Bleeding Heart (17 page)

“Mom!” Olivia said, her voice shrill on the other end of the line. “I just finished the
Times
piece on Mackenzie. This is your client, right? And he’s
dead
? He
died
at your big opening day? He’s all you’ve been talking about for the last four months—and you didn’t think to call me and tell me the news yourself?”

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “But it’s been so chaotic—”

“I bet!” she said. “This is just incredible. It’s pretty clear the man was nothing but a crook! I can’t believe you allowed yourself to get involved with him. I can’t believe you were so
proud
of the work you did for him! What is it about you that makes you drawn to these cheats and liars . . .”

She stopped herself before I did it for her. It had been years since she’d made even a passing reference to her father. I think that, of the three of us, Olivia had been the most damaged by his betrayal. She certainly was the first to claim to have put the whole thing behind her, slamming the door on the past. I was shocked to learn, a week before her wedding, that she hadn’t yet told her fiancé, Allen, about what had happened.
Why should I?
she’d told me.
Daddy has nothing to do with who I am now. Nothing!
It had taken me until then to realize that she wasn’t just ashamed of what Richard had done; she was terrified by it. If someone she loved and admired had turned out to be such a monster, then whom could she trust? Including herself.

“I’m sorry you had to learn about this the way you did,” I told her. “I should have called, but—honestly—I knew you’d be upset, and I had enough on my plate. Mackenzie’s death and business problems have complicated things for me—and for Green Acres.”

“Complicated? In what way?”

“He owed me money. A lot of it.”

“Oh, Mom . . .” Olivia sighed. I would have so much preferred that she yell at me the way she had earlier. Because in the slow
exhalation of her breath I heard her opinion of me shifting . . . changing . . . deflating.

Olivia must have called Franny as soon as she hung up with me. Ten minutes later my younger daughter was on the phone.

“Mommy? Are you okay?”

“Yes, Franny. I’ll be fine.”

“But this money situation—how bad is it?”

“I don’t really know yet.”

“But you did make him sign a contract, right? You have something in writing that will stand up in a court of law?”

I thought of the day I presented my plans to Mackenzie. The moment of triumph when he turned to me and said,
It’s perfect! Absolutely fucking perfect! I knew you could do it!
How he’d reached so casually into his desk drawer to pull out his ledger and write me the biggest check I’d ever seen. After that, it seemed ridiculous to have him sign anything else. I didn’t use contracts at Green Acres. It wasn’t that kind of business. I usually just called and gave my clients an estimate of what any given project would cost, and then sent in the bill when it was finished. I’d never had a problem in the past. But Franny and Olivia existed in a different world, one where verbal agreements were no doubt considered antediluvian.

“Mom . . . are you still there?” Franny asked.

“Yes,” I told her. “I’m here.” But where I actually stood I really couldn’t say.

Y
ou learn a lot about people when you’re in financial trouble. Mara, for instance. I was both touched and taken aback when she said I didn’t need to pay her until I got our money problems sorted out. What a selfless gesture, I thought, from someone who was usually so curt and detached. Her behavior continued to impress me in the days following Mackenzie’s death—days that stretched into nearly a week with nothing resolved about Mackenzie’s funeral service. Apparently, for reasons that weren’t at all clear, the medical examiner was refusing to release the body to the family for burial.

“Eleanor says the ex-wife is reading everybody the riot act,” Mara told me the Friday after Mackenzie died. “The hospital. The coroner’s office. Eleanor, even. Like she has anything to do with this. What a b-i-t-c-h!”

It felt strange, after spending almost every waking hour at Mackenzie’s for so many months, to have no direct communication with the household. If not for Mara’s relationship with Eleanor, I wouldn’t have had a clue what was going on. That the two women
continued their unlikely friendship, even though the link that first brought them together had been broken, intrigued me.

“So you’ve seen Eleanor?” I asked.

“We talk on the phone,” Mara said. “She asked me and Danny over for lunch tomorrow. She doesn’t like being alone at the house. It’s depressing for her now that Mackenzie’s gone—and she doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her.”

“It’s kind of you to go,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” Mara said. “I
like
going. She’s good people. And she’s great with Danny. He just loves her.”

