wife and then sent them money and weird letters and—he glanced down at the light in his underground office window. He’d left the letter out on his desk.
And why all the goddamn red stamps? FINAL NOTICE? The guy was taunting Mack, that’s why.
Mack hit another shot out into the lake; this time he did hear the splash.
This guy thought he could tell Mack what to do. He’d sent Mack money, as if Mack were some needy college kid, like Mack was eighteen again and all on his fucking own. Had Hailey told this guy Mack was broke? What else had she told him?
His next ball went left, over the fence on the other side and probably onto the road. Fortunately, there was no scream, no smack of breaking glass. On his backswing though, Mack had seen Eddie and Pammy Byers in Mabel’s bedroom window. What a show he was giving them!
The real kicker was that this prick Hailey was screwing was just like every frat boy Mack had ever known: loaded, entitled, smug in the knowledge that life was just a good time when you had money to back you up.
When you had your own brand-new Toyota Forerunner at sixteen and your parents’ ski lodge in Jackson Hole and as many private golf lessons at the country club as you could ever fucking dream of . . .
Mack’s next swing sent the ball rolling along the ground like he was playing croquet, and then somehow his bucket was empty.
He leaned his club against his fucked-up house and chugged at the wine bottle. He was freezing, but he couldn’t go back inside now, not while everyone was still here.
He decided to go for a walk. Who cared if it was nighttime? Who cared if it was November? Who cared if nobody went for walks around Bratenahl except geriatric sneaker magnates?
Mack knew what this David guy was, he realized as he got to the end of the driveway.
Mack had cut his teeth observing David Moneybags’s type of privilege.
West Palm Beach High School had been a melting pot of mega-wealthy kids and the offspring of masseuses and cleaners, and people like himself, who fell somewhere in between.
Mack had worked his ass off to get into Duke, had had a four-point-something GPA, had founded a literary society, and by sixteen had a poem published in The Paris Review.
For his last two years of high school he had single-handedly run the school newspaper and founded a reading program at a nearby homeless shelter.
And in between all this, Mack dragged rich people’s golf bags around Bear Creek Country Club and refreshed off-season water glasses and bread baskets so that he wouldn’t have to live completely off Leonora’s hard-won salary.
With all of that effort, he had just about managed to squeak in Duke’s door, begging and pleading for financial aid, for federal loans, for a last-minute golf scholarship.
He had elbowed his way into a banquet of debt, among the engineers and the future neurosurgeons with 1600s on their SATs.
Then there was Nicholas Flack. Nick Flack’s house looked a lot like Mar-a-Lago, Mack knew.
He drove a Porsche 911 to school and he sat in non-AP classes in his rolled-up $75 Abercrombie khakis earning mostly Bs, from what Mack could tell.
His grandfather had founded one of the biggest insurance companies in the country; his uncle was a senator.
Nick Flack got into Duke too, even though he hadn’t even graduated with honors, and even though five other more qualified kids in their graduating class had been rejected.
Mack stumbled past the Magpie Court gate. What good was a damn gate if there was no one there to man it? He tossed his wine bottle at the useless guard hut, heard it smash on the pavement.
Good!
Yep, Nick Flack had bought his way into Duke—perfectly legally, with school buildings and Mommy and Daddy’s tax write-offs—and now Hailey had screwed him.
(Okay, not Nick himself, but someone just like him.)
Hailey was supposed to know better than this.
She was supposed to be better. But all along, she’d just been waiting for her chance with a Nick Flack.
Mack hated her then, and yet somehow ached for her too, like he had never ached before.
He had to fight the urge to run home and shake her until she could tell him that it wasn’t true, that it hadn’t happened, that of course he had misunderstood, that she was still who she had always been.
Instead, Mack staggered left out of his development, away from the lake. There were no cars, and out here the streetlights were just the plain old kind, instead of the new, very-old-looking kind.
He wandered, past leafless November trees and houses with light peeking through drawn curtains.
Occasionally he saw headlights in the distance, but only until he turned off the main road.
His head had started to hurt, so he took out the other joint and watched the end of it spark to life beneath his nose.
Always, always Mack had tried to do the opposite of what people like Nick Flack and David Whatever-the-Fuck-His-Name-Was had told him to.
They said: Be a banker, dude, you’ll make a shit ton of cash, and Mack had not done it.
They said: Go ahead and play around on your wife, dude, everyone does, and Mack had not done it. (Even though apparently everyone thought he had!)
And now, in more direct language than ever before, those pricks were talking in his ear. Now they were writing him letters.
Mack stopped in front of the old shed. There were no streetlights at all now, and pretty much all he could see was the outline of the building and the glow of his cigarette.
The night was silent, though Mack swore he could hear a chorus of prick voices from all around the world, laughing at him.
His head began to swim, and he felt rage sloshing around with the wine in his stomach.
He couldn’t even complain. His whole life, he’d had enough food and a decent place to live.
He’d had his own opportunity and privilege bestowed upon him just by being born into the skin he was, he knew this.
And even though he’d lost her so cruelly, he’d had his mother too, with her excellent soundtrack and her relentless drive to make sure her son had everything he could want.
So yes, Mack was very aware that most people on the planet had it so much worse.
The thing was though, some had it better. And it was one of these better people who was screwing his wife.
He wished for his golf club then. He yearned to smack it against the dry, ramshackle wood, to feel the splintering of old boards as he beat the thing to death. But his iron was at home, and all Mack had now was the shirt on his back and the joint in his mouth.
You win, pricks.
In a single motion he flicked the joint from his lips into the tangle of weeds at the base of the small structure.
He saw its red tip land and surge slightly, and then it went dark.
He swayed on his feet, backward and forward, laughing at himself, at how ridiculous he was.
How inept even at this. Nick Flack and David Whateverhisnamewas would be so disappointed in him; he couldn’t even play their prick game right.
The wind picked up, and the sharp blast of winter air made Mack think of Christmas, of pine trees and eggnog and log fires.
How would they do Christmas now? In their miserable gray identikit house, in this isolated neighborhood among all this damage Hailey had inflicted?
Mack had barely registered the thin curl of smoke snaking up from the weeds when an angry lick of flame appeared.
He managed to stamp it out—he felt its heat through the sole of his sneaker—but then another burst of orange popped up, and another.
Mack stood frozen as the fire spread along the vegetation at the base of the little building, but by the time the first board had ignited, he had turned and run for home.