A Soft Place to Fall (4 page)

Mrs. R deserved a hell of a lot better. And
that was how he came up with the bright idea to move her monies
back into the safer holdings they both preferred, a painstakingly
laborious process made more so by the fact that he wanted to stay
off the radar screen. So it began with Mrs. R and when that seemed
to work he remembered the old guy in Brooklyn, Ben Ashkenazy, who
had fought in World War II with their next-door neighbor, then
worked his butt off at AT&T for thirty years. He deserved
better than a year of diminishing returns, didn't he? And it worked
for Ashkenazy too which got Sam thinking about Lila Connelly who
took a buyout from IBM and now her entire retirement fund was in
Sam's hands and disappearing. These clients were small fish in a
big sea, the forgettable ones, the ones you practiced on before you
moved up to the whales. Why in hell were they the ones who reminded
him he had a heart?

Lila used to get her hair done at the place
where his mother worked and when his mother died, Lila was there at
the funeral with a fifty dollar bill for the Butler kids and a
promise of more. And now he was letting them screw her to the wall,
take all of her dreams and run them through a giant shredder called
business.

The hell he was.

So he began moving Lila's funds too – slowly
so slowly -- and that was when the clock finally ran out.

On a sunny Friday morning in early August,
Franklin Bennett Mason, senior partner and occasional racquetball
opponent, called Sam into his office and told him he was through.
Mason gave him the company line about new directions and how much
they appreciated everything Sam had done for them over the years
but they both knew what was really happening. The stone cold look
in Mason's eyes gave it away. They'd noticed that Sam was quietly
shifting monies away from the questionable ventures and back into
the blue chips and they were smart enough to know exactly what that
meant.

Lucky for Sam they didn't know
everything.

They cut him a nice goodbye check and he was
out the door thirty minutes later. Sam knew the talk would start as
soon as he stepped out onto the Street. Another head case, they
would say. A burnout. You can't keep the heat turned up that high
for so long and not pay a price. They would wonder over lunch where
he would turn up next. Maybe Morgan Stanley. Maybe Salomon. Maybe
he'd even pull a Jimmy Buffett and live on a sailboat moored down
in the Keys. But nobody would call to see how he was doing. The
pace was too fast, the competition too intense. His desk would be
claimed by the next morning and his television spot would be given
to someone else before the closing bell rang that afternoon. He
would be forgotten before the end of the quarter.

Within the hour his friends in the expensive
black suits showed up at his door to relieve him of his key to the
safety deposit box and to warn him that things were going to get a
lot worse before they got better.

If they got better at all.

They advised him to make himself scarce for a
while. Pick a spot, they'd vet it, then disappear. They gave him a
cell phone equipped with all sorts of fancy blocking devices and a
number to call every day to check in. He was to stay in the
country, keep the phone with him at all times, and be ready to be
brought back on a moment's notice to testify against his former
employer. They made no promises. With luck, the information he'd
gathered would clear his name. Without it, he was looking at
serious jail time.

He thought about renting a room in the
Hamptons but that was still too close to ground zero. The Jersey
shore was a possibility but it would be too easy to bump into
someone he knew. He hated Florida and California and couldn't
afford Hawaii. He had, however, always liked Maine with its three
thousand miles of coastline. Warren owned at least a half dozen
houses in Shelter Rock Cove. Maybe he would rent one of them to Sam
on a monthly basis until he found out if his next address came with
number embroidered on the back of his shirt.

Warren said yes before Sam had time to finish
his question.

Shelter Rock Cove was vetted and okayed. He
told his brothers and sisters that he was taking off into the wilds
of Maine on a sabbatical. He told them that he wanted to get in
touch with nature, clear his head, whatever excuse he thought they
would believe. What he didn't tell them was the truth.

"I give you six months up there, Nature Boy,"
Courtney had said as they loaded his sound system and television
into her U-Haul van. "You'll be knocking on my door, asking for
your stuff back."

