The Locals

by Jonathan Dee

“I forget her name.”

  “Why does she care?”

  “I don’t know.” Of course he did know—it was Karen, who was still working part-time in the admissions office—but he’d probably said too much as it was. Some father of some other kid in Haley’s class had heard about this episode and had flipped his shit. He was demanding Sills be fired.

  “Can they do that?” Karen asked Candace on the phone that night.

  “Sure,” Candace said. “It’s a private school. There’s no teachers’ union. They can do what they please.”

  And they did fire him. He’d taught at Mullins for twelve years. Karen pulled the file on the parent who’d complained and saw that he had three kids enrolled there and was paying the full tuition for all of them. So you knew he was loaded. She realized there was no one else at work with whom she felt safe questioning the wisdom of all this. It had been a dumb thing to say, for sure—particularly to a roomful of nine- and ten-year-olds—but that didn’t mean the punishment shouldn’t fit the crime.

  So, what, this guy’s a terrorist now? she emailed Candace. You can’t just be a weird old hippie with hippie ideas anymore? This whole area used to be full of them. Now it’s like, let’s just send them all to Gitmo. Have you had anything like this happen over there?

  A few years ago I would have said it’s all about the money, Candace wrote back the next day. But it’s about something else these days. Just keep your head down and wait for it to pass. P.S. Note that I sent this from my personal email—please don’t send any more emails like that last one to my school account. Never know who’s reading!

  But Karen couldn’t let it go. She tried sounding out some of her admissions-office colleagues about it; they just shrugged. She couldn’t tell if they were afraid to talk or if they just didn’t consider the unfairness of it far enough out of the ordinary to be worth their attention. She didn’t want to work with people like that, and it wasn’t a long trip from that conclusion to feeling like she didn’t want her daughter to go to school with people like that.

  “We should take Haley out of Mullins next year,” she said to Mark a week later, when they were both staring into the bathroom mirror. “I mean don’t freak out, I know we can’t really do it. I’m just saying.”

  “What are you talking about?” Mark said.

  “Forget it. I—”

  “And send her where, to Howland Elementary? I thought you told me—”

  “I said forget it. I just don’t respect those people. Probably what I’m really saying is that I don’t want to work there anymore, I don’t want to be part of it, at least not in that way, but I know that’s impossible.”

  “What is?”

  “For me to quit.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?” she said quietly. “Because we need the money, or the break on Haley’s tuition, same difference.”

  “We don’t need it,” Mark said. “Or we won’t for much longer. I mean I don’t even know what I’m arguing for here, because I want Haley to stay at Mullins anyway. I’m just saying that if you quit it wouldn’t mean she couldn’t go there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  And that finally opened up the discussion, which he had been trying to find a way into for two months, about taking out a second mortgage on the house, to give Mark enough ready cash to expand his business by buying up some of the distressed or foreclosed homes throughout southwestern Mass.

  “The housing market’s taking off,” he said. “Especially around here. A big part of the reason is that the banks only want a few percent down. In some cases nothing down! So if you know where to look, and have a little patience—and let’s say a little skill in the art of renovation—you can flip these places serially and make a fortune. Or just hold on to them and make a fortune down the road. The timing right now is perfect. Remember, it’s how we got this house, and that turned out not to be such a bad thing, right? It just takes a cash reserve which might seem like a lot, but in terms of risk/reward, it’s like nothing.”

  Karen was bent over the sink, the water running, so that Mark’s was now the only face in the mirror.

  “Give you an example,” Mark said. “There’s a place I bought at a government auction last weekend in Becket. The previous owner was selling drugs out of there, so it was seized. But it’s the government, right, they don’t know the real estate business and they just want this property off their hands. So I wound up buying it for about forty percent of what it was valued at four years ago. And that valuation is only going up. So we can sell it whenever we want, but the longer we can wait, the better, right? And that’s like Haley’s college tuition right there.”

  “We?” Karen said. “I don’t understand. What did you buy this home with?”

  “Cash,” Mark said. “That’s how cheap it was.”

  “The cash from where, like from our bank account? The money from the Hadi job, that cash?”

  He didn’t want to tell her why credit wasn’t an easy option for him right now. Explaining it would mean going back and telling her about something that happened almost two years ago, when out of some weird post-traumatic compassion he’d let a total stranger spend the night in his hotel room in New York, something that he should have told her about at the time but it was too late now, she was upset enough as it was.

  “You didn’t even want to ask me first?” she said.

  “Do I usually do that? My business is my business, I don’t usually have to get my decisions approved by you or by anybody, do I?”

  “And now you’ve borrowed against this house. Holy shit.”

  “No, I haven’t. And technically I wouldn’t be. It’s complicated. But if you don’t understand it then I don’t know why you won’t take my word for it.”

  “You don’t?”

  “The housing market is just like everything else. You don’t have to be like some clairvoyant about it; if you don’t panic when everybody else is panicking, you can clean up. I talked to Phil Hadi about all this. He said you have to take a step back from your work, see it whole, if you want to succeed, if you want to profit from trends rather than be a victim of them.”

