The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  “You don’t sound happy,” she said.

  “Hey, what’s it my business? She was only my daughter.”

  In his bitterness she heard an invitation to pry.

  “Saul,” she said cautiously, “had you got the impression that Sandi and Jeff weren’t getting along?”

  “You think they tell me anything? I’m just the father who writes the checks. That’s all …”

  He closed his mouth, appearing to masticate on his words for a few seconds.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” he said, deciding to spit the rest of it out. “If I thought he wasn’t treating her like an absolute princess, I would’ve cut him off years ago.”

  “What do you mean, ‘cut him off ’?”

  “Who the hell do you think helped pay for this house?” He turned his palms up. “You’d think they’d at least be able to furnish it themselves.”

  “Wait a second. You paid for this house?”

  “That’s my name on the deed. Unless my brilliant son-in-law has decided to change his name to Feinberg as well.”

  “But I thought Jeff’s business was good.” She put her hands on her hips.

  “Sure it is. And I look just like Cary Grant.”

  He grunted like an old garbage disposal, and for a moment she’d felt sure that he was about to spit on the onyx floor.

  “Then who paid for the old house?” Lynn asked. “Didn’t they sell that before they moved here?”

  “Mine too. Picked it up for thirty thousand less than its asking price and sold it for almost twice as much. You think I went into real estate so I could lose money?”

  “But I still don’t understand.” She blinked as if a fly had just gone past her face. “What about Jeff’s company? I thought they were making ten, twelve million dollars a year.”

  “My love, do you know what the first great lesson of the Bible is?” He looked at her with a kind of fatherly indulgence. “It’s not Do unto others. It’s If something looks too good to be true, it probably is. For five years, I’ve been helping float this kid and telling him his business plan doesn’t make sense on paper. I keep asking him, ‘Where does the profit come in? What’s your revenue stream?’ And he keeps telling me that I’m out of it, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that there’s a new—he crooked his fingers to make quotation marks—‘paradigm’ with the Internet. Ha!”

  “So you’ve been helping to underwrite Jeff’s company this whole time?”

  “You call it underwriting; I call it bloodletting. By this spring, I told him enough is enough. I said he had to cut his overhead by fifty percent and come up with a new plan to take this company public in a year or I was pulling the plug on him.”

  “Oh.” Lynn swallowed. “I guess that’s understandable.”

  She wondered how Barry and she would handle having their backs up against the wall this way. She told herself that they’d be strong and stick together. But then again, she’d noticed the way Barry seemed to get quiet and tense lately whenever she asked him how Retrogenesis’s stock was doing.

  “Listen,” said Saul, “I loved my daughter, but I have other children and grandchildren and a wife with stepchildren I have to try and help support. My name is not Warren Buffett, and my pockets are not the Grand Canyon. You have to set limits, even with your children. Otherwise, they never learn to do things for themselves.”

  “Of course. You’re right, Saul.”

  She listened to the sounds of the kids’ swords and bats beating against the baby-sitter’s shield, noticing how much emptier the house seemed now that she had this information. Almost like a movie set deserted by the cast and crew.

  She saw Inez retreat from the force of the blows, each one seeming to say, You’re not my mother; you’re not my mother. The baby-sitter backed into the kitchen and let the door flap shut after her, a light breeze ruffling the children’s hair. Dylan and Isadora looked at each other and then gazed toward the front of the house.

  “Grandpa, come play with us!” Dylan raised his sword, the little warrior beckoning. “I’ll be the bad guy.”

  “Can you believe I gotta start this shit all over?” Saul sighed and reluctantly started to take his jacket off. “At my age.”

  26

  “WHAT’S UP?” ROSS Olson asked as Barry walked into his office. “I’m sorry I wasn’t around to return the call yesterday. Chiropractor appointment in the afternoon and Curriculum Night at Dalton. The perils of being an old husband with a young wife.”

