Bleeding Heart (14 page)

S
al stopped by the kitchen on his way out to say good-bye.

“You’ll call me when you get word—right, Eleanor?”

“Of course, Mr. Lombardi.”

After we heard the visitors leave, Eleanor got up from her chair with a sigh.

“I guess I should get some lunch on the table,” she said to Mara. “Do you and Danny want to stay?”

“Sure,” Mara said. I hadn’t been invited, but I was too upset and nervous to sit still anyway.

“I need to get back to the office,” I said. I knew I had to keep moving and working—anything to keep from dwelling on the situation. But it was painful to drive along the top of the gardens on my way out. Had it really been only a little over four months since I’d first seen these half dozen sloping acres? I’d invested so much time, energy, and imagination into them! And so much hope. The Open Day had come to seem the ultimate proof of my worth, not just as a landscape designer but as a person. Where did that leave me now?

When I got back to the office, I decided to spend the rest of the afternoon sorting through the accounts. Once I got a better grip on what we actually owed, I was certain I’d feel less panicked. Green Acres was a solid, going concern, I told myself. I wasn’t about to let one bad account—no matter how big—undermine that. I’d forgotten, though, that Mara had upgraded and moved the accounting software to her computer. And I didn’t realize until I tried to log in at my own computer that I could no longer access the books from there.

I moved across the room to Mara’s desk and sat down. Because she’d arranged her area so that the back of her terminal faced me, I rarely had the opportunity to see her screen. It was filled now with a montage of photos. Family photos, I assumed, because there was Danny and a young woman, around Mara’s age, who looked a lot like her except that she was smiling in almost every frame. And there was a shot of a good-looking man in his late twenties and an older man standing in front of a ranch-style house flanked by willow trees. It cheered me to think that Mara and Danny were part of a larger family, even if Mara never alluded to it.

I was able to find the accounting software easily enough, but it was password protected. I tried numerous name and number combinations until I finally hit on “Danny829”—I knew his birthday was coming up at the end of August—and found myself looking at an unfamiliar accounting setup. I wandered around in the system, clicking on different tabs, trying to locate the most current receivables statement, and feeling increasingly frustrated. I was relieved to look up and see Mara and Danny coming down the path to the office. But that feeling didn’t last long.

“What’s going on?” Mara cried when she saw me at her desk. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I was just trying to look at the accounts,” I told her. I could tell she was incensed, but I was pretty angry, too. I got up from the desk. “Don’t yell at me like that. This is
my
office.”

“I thought I could count on a little privacy around here,” Mara said, softening her tone. I sensed she was making a concerted effort to get her feelings under control. She turned back to her son and said, “It’s okay, sweetie. Why don’t you run out to the garden and see if you can find some more of those caterpillars? You know where to find their special house, right?”

Danny looked from Mara to me. It must have been a pretty unsettling day for him.

“I hear they sometimes turn into butterflies,” I told him.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. That seemed to reassure him, and he left, the door slamming behind him. Mara and I took a moment to watch him make his way across the lawn to the old greenhouse and then reemerge a moment later carrying a big plastic jug.

“Sorry,” Mara said, walking past me to her desk and sinking into the chair. She ran her hands through her hair. “Listen—I’m just really stressed about what happened.”

“I can tell,” I said. “Are you okay? You look exhausted.”

“I am,” she said. “I’m living with a three-year-old. I’ve been putting in ten-hour workdays. And now I’m scared shitless my job’s going to go up in smoke.”

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I know we’ll be able to work this out. I think Eleanor’s right: Mackenzie would never leave us in the lurch. He may be tough, but I think he’s loyal. I think he takes care of his own.”

“You think?” she said sarcastically. “The truth is you didn’t really know a damned thing about him when you took this job on.”

“Please, there’s no point in arguing,” I told her. “We really need to work together right now. For starters, could you please
print out the latest statements for me? Then maybe we can sit down and try to figure out how we’re going to manage.”

