Company Man (7 page)

The architect who was doing the renovations to the Conovers' kitchen was a stodgy but affable man named Jeremiah Claflin. He wore round black glasses of the sort that some of the famous architects affected—that Japanese guy, that Swiss guy, Nick forgot their names if he ever knew them—and his white hair contrasted pleasantly with his ruddy face and curled over his shirt collar. Laura had interviewed him and several other architects from Fenwick and the surrounding towns as intensively as she'd interviewed nanny candidates years ago. It was important to her that the architect she hired not only had a portfolio of projects she admired, but also wasn't too stubborn, too much of an
artiste
that he wouldn't do exactly what she wanted.

Nick got along with Claflin, as he got along with just about everyone, but he realized early on that the architect found Nick frustrating. Sure, he was pleased to be working on the house that belonged to Stratton's CEO—that gave him certain bragging rights—and since Laura had chosen nothing but the most high-end, most ridiculously expensive appliances and cabinets and all that, Claflin was making a boatload of money for not that much design work. But Nick wasn't all that interested in the fussy little details that Laura had had such patience for, and there sure as hell were a million fussy little details. The decisions never seemed to end.
Did he want the kitchen counters to have a full bullnose or half bullnose or an ogee edge? How much of an overhang? How tall did he want the backsplash to be? A self-rimming sink or an undermount? What about the height of the countertop? Jesus, Nick had a company to run.

Claflin was forever faxing him drawings and lists of questions. Nick would inevitably tell the architect to just do whatever Laura had told him to do. He really didn't give a damn about what the kitchen looked like. What he cared about—was obsessed about, really—was that it be done precisely the way Laura wanted. The renovations had been Laura's last big project, pretty much all she thought about, talked about, in the months before the accident. Nick suspected that part of the reason she'd poured so much of herself into it was that the kids were getting older, and being a mom was no longer a full-time job. After Lucas was born, she'd quit her job teaching art history at St. Thomas More College. She tried to get her teaching position back when the kids were older, but she couldn't. She'd been mommy-tracked. She missed teaching, missed the intellectual engagement.

Laura was by far the smarter one in the marriage. Nick had gone to Michigan State on a full-boat hockey scholarship, busted his hump to get C's and B's, while Laura had breezed through Swarthmore
summa cum laude
. It was like she had a deep well of creative energy inside her that needed to be tapped or she'd go crazy, and the renovations filled a need for her.

But there was more to it: Laura had wanted to knock down the sterile old kitchen, which looked like no one ever used it, and turn it into a hearth, a great room where the whole family could gather. Laura, who was an excellent cook, could make dinner while the kids did their homework or hung out around the kitchen island. The whole family could be together comfortably.

The least Nick could do to honor her was to make sure the damned kitchen was done the way she wanted.

Their marriage had been far from perfect—hell, they'd been arguing the night she was killed, as he'd never forget—
but Nick had learned you choose your battles. You made unspoken deals sometimes, ceded turf. Laura, who'd grown up in a shambling Victorian on the Hill, a pediatrician's kid, wanted to live a certain way, namely better than the way in which she'd been brought up. She wanted the elegance and style she never had growing up in a house that was always in some state of chaos and disrepair. She subscribed to
Architectural Digest
and
Elle Decor
and half a dozen other magazines that all looked the same, and she was always tearing out photos and two-page spreads and adding them to a steadily thickening file folder that she might as well have labeled
DREAM HOUSE
. To Nick, having a house with more than two bedrooms and a backyard and a kitchen you didn't eat in already bordered on unimaginable luxury.

Claflin was waiting for him in the kitchen when he arrived, twenty minutes late. From the family room Nick could hear Julia and her best friend, Emily, playing a computer game called
The Sims
in which they created their own creepily real-looking human beings and bent them to their will. Julia and Emily were shrieking with laughter over something.

“Busy day?” Claflin asked. His tone was jovial, but his eyes betrayed annoyance at being kept waiting.

Nick apologized as he shook the architect's hand, and then his eye was immediately caught by something. The countertops were in. He went up to the island and realized that, even to his untrained eye, something looked wrong.

“I see they've put a new alarm system in,” Claflin said. “Fast work.”

Nick nodded. He'd noticed the white touch pads on the wall as he entered. “The island,” he said. “That's not what Laura wanted.”

She'd designed a big island in the center of the kitchen around which the whole family could gather, sitting on stools, while she made dinner. But you sure as hell couldn't sit at this thing. It had walls of black granite that came up about two feet, no overhang, no place for stools.

Claflin beamed. “None of your guests will have to see the
cooking mess from the dining table,” he said. “Yet it works perfectly as a food-prep station. Clever, don't you think?”

Nick hesitated. “You can't sit at it,” he said.

“True,” Claflin conceded, his smile fading, “but there's no unsightly mess. That open-kitchen thing, that's the big problem with this great-room design that no one talks about. You have this stunning kitchen with all the best appliances, and this big farmhouse table where your guests eat their dinner, and what do they end up looking at? A mess of dirty pots and pans on the counters and island. This solves that problem.”