  Kara, honey-haired, golden-thighed, and thirty-two, grinned from a picture on a side shelf next to framed finger paintings by the kids and a photo of Ross with his old artillery unit in Vietnam.

  “I went to see Mark Young,” said Barry.

  Instead of sitting down, he stood before Ross, hands deep in his pockets, flexing slightly at the knees as if he was getting ready to jump on top of the desk.

  “And what was on his feeble mind?” Ross swiveled sideways in his black leather office chair.

  “We got problems.”

  “Do tell.”

  “He knows how badly we’re stuck in Phase Two trials for Chronex. I think I scared him off using any more information about the Monkey Suit, but there’s nothing I can do to move our drugs through the pipeline faster. If the FDA moves up our deadline for filing results to December fifteenth, like they’re threatening to, we’re not going to be ready, and he’s gonna be all over us again, saying we misled our investors.”

  “I’ll call Paul Fleming down in Washington,” said Ross, referring to the former Florida congressman who’d done lobbying for Retrogenesis. “Maybe he can buy us a few more months.”

  “There’s something else.” Barry cocked his head to the right, looking past Ross for a moment to the exact spot where he’d seen the American Airlines plane coming in low.

  “Okay.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you sold four thousand shares of your stock this summer?”

  Ross’s face became taut in the middle and wrinkled on the sides, like a tarpaulin stretched by a baseball ground crew on a rainy day.

  “Who told you that?” he asked.

  “Young did. His researchers caught it.”

  “And why is it any of your business?”

  “Ross, I just made a speech to the executive officers of this company, telling them why they shouldn’t abandon ship. And now I see the captain’s already in the lifeboat.”

  “Oh, that is just a pile of thoroughbred shit.” Ross’s chair gave a small insulted squeak. “You knew I was buying a summerhouse on the Vineyard.”

  “I thought you’d already closed on it.”

  “Kara and I agreed that we should lay out a bigger down payment and reduce the monthly mortgage. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  “Of course not.” Barry put his shoulders back. “But I just want to remind you that there are a lot of people risking almost everything they have on this enterprise staying afloat. And they have a right to know if the ship’s going down.”

  “The ship is not going down,” Ross said. “We’re going to be outlining a new ‘Path to Profitability’ report to the investors in the next six months. Coridal is coming on three new Asian markets in January. And I didn’t want to say anything premature, but I just set up a meeting with one of the major pharmas next week, who might be interested in giving us some extra support to finish off our R-and-D work on Chronex.”

  “These aren’t the same guys Steve’s been talking to, are they?”

  “Shit, no.” Ross gave a barbed chuckle. “He’s got a friend at Pfizer who he thinks is going to put him in my seat. That boy’s got more ambition than sense.”

  “Then who are you talking to?”

  “Well, I don’t want it getting around, but you know Bill Brenner and I are still close …”

  “Oh, come the fuck on.” Barry winced. “Brenner Home Care? Bill Brenner’s a psychopath. I worked on that pesticide case for five years with you, Ross. I know how he works
. He’ll surround himself with yes-men and ease the rest of us out one by one …”

  “I’ve already made it clear to Bill that he wouldn’t be the Grand Pooh-bah of this particular lodge. I told him we were envisioning more of a supporting role.”

  “You mean, he’d become one of our creditors?”

  “That’s one possibility.” Ross angled his chair. “But I wouldn’t make any definitive moves without consulting the rest of the executive committee.”

  “Look”—Barry found himself fingering the coins in his pocket like worry beads—“all I’m asking is that you give the rest of us a little heads up if you’re seriously considering a move like that. It’s going to be hard as hell finding another job in this economy.”

  “Barry”—Ross stood up—“it’s like I told my men in ’Nam. I may ask you to take risks, but I’ll never ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.”

  “Keep me in the loop,” Barry said tersely.

  But as he walked out of the office and headed down the hall, he remembered that Ross’s company had lost more than half its men in a firefight near Da Nang.

  27

  LYNN WENT INTO Sandi’s kitchen to put away the lasagna, apple pie, and salad she’d made and found Inez, the baby-sitter, leaning against the counter, trying to catch her breath.