Though the way to Mara’s heart was obviously through her son, I couldn’t help but wonder what else moved and motivated her. I remembered the stricken look on her face—and her terrified
Is he dead?
—when she learned that Mackenzie had been rushed to the hospital. Had she cared about him more deeply than I realized, or did the crisis perhaps remind her of some other similar event in the past? Her behavior since his death had seemed a little unusual as well. Though she remained acerbic and short-tempered, she’d never been more helpful. In fact, she seemed to be going out of her way to be of use, coming in early and working late, keeping track of the crews, getting the bills out on schedule, fielding the queries about payment that were starting to mount, and, in general, freeing me up to make calls to current clients and potential new ones. She even brought me a few leads.

“You might want to follow up on these,” she said, handing me a creased copy of the Open Day handout with three names and numbers written in her careful schoolgirl hand on the back.

“Who are they?”

“People I met at the Open Day. I talked to them about Green Acres. You know—what we do, how we work.”

“Mara! You actually pitched them? That’s great. But then maybe you should handle these yourself.”

“No way,” she’d said, turning back quickly to her computer. “That’s not what I’m good at.”

But just what Mara was capable of remained an open question in my mind. I realized that something had shifted between us since Mackenzie’s death. The crisis had brought us closer together, the way bad times often will. But it was more than that. Mara had become invested in Green Acres to a degree I’d never sensed from her before. I felt we shared a mutual determination to get our business back on track. And that, in fact, it had now become
our
business.

Other people, however, were less helpful. Less understanding. Nate had been particularly persistent, calling every day, leaving increasingly angry messages. I finally paid him and our summer crew out of my personal checking account. I gave Mara a handwritten check as well.

“Just so you know, I’m not cashing this now,” she said. “And give me a list of everything you’re paying with your own money. I’ll record it as a loan to the company. And we’ll reimburse you as soon as we get things straightened out.”

Her matter-of-fact tone—so different from the semihysterical reactions I’d received from my daughters—cheered me more than I could say. She seemed so determined. It was almost as if she had no doubt, at least none of the sleepless dread that I was experiencing, that we’d pull through this.

The Lombardis’ pink stucco mansion, which Sal had named Lombardi Oaks, was located down the mountain from Mackenzie’s. It featured multiple turrets, towers, balconies, parapets, and mullioned windows, and seemed to have been designed by the same architectural firm that came up with Cinderella’s castle for Disney World. It was, as far as I was concerned, a real hodgepodge, but Sal was enormously pleased with it. It was clearly, in his mind, a symbol of his success. He spoke frankly about his hardscrabble
background. He was proud to be self-taught and self-made, a rough diamond in the venture capitalist world that was so densely populated with Ivy League types.

“I work by my gut,” he told me when I first came to know him. “I’d trust my instincts over all the spreadsheets and P&Ls in the world. Numbers can be manipulated and massaged, but not a person’s character. And I like to think that I invest in people, Alice, not companies.”

Sal and Gigi had been Green Acres clients almost from the moment I’d opened my doors. I’d first met Sal during a fund-raiser at the Berkshire Botanical Garden, one of the many not-for-profit organizations in the area that he supported financially. Though the tickets were pricey, I’d decided that attending would be good for my fledgling business. But, not wanting to go alone, I’d asked Gwen to attend the gala with me. I should have realized it at the time, of course, but when Sal first struck up a conversation with the two us he wasn’t really all that interested in Green Acres. He glanced from me to Gwen as he swirled the ice around in his tumbler of scotch, nodding as I tried to soft-sell him on my services. But his gaze lingered on Gwen as I nattered on. Until Gigi found us, that is.

“I like what Alice here was saying about using sustainable materials in her landscaping work,” he told his wife, surprising me a little. It seemed to me he’d been only half listening to my spiel, but I would come to realize that he didn’t miss much. “What do you think about having her give us a proposal on the pool project?”

Gigi nodded and smiled, scrutinizing the three of us as if trying to puzzle something out.

“Whatever you say, darling.”

After Gigi led Sal off to their table for dinner, Gwen said to me, “Man, does she have
him
on a short leash!”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on, Alice! Can’t you tell? He’s a player. Didn’t you see him mentally undressing us? What’s happened to your sexual radar?”

