Loved Me Once (Love, Romance and Business)

by Gail Hewitt

  The waiter appeared and wanted to know if they'd be doing the buffet. "I think Friday's is our best," he assured them.

  "I'd prefer the crab cakes," Maggie told him. "I love the crab cakes." Suddenly, against all odds, her mood was much better.

  "I'll have the same," Miles said, adding, "and bring a bottle of chilled sparkling water, Apollinaris if you have it."

  Lunch, as usual, was pleasant. She actually found herself laughing, in spite of the nagging worry that seemed to serve as emotional white noise these days whenever she wasn't focused on work. Afterwards, when he'd had the desk bring the rental around and she was pulling out, she looked in the rear-view mirror to see Miles standing, watching her leave, an unmistakably forlorn look on his face. She shook her head. What was she going to do about Miles? He seemed to be a genuinely nice man, but he puzzled her. She'd assumed he would get over whatever it was in his rather offhanded pursuit that piqued his interest. Yet, here he was. More to the point, here they were. She sighed and shook her head again, more than a little irritated that she couldn't help feeling pleased at that fact. Maybe, she conceded, what she needed to do about Miles was just relax and let nature take its course. She got tired sometimes of thinking about everything, always juggling. It wasn't as if she had other entanglements, certainly nothing that meant anything; and if Miles were seriously seeing anyone else, he was being very discreet about it. As for what Bill Holmes, her boss and the head of WHT, might think, neither Miles nor his family's company was yet a client, hard as Bill had worked to make that happen; so, technically, she wouldn't even be violating a company rule.

  She noticed that the rental car, which had been parked, windows closed, for several days, smelled of cigarette smoke as she inched her way south on Peachtree Street. She turned on the air conditioner in spite of the outside temperature, which hovered in the mid-forties. It irritated her that she would show up at her mother's smelling of stale smoke, a cardinal taboo in Elizabeth McLaurin's meticulously fresh environment, which, throughout Maggie's childhood, had been permeated with the scent of rosemary and fresh lemons. That wonderful aroma was, in fact, one of the few pleasant memories that she associated with her mother.

  The traffic grew so sluggish that she abandoned her usual route to Buckhead, instead turning east on Piedmont, then south on Roswell. The traffic was somewhat better here, and in a few minutes she was in a block that she'd once known very well. She could remember being brought to the Roxy Theater, just there, now a rock concert venue, to see a movie that her mother had halfway through decided was inappropriate for a girl her age and so they'd left, her father laughingly protesting. Still, he'd given in, as he always had. She supposed she remembered it so clearly because he'd died a few weeks later, a massive heart attack the doctor claimed, but Maggie had always felt that her mother had simply worn him out. She had that effect on people, even now, after all the changes in her mental and physical condition. Time had played cruel tricks on her mother's brain, but had done nothing to mellow her disposition.

  The car inched up another couple of feet. There was the place that had sold what? Some kind of paint? That was it. Dutch Boy Paint, she remembered triumphantly. And hadn't there been a shoe repair shop just there? And had the music shop been earlier or later? And around the corner, in a cluster of stores off West Paces Ferry, there had been a Baskin-Robbins. Those trips had stopped when her father died, but she remembered them well, even that his favorite flavor had been Rocky Road, which had immediately become hers. In fact, it was during one of those faintly illicit Baskin-Robbins excursions, as they got into the car for the drive home, when her father had said quietly, almost off-handedly, "You know, Pumpkin, I'm older than your mother and I may not always be around. I want you to promise me that, if ever I'm not, you'll look after her. She's not very well equipped to handle things on her own."

  Maggie had been twelve, old enough to understand at least something of what he meant, and she had solemnly agreed. Over the years, looking back on that conversation, which had also been within months of the fatal heart attack, she'd assumed that he had been saying one of those casual things that she'd noticed parents sometimes come out with when they feel particularly close to their offspring. It had, she remembered, made her feel grown-up and important, and perhaps that had been the point of it. Nowadays, however, she found herself wondering increasingly if he had a premonition of what was coming, and, if so, why on earth he hadn't structured the finances differently in his will.

  Whatever his motivation for the request, she had done as he'd asked. She had looked after her mother to the best of her ability, given Elizabeth McLaurin's headstrong nature. At first, of course, she'd been too young to have any influence over anything. For years, the bank officer named by her father as Maggie's financial guardian had been the one to refuse to mortgage the house and give Elizabeth McLaurin the proceeds. When Maggie became twenty-five, the age when, according to her father's will, she assumed all legal rights, the bank officer invited her to lunch at the Piedmont Driving Club and told her that she should not allow her mother to force her to encumber the house in any way, that Mrs. McLaurin had been left very well provided for, which was why Maggie had been left the real estate.

  "I had a great deal of respect for your father's judgment in leaving the house to you, and I'm sure he intended that you hold on to it, both as a home for your mother and as a future nest egg for you. All the property on West Paces Ferry is only going to become more valuable. They've already built cluster homes at the Northside end. It's my feeling that the same thing will happen to most of the acreage on your stretch as well. Just keep those taxes paid and your mother's hands off the deed." He'd smiled, but it was clear that he was serious.