  “Hoo, boy.” Inez put her cardboard shield down and wiped her brow. “They wear me out.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re here for them.” Lynn opened the Sub-Zero and shoved the food in. “They must need a lot of attention right now.”

  “Please, God, tell me about it. I was here all day and all night Sunday and then all day Monday until midnight, please, God, when Jeff came back from the police station,” Inez said, emphatic Jamaican accent bobbing and weaving among her words. “Then I had to get my granddaughter ready for school and go by Jeanine at ten the next day, please, God, because I’m only supposed to be here three days a week. Then I had to come back here at four yesterday so Jeff could go out. Do you know I’m beginning to wonder if I ever get back home?”

  Inez was the Holy Grail of suburban nannies, a fabulous cook with a driver’s license. She was a compact woman in her midforties with quick darting eyes in a round pleasant face. A woman who could keep her own counsel but never miss a thing. Lynn had met her while she was baby-sitting Jeanine’s kids and always found her a gas to talk to, not only because she was wise about children but because she was tart, discerning, and undeluded in a way that most white middle-class people in the suburbs couldn’t afford to be about themselves.

  “And in the meantime, Jeff needs all his shirts with starch on a hanger, not folded, in the drawer. Do you know he needs all his suits back from the dry cleaner so he can look at them and then decide which one to wear to the funeral?”

  “Hmm.”

  Lynn watched dry ice vapor tumble out of the freezer, still thinking about the conversation she’d had with Saul. So odd that he’d been carrying Sandi and Jeff financially for such a long time. What must that have done to their marriage? She remembered Sandi confiding to her right before the wedding that one of the things she loved most about Jeff was that he’d given her a way to stop being so dependent on her dad.

  “Inez”—she turned around—“were Jeff and Sandi fighting a lot right before she disappeared?”

  “What do you mean a lot?” Inez busied herself, folding dish towels. “He was always after her for spending too much money on the house, and she was always after him about those nasty habits he has. Please, God. I hate to talk about some of the things I’ve bundled up in the trash.”

  Good old Inez. You could always rely on her to come across with the dirt. A couple of years ago, Jeanine had gone back to work part-time and Inez had matter-of-factly told Lynn that she was the one personally providing the clean urine so Jeanine could pass the company’s drug test.

  “What kinds of things?” asked Lynn.

  “Oh, you know, man things.” Inez wrinkled her nose. “They have their nasty ways. I hate to tell you about some of the videos up on the shelf in his study.”

  Though how Inez would know what was on the tapes if she hadn’t looked at them pretty carefully herself, Lynn wasn’t sure.

  “Do you think he ever hit her?” she asked instead.

  “Oh”—Inez turned on the sink and started washing glasses by hand—“I never saw that.”

  “Well, had anything changed between them?” Lynn looked around, realizing there was no dishwasher in the kitchen.

  “You know? I’ll tell you the truth what I saw happen,” said Inez, never one to resist the chance to tell a story. “Sandi was always asking him to clean those rain gutters outside the house. You know? But he was always upstairs watching his sports. And then one day, a few weeks ago, she wouldn’t leave him alone, and so he finally got high up on a ladder to do it and he slipped. I was in here, and all of a sudden I hear all kinds of bangin’ and yellin’ and cursin’ from outside. Because he’s hanging on to one of them aluminum gutters to keep from falling, and she’s standing under him, yelling for him to let go before he tears the gutter off the house.”

  “Really?” asked Lynn, the image of Jeff dangling by his fingertips burning directly into her visual imagination. “So, what happened?”

  “So he let go and fell in her rosebushes, and then all that yelling started up again. He comes in this house, limping and cursing the hell out of her because she loves the house more than she loves him. And she’s rushing around, telling him that’s not true and trying to get him ice for his leg. And the kids are upstairs covering their ears. Oh, Lord, that was something.”