“I’ve no use for it anymore,” I said. “And if he was mentally undressing anybody, it was you, not me. But I sort of liked the guy.”

“Who’s saying I didn’t?”

It was true that I wasn’t as attuned as I used to be to sexual atmospherics, but that didn’t mean I was oblivious to them. I kept my antennae up when I was around Sal over the weeks and months that followed as I worked with him and Gigi on the pool garden. But I didn’t get the sense that he was on the prowl. He and Gigi seemed devoted to each other and their three grown children. And they were both at the giddy, adoring stage with their first grandchild, pressing their latest iPhone photos on me whenever the opportunity arose. The only hint I got of any extracurricular interests on Sal’s part was when he asked me for a personal reference for Gwen.

It was a couple of months after the Botanical Garden gala and Gwen had put her name forward as a candidate for the executive director position of the Woodhaven Historical Society. Though it seemed a bit of a stretch to me, Gwen had made the case that her varied backgrounds in real estate, sales, and management, as well as her extensive knowledge of the area, made her exceptionally qualified. And apparently she’d been able to sell the board on this idea, as she’d managed to land on the short list of candidates. She’d also mounted a major charm offensive and rallied every important person she knew in the Berkshires to write a letter on her behalf.

“It’s now down to me and some dullard from Boston with an MFA in historic preservation,” she’d told me. “But if they primarily
want somebody who can go around shaking the money tree for Bridgewater House, they really need to go with a local. Someone who knows where all the wallets are buried. Sal Lombardi’s head of the search committee. So put in a good word for me, okay? I gave him your name as a reference.”

Sal’s questions about Gwen were, at first, circumspect and by-the-book. Was she reliable? Hardworking? Trustworthy? Did she seem to me to be a self-starter? Then they drifted into more personal territory. How long had I known her? Was her character all that it seemed to be? Of course, I answered all these queries with glowing affirmatives. And then he threw in the kicker. Was she . . .
married
?

“What?” I asked.

“I was just wondering if she was—well—you know—really settled down in this area,” Sal said, stumbling over his words. “I mean, I’d hate to hire her and then have her leave for some more glamorous post elsewhere in a year or two. And I always find that married—”

“She’s not,” I said, putting him out of his misery. Or had I, unintentionally, caused him more heartbreak than the poor man deserved? Because, though I was now alerted to the fact that he was attracted to Gwen, I had no idea at that point just how smitten he was with her. And I was never sure how soon after that their affair started—or if it had already begun. I didn’t want to think that Gwen had willfully used Sal’s interest in her as leverage to get the job. But in less than six months after taking the position, she’d spilled the beans to me that they’d been romantically involved. And that he was ready to get a divorce—anything!—to keep her in his life.

“He’s a real sweetheart,” Gwen had told me. “But it’s over for me. I’m just not attracted to him anymore. He was a mess when I told him. He’s such a macho kind of guy, but he cried like a baby.
Then he pulled himself together and told me not to worry about the job. That this wouldn’t affect our professional relationship. He’d deal with it. You know, Alice, remember when I told you I thought he was a player? I was wrong. He’s not. He told me that he’d never cheated on Gigi before this. And I believe him.”

I never let on to Sal that I knew what had happened. In the last couple of years I’d been in social situations with both him and Gwen, and only the closest of observers would have suspected that they’d ever been more than colleagues. Gwen had no trouble being breezy and upbeat, but I thought Sal acted different in her presence. He stood erect, shoulders back, eyes straight ahead, like a soldier at attention. And that’s what he was in a way, I suppose: a man still at war with his feelings.

Though when I went to see him a week after Mackenzie’s death, he seemed very much at ease. He greeted me at the front door and led me through the elaborately furnished downstairs. So different from Mackenzie’s understated taste, the interior design style of Lombardi Oaks was oversized and overstuffed: enormous tufted chairs and couches, ornately carved wooden tables and breakfronts, gilded mirrors.

“Gigi’s at Kripalu doing her yoga thing,” Sal told me as he showed me into his study. “She said to say hi. But I wanted to talk to you alone anyway. Take a seat. Care for a drink or anything?”