He grinned and ruffled her short red hair,
the same way he used to do when she was six years old and afraid of
the monsters under the bed. She was two weeks shy of her twentieth
birthday now, just one year away from graduating Columbia
University and diving head-first into life. Her tuition fees and
living expenses for senior year were paid in full. He'd sold off
everything he could to see to it. Too bad he hadn't been able to
make sure his clients had been able to do the same.

"Don't worry, kid," he said in his best
film noir
impression. "Nobody's going to ask for your
stereo."

Courtney thought he was coming off a bad love
affair and heading north to lick his wounds. Their brother Tony
said it was a mid-life crisis ten years too early. Instead of hair
plugs and a phallic sports car, he was chucking it all for life as
a loner up in Nowhere, Maine. Kerry, Dave, and Marie just thought
he'd gone nuts. He didn't argue with any of them. How did you tell
the people you loved, the brothers and sisters who looked up to
you, that you'd done some things along the way that you weren't
proud of, that some of the decisions you'd made to keep the family
together had hurt innocent people? And how the hell did you tell
them that the only way out of the mess was by being part of a sting
that might backfire and put you behind bars?

He hadn't planned it that way. Hell, he
hadn't planned any of it. He went to bed one night as your average
party-hearty college kid, only to wake up the next morning to
discover he was the unemployed, uneducated, scared-shitless head of
a family of six who ranged in age from nineteen down to three.
Somehow he managed to survive and pull the rest of the Butler
family along behind him. After a few rough patches they'd managed
to stay on the right road and their bright futures made his own
shortcomings easier to bear. When the waiting was over and the
stories were told, he hoped they would understand.

And so there he was in his second-hand car,
with his second-hand dog, and his second-hand life, wondering if
the dreams he'd put aside when he was nineteen would play half as
well now that he was thirty-five. For a man with so much family, he
had never felt more alone.

#

By seven o'clock, Annie had retreated to the
back porch with a cup of coffee to revive her spirits and a bottle
of aspirin for the world-class headache pounding away at her
temples. It wasn't that she didn't appreciate the help and the
company, but after a full day of packing, sweeping, cleaning up,
making conversation, and trying to stay one step ahead of her
memories, she had just plain had enough. She loved every single one
of the people who had come to help her out but right now she found
herself wishing they would disappear.

Or maybe that she could.

Nothing was quite the way she'd thought it
would be. The house that had seemed cozy and affordable last month,
now looked more like an overstuffed pup tent. Cardboard boxes
filled with books, pots and pans, clothes, bath towels and bed
linens littered every available surface yet her only real piece of
furniture was the refinished sleigh bed that filled up most of the
bedroom. She wasn't a stupid woman. Why hadn't she realized a
king-sized bed required a king-sized room to accommodate it? She'd
have to somersault across the mattress in order to get to the
closet because the foot of the bed was almost welded to the
wall.

To make matters worse, the cats were taking
swipes at anyone who dared venture into their territory, which, to
the dismay of all, included the only bathroom. Susan's husband Jack
dug out her tool kit from one of the many cardboard boxes and set
to work installing a new lock on her front door while Eileen and
Claudia began unpacking her glasses and dishes and the boys
continued lugging in boxes of books from the U-Haul. They all
worked with such good cheer and high spirits that Annie felt
ashamed of herself for wishing she could be alone with her
disappointment, instead of being surrounded by assorted friends and
Galloways, who were trying very hard to pretend they loved her new
house at least a little.

The fact that they were also whispering among
themselves about her sanity wasn't lost on her.
Somebody should
have stopped her. . . Why would she leave that beautiful house for
this place . . . She still isn't thinking clearly, is she . . . so
sad . . . so terribly sad.

