“Where will the plant itself go?”
“Several possibilities, but I’m thinking primarily of an assisted living group out of Texas. They’ve got the wherewithal and I will show them the need.”
Natalie mused on how attractive an Indian man could be: refined features, eyes just like a cocker spaniel’s! But Evelyn found his act of being one jump ahead of everybody to be slightly irritating. She also thought that, while justified by the weather, the British clothes somewhat overwhelmed him. Later when he showed them his picture sea bathing at St. Barts in a little bathing suit he called a “banana hammock,” he revealed that he was far from inflexible in dress.
“How will you convey the need to own a family business to this Texas firm?” she asked.
“Not just Texas! Fort Worth — where the Basses live! — Evelyn, here’s how: I crawl over the portfolio till I find the missing tooth.”
Natalie brought out some pastries and coffee while Majub flipped through the celebrity photographs. When he got to Yoko Ono with John Lennon curled up next to her in the fetal position, he cried out in delight, “She’ll have him for dinner!” After thumbing furiously through the rest of the book and finding the attention lavished upon subjects he didn’t recognize maddening, he pushed the book away and settled down.
“In order to sell this company I have to find its value, which under present management is falling rapidly. I can rough it in by using a multiple of earnings, but there is a trend here and I don’t want to risk an opinion and have our sale overturned by a probate court. We’ll get a reputable appraiser, maybe even find one in a cowboy hat.”
“How did you find us?” Evelyn demanded.
“Your father found me. Did you not read the trust instrument? I’m the third codicil.”
Evelyn and Natalie turned to each other again. They had thought it morbid to study the estate information too closely; their mother read it in its entirety and her reports had seemed sufficient to the girls.
“Your father and I had a long association. He didn’t like to invest in the stock market, and looked to me to find alternatives. He felt he had no influence over companies in which he merely invested. He wanted to own whole companies, and I helped him find them.”
“Where are they now?” Natalie wished to know.
“Come and gone, mostly lost money. He really only knew how to run this one business, I’m sorry to say, but it has done nicely until now. Your father was not in the best of health. He never exercised, and he’d been eating those same big marbled steaks from Kansas City all his life. He once told me he’d eaten more beef than you see in the stampede scene in John Wayne’s Red River, but that he’d reached the age and state where he couldn’t eat another herd of that size. It was his intimation of mortality. His hope was that the bottling plant would remain as a monument to, well, to him. But he was a realist. He thought that your husband—”
“Estranged husband.”
“Of course. That Paul had the best chance of holding the asset together.” He turned to Natalie. “Whereas I thought your husband—”
“Soon-to-be used-to-be,” said Natalie. “I just gave him the news.”
“Anyway, I considered Stuart the steadier man. However, your father somehow thought he owed it to Paul, and so Paul it was. Frankly, he has been a nonstarter because the fortunes of this company are dropping like a rock. As far as I’m concerned, Paul is out of runway. I mean, you girls can look after yourselves, but I don’t want to see your mother sleeping in her car.”
“Has my mother heard this?” Evelyn asked.
“The doctor is with her now.” After giving the remark plenty of time to settle in, he continued. “But look, relax. I will get this fixed, you have my word. And when I’m done you’ll see a little security, a little income. You’ll need to work, of course, but you’ll have some latitude as to the job, not just flipping burritos at Taco Bell.”
“How much income?” said Natalie.
“Too soon to tell. And Stuart—”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“He’s a stakeholder.” He turned to Evelyn. “You’re different: you become a landowner. And, more importantly, when the plant goes away, Paul goes away. His claim to fame was to do a good job, and the job he accomplished was sabotage. You’re lucky the old man put me in place, or this thing would be an oil slick. And you can thank me for figuring a way to park your marriage until we liquidate.”
“Are you being paid?” asked Evelyn.
“I was paid a long time ago. I’ll spare you the details.”
On the fifteenth of February, the snow stopped and the sun came out. People begin to act crazy. They washed their cars, kissed in public; several suspicions of fire turned out to be barbecues, meat grilling in the shadows of snowdrifts. When the plows finished the town’s streets, a pair of hot-rod roadsters drag-raced ten blocks straight east, before being forced to the side of the road by a Montana Highway Patrol car. Both men qualified for senior discounts and had built the cars themselves, starting back in high-school shop class forty years earlier. One driver, wall-eyed with adrenaline, was quoted in the paper as saying, “Officer, you’re lucky you ever caught us in that lead sled of yours. These cars are freaky-fast, wind-in-your-hair, point-and-shoot hot rods. They are not for the faint of heart.”
The Whitelaw family would have been hard pressed to demonstrate quite such jubilation as they stood and watched a crane lower the WHITELAW BOTTLING sign and replace it with the shorter and graphically more up-to-date ECO FIZZ. It would in time be a memorable gathering — Alice Whitelaw (openly weeping), Natalie Whitelaw (patience rewarded), Bill Champion (out-of-place), Paul Crusoe (ironic leer), Evelyn Whitelaw (uncomfortable), Stuart Cross (nostalgic). Paul’s dog stood between the family and the spectacle and alone seemed free of uncertainty. One of the new owners gazed around the neighborhood and asked of nobody in particular, “Whose idea was it to build a town here?”
Looking at the new sign, Natalie feigned cheer as she pointed out to her heartbroken mother, “That’s the same lettering they use at Planet Hollywood.”
Having felt his gaze, Paul turned to look at Bill, whose cowboy boots were being inspected by Whitelaw, who had sensed Bill’s feelings about his master.
“Which planet?” said Alice as Bill looked at her protectively and the dog growled at his feet. Evelyn felt Paul’s eyes on her face but declined to turn to him. She shared her family’s exhaustion from the negotiations and sale and all the turbulence that went with them. The assisted-living people — born-again Christians, skiers and very tough business people — were openly contemptuous of the Whitelaws, whom they viewed as the dysfunctional family. During one tense moment their accountant said, “We need to wind this up and let this family crawl back under their log.”
Natalie and her mother stood shoulder to shoulder, holding the collars of their winter coats to their throats with the same left-handed gesture, and staring at the flashing Eco Fizz sign. Paul walked briskly toward the parked cars without recognizing any of the employees who’d begun to drift out coatless to see the new sign and smoke cigarettes, their expressions revealing their view that this was more management high jinks.
Evelyn’s eyes were on Paul when her sister said, “We’re going for a victory drink. Care to join us?” Momentarily despising Natalie, she said, “No.” Her own mother appeared to her to be a simpleton and an opportunist. Her eyes were on Paul, heading to his car. She wondered why she wasn’t happier to see him so utterly defeated.