She pulled some more tissues out of a box on the side table and wiped her face.
“I had to keep her in the City to stay on Medicaid. They all made it clear I should pull the plug. All the doctors and Medicaid people. I can understand why. The rest of the world shouldn’t have to pay for one little vegetable. But she was my
She was crying now in a solid, steady kind of way. I took her hand and she squeezed hard. With her other hand she pulled out a few tissues and blew her nose. She looked at me.
“Then she made it easy for her mommy. She just left.”
It took a long time for her to catch her breath.
“I’m so sorry, Sam.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.”
“Oh yes there is.”
She shook her head and a long sweep of auburn hair fell in front of her face.
“It’s about Roy. I knew him in high school. We dated a little. He was nice enough, but, you know, not very interesting. Not for a girl like me who was burning to get outta town. Roy had no such desire, though he had a real thing for money. His father died when he was little and his grandparents basically raised him with his mother. They never had anything. I bet you always wondered who lived in those houses along the dump road. One of them was Roy’s grandparents’. You wouldn’t believe how they lived, so close to so much.
“But Roy was going to change all that. He was going to make money, goddammit, and he did. He did really well for himself. Paid for his own college, went to business school, joined the bank, worked his way up. I was very impressed with him, really I was. Proud of him for actually doing something he said he was going to do. It’s hard, you know it is Sam, to be around all this money out here and not have any of your own. It can twist you all up, if you let it. But Roy was never like that. He just did it the hard way, working his ass off and doing what he had to. For years he supported his whole family. Now he’s got me, and—”
She looked at the mute wall of ashes, lowering her voice to a near whisper.
“I could have never afforded this place. Even this tiny little place for my baby girl. Roy paid for it all.”
She looked over at me for the first time. Beseeching or questioning, I couldn’t tell.
“He tried to ask me out from the get-go, when I came back from the City, but I couldn’t face anybody. Finally, I went to dinner with him a few times. Invited him over. He was very sweet to my mother. He’s not a bad man, he’s just who he is. And he loved me. He told me he always had, and that when I left for the City it was the saddest thing that ever happened to him. I didn’t even know he felt that way. He was so shy and self-conscious.
“But then he made some pretty good money—you know, he started a whole commercial lending operation out here for Harbor, and did great—it gave him some confidence. It was nice. And easy, and I was so tired and lost. When he offered to marry me I felt like an angel had come along and plucked me off the tracks. He saved me, he really did.
“I knew this wasn’t what I wanted, but it was far better than killing myself, which I strongly considered, oh, maybe a thousand times. But then I thought about my mom, and what I was going through over Monica. So we got married and it all happened like he said it would. I didn’t love him, but I appreciated what he’d done. I tried to hold up my end, and I think I did pretty well. He was always patient with me. He liked to control things, and I was so sick inside, I liked letting him do it.
“And then you. You. You. You.”
She swatted me on the shoulder.
“All busted up yourself. Big sad eyes and crunched-up nose. Flirting with you wasn’t a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it was the only pleasant thing happening to me. I prayed I wasn’t being too obvious, so I wouldn’t scare you away. But you kept coming in every once in a while, and I’d look forward to it. I could tell you liked me. I wasn’t that far gone. And I knew I would
“But you know what the problem was?” she asked.
“Roy knew.”
“No, worse than that. Oh, God.”
She’d stopped crying when the story moved off her daughter, but then she started again.
“It was his idea,” she said, ripping out the words through her tears, “Roy’s.”
I waited till she was ready to get back on track.
“Soon after we were married, Roy came home from work more excited than I’d ever seen him. He said we had the opportunity of a lifetime. A big real-estate deal, the biggest in the Hamptons, he said, our ticket to the ball. You should have seen him. Roy’s a very positive person on the outside, but he worries, and broods a lot when nobody else is around. Nobody but me. This was so different. He was like a little boy. He went on and on about it, though I had a hard time following everything. I love science and technology, but all this financial stuff, it bores me.”
“Not a good thing for a personal banker.”
“The bank would handle financing, and Roy was going to take a position personally, which was the main thing, but we’d also make out because my mother’s house would be part of the plan. That upset me a little, which I know is silly. But, what the heck, he was so happy, and it seemed like a long way off. I don’t know.
“The next year was wonderful. Roy was crazy busy at the bank, especially with this big project. He worked late a lot and went into the City at least once a week, which was very nice for me. It gave me a little break. People also came out from the City to talk to him, to help with the Town, I guess, and other things. I admit I didn’t pay much attention to it all.
“Then something happened. It wasn’t all at once, but slowly Roy got more and more nervous. Distracted. Something was going wrong with the project, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Not at first. Then he told me there was a snag with Environmental Protection. Nothing real, just a bunch of regulations that could stall progress and endanger the deal.
“‘The neighbors,’ is what he kept saying. ‘Amanda, the neighbors could ruin the whole thing.’ He always insisted we keep everything hush hush. He said if one word of this got out, other players could elbow their way in. Investors would come out from the City and he’d say, ‘Don’t even act like you know them. People will put two and two together.’”
“Bob Sobol,” I said.
She looked impressed.
“That’s right. The creep. Always trying to knock me off balance. I wouldn’t give him the pleasure.”
“He brought the deal to Roy.”
“No, it was Roy’s deal, all the way. Bob Sobol and this guy in Sag Harbor are investors. Or front the real investors, I can never figure out which, though frankly, I don’t care. I don’t like either one of them.”
“Milton Hornsby.”
She swiveled over on the bench so she could get a clear look at me.
“You know him?” she asked.
“A little.”
“What an unpleasant person. He always looks like he’s swallowed a frog or something. No sense of humor. How did you know he was involved?”
“It’s a long story, too.”
“So I guess you know they’re old friends, Bob Sobol and Milt Hornsby. Or something. Can’t honestly say Hornsby was friendly with anybody. Bitter old bastard.”
“So Roy was worried about the neighbors.”
“He said there’d be public hearings and that some people with adjoining properties might put up a fight. He was mostly concerned about you.”
“No kidding.”
“Oh, you were a big topic at the dinner table for a while there. He said you were a retired executive with a reputation as a first rate SOB, his words not mine.”
She smiled for the first time.
“Though you can be difficult,” she said.
“So I’m told.”