“But the kids can't sit around it.”

“Believe me, that's trivial compared to—”

“Laura wanted everyone to be able to sit around the kitchen island. She wanted to be able to see the kids hanging out here, doing their homework or reading or talking or whatever while she was making dinner.”

“Nick,” Claflin said slowly, “you don't cook, right? And Laura's—well, she's…”

“Laura wanted this big, open, hang-out kitchen,” Nick said. “That's what she wanted, and that's what we're going to have.”

Claflin looked at him for a few seconds. “Nick, I faxed you the specs, and you signed off on them.”

“I probably didn't even look at them. I told you we're doing everything exactly according to Laura's wishes.”

“This has already been cut. We can't…send it
back
. You own it.”

“I really don't give a shit,” Nick said. “You get the stone guy back here and have him recut it the way Laura wanted.”

“Nick, there's a logic to this design that—”

“Just do it.” Nick's voice was arctic. “Are we clear?”

As soon as Claflin left, Julia entered the kitchen. She was wearing a gray sweatshirt emblazoned with the arch-shaped logo of the Michigan Wolverines. Her friend was still sitting at the computer in the family room, busily tyrannizing the lives of her Sims family like some high-tech Hitler.

“Daddy, are you the president of Stratton?”

“President and CEO, baby, don't you know that? Give me a hug.”

She ran to him as if she'd been waiting for permission, threw her arms around him. Nick leaned over and gave her a kiss on her forehead, thought:
She's just figuring this out?

“Emily says you fired half the people in Fenwick.”

Emily looked up from the computer screen, stole a furtive glance at Nick.

“We had to lay a lot of really good people off,” Nick said. “To save the company.”

“She says you fired her uncle.”

Ah, so that was it. Nick shook his head. “I didn't know that. I'm sorry to hear it, Emily.”

Emily gave him an imperious, condescending look, almost withering, quite remarkable for a ten-year-old girl. “Uncle John's been unemployed for almost two years. He says he gave everything to Stratton and you ruined his life.”

Nick wanted to respond—
It wasn't me, and anyway we provided extensive outplacement counseling, you know
—but once you start debating with ten-year-olds you might as well hang it up. He was saved by the honk of a car horn. “Okay, Em, you'd better get going. You don't want to keep your mom waiting.”

 

Emily's mom drove a brand-new gold Lexus LX 470 roughly half as long as a city block. She wore a white Fred Perry tennis shirt, white shorts, a Fenwick Country Club windbreaker, expensive-looking white tennis shoes. She had great, tanned legs, short auburn hair coiffed in a high-fashion cut, a giant glittering diamond engagement ring. Her husband was a plastic surgeon who was rumored to be having an affair with his receptionist, and if even Nick, who was completely out of the gossip stream, had heard it, it was probably true.

“Hello, Nick.” Her cigarette-husky voice was chilly and bone-dry.

“Hi, Jacqueline. Emily should be out in a second. I had to tear her away from the computer.”

Jacqueline smiled in an artful semblance of sociability. Nick knew her only enough to say hi: maintaining friendships among the school parents had been Laura's job. Not that long ago, Jacqueline Renfro would light up when she saw him at school plays and parents' nights, as if he were a long-lost friend. But people didn't suck up to him so much anymore.

“How's Jim?” he said.

“Oh, you know,” she said airily. “When people lose their jobs they don't get Botox quite as often.”

“Emily mentioned that her uncle got laid off from Stratton. Is he your brother or Jim's?”

She paused, then said sternly, “Mine, but Emily shouldn't have said that. Honestly, she has no manners. I'll talk to her.”

“No, no—she was saying what was on her mind. Where'd your brother work?”

“I don't—” she faltered, then she called out, “Emily, what is
taking
you so long?”

They stood in awkward silence for a moment until her
daughter emerged from the house, struggling under the weight of a backpack the size of a Sherpa's.

 

Julia didn't look up from the computer monitor as Nick approached and asked, “Where's your brother?”

“I don't know.”

“You finish your homework?”

Julia didn't answer.

“You heard me, right?”

“What?” What was it with the selective hearing? He could whisper “Krispy Kreme” in the kitchen and she'd come bounding.

“Your homework. We're eating dinner in half an hour—it's Marta's night off. Turn off the computer.”

“But I'm in the middle—”

“Save it and shut down. Come on, sweetie.”

He went to the foot of the stairs and shouted up for Lucas. No reply. The house was so unnecessarily big, though, that sound didn't carry far. Nick went upstairs, past Laura's study, its door unopened since her death, to Lucas's room.