  Lynn shook her head, still framing the scene in her mind. Portrait of a marriage under pressure.

  “So have the police talked to you about this already?” Lynn asked.

  “Ye-esss,” said Inez, trapping the word in her teeth. “They’ve been by last night and again this morning.”

  “I didn’t realize that.”

  “Yup. I talked to a couple of them. Big white one and a little bald Spanish one.”

  “I guess they must’ve asked you if either Jeff or Sandi was seeing other people.”

  Inez cut the water off with a quick muscular turn of the wrist and stood there watching suds circle the drain. Lynn had the sense that a faint but unmistakable social boundary had just been transgressed.

  “Mrs. Schulman, I need this job,” Inez said evenly. “My family needs me to make this money. I’ve got one daughter on public assistance and another who’s HIV positive and won’t take her drugs. I’ve got four grandchildren I’m helping to take care of. I don’t need to have a problem with the police or the people I work for up here.”

  Lynn looked down and saw Inez squeezing a Brillo pad so hard in her fist that pink soap oozed out between her knuckles.

  “I’m sorry,” Lynn said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Inez turned the sink on again, letting the water run hot enough to make vapor clouds rise toward the ceiling.

  “So who was it?” asked Lynn.

  “I don’t know. Mrs. Pollack already asked me about this.”

  “Did she?”

  “Oh, I tell you, she give me the third degree!”

  Lynn snorted, remembering how critical Jeanine had been yesterday. Let the police do their job. Sure. Now it turned out she’d been snooping herself. And she called Sandi competitive?

  “So you told her you don’t know anything,” said Lynn, not above doing a little scorekeeping of her own.

  “I don’t know anything.” Inez rinsed out a highball glass and a Pikachu juice cup. “It’s none of my business.”

  “I don’t believe you. I know all the extra hours you gave Sandi. I saw you out there sword-fighting just now with the kids. So I know this isn’t just a job to you.”

  She could see Inez fighting with herself as she started drying the glasses with a dish towel more vigorously than she needed to, the drain slowly pulling the remaining suds toward the middle of the s
ink.

  “You didn’t hear anything from me,” she said finally, opening the cupboard to start putting the glasses away. “Please, God.”

  “What is it?”

  “I came home early one day with the kids because the library was closed, and I saw the man who put up the deer fence had his truck in the driveway but no one was working in the backyard. I started to come in the house, and then I heard these noises from upstairs in the bedroom …”

  Inez turned over a wineglass and looked at it from the bottom, leaving no doubt about the kind of noises she meant.

  “So, what’d you do?”

  “I took the kids and went to the supermarket for a half-hour.” Inez carefully placed the glass on the shelf above the children’s cups. “And when I came back, the truck was still there. So I took them to the video store until it got dark, and then I called to make sure it was okay to bring them home.”

  “And did Jeff ever find out about it?”

  Lynn felt a little electric surge up the back of her legs as she heard Jeff’s voice right outside the kitchen door, talking patiently to the kids. He must’ve just got home.

  “I don’t know.” Inez dropped her voice. “I never said anything.”

  She shut the cupboard and wiped her hands on a dish towel.

  “So who was he?” whispered Lynn, determined to grab any last scrap before the baby-sitter fled. “The deer fence guy. Was his name on the side of a truck?”

  “He was a cop,” Inez muttered as she slid past her to start setting the dinner table. “One of the same ones who talked to me. He didn’t know I’d seen him that day.”

  28

  JUST AS THE train pulled out of Grand Central that night, Barry looked over and saw a familiar figure come chuffing and staggering red-faced up the aisle. His guy. His traveling companion. The keeper of the cubicle, the lord of the saltbox, the ignorer of the river. His doppelgänger, who he hadn’t laid eyes on since the Eleventh. At that moment, Barry was so elated to see him alive that he actually blurted out, “How you doing?” after the guy collapsed in his usual seat and caught his breath. The man froze with his laptop half-opened, slightly aghast that a stranger was trying to pick him up, and then quickly turned away.