How much easier it would have been if she had
sat down with them after he died and simply told the truth. If she
had told them that their beloved Kevin, the man she had vowed to
spend her life with, had gambled away everything long before he
died and left her alone to clean up after him. The Galloways would
have rallied around her, the same way they had rallied around her
when she was sixteen years old and her world went up in flames.
They welcomed her as family years before she became Kevin's wife.
They gave her a home and love and security, priceless gifts for a
teenage girl with nothing of her own. Kevin was the shining star of
the family, the poet and dreamer, the one they believed would have
made his mark on the world if only he hadn't been struck down so
terribly young.

She loved them all, both Kevin and his
family, too much to destroy those memories.

"You're out of soda," Susan said from the
kitchen doorway.

She swallowed two more Bayers. "Let them
drink beer."

"You're just about out of that too."

"Do you think anyone would notice if I
sneaked out to replenish supplies?"

"They will if you don't come back." Susan
joined her at the railing "It's written all over your face."

"I'm tired," Annie said. "That's all you see
on my face. What I need is some curtains, a few rugs – it'll feel
like home here in no time."

"There aren't enough curtains in three
Wal-Marts to make this place feel like home and you know it." Susan
rested her elbows on the porch rail. An unlit cigarette dangled
from her right hand, her latest attempt at kicking the habit. "Fran
at the office told me that Bancroft decided to rent out the other
house on your block."

There were only two houses on Annie' s block,
her own and both belonged to Warren Bancroft, Shelter Rock Cove's
greatest success story. He had parlayed one small fishing boat into
a major operation worth millions yet he had never turned his back
on the town where he was born. He had grown up in the tiny cottage
that now belonged to Annie. The place on the water had belonged to
his sister Ellie who died the same year as Kevin.

"Anyone we know?" she asked Susan.

"A retiree from New York. Fran said she heard
the guy is an old fishing friend of Warren's."

One of the best things about Annie's new
house was the fact that it was within a few hundred yards of a
private beach that had gone ignored for the last few years. She had
spent considerable time daydreaming about long morning walks on a
deserted stretch of sand. Now some big mouth from New York was
going to move in and claim it all for himself.

"What kind of loser would move to this
godforsaken town?" she asked, feeling uncharacteristically peevish.
She should be grateful that she had a roof over her head and that
it was all paid for. "Doesn't he know every retiree worth his salt
lives up Bar Harbor way?"

"Bar Harbor's overrated," Susan said. "Too
many tourists --" She stopped and tilted her head toward the door
at the sound of high-heeled footsteps. "Oh great," she muttered,
"Here comes Bigfoot." The Galloway clan was merciless on their tiny
mother's love of excessively noisy high heels, even though that
early warning system had come in handy many times when they were
teens and sneaking dates into the house after hours.

"I should have known I'd find you two girls
hiding out here." Claudia stepped out onto the porch, still looking
perfectly groomed and coiffed. You would never guess she had spent
the last few hours cleaning the stove and refrigerator and
performing other odd jobs. "Where are your manners, Anne? You have
company inside."

"Annie's thirty-eight years old, ma," Susan
tossed over her shoulder. "This is her home. She can stay out here
all night if she wants to."

Claudia picked her way carefully across the
uneven porch, avoiding bent nails, warped boards, and Susan's sharp
tongue. "Did I hear you say someone's moving to Bar Harbor?"
Claudia was the only woman on earth who could make the famous
resort town sound slightly downscale. "Anne, I hope you aren't --"
Her words trailed off and she looked so suddenly vulnerable and
worried that Annie's heart twisted. In all the ways that mattered,
this woman had been her mother for the last twenty-two years and
she deserved better than Annie's bad mood.

"Don't worry." She landed a quick kiss on her
mother-in-law's forehead. "The only place I'm going is to the store
for more soda."

"You look so tired." Claudia's voice softened
and she reached up to smooth a lock of Annie's hair from her
forehead. The touch brought back a thousand memories, some of them
too painful for Annie to bear. She was relieved when Claudia turned
toward her oldest daughter who was slouched over the porch rail,
smoking the still unlit cigarette. "Susan, why don't you go to the
market so Annie can relax?"