He knocked. The door, slightly ajar, opened inward a few inches. He pushed it open the rest of the way, called, “Luke?” No answer; no Lucas here. His desk lamp was on, a textbook open. He walked over to see which textbook it was, inadvertently bumping against the desk. The iMac's flat panel screen came out of sleep mode, displaying a profusion of colorful flesh-tone photographs. Nick looked again and saw naked bodies in various sexual contortions. He came closer to get a closer look.

The entire screen was taken up with pop-up windows of slutty-looking women with huge boobs in garish shades of pink and orange. “Real Amateur Pussy,” one window read, the word “real” flashing red like a neon sign.

Nick's first reaction was a very male one: he looked even closer, intrigued, felt a stirring he hadn't felt in months. Immediately after, though, he felt disgusted at the tawdriness of the images—who were these girls who were willing to do this stuff for all the heavy-breathing Internet world to see?
And then the realization washed over him that this was Lucas's computer, that his son was looking at all this stuff. If Laura had discovered this, she would have freaked out, called him at work, demanded that he come home at once and have a Talk with his son.

Whereas Nick didn't know what to think, how to react. He was at a loss. The kid was sixteen, and developmentally a fairly advanced sixteen at that. Of course he was interested in sex. Nick remembered when he and a buddy, around the same age, had found a matted, waterlogged
Playboy
in the woods. They'd dried it out carefully, pored over it as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls, hid it in Nick's garage. Looking back on it now, it was amazing how different smut was in those days, how innocent, though it sure didn't seem it at the time. The photos in
Playboy
were so heavily airbrushed that it was something of a shock when Nick first got an up-close glimpse of his first real-life tits not long afterward, in the finished basement of his first real girlfriend, Jody Catalfano. Jody, the cutest girl in the class, had been after him for months, was ready long before he was. Her breasts were far smaller than the voluptuous babes' in
Playboy,
her nipples larger and darker with a few stray hairs around the edges of the areolas.

But this stuff, garish and flashing, was way too
real,
somehow. It was more blatant, more perverted than anything from Nick's fevered adolescence. And here it was, a couple of mouse clicks away. It wasn't half-buried under dead leaves in the woods, didn't require conservation efforts or concealment in an empty Pennzoil box in a garage. On some level it was almost sickening. And what if Julia had wandered in here and seen it?

He picked up Lucas's desk phone and called his son's cell.

Lucas answered after five rings, fumbling with the phone a long time. “Yeah?” In the background was loud music, raucous voices.

“Luke, where the hell are you?”

A pause. “What's up?”

“What's
up
? It's suppertime.”

“I ate already.”

“We have dinner together, remember?” This “dinner together” thing had become one of Nick's recent obsessions, particularly since Laura was gone. He sometimes felt that if he didn't insist on it, the remains of his family could all fly away by centrifugal force.

Another pause. “Where are you, Luke?”

“All right,” Lucas said and hung up.

 

An hour later, Lucas still wasn't home. Julia was hungry, so the two of them sat down to dinner at the small round table that had been temporarily placed in one corner of the kitchen, away from most of the construction. Marta had set the table for the three of them before going out for the evening. In the warm oven was a roast chicken, tented with foil. Nick brought the chicken and rice and broccoli to the table, remembering to put trivets under the chicken pan so he didn't scorch the table. He expected a fight over the broccoli, and he got it. Julia would accept only rice and a chicken drumstick, and Nick was too wiped out to argue.

“I like Mommy's better,” Julia said. “This is too dry.”

“It's been in the oven for a couple of hours.”

“Mommy made the best fried chicken.”

“She sure did, baby,” Nick said. “Eat.”

“Where's Luke?”

“He's on his way back.”
Taking his damned time of it too,
Nick thought.

Julia stared at the chicken leg on her plate as if it were a giant cockroach. Finally, she said, “I don't like it here.”

Nick thought for a moment, unsure how to respond. “Like it where?”

“Here,” she said unhelpfully.

“This house?”

“We don't have any neighbors.”

“We do, but…”

“We don't know any of them. It's not a neighborhood. It's just…houses and trees.”

“People do keep to themselves here,” he conceded. “But your mommy wanted us to move here because she thought it would be safer than our last house.”

“Well, it's not. Barney…” She stopped, her eyes welling up with tears, resting her chin in her hands.

“But we will be now, with this new security system in.”

“Nothing like that ever happened in our old house,” she pointed out.

The front door opened, setting off a high alert tone, and a few seconds later Lucas trundled noisily into the kitchen, threw his backpack down on the floor. He seemed to get taller and broader by the day. He wore a dark blue Old Navy sweatshirt, baggy cargo pants with the waistband of his boxer shorts showing, and some white scarflike thing under his backwards baseball cap.

“What's that on your head?” Nick asked anyway.

“Do-rag, why?”

“That like a hip-hop thing?”

Lucas shook his head, rolled his eyes. “I'm not hungry,” he said. “I'm going upstairs.”

“Sit with us anyway, Luke,” Julia pleaded. “Come on.”

“I've got a lot of homework,” Lucas said as he left the kitchen without turning back.