  She'd thought his advice sound and had done her best to follow it. Now, it appeared, he was right. Buckhead, once so bucolic according to her father (who had grown up in the house toward which she was heading), now looked like a small city, complete with more than a few skyscrapers. It was very different than it had looked even during her adolescence. Miller's Books, the men's shop, the dry cleaner, the antiquarian bookstore, most of the places she remembered, were gone. Now, everything seemed to be some kind of boutique or bar or restaurant with an obscurely trendy name. She drove through the area frequently, for she was often in Atlanta on business and almost always came through on her way to the house. Those trips, however, were routine duty visits, done almost on autopilot, and she hadn't truly looked at the neighborhood in years. She supposed it was her mood that prompted her awareness today.

  She was really dreading this visit. Not that she ever exactly looked forward to seeing her mother, but today's dread was of an entirely different magnitude. Coming on top of the money situation, this felt very much like the final straw. What on earth had the doctor's office meant by their rather cryptic mention of "the billing issue?" As far as she could tell from the unending stream of notices regularly forwarded to her New York condo, between them Medicare (a program against which her mother had railed) and the supplemental insurance were covering everything related to doctors and medical facilities. As for the medicines — which seemed to change every few months — the prescription drug coverage took care of all but a portion of the cost. The balance — along with all household expenses — was charged to a credit card that she had given Amanda Perry, the LPN who lived with her mother, a card Maggie was careful to pay in full each month. There was no way that she could owe the doctor money. Common sense told her that his office probably wanted some additional information to do with billing, but ever since the conversation a few days ago a small knot of dread had remained firmly lodged in the pit of her stomach. When she'd tried to determine what the medical billing supervisor had meant, she was told the doctor would discuss the issue with her when they met this weekend.

  She hit the power button on the radio, but a commentator was talking nothing but doom and gloom about the economy. It seemed as if the world were trying to end all around her, at least when it came to money. S
he kept thinking about the money thing as the light finally changed and she turned right on West Paces Ferry and began to creep along the street that had once been as familiar as the driveway of the big white house toward which she now headed. A crease appeared between her large brown eyes, and she nervously swept back her heavy hair. What was she going to do about the money? When she was growing up, it had never been an issue. Financial matters were a non-item; she could not remember money ever being discussed while her father was alive. Now, it seemed to have become the perpetual leit motif of all her conversations with Amanda, her mother's LPN. The specifics might vary from one time to the next, but the theme never changed — more money was needed. One part or another of the house seemed always on the verge of falling apart, and finances had forced Maggie to reduce the housekeeping and yard services to twice a month and then only to do basic cleaning and tidying inside and, outside, to cut the grass and trim the shrubs at the front of the house. The old gardens at the rear, once her mother's pride, looked like an overgrown jungle. In any event, the yard was the least of her worries, for the taxes were now so high that she didn't see how she'd be able to pay them when they fell due the coming year. She'd taken out a loan to handle them the last time around, and was barely managing to make the payments on that. Except for the vintage Rolex she wore every day, the jewelry her grandmother left her had been sold years ago. She'd tapped out the last of her 401(k) earlier in the year. She'd already refinanced the New York condo, and static prices meant it hadn't increased enough in value to go that route again, even if credit weren't so tight in the general economy. She didn't own a car; the company arranged for rentals everywhere she went. As for her mother — the elegant, once socially prominent, once wealthy Elizabeth McLaurin — all that she had left, apart from her monthly Social Security stipend (another system against which she'd railed as long as she comprehended such things), was the one small trust fund that she hadn't been able to hand over to her spendthrift cousin to manage (the spendthrift's only qualification being that he was male and therefore entitled — even in Elizabeth McLaurin's usually suspicious eyes — to handle a widowed female relative's money). If Laurence McLaurin hadn't left the house in trust for Maggie instead of leaving it to his wife with the rest of his estate, they'd have almost nothing now. The bank manager's advice had been even better than he'd realized.

  Maggie wondered how much longer she'd be able to hang onto the house, and how on earth she would deal with her mother when she couldn't. She'd been on the verge of admitting that she was going to have to sell it five years before, when the last of the money from the sale of her grandmother's jewelry was gone, but it was then that the first of the spectacularly odd things happened. It had begun, Maggie remembered, with a call from her mother's bank manager. Mrs. McLaurin, he told her daughter, had withdrawn all of the money in her checking account and had announced to the bank at large that she knew they had been stealing from her. At first Maggie assumed that her mother was simply in the middle of one of her snit fits, the sort that brought out all her natural arrogance and prompted her to say things that she knew weren't true just to annoy the person to whom she was speaking. The irritation that Maggie had initially felt began to dissipate when she couldn't reach her mother at home and heard from the housekeeper that she, too, had been accused of theft before being dismissed.

