He reached for the glass and gulped back its contents, then picked up the bottle of Scotch and refilled it. “I broke the cardinal rule. Let my emotions get the better of me. Of all people, I knew better.”
Her fear growing stronger, Meg sat down in a chair near his desk. “Please tell me what you’re saying.”
“I didn’t tell you. I couldn’t tell you.” He averted his eyes from hers. “I got fired.” He gave a small, bitter laugh. “Well, that’s not what they called it, but that’s what it was.”
“Fired? You?” Meg’s mind was jumping from one thought to the next. How terrible this was for James. What it meant for the family short term. What he should do to find another job. She caught herself up short; it would do no good to panic. “Okay, let’s wait a minute. It’s not the end of the world. We’ll be okay.”
He only looked at her.
She frowned. “I can’t believe they’d fire someone right before the holidays! When exactly did this happen?”
Another gulp from his glass. “August.”
“August?” Meg sat up straighter in the chair. “You’ve been out of work since August, and you didn’t tell me?”
He ran a hand across his forehead tiredly. “I thought I could find another job before I had to tell you. I thought I could fix things.”
Questions were piling up in her mind. “But … what have you been doing every day when you tell us you’re at the office?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Going out, walking, hanging out at Starbucks.”
“You’ve been pretending to go to the office.” Meg was stunned, replaying in her mind’s eye the months of his dressing for work, taking his briefcase, acting as if everything were the same as always.
“I didn’t want the kids to know. Or you. It was humiliating.”
Slowly, anger began to crowd Meg’s fear. “You didn’t tell your wife you were fired because you were embarrassed? Are you crazy? I could have helped. I could have done a million things.” She was struck by another thought. “And instead of listening to your yelling about the bills, I could have put a halt to all spending. That’s what needed to be done.” She sank back in her chair. “This is unbelievable, James. In a million years, I never would have expected—”
His expression was pained. “Yeah, well, it was stupid, but you don’t know what it feels like to get thrown out of a big job like that, do you?”
She was stunned by the jibe, but she let it pass. Her voice softened. “No, you’re right. I don’t. I’m just a bit horrified that you would put on such a charade. And that you didn’t feel you could trust me enough to tell me.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, we have plenty of savings, and you’ll get another job eventually.”
He gave her a nasty smile, one she had never seen on him before. “But that wasn’t the bad news.”
She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to hear what else he might say.
“In September I had a great opportunity to invest in a real estate deal. I jumped at it. It was a beautiful deal.”
He stopped. Meg swallowed, waiting.
“A few weeks into it, one of the other big investors dropped out. The deal couldn’t go forward, and I saw an opportunity to double my returns. I’d make enough so that I could retire, never even have to get another job. I took it. All in.”
Meg’s stomach clenched. “And …?”
“The guy who put together the deal turned out to be a crook. He stole everything and disappeared.”
There was a long silence in the room.
“How much did we lose?” Meg whispered.
“Everything.”
Meg barely got the words out. “What’s ‘everything’?”
Anger at her slowness flashed in his eyes. “Everything means everything! All the money we had in the world. Whatever we had as collateral.”
“You don’t mean the house?” She silently begged him to answer no.
“Of course! The house, the savings, our investments.”
“No, you didn’t,” Meg breathed. “You couldn’t have.”
Rage and pain flashed across his face as he smacked his hand on the desk. “I could, and I did. I was desperate, and that affected my judgment. That’s what did it. McDowall knew I’d been let go, and he played on that, too.”
“Is that who took our money? Are they going to find him?”
“They did, but it’s not going to help us any. About an hour ago, I talked to another guy who was also an investor. They found McDowall last night in a hotel in Los Angeles. He shot himself. No money anywhere. Nobody knows what happened.”
Meg’s hand rose to her throat. “Maybe …”
He grimaced. “We’re never going to see that money again. Like I said, it’s over.”
Meg sat paralyzed, trying to force her mind to make sense of what she had just heard. No, it wasn’t possible. Things like this didn’t happen to people like them.
The ongoing flood of emotions seemed to have exhausted James. He spoke quietly. “We have to leave the house. Our cars go back because they’re leased. I own the Mustang, so that stays with us. The kids can finish out the semester, since the school bill was paid long ago, but they’re done there next month. The big things are obvious.” He paused. “You need to understand that all we have is what’s left in our checking account, which is about nineteen hundred dollars. And whatever you have in your wallet. I have a hundred and fifty bucks in mine.”
He closed his eyes and slowly swung his desk chair around so that his back was to her.
Meg struggled to understand. They had nowhere to go and money that would last only a few weeks. They were homeless. Destitute. All because James had decided he could cover up getting fired. He had chosen to take every cent they had without even discussing it with her, then handed it over to a crook. No, she corrected herself, he had gone out of his way to double his investment.
She thought about the children. If they had no place to live, how would they go to school, private or otherwise? Forget about their having to say good-bye to everything they had ever known in life—their friends, the community in which they lived, their everyday activities. They would lose the very foundation of their lives, which was that they were safe and secure in the world, protected by their parents.
