Chapter 9 - The Liquidation of Entitlement
By the middle of August, the heatwave had broken, replaced by the cool, dry breezes of early autumn that turned the leaves of the oak trees along Route 9 into shades of dull copper and gold.
Outside Unit 104 at Route 9 Climate Storage, an orange flatbed tow truck from the county sheriff's department idle-rumbled in the gravel lot, its diesel exhaust drifting through the open chain-link gate.
Gary Whitmore stood beside his white Ford F-250, wearing a stained sleeveless shirt and a pair of faded work boots that had holes in both toes. His face was no longer red from the beach sun; it was grey, sunken, the skin around his jowls hanging loose like an old hound that had spent three weeks living on scraps.
Beside him sat Linda, perched on an overturned plastic milk crate, clutching her purse to her chest as she watched three men in work gloves carry her custom silk drapes out of the metal garage bay and load them into the back of a liquidation auctioneer's van.
"You can't take the drapes!" Linda wailed for the fourth time that morning, her voice thin, cracked, and completely ignored by everyone in the lot. "Those drapes were custom-measured for the dining room at Oakridge! They cost four thousand dollars!"
A young deputy sheriff with a clipboard stepped between Linda and the van, checking off items with a red ballpoint pen.
"Ma'am," the deputy said, without looking up. "These goods have been surrendered to the county sheriff's civil division to satisfy the municipal fine for unpermitted electrical and structural modifications executed at 414 Oakridge Crest. The fine is six thousand eight hundred dollars. The auctioneer is giving you an eighty percent liquidation credit toward the balance. If you interfere with the loading, I will have to issue an administrative summons for obstruction."
"Gary!" Linda screamed, turning her venom on her husband. "Do something! You built the damn workshop! Tell them you had a permit!"
Gary did not yell back. He didn't even look at her. He stood with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, his shoulders hunched against the morning wind, watching his forty-thousand-dollar collection of Delta saws, Makita planers, and Milwaukee drills being loaded onto the flatbed under the supervision of a city code enforcement officer.
"I didn't have a permit, Linda," Gary muttered, his voice a flat, dead rasp. "You told me not to pull a permit because you didn't want the city assessor to raise Sarah's property taxes before we finished the deck."
"And you listened to me?" Linda shrieked, her face twisting into a mask of bitter, hysterical hatred. "You're the contractor! You're supposed to know the law! Now we’re living in a sixty-dollar-a-night motel with roaches in the bathroom, my son is working out of a rented cubicle in Richmond, and we don't even have a bed to sleep on!"
Ethan walked out of the storage office, holding a single manila envelope containing three cashier's checks.
He was thinner—twenty pounds lighter than he had been on the beach in North Carolina. He was wearing an off-the-rack grey suit from an outlet mall, his hair cut short by a twelve-dollar barber on the bypass, his executive watch gone from his wrist, replaced by a simple black rubber sports watch he had bought at a pharmacy.
He walked over to the milk crate and dropped one of the cashier's checks into his mother's lap.
"What is this?" Linda hissed, clutching the paper with trembling fingers.
"That's your share of the settlement, Mom," Ethan said, his voice completely devoid of the self-important swagger that had once defined him. "Eighteen hundred dollars. That’s what was left after the partnership audit paid off the corporate credit line and settled the back rent on Ashley's apartment."
"Eighteen hundred dollars?" Linda screamed, her voice rising into a shriek that made the auctioneer’s men pause by the van. "What are we supposed to do with eighteen hundred dollars? That won't pay for three weeks at the motel!"
"Then you’d better find an apartment in Scranton, Mom," Ethan said, looking down at her with eyes that were cold, dead, and utterly exhausted. "Because I don't have any more money. Whitmore & Croft dissolved the equity tier on