  Everything he said was designed to reassure her, yet he could see her expression growing more and more horrified. He was tired of it.

  “You know, it would be one thing if you disagreed with my business model, or my market analysis, or anything like that. Even though that would contradict people who do this for a living, by the way, who are paid to know what they’re talking about. But you’ve made up your mind already. What are you so afraid of? You complain about this life and yet when I try to lift us out of it, you couldn’t be more negative. Why?”

  “You’ll fail,” she said, before she could think to stop herself, and she put her hand over her mouth.

  This is who I’m married to? Mark thought. This is my partner in life?

  “I mean I do not understand you at all,” she went on. “It wasn’t that long ago that we lost nearly everything.”

  “Okay, first of all, this is the difference between guys like Hadi and the rest of the world. He loses ten times what I did every single day, and makes it back again and more, and do you know why? Because he doesn’t look back. He learns from his mistakes but he isn’t frightened by them. The past stays in the past.”

  “Oh my God,” Karen said.

  “And second, there is a big difference between losing something and having it stolen from you. You do see that, right?”

  “That’s all that world is, people who want to steal from you. So what makes you think it won’t happen again this time?”

  “Because I’m smarter. I trust people a lot less. I don’t let anybody handle what I can handle myself. I’ve changed. You do believe people can change, right?”

  “Actually, no, I don’t,” she said. “I just get more and more like myself, every day, and so do you.”

  She was crying now, and there he sensed an advantage. “Would you really deny Haley wh
at you want for her,” he said, gingerly taking her by the upper arms, “just because you’re so primed for the worst-case scenario? You say you want to change. So let’s change. Let’s dare to be hopeful for once. For Haley’s sake.”

  There was nothing to do, no way to stop him. The following Monday, Karen gave notice at Mullins; they were surprised but not all that inconvenienced, since the admissions season was over, and perhaps for that reason they graciously agreed to extend Haley’s tuition abatement through the end of the school year. Three weeks later, Karen took a different job, thirty hours a week, as a secretary in the development office of the Caldwell House, right there in town. It paid eighteen thousand a year, almost exactly the amount of Haley’s new tuition, which mattered to Karen for some reason. It had all happened quickly, if not quite spontaneously; she’d read in the Gazette’s want ads that they were hiring, she called them up, she went in that same day, and she accepted the job, without even time to consult Mark. But that was half the point: to take an important step without consulting him. Of course he didn’t even give her the satisfaction of getting mad. He thought it was great. Not because of the extra money, but so she would get out of the house more, stay occupied, you know, interact more with people. She could have punched him.

  It was true that her salary didn’t matter. Fifteen hundred a month, before taxes, was no protection from the disaster latent in however many tens of thousands of dollars Mark’s business was now in debt—she didn’t even want to know the figure. It was only a kind of hedge, a safety valve, an escape route. He would not take her down with him if he crashed again, which she feared he would do, so much so that she remade her daily life in order to be ready for it.

  She’d been to Caldwell House exactly once before, way back when Haley was two and Karen was always searching for some new, safe outdoor space for her to run around in. They went with Whitney Reed and her daughter, on their recommendation in fact, since Whitney said she and Kristine went there nearly every week when the weather was nice. You could get a grounds pass then for just eight dollars; you couldn’t go in the house, but who knew what manner of rare china or whatever was on display in there, too nerve-racking to approach with a two-year-old anyway. The whole trip had backfired. The inside of the mansion, of course, was the only thing Haley had any interest in seeing, especially after it was explained to her that she wasn’t allowed. Real flowers turned out to be no more engaging—possibly less so, in fact—than her own drawings or paintings of flowers. She bolted across the manicured east lawn toward the flower beds and started yanking them out of the soil, as a present for Mommy she said, and as some angry skinny matron bore down on them Karen lifted Haley off the ground, carried her kicking the air back to their spot on a blanket in the middle of the lawn, and basically held her down while she squirmed and complained. It was a disaster. Kristine sat and played quietly, murmuring to herself, like a little angel, or a simpleton.

  The house itself (she picked up quickly that no one who worked there referred to it as a “mansion”) was erratically heated and intermittently sunlit and very clean and deceptively gigantic; the daily operations of the trust took place in small rooms behind the kitchen, one-person offices originally used by the head domestics. Neither Karen nor her fellow employees—a Director of Development, a Head of Guest Services, a Horticultural Supervisor, the heads of housekeeping and groundskeeping—worked full-time, but schedules were staggered to make sure there was at least one person present to cover the phone during business hours. For stretches on some days, at least until June, when the grounds officially reopened for visitors, Karen was the only one in the house, typing correspondence left for her, responding to email inquiries off the website. Some days, when the phone rang, she jumped.

  She brought lunch and, after eating and washing her hands, if she had some time left—she observed the convention of lunch hour, even on days when she was alone—she would tour the empty rooms, staying behind the ropes only housekeeping was allowed to cross, admiring the vast canopy beds. The beds were stripped in the off-season, revealing anomalously modern mattresses encased in plastic; still, their naked condition was somehow suggestive to Karen of the fact that people had died in those beds. There was also Winston Caldwell’s study, with two desks in it, old-fashioned rolltops, one left open and one forever shut. Other rooms were unrestored and always locked. The deeper Karen got into the vast upper floors, the more nervous she became, mostly for fear that the phone would ring while she was up there and she wouldn’t be able to run downstairs in time.