Meg stood, speaking through clenched teeth. “I could kill you right now, James. You’ve destroyed us. All by yourself. You were too smart, too important, to talk to me about anything you did. You never considered what that could do to your family. If you wanted to play roulette with your own life, that’s one thing. But what about the children and me? You thought so little of us, you sacrificed us without a second thought.”
James turned his chair to face her. Tears spilled from his eyes as she spoke. “I know,” he whispered. “You’re right. I don’t know what to do to make it up to you.”
“I can’t imagine that you’ll ever make this up to us!” She began to tremble, rage and terror threatening to overtake her. “We have nothing! James, how could you?”
They stared at each other, fury and confusion on her face, misery on his.
The doorbell rang.
“It’s the Dobsons.” They heard Sam’s shout as he raced down the stairs. “I’ll get it.”
It was four o’clock. Their guests were starting to arrive.
Chapter 4
Bleary-eyed from exhaustion, Meg clasped a mug of steaming coffee with both hands as she made her way around the backyard. It was barely seven o’clock. Now, before the children got up and she had to face whatever this day might bring, she had some time to be alone in the garden. She reached out to touch the cyclamen’s heart-shaped leaves, satisfied to see signs of its emerging white flowers. Looking over the remnants of her hydrangea and foxglove blooms, she recalled her small triumphs and disappointments with them over the seasons. Her crocuses would be in full bloom by Christmas, but she wouldn’t be there to see them. Maybe it’s silly, she thought, but I’ll miss this more than the house itself.
She sat
down on one of the Adirondack chairs. No need to worry about painting them now.
Yesterday’s Thanksgiving meal was probably the hardest thing she ever had to endure. She could barely believe she had gotten through it. Smiling, making small talk, cooking, serving. All the while seeing her husband seated at the head of the table, downing Scotch after Scotch. His exaggerated cheerfulness, obviously fueled by the alcohol, made her wince. Worst of all was watching the children, all three in notably good moods at the same time, a remarkable occurrence. The things she was going to have to tell them—actually uttering the words “We’ve lost everything, and we have no idea what’s to come”—were unimaginable. Meg set her coffee cup on the ground and tightened her robe against the chilly morning air.
After the meal, when everyone had finally left, Meg had the children help clear the table, then, to their apparent shock, dismissed them from further kitchen duty. She needed to be by herself, to let the corners of her mouth release her frozen smile, to fall silent. For the next two hours, she cleaned furiously, her mind blank as she gave herself over to the physical task. She loaded the dishwasher carelessly, dishes banging as she dropped them haphazardly into the slots. Hand-washing the crystal glasses, she squeezed a wineglass so hard the stem snapped, but she ignored the bleeding from her thumb, and after a while it stopped.
Later, when she could find nothing else to clean, she dragged herself upstairs, emotionally and physically drained. James was nowhere to be seen, which was fine with her.
“I’m going to sleep. G’night, kids,” she called out from her bedroom doorway.
“Mom?” Sam’s voice floated down the hall. It was unusual for her to go to bed without coming into their rooms to say good night.
“Go to bed, Sam,” she replied, firmly shutting the door. She hated ignoring her son, but she couldn’t face the children. Not tonight.
She peeled off her clothes, dropping them on the bathroom floor before grabbing a nightgown from the hook on the back of the door. What difference did it make what she did with the clothes now? she thought. All her compulsive housekeeping and keeping on top of things had only brought her to this point. Nowhere.
Sliding under the comforter, Meg was so exhausted that she knew, thankfully, she would find the oblivion of sleep quickly. She was wrong. Over and over, she replayed the conversation with James and his actions over the past months. Everything about their life since August was now recast in a completely new light.
It was not a light that reflected flatteringly on her husband. Despite her offering him a hundred openings, he had chosen to keep what was, in terms of a marriage, a monstrous secret. He had lied to her again and again through his silences, his pretense of going to work, his clandestine gambling of all they had.
This couldn’t be her husband, her James, the man who had brought her a cup of coffee every morning since the day they married. Who always filled the house with peonies, her favorite flower, on her birthdays. Who, for years, had designated alone time with each child one Sunday a month to go to a museum or a ball game or wherever his son or daughter might want. He was a straight arrow and honest to a fault. Meg would have bet her life—the lives of her children—that he couldn’t have done such a thing. Knowing she would have lost such a bet made her blood run cold.
The sound of the screen door opening brought her back to the moment. She watched James emerge into the morning air, holding his own mug of coffee. He wore the same clothes from the day before and was unshaved, his hair uncombed. It was obvious that he, too, had passed a sleepless night. She wondered if he was feeling hungover from all that Scotch. She hoped so. The sight of her handsome husband usually had a warming effect on her, a combination of love, attraction, and comfort. All that was over. Today she felt only anger and the stabbing pain of betrayal.
“I saw you through the window,” he said as he drew closer. “What are you doing out here so early?”
She didn’t reply. He sat down on the chair next to her. “Good coffee. Thanks for making it.” He glanced down at her feet. “Aren’t your slippers getting wet out here?”
She looked over at him in disbelief. “Are we chatting?”
His voice suddenly reflected his fatigue. “Look, it won’t do us any good to go at each other. We’ll have to work this all out, and we might as well do it as a team.”
“James, we’re not discussing where to go on vacation or whether the kids should take Spanish or French. We’re discussing how you deceived me and what you’ve done to the whole family. We’re talking about whether I’m leaving you.”
He held up a hand and spoke soothingly. “I know you’re angry now, Meg—”
“Don’t patronize me.” Her tone was icy. “I feel like such a fool, being all chipper to try and cheer you up, feeling sorry for you while you were busy nursing your wounded pride in coffee shops. You know, if we had worked as a ‘team,’ as you put it, when you lost your job, that might have been helpful. I never would have let you risk everything we had, no matter how fantastic the deal was.” She stood. “True, you were the one with the high-powered job, the one who made all the money. You were the important one. Nothing I did mattered much. Raising the kids, running our lives—stupid stuff, I guess. Even so, couldn’t you have thrown me a bone? Given me a hint what you were going to do?” She stooped to retrieve her coffee cup. “I’m sorry, but I really can’t bear to look at you another minute. We’ll have to sit down and go over some things later. Like when we have to get out of the house. And where on earth we’re going to go.”
James’s tone was angry. “Don’t twist everything around. I was only trying to spare you and the kids.”
“If things had gone your way, that would have been fine. I’d never have been the wiser. It simply didn’t occur to you that something might go wrong, did it?” She paused. “Maybe having such a high-powered job isn’t always a good thing. The adrenaline of all that risk-taking, the thrill of so much money. It can lead to some pretty terrible consequences.”
“You were perfectly happy to spend all that money, as I recall,” he said.
She waited a moment to be sure she could sound calm. “Your nastiness aside, none of this is about money, don’t you see that? It’s about my never being able to trust you again. It’s about the fact that our marriage is a big fraud because you’re in one marriage, and I’m apparently in another. The person I thought you were would never put his family at risk.”
Looking exhausted, he closed his eyes. “I’m the same person I always was.”
“Well, James, that kind of makes it worse, you know? That means I never really understood what kind of person you were.”
He looked at her, his gaze hard. “Could we stop all this, please? We have to make some decisions, and we don’t have time for you to berate me for hours. What’s done is done. We need to move forward.”
Her eyes widened. “Wait—you get to do something this terrible, and then you get to dictate how much I can say about it? I’m annoying you?” Before he could reply, she turned and walked back to the house, trying to stifle her rage. She refilled her cup in the kitchen and sat down at her desk, her mind racing. There were phone calls to make and lists to compile, lists of awful and humiliating things to do. If only I could go back to my silly to-do lists in my pink leather book, she thought. I’d never complain about it again.
She rummaged through the filing cabinet beneath the desk to assemble an armload of files containing unpaid bills and legal documents. Setting them down, she grabbed a legal pad and a pen. She wrote “cancel” on the top left of the page and started adding whatever came to mind. Cable, newspapers, magazines, cleaning service. Credit cards. She had to find some way to pay off the balances, which were high, but to keep the cards in case they got desperate.
They also owed money at several local shops, many where they knew the owners personally. It wasn’t that they were in any great debt to these shops, but Meg typically waited to pay the bills until she had accumulated two or three months’ worth. She
recalled all the times Mr. Collins at the pharmacy had advised her when the children got sick. His many kindnesses were the reason she did her drugstore shopping at his tiny store instead of the less expensive chain. She must owe him a fair amount on the house account. He would never collect it. Alice, the lovely woman at the dry cleaner, would also go without getting paid on their open account. Glen Richards, their wonderful gardener with whom she had spent so much time discussing what plants worked best where. All these people would be cheated. The mental images made her cringe. She made a note to check on the balances and write IOUs. One day, somehow, she would make good on them.
So many ugly tasks. She jotted down their various insurance policies—medical, life, car. All paid for now, but when the next premiums came due, the policies would lapse, and if one of them got seriously ill or worse, the family would be completely unprotected.
She could see something of the lengths to which James had gone to hide his situation. For the past three months, he had been careful to maintain his usual system of transferring enough money into their checking account so she could pay the bills. What upset her even more was that if she had known the truth, she could have chosen which bills to pay. He had let her go on paying for cable television instead of putting aside funds for more important things.
Her mind drifted to the people they knew around town. She wished with all her heart that she could disappear from Charlotte today, this very minute. She grimaced. To go where? She had several good friends here but no one she would ask to put up a family of five indefinitely. Besides, she could see herself telling her friends that James had lost his job, but sharing that he had lied to her and lost everything in a swindle was a different matter. She knew she could never bring herself to confide that to anyone. Realizing she had to live with this enormous secret made her feel completely alone in the world.
They could go to a motel until their remaining money ran out, but that wouldn’t take long. And then what? To make matters worse, she didn’t know if she could bear to go anywhere with James ever again. When had he become so obsessed with money and success that he’d given up all perspective? Losing everything, every last penny—it made no sense to Meg. He had no internal brakes, nothing to tell him that things should go so far and no farther. He had lost himself completely.
An Amish Christmas: A Novel Page 4
