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I SWEAR, RUNNING INTO that girl this morning had me all kinds of distracted—and I was having a hard time clearing my head of everything that had been put there when she looked up at me with those green eyes and her jaw had dropped.
But I was supposed to be at work. That was where I had been headed after spending a quiet morning eating breakfast and reading up on the news from last night—well, and checking out what kind of vibe the Kingston Press gave off before my interview there at the end of the week.
Though I got the feeling that I had a lot less to worry about now that I had bumped into the woman who was going to conduct the interview with me. She seemed totally grateful that I had been willing to shift the interviewer from her editor to her, but honestly, I figured that it would likely work out better for me that way—I knew she would be much easier to handle than her formidable editor, who might hit me with some of the hard questions that I didn’t want to answer.
Part of the reason that I had come into the office today, actually, was to try and give myself plenty to discuss at that meeting that had nothing to do with my past. I knew that she would still likely hit me with a few questions about it, but I was sure I would be able to deflect them and turn the piece into something more focused on what good I was doing around the town since I had arrived.
It had been a busy morning—the end of the summer always brought about a new wave of people with ideas that they were looking to get funded, and my assistant, George, filtered them well enough that the ones who came through the door were almost entirely winners. I had approved three applications so far, sharing a few thousand each with them so that they could get their businesses off the ground. They had all promised me that I would be welcome there any time that I wanted, and I nodded and smiled as they thanked me over and over again. I was just glad that I could do something good with the money that I had.
I couldn’t even think about where it had come from. Truthfully, most of it had risen from some solid investments I had made after I had first arrived in this town, wanting to get that cash as far away from me as possible so that the stink of stealing it wasn’t too fresh on my back. But that had turned out better than I’d expected, and I had wound up with millions.
Since I hadn’t exactly grown up with money, I didn’t know what to do with it now that I had it. I didn’t want it. I had supported Luke for long enough now, and he was at the stage where he just wanted to take care of himself. I didn’t want to patronize him by trying to look after him now that he was a grown-ass adult, and I was happy to let him set off and do his own thing on his own terms.
But that meant that I had a whole hell of a lot of money to get rid of, and I intended to do everything I could to get rid of it. I knew that I had already done more good in the last six years than I’d pulled off in the twenty-five years that preceded it, but that didn’t mean that the weight of it didn’t press down on me some nights. I would lie awake in bed, stare at the ceiling, and the memories would flood through me like an avalanche, crushing my chest under the weight of everything that I knew I would never be able to undo.
Maybe it was what the universe had already decided on for me. I did bad, and then I did good. My mother would have been proud of the man that I had managed to become. If she could have ever forgiven me for what it had taken to get to this point.
I had one more meeting that afternoon, with a woman called Nancy—she was due in at four, but it was already a few minutes past, and there was no sign of her. Suddenly, I heard a flurry of activity outside, and then a knock at my door came and I rose to my feet to answer it.
Sure enough, there she was, dressed in a long skirt and a blouse, her hair tossed up in a messy ponytail, with dark rings under her eyes that looked as though they had been embedded there for the last five years straight.
“Nancy?” I greeted her, and she nodded and smiled and stretched her hand out to greet me.
“Nice to meet you,” she blurted out. “And thank you so much for taking the time to meet with me—I know I’m running late, but I can explain—”
“You don’t have to,” I assured her at once. “Come in, take a seat. Would you like a coffee?”
She nodded, and I stuck my head outside to George to tell him to bring us a couple of cups. I knew that it was late in the day to have one, but I got the feeling that she was going to need all the energy she had to get through this, and I didn’t want to leave her sipping on her own.
“So, my pitch,” she announced once she had the coffee in her hand, “is a daycare center. As you can probably tell...”
She gestured to herself.
“I could really use a little help making it through single motherhood,” she continued. She sounded as though she had rehearsed this. Her voice was shaking slightly, as though she was worried that she was going to fuck this up. I wanted to assure her that she had nothing to worry about, but I got the feeling that she wasn’t going to listen to me.
“So I came up with this idea,” she explained. “Co-op daycare. All the single parents who need to use it put in as much as they can to pay the staff, and they get to leave their kids for free...”
She explained the concept to me. It was a good one, and would be a solid way to help out the parents who were struggling to hold themselves together in between work and raising their babies. I knew it was the kind of thing that my mother would have loved to have access to when she was raising us. My father had never really been around, vanishing out of our lives when Luke was young, and she’d had to battle to make sure that we got the care that we deserved, as she tried to keep working and put food on the table for us.
A lot of what I did here, I did for her. I saw people like her coming in every day, people who had worked hard all their lives and just needed that one little break to push them over the edge. And I was glad that I could bring that to them. I knew what these people must have been through, how desperate they must have been to ask for help, and how they likely looked at me and saw someone who had never had to struggle with the same things that they had. Sometimes, I wished that I could tell them that I understood, but I knew that most of them would never have believed me in the first place. Better to just keep my mouth shut, keeping people guessing about where I got my money from, and hope that I could change the world for the better a little longer before I ran out of cash that I could give away.
Once she was finished pitching me her idea, Nancy sat back in her seat, clutching her coffee cup nervously as she waited for my response. I nodded at once.
“I really like the idea,” I replied. “How much did you say for the lease, again?”
She repeated the price to me once more, and I reached into my top drawer and pulled out my checkbook. I scribbled her out the cost, and a little more for anything else that came up and handed it across the table toward her.
She stared down at it for a long moment, as though she wasn’t quite sure that this could be happening. She clapped a hand over her mouth and looked back up at me with tears brewing in her eyes.
“This is...I don’t know what to say,” she muttered, and she quickly grabbed a handkerchief from her pocket and pressed it to her eyes. I shook my head.
“You don’t have to say anything,” I assured her. “A business like that could really make a difference. I’m sure that you’ll show me that I made the right choice soon enough.”
“Thank you for believing in me,” she told me, and she rose to her feet and extended her hand to mine. I shook it.
“You won’t regret this,” she replied, and after we said our goodbyes, she headed to the door and closed it behind her, and I slumped back into my seat and stared at the spot that she had just been sitting in.
She had been so happy. I was glad that I was able to make a difference for someone like that, I really was—sometimes, I wondered if I was tempting fate by giving away all my money like this, begging for someone to come and notice what I was doing with it and start asking some very reasonable questions about where it had all come from.
But I couldn’t just sit around like a miser, hoarding every cent of what I had stolen, of what I had to live with for the rest of my life. I had better things to do than that. Brighter things in my future and to give to Kingston’s future than to avoid doing anything worthwhile with it. Besides, it was a joy to see the way that just a few thousand dollars here and there could change the course of the lives of the people in this town who needed it most.
And this was going to give me even more to talk about when it came time for my interview with the Kingston Press on Friday. I knew that I might have been down to talk to someone who wouldn’t push as hard, given that she was new there and likely didn’t want to alienate me, but I was glad I would be able to walk in there with plenty to prove that I had been the best thing to happen to this town in years.
It was hard to believe that half a decade or more had passed since the last time that I was wrapped up in the life I’d had before. Sometimes, it seemed so present I was sure that it had to be yesterday, —other times it was so distant that I doubted that I could ever have done those things at all.
But I had. And I needed to find some way to reconcile that version of myself with the one that existed now—the one who only wanted to do good in the world, the one who wanted nothing more than to make a difference and prove that there was still good to be found here. I wanted everyone to know what kind of man I was. And that meant avoiding the memory of the man I used to be.