It was worse than I’d thought. Convinced that Mackenzie’s second and final payment was covering me, I’d spent freely with several firms I’d never worked with before and whose terms were more rigid than those of my regular suppliers. Invoices from a nursery in Oregon, a high-end garden furniture company in North Carolina, and a rose grower in Ontario were all overdue. Bills were also starting to come in from local vendors. These were the very garden centers and nurseries I needed to be on good terms with if I hoped to stay in business. And I didn’t have the money to pay any of them.

“Maybe we could try to speed up our receivables?” I asked Mara, running my eye over the list of our regular customers. There were a few who occasionally required past-due notices, but in general our clients kept pretty current.

“How? By billing ahead?” Mara asked. “I don’t see how we can do that without setting off alarms.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I was just thinking out loud. The last thing we want is for word to get out that we’re in trouble.”

“That might already be happening,” Mara said. “Damon kind of cornered me this morning. He asked me if he could get paid in cash for the waterfall railing.”

“Did he say why?”

“No—and I didn’t ask. I didn’t commit, of course. I told him I’d have to talk to you about it first.”

“Thanks. But you’re right: he knows what happened. Nate told him about the bounced check. I guess there’s no way we’re going to be able to contain this thing. We need to get cash flowing again—fast.”

“Don’t worry about paying me for now,” Mara said.

“That’s ridiculous. Of course I’m going to—”

“No, you’ve been really generous with all the overtime this summer. Danny and I are good for now.”

“That’s kind of you, Mara, but I’ll find a way to pay you.”

“I’m not being kind, just realistic. We’ve got to pay the crew first. We lose them, and we’re really sunk.”

Mara and Danny left about an hour later. We hadn’t solved anything, but at least I now understood the extent of the problem. And it was daunting. Green Acres had been wrung dry in terms of money—and at the worst possible moment. Mackenzie had to come through, or I was going to have to start liquidating my retirement fund. Or consider mortgaging the house. Which would not only break my heart but put at risk a promise I’d made to my father years ago.

“You know, your great-grandfather built this place,” he’d told me the summer before he died. That was the year my dad started repeating himself and living more and more in the past. I’d heard the story many times before about how dapper Walter Childs, a New York City lawyer, broke a leg during a fishing trip in the summer of 1901, and was laid up in the rural backwater of Woodhaven for a few weeks. He stayed in a boardinghouse run by my soon-to-be great-grandmother’s family and quickly fell in love with the young woman who helped take care of him. After they married that Christmas, Walter took her back to the city to live, but soon discovered that his new wife yearned for the wooded hills of her childhood. So Walter built her the eyebrow Colonial farmhouse not far from the Heron River site of his accident. The family spent every summer there for the rest of their lives. Just as his eldest son—my grandfather—and his family did after him.

“One of my first memories was selling raspberries out there by the roadside,” my father told me—again, hardly for the first time. “Summer of ’38. Nobody had any money. My father had lost his job in the crash and we’d moved up here from the city. The bank was
trying to foreclose on the house, but my mother and father were determined to keep that from happening. There was my mother, who’d been born wealthy, with maids and chauffeurs in New York City, putting up jam! My father grew vegetables. And all of us kids did our bit, helping out in the garden and running that fruit stand.”

“I know, Dad,” I told him, only half listening.

“No, you don’t!” he said, his voice rising. “You have no idea what it was like! You’ll probably never know what it feels like to be in danger of losing everything you have! But if you do, Alice, you’ve got to promise me something.”

The doctor had told us that it wasn’t good for my father to become upset. And I’d been spending a lot of time that summer trying to deal with these sudden outbursts.

“Of course, Daddy, I’ll do whatever you say,” I told him.

“No, I mean it, Alice,” he said, his voice suddenly forceful and clear. He looked me in the eye. “I’m going to leave this place to you when I die because you’re my only child, but it really belongs to our family. To those who came before—and those who’ll be coming after. Promise me you’ll never let it go, okay?”

I was married then. To a wealthy, successful man. We owned a big Cape Cod in Westchester and a vacation condo on Sanibel Island in Florida. The idea of needing to sell the old family farmhouse in the Berkshires seemed far-fetched, to say the least.

“Yes, of course,” I told him without a second thought. “I promise.”