  She read all the brochures, listened at her desk to the audio guides, trying to internalize it all so that if someone asked her a question, she would have the answer at hand. She aspired to intimacy with the place, even a feeling of semi-ownership, but that was mostly in the interest of doing a good job. She was not one to half-ass anything. She didn’t find the history itself all that riveting. Just some rich folks with a big country house. She tried to work up some sympathy for their childlessness, but it seemed a bit much to treat as a tragedy the fact that these people who enjoyed almost every conceivable privilege had not lived lives completely free of misfortune. She looked out her window at the emerald lawns and the black-bordered flower beds, full of gawking strangers. If it had happened when old Caldwell was alive he probably would have had them all shot on sight. But what was property in death? She texted Mark to make sure he was there to meet the bus that brought Haley home from day camp. He worked mostly at home these days; he didn’t need to be reminded but it made her feel better.

  On it, Mark texted back. He’d invited his brother Gerry over for a lunch that was still going on; so he was grateful for the reminder, if also a little unsure how to get Gerry out the door before Haley came in. No more beer would be a good start, he determined.

  “So to sum up here,” Mark said, regretting it immediately when he saw the look of hurt belligerence on Gerry’s face, “there’s no capital you could bring to the business, which is frankly what I need most right now. But you do know more than I do about the housing market here in general.”

  “A lot more.”

  “And your credit is solid? If we needed to do transactions, like bank transactions, in your name?”

  Gerry squinted at him. “You asked me that before,” he said. “I don’t get it. It makes me nervous that there’s some kind of risk you don’t want to expose yourself to, but you’re happy to expose me to it.”

  “That isn’t it,” Mark said. “Look. This is between you and me. But I’ve been a victim of a kind of ID theft. I haven’t lost any money but in terms of credit and bank accounts and whatever, it’s been a nightmare. I’ve been trying to change my cell phone plan and I can’t even do that.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope. But it’s temporary. At some point soon all these restrictions get lifted.”

  “Do you have any idea how it happened?”

  Briefly, Mark imagined himself telling his brother the story. “None,” he said. “So but anyway, I don’t have the cash flow to pay you a straight salary until we get enough money coming in. So we’d have to agree on some percentage of the business you’d own.”

  “Like partners,” Gerry said, just to be provocative.

  “In a sense. A family business.”

  “Mom and Pop.”

  “No, Christ, I wouldn’t bring them in on this. It’s just you and me.”

  “I was kidding,” Gerry said, “it’s just an expression. Like a family business, a mom-and-pop operation. I guess you’d be the pop, in this setup, and I’m the mom? What do you say,” he said, waggling a beer bottle back and forth by its neck, “one more?”

  “You know, Haley gets off the bus in a few minutes, and I don’t really want to be any deeper in the bag than I am.”

  “Ah.”

  “In fact,” Mark said, “it’s about time for me to go get her.”

  “You have to go get her? From where? I thought the bus—”

  “Just from the
end of the driveway.”

  Gerry raised his eyebrows. “You mean the end of the driveway like a hundred feet from here? What, she can’t walk it?”

  “Obviously she can walk it. But she likes seeing me there, and I like it too, so bite me.”

  Gerry rolled his eyes and held the door for his brother and the two of them walked down to the road. It had rained all morning, and though the light was strong enough to cast their shadows now, the invisible life that surrounded them, the birds and insects, remained silent. Gerry wished he’d worn boots. At the same instant they both caught, on the leftmost edge of their vision, the flashes of yellow through the green canopy as the school bus downshifted to make the turn at the intersection a few hundred yards away.

  “So, you know,” he said, “if you really want to make some money, the thing to do with these distressed properties you buy up is to rent them.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Otherwise it’s just lost income, for as long as you hold on to them. Plus taxes. And there are all kinds of tax breaks and such you can get if you rent to certain people.”

  “No shit? See, I knew this was a good idea.”

  And there’s a classic Mark moment, Gerry thought: instantly turning someone else’s good idea into his own. He wished Candace had been there to hear it.

  His niece was happy, and oddly unsurprised, to see him; they walked her back up the drive, swinging her by the arms over the puddles, and by the time they were back inside the house Gerry felt his buzz had pretty well worn off. He grabbed his jacket, said goodbye, and got back in his car to head home. Something in him kept warning that it was a mistake to get involved in any business venture with his brother, not because Mark wasn’t a smart guy but because it would inevitably revive, and exacerbate, all that was worst about their relationship. Which was to say, what was worst about Mark himself: he was condescending and superior and never, ever troubled by the thought that maybe he was wrong about something or that maybe someone else might know more about a given subject than he did. On the other hand, Gerry needed the money, even the prospect of money. Plus he didn’t want to be a hypocrite: he’d been reading a lot lately about the decay of traditional nuclear-family structures, so if he found that idea troubling, he couldn’t be so cavalier about it in his own life.