He bought everything she suggested. “That was more than I’ve ever spent on clothing in my life,” he said, finding her back at the tie display after he’d paid. “You should get a raise.”
“Oh, I don’t work here,” she said. “My boyfriend’s birthday’s coming up. Came in to buy him a tie.” That boyfriend was gone an hour later, about the time Sam and Annie finished their second drink at the bar across the street, where Sam probed her about her life, learned about her childhood in Maine, growing up in a house her father—long deceased—built himself.
She was his date to the wedding the next week, his wife within the year, marrying him in the backyard of their new home the day they closed on the house. Annie Potter, a woman like no other. Brilliant, funny, exciting as hell. He still has trouble believing he convinced her to follow him to Chestnut Hill, New York. Charming, that’s the word she used, the first time she came, ninety-nine minutes on the train from New York. “Did you know petroleum was discovered right here in Chestnut Hill?” she said, tugging him by the arm to point out the historical marker he’d never noticed outside the ice cream shop.
And she still thinks it’s charming. She even likes going to see his mother at Rushing Waters, where she’s made a list of every resident’s birthday, stopping at Mrs. Fields in the strip mall to buy them a cookie the size of a dinner plate, coming home to tell him that this was the right thing to do, moving here to help Margaret.
His mom was wrong. He’d never hurt her.
The thought is interrupted by the sound of a phone, and he feels his body tense, realizing it’s his phone, ringing from the inside pocket of his sports jacket. Christopher stops what he was saying—What the hell was he saying?—and Sam reaches into his pocket, embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” Sam says. “I usually remember to turn this thing off.” He sees the 1–800 number, another credit card company, before silencing the phone and returning it to his pocket. He allows Christopher a few moments to finish what he was saying and then shifts a little in his chair. “Looks like we’re out of time,” he says.
“Already?” Christopher says, making no move to stand. Something changes in his expression. “Because there was something else I wanted to mention.”
“Oh?” Sam says.
“A girl at work accused me of sexually harassing her.”
Sam has to restrain himself from laughing out loud. Classic doorknob revelation. A client spends the session talking about something mind-numbingly innocuous like the pros and cons of pour-over versus drip coffee and then right before time’s up—bam!—he drops a bomb, walks out. He needs to say whatever it is out loud, inside the room, but doesn’t want to hear the therapist’s response. “Well, that certainly sounds like something you and I should talk about,” Sam says. “Next Wednesday?”
“Sounds good.” Christopher slaps his knees and they stand up. “See you next week,” he says. “Same bat time, same bat channel.”
Sam flatters Christopher with the same chuckle he forces every time Christopher says this. The outside door slams loudly behind him. That fucking door. Sam takes out his phone, the sinking sensation growing in his gut as he plays the message. He was wrong. It wasn’t a credit card company, it was the bank that holds their mortgage. He deletes the voice mail without listening to it. It’s all going to be fine. The phone calls he’s avoiding. The bank. The credit card companies. He needs to avoid them for another week or so, just until he gets access to his father’s money.
Sam came across the letter from his father in his mother’s kitchen cupboard while preparing to sell the house. She’d been living at Rushing Waters for a few months when he found it, typed on the expensive stationery that his father used for the letters he sent Sam a few times a year, with his name embossed on the top. Other than a phone call every year or so, this was the extent of their relationship. Each was typewritten, and Sam imagined his father speaking a few sentences into a Dictaphone and handing it to a secretary. “Get that thing off for me, okay, sweetheart?”
He sat down at the kitchen table, the same table where he once choked down the world’s worst piece of Pepperidge Farm coconut cake, and tried to make sense of what he was reading. It was addressed to his mother. I have some things I need to say, Maggie.
Three pages long, the letter explained the regret his father had felt for the last twenty years—how hard it was for Ted, living with what he did to the family. I understand why you wouldn’t talk to me when I tried, but I want you to know that not knowing my son has been the most painful part of my life.
And then Sam got to the last page, with the big reveal. Ted and Phaedra had divorced, and he’d been given a sizable amount of money in the settlement. He wanted Margaret to have half of it. Two million dollars, Ted wrote, explaining he had already deposited the money in an account in Margaret’s name at NorthStar Bank. Please don’t be stubborn about this. Use the money as you’d like, for you and Sam. You’ve worked hard raising our son, and truly I can never repay you for that.
Margaret was watching television when Sam went to see her the next day. He could tell by the look on her face that her mood was stable. “Mom, what is this?” he asked her.
Her face reddened when she saw the letter, embarrassed, like the time she found Sam in the garage with a copy of Hustler magazine. He said he found it at school, too ashamed to tell her that his father had given it to him; that Ted had been giving Sam his copies since Sam turned twelve.
“Sit down,” Margaret said, taking the letter from him. “Let’s talk.” And just like that he was a kid again, that look on her face as she tried so hard to connect with him, the only guy she had left. But this time he was actually interested in what Margaret was saying. The whole thing made her so mad, she confided. Ted Statler, thinking he could make up for everything he’d done simply by throwing money at her—money he did nothing to earn. Her jaw was clenched with anger as she spoke, which Sam found utterly thrilling. His mother was angry at Ted Statler, the world’s biggest shitbag. Finally. “Which is why I’m giving all the money to you,” she said at the end of her diatribe.
He couldn’t believe this was his mother, the same woman who had been such a doormat all his life. “What?”
“I’ve started the process of giving you power of attorney,” she said. “You’re getting everything I have, including your father’s money.”
He must have read the letter two hundred times on the train ride back to New York the next day. The whole thing infuriated him at first. His mom was right, it was exactly as hypocritical and manipulative as one would expect from Ted Statler, a man who’d deigned to call his son no more than a handful of times in the last several years, thinking all could be forgiven with the sweep of a pen.
But then Sam started to think what his father’s money could afford him—a simpler life, a little bit of luxury. He’d been ready for a change after nearly a decade working in the children’s psych ward at Bellevue Hospital, teaching grad students and treating irrevocably damaged children. And suddenly he felt better about the whole thing. On their second date he told the story to Annie, who wisely suggested he wait until his mother signed power of attorney over to him before spending the money, but it was complicated. Sam couldn’t say no to the money, nor could he stand the idea of having it. So he spent it, compulsively, every purchase aimed to wipe that smirk off Ted Statler’s face. Once he got started, he couldn’t stop himself—and on the stupidest shit. A nearly $5,000 Eames executive chair made of polished die-cast aluminum and locking casters? Thanks, Dad! A Lexus 350 with leather interior and automatic ignition? Thanks, Dad! Living large on credit, all of it to be immediately paid off as soon as his mother signs the money over to him, which is literally any day now, according to Sally French, the director of Rushing Waters.