  Maggie had immediately headed for LaGuardia and flown to Atlanta, which was sweltering in a mid-July heat wave. Once here, she'd looked everywhere she thought it was even possible her mother might go. There were few relatives left who were close enough to be likely hosts, but Maggie tried them all. She called the sorority to which her mother had belonged in college to see if they were having a special alumni event of the sort that Elizabeth McLaurin had once regularly attended. She called the widower of the woman who had been her mother's best friend for many years. She called the hospital to which her grandparents had given a wing, decades earlier, and on whose board her father and, then, her mother had sat for years, to see if the secretary of the board had heard from her. She called the wife of the executive pastor at her mother's church, a friend, to see if she had gone there. She called a couple of Atlanta clubs of which her mother was then still a member. She called a former housekeeper of whom her mother appeared to have been fond. Then, as a last resort — while she waited to see if the company that had issued the credit card she paid regularly every month would give her information on recent charges to allow the missing woman to be tracked in that way — she began to call all of her mother's favorite hotels, both in Atlanta and elsewhere.

  At last, at the Waldorf in New York, she got lucky. Mrs. McLaurin was indeed staying with them. If Miss McLaurin would hold, she'd be connected. Her mother answered the phone, proclaiming grandly, "The McLaurin Suite," and then indignantly asked Maggie when she was coming to take her to dinner as they'd arranged.

  Life around her mother had never been especially calm – the elder woman was too quixotic and demanding for that – but the last five years had been a nightmare. If it hadn't been for Amanda, hired immediately upon their return to Atlanta, the situation would have been impossible.

  What made the whole thing worse, or maybe better (she couldn't decide), was that there was no one with whom she could talk. Everyone assumed that the family money was still there, even Bill Holmes, her boss, the president of WHT, who had known her parents since his college years, whose graduate education, in fact, had been subsidized by her father. All of her parents' old friends had long since died or moved away, the only contact now the occasional Christmas card. The sole close relative remaining to her mother – apart from Maggie herself – was a female cousin, who'd argued so vehemently with Elizabeth McLaurin a few years earlier that the two women had only just now resumed speaking. The neighbors who'd lived on either side of the McLaurins on West Paces Ferry while Maggie was growing up had sold out years ago, and one of the houses was now a burned-out shell, desperately needing either rebuilding or taking down. The officer at the bank who had given Maggie the good advice had died about the time her mother began to lose her grasp, and Maggie's impression of his successor, a brusque man who'd obviously just as soon not be bothered by such an insignificant chore as superintending the small trust fund remaining to Elizabeth McLaurin, was that he would be uninterested in her well-being to the point of offensiveness. Even the doctor who was to meet Maggie the next day was relatively new to the situation, having taken over her mother's case when her long-time practitioner had dropped dead the year before. As for Maggie's business associates in New York, each had problems of his or her own, and she had never confided in any of them, not so much because she thought they'd be unsympathetic as because of her instinctive reluctance to reveal anything private to them. She knew they thought she'd been hired eight years earlier because Bill Holmes had known her parents, knew also that they disapproved of what they considered her meager credentials — a mere master's degree rather than the doctorate typical of those developing and trialing high-level corporate training. So, here she was, feeling like a rat caught in a trap save that the trap had wheels and was steadily moving ever closer to her parents' home and her mother.

  A female driver at the wheel of a Hummer with a Christmas wreath on the grill impatiently honked at her as she slowed to make the turn into the circular driveway that curved from West Paces Ferry to the house and back. To her surprise, there was an unfamiliar vehicle before the front door. She pulled to a stop behind it, wondering if the doctor had misunderstood and come a day early, but this red SUV didn't look like a doctor's car. The mystery was solved when the front door of the house flew open and a familiar-looking woman seemingly burst out of it, talking angrily to someone over her shoulder.

  "You are just as unreasonable as you ever were, Elizabeth McLaurin, so don't think I'll darken your door again. You always were a most unpleasant person, and after all my poor brother tried to do for you!"

  Maggie recognized the angry woman as her mother's long-absent cousin, youn
ger sister to the ne'er-do-well who had years earlier wasted Elizabeth's fortune. The visitor clasped the strap of an expensive-looking purse in one hand. In the other was an opened box, still half-wrapped in Christmas paper, from which hung the sleeve of a sweater.

  "Well, if it isn't the high and mighty Maggie," the woman said irritably as she opened the SUV's door and tossed the bag and package onto the passenger seat. "I don't intend ever to have anything else to do with Elizabeth and so it's really none of my affair, but she told me how you've been treating her, and I would think you'd be ashamed. As for this house and yard, it's a disgrace. I know you live in New York and you don't care if your mother is embarrassed in front of everyone by your neglect, but it isn't right. Your poor father would be shocked, yes shocked, to know that a daughter of his would allow her mother to live in such a way."

  "But Cousin Ella . . ." Maggie started to protest, to explain that surely she could see that her mother wasn't herself any more and that nothing she said could be taken at face value, but she'd barely opened her mouth when the other woman continued.

  "She always said you were the kind of daughter who would desert her in the end, and I must say it seems she was right." She slid into the red vehicle and slammed the door.

  In the few seconds that it took Maggie to decide how to respond to this, the SUV roared into life and spurted toward the road. When Maggie turned around, she realized that her mother was standing in the door, a grim smile on her long, handsome face. Over her shoulder, Maggie could see Amanda Perry's usually amicable expression pinched by concern.