Kelly took off her dark glasses and looked at her face in the bathroom mirror. It was strange, still, to see the patch where her left eye used to be. When she was fourteen, her creepy science teacher Mr. Skinner used to massage her shoulders during class and say, “You don’t have to worry about science, sweetie. Your face is your fortune.”
Well, now her fortune was her fortune.
Fuck you, Mr. Skinner.
Kelly knew her happiness wasn’t to be found living full-time in Beekman, but she also knew this: Beekman was the best place for her son. It might be filled with boring old housewives who volunteered to be lunch ladies, but for a kid who stood to inherit billions, the chance to be a stone’s throw from a normal childhood was priceless. Rocco’s best friend, some kid named Theo, lived in a house that was smaller, square-footage-wise, than Rocco’s playroom. Kelly knew this only because Gordon had found the school directory and looked up the kid’s address on some real estate website and then told her about it. And just last week, Rocco had asked her if they could go to Hershey Park. A kid on his soccer team named Brannon—the same Brannon who had taught Rocco the word titty—told him it was the best place ever. Not Aspen, not Nantucket, not Gstaad. Not even Disneyland. Hershey Park.
And it was good for him, Kelly knew. All those things Gordon had wanted, the rock collections and the sledding and the little American flags, all of that was real. She might have been raised in a trailer park by a single mom with a weakness for bad boys and a taste for methamphetamine, but Kelly knew what childhood was supposed to be like. And Rocco had it.
But all of that didn’t take away from the fact that Kelly wanted to cause Gordon some pain. She wanted the loss of her eye to cost him something, something more than just houses and stock portfolios and cold hard cash.
And so she sat alone in her lawyers’ bathroom for a while and had herself a good long think.
*
Izzy had gone radio silent on Owen, so completely silent that he began to worry about her. No calls, no texts, no menacing emoticons—nothing. When he saw Sunny Bang at soccer practice that week, he pulled her aside and asked her if she’d talked to Izzy.
“She’s gone,” said Sunny Bang.
“What do you mean, gone?” Owen asked. “She’s dead?”
“No, you idiot,” said Sunny Bang. “She’s gone. She disappeared. Nobody knows where she went.”
“Someone has to know. She can’t have just vanished.”
“She did.”
“What about her house? What about her store?”
“She hired a lawyer from Poughkeepsie to handle everything. He’s selling her house, liquidating the inventory of her store, getting rid of all of her stuff. He won’t say where she went or where she wants the money sent.”
“That’s crazy,” said Owen.
“It’s really unhealthy,” said Sunny Bang. “She needs support. She needs the Sunny Bang meal-delivery treatment, at least. I would drive her to her chemo appointments. We weren’t best friends or anything, but that’s what I do.”
“She told me she didn’t want any treatment,” said Owen. “She said she was too far gone. I figured she was upset and she’d change her mind.”
“You’re never too far gone. My uncle had stage-five colon cancer and the doctors said he had three months left. It’s four years later and he’s still alive.”
“There’s no such thing as stage-five cancer.”
“There is in Korea,” said Sunny Bang.
“Your uncle still lives in Korea?”
“No, he lives in Jersey. ‘Every day is a gift,’ he says. He has to crap in a bag but he seems pretty happy.”
Conversations with Sunny Bang sometimes went like this, Owen thought. Half of you felt like you were talking to a wise woman from an esteemed and ancient culture, the other half left each conversation genuinely confused.
“Well, where do you think she’d go?” said Owen.
“I don’t know. We weren’t friends like that. I don’t know her people. She’s not even on Facebook under her real name.”
“What about her ex-husband?”
“Christopher? He doesn’t know anything,” said Sunny Bang. “Not about the cancer, not about where she might be.”
“Did he say anything? Anything at all?”
“Not really,” Sunny said. “Just that he thought something was up when a delivery guy showed up at his front door and gave him his great-grandfather’s desk.”
*
When Kelly returned to the conference room, even her lawyers had no idea what she was planning to propose. They had been hanging out around the conference table, leaning way back in their chairs, billing their hours while they texted each other about how their client was the luckiest goddamn floozy on the planet. They joked about trying to seduce her and then marrying her and how they’d refuse to sign a prenup. They speculated about what she looked like without her dark glasses on and whether or not she’d be willing to wear them during sex and/or blow jobs.
Kelly settled down into her chair and looked across the table at Gordon.
“I want Gordon to get Mrs. Lowell her job back.”
“And who is that?” asked Hugh Willix.
“The kindergarten teacher that Gordon got fired,” said Kelly. “The one who turned into a woman.”
“Mr. Allen can’t do that. It falls under the jurisdiction of the local school-board officials. It’s entirely beyond his control.”
“I think Gordon can control anything he wants. And I’m not going to sign anything until it’s done.”
And with that, Kelly pushed her chair away from the conference table, hooked her elbow through her Dior bag, and made what she thought of as her Hollywood exit.
Twenty-Three
We all have a strong preference that life should be easy, comfortable, and pain-free, but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with life when it isn’t those things. It’s just life. It’s just life and it’s not how you would prefer it to be, but that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with it.
—Constance Waverly WaverlyRadio podcast #132
No,” said Owen.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I mean no, I don’t want you to go to the city tomorrow. I don’t want you to see whoever you see when you go there.”
Lucy and Owen were in the living room, both on their laptops. Wyatt was asleep, early for once, and the house was quiet except for bursts of typing and clicking.
“The six months aren’t up yet, Owen,” said Lucy.
“I’m aware of that.”
“I’m going to the city.”
“No.”
Lucy closed her laptop and looked at her husband. “Honestly, I don’t know what you mean by no.”
“I mean, I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to go into the city to see the person you’ve been seeing there. We had an agreement. If things got too crazy and out of control, we would call it off.”
“Is that on the paper, Owen? Because I don’t remember that part.”
“I’m going to go get the legal pad,” he said.
“You’re going to go get the legal pad?” Lucy started to laugh. It was a forced, angry laugh. “I love it!”