“I’m worried, Mom,” Kate said. “Noah and I—”
Noah interrupted. “Let’s face it, the market is shit. The brokerage is hurting—not layoffs bad, but tense.”
“Funds are switching all over the place,” Kate said. “He keeps taking money out of the brokerage and sending it up to thirty-seven. Or into the trust.”
A fog of inexplicable fear seeped in. “What do you mean?” Phoebe asked.
“What I said, Mom.” Kate rolled her eyes as though she were fifteen and reminding her mother to listen. “He’s switching millions from the holding accounts into the family foundation and the Club. Accounting, he keeps saying. Bookkeeping. But it’s hurting the company’s numbers. He ignores everything we say. Can you talk to him?”
Phoebe pushed away her plate, the smell of meat revolting. She clenched her hands in her lap. “If you were worried about money, why’d you let him help buy you the house?” she asked. Three million dollars he sent to Kate’s lawyer to speed the sale. “Chicken feed,” Jake had said.
“Dad wanted us to buy it,” Kate insisted.
“That’s the problem.” Phoebe crossed her arms to keep from throwing her own napkin. “How can he slow down if he keeps buying, buying, buying for everyone?”
“Don’t worry, Mom. You know it’s gonna be fine,” Noah said. “Dad always finds a way.”
CHAPTER 24
Phoebe
Freezing rain beat against the terrace door. The world felt as if it were going to explode this morning. Knots twisted Phoebe’s back. A vague apprehension suffused her every breath. Thanksgiving the previous week had been a subdued time, with everyone on best behavior and Jake nearly silent.
Last night, he’d ordered her to put money that he’d give her into her bank account, which made no sense with redemptions flooding in, but when she asked for his reasons, he wouldn’t clarify the request.
“Just do it.”
Two days ago, he couldn’t eat supper. Not a bite. He’d tried to hide his lack of appetite by picking at the fish, moving vegetables around on his plate, and barking about her lousy, boring suppers. Last night, she had found him with a giant bag of M&M’s, reaching steadily, hypnotically, hand in, hand out, while he watched some old John Wayne movie. He lived on sugar, water, and movies.
? ? ?
Phoebe slipped into the elevator and pressed the gold button for the thirty-eighth floor. She’d come for the money. Her hands trembled against the tissues and change in her pockets. December had turned so cold and wet that morning that she had put on her mother’s old fur coat. Jake said the same thing every time she wore it: “Why do you wear that ratty thing? Makes me look like a miser.”
Jake would take her into Fendi tomorrow and buy her anything if she so wished, but she didn’t wish at all. She hated fur and wrapped herself in this one only because it reminded her of Lola. Phoebe never would have imagined she’d miss her mother so much. In any case, her coat would be the last thing on Jake’s mind today. He had verged on unhinged when he called at eight that morning to remind her to get the money now!
“What’s the rush?” she’d asked, the phone crooked in her neck as she put together papers for a meeting with Eva.
“Don’t ask questions.” He sounded frantic. “Gig will have the check ready for you. Ten.”
“Ten million?”
“No, Pheebs. Ten dollars. I gotta go.”
She’d wanted to ask a thousand questions, but hearing the answers might have been worse than not knowing. Seeing Gig tempted her to dig—he took care of the Cupcake Project’s books, so that gave her rights—but terrifying article after article in the paper locked away her curiosity. Bear Stearns taken in a forced sale. Lehman Brothers, bankrupt. Merrill Lynch sold. What if something happened to JPE? Only remembering that they were part of a crowd soothed her. Everyone in New York ran scared these days. Jake was bookkeeping. He had handled crises before and would again.
Light poured through the bank of floor-to-ceiling windows. She forced a smile at the receptionist. “Hi, Wendy. How are the kids?”
“Jesse finally got his braces off. He’s thrilled and . . .”
Phoebe nodded, hearing nothing as the woman unrolled her life.
Jake’s secretary waved as Wendy babbled. Phoebe waved back, but avoided eye contact with Connie. Ordinarily, Phoebe never came into the office without chatting with her, but Jake’s insistence drummed. The money needs to be there before noon. Got it?
“Excuse me, Wendy.” Phoebe interrupted midgush as the receptionist expressed her gratitude to Jake for paying for her son’s braces. “Gig’s waiting for me. We’ll catch up later, hon.”
Secretaries, drivers, data entry clerks—staff at JPE were always thanking her for operations funded, overdue tuition bills paid. In a field known for people leaping from one dangled carrot to another, at JPE, they settled in for the duration.
Phoebe headed down the corridor and entered Gig’s office.
“Phoebe, doll.” Gig came from behind his desk and pecked her on the cheek. “I have everything ready.”
He handed over a thin envelope with her name. She didn’t check it, simply tucked it in her purse. She didn’t stop in to see Jake, whose words rang: Get the fuck over to the bank, pronto. When she reached the waiting Town Car, Leon put down the Daily News and hurried out from the front seat, but she had the back door opened before him.
“The bank on Fifty-Third, please, Leon.”
“Pleasure, Mrs. Pierce.”
Phoebe worshipped Leon’s tendency not to make small talk. Being Mrs. Pierce meant providing smiles and sympathy, keeping up with births and deaths, bar mitzvahs and confirmations. Jake had pushed her years ago to become the maternal face of JPE. She carried the JPE employees around in her head: Wendy’s son’s crooked teeth, Connie’s mother’s breast cancer, Leon’s kids’ five college tuitions—they crowded her mind along with the people from the Cupcake Project and Mira House.
? ? ?
A pink-faced man materialized and ushered her into a hushed back room the moment she entered the bank. Perhaps the suited woman at the dais behind the security guard watched for clients with multimillion-dollar accounts, and then, when one appeared, summoned an executive with a stroke of a computer key.
“Mrs. Pierce, how nice to see you,” he said. “Owen King,” he reminded her without a hint of judgment about her memory.
“And you, Mr. King.”
“How can we help you today?”
She patted her purse. “I have a deposit.”