Justin Cronin - The Summer Guest

Hal frowned. “You still do that?”

“Only for people I like. How about it, Mr. Crosby?”

“It’s Joe, please. And no, thank you.”

“That must be some place you have up there in Maine. Hal and Sally just rave about it.”

I shrugged. “I’m a lucky man.”

“Luckier than you may know,” Hal said. He poked a thumb across the hall. “Okay, enough love. Let’s get this thing rolling. We’re actually set up in the conference room.”

“The conference room,” I said. I looked at Zoe. “Sounds pretty fancy.”

“Just how we do things around here,” Hal said. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, Joe? We’re trying to impress you.”

Sally was waiting for us, wearing a lawyerish blue suit and seated on the far side of a long table. A handshake seemed wrong, so I gave her a hug and stepped back to look at her. Hal was a good-looking fellow by any estimation, but his marriage was a fair fight: even dressed for court, Sally was about the prettiest woman who crossed my path with any regularity.

“Looks like motherhood suits you, Sally. How about a picture?”

She smiled at my request. “Well, as it so happens…”

Out came her wallet, and the snapshot everyone has: a fat, happy baby, so plump she had creases in the middle of her forearms. They’d put one of those frilly little headbands on her so people would know she was a girl, a nervous touch I liked.

“She’s just beautiful,” I said. “Good for you.”

Sally took the photo from me and returned it to her wallet. “That’s already way out of date. She’s walking now, gets into everything. Hal spent the weekend baby-proofing the apartment.”

“You did that, Hal?”

He grinned self-consciously, though I could tell he was proud of himself. “Bet you didn’t know I was so handy.”

“Come up this August, there’s plenty of work for you if you want it.”

“Don’t laugh, Joe,” Hal said. “I just might take you up on that.”

We took our places, Hal and Sally on one side of the wide table, myself on the other. The room was all business-just the table, a huge gleaming slab of a thing, and behind Hal, a second, smaller table with a computer and a telephone. On the table between us sat a water pitcher and glasses, and a single manila folder, which Hal opened.

“Okay, the first thing to say here, for the record, is that Sally is present in her capacity as my father’s personal attorney. The offer my father wants to make to you is a personal one, not one connected to the company. All right with that?”

I nodded. “Sure. Seems clear.”

“Just so long as it’s understood.” Hal poured himself a glass of water. “Anyway, I might as well cut straight to it. Here’s the deal. My father wants to make an offer for the camp, Joe. He wants to buy it, I mean. And he wants to do it right away, or as soon as possible.”

This was, of course, exactly what I’d figured on. The plane, the peanuts, the limo ride: a hundred other things besides, and at the end of the day, a man who scouts the water for his living knows things in his gut, as I’d known this.

“What’s he offering?”

Hal raised an eyebrow. “Don’t look so surprised, Joe.”

“I’m not. It’s all right.”

He sipped the water. “What’s all right?”

“All right, I’m listening.” I nodded at Hal and Sally in turn. “If the offer’s a good one, we can talk about it.”

Hal took out the papers and slid them across the desk. “The figure is more than generous, I think. Anyway,” he said, and wagged a finger, “it’s right there.”

I looked the agreement over. Lock, stock, and barrel, Harry Wainwright was offering me $2.3 million for the camp-the buildings, the land, the right-of-way along the river, the leases on the parcels across the lake, everything right down to the leaky canoes and the kitchen pots and pans. In the days before I’d left Big Pine, I’d done a few computations. It was a lot of land, but not especially valuable, and as a business, the camp had never turned more than the thinnest profit. Harry’s figure was, as best as I could tell, about twice what it was worth, maybe a little more.

“I’ll be honest with you, Joe,” Hal was saying. “I’m not in love with this, as a business deal. But I think everybody here knows that’s not what this is.”

“Jeez, Hal.” I flipped back through the agreement, if only to keep my eyes and hands occupied, skimming past pages of information I should have cared about or at least read. “Two million bucks is a lot of money. For that kind of bread, I would have been happy to fly coach.”

Hal nodded smartly; the chummy banter was over for the moment. “That’s the general idea, Joe. My father wants to get this thing done. What do you think?”

And I paused to wonder: what did I think? Every man has his price, and Harry had found mine-more than found it, actually, as a million five would have produced in me more or less the same set of emotions: a heady rush of pure greed, followed by the unsettling awareness that all the problems of my life had been solved in one painless instant. But that, of course, was just the problem. Somebody offers you something you suddenly can’t live without, but five minutes ago never knew you needed-well, there’s a catch somewhere, the most obvious being that what feels like luck is actually somebody else’s wand being waved over your life.

“Just one question, Hal. What does he want to do with it?”

“The camp?” Hal leaned back in his chair. “Keep it in the family, I suppose. There’s not much else he could do with it. That’s really his to decide, Joe.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I have to know this.”

Hal shot a look at Sally, who nodded a lawyerish nod, then turned his eyes back toward me. “He’s rewriting his will, taking this into account. That’s as far as I can go. And don’t ask Sally, because she can’t tell you. You’ve heard of a little thing called attorney-client privilege? She can’t even tell me.”

“You said yourself this wasn’t just a business deal.”

Hal sighed. “Look, here’s the bottom line. He wants to be helpful, Joe. Forgive me, but we did a little digging, and we know your situation. You’ve borrowed pretty heavily in the last few years-”

“College,” I interrupted. “For Kate.”

“Fair enough. But there’s also the place in Florida, and the new boats. You’re stretched pretty thin. I know you want to make a go of it down there, and you should. You’re entitled. You and Lucy are entitled. With the right seed money, the two of you could really set yourselves up nicely. I know you’ve made some inquiries about selling one of your leases back to Maine Paper. That’s exactly the kind of thing that Harry wants to avoid.”

I felt my face grow warm. “Is this the part where you turn on the salesman’s charm, Hal? Because where I come from, talking about another man’s debts is not a way to make friends. And if you really want to know, they approached me. They have for years. I can set my fucking-excuse me, Sally-my fucking watch by it. The answer is always no.”

“But how long can it stay no?” Hal took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. “Look, Joe, I’m not going to try to tell you how to run your business. You’re absolutely right, and I apologize. It’s been a hell of a week, a hell of a month, really. You don’t know the half of it. So if I’ve spoken too bluntly, I’m sorry. But I also won’t insult your intelligence. We’ve known each other too long. This is a good deal. Hell, it’s a great deal. We both know that. You’re never going to find another buyer with this kind of dough to spend. And with Harry, you don’t have to watch the thing broken up and sold back to the loggers. That’s the real point, Joe. You can have my word on it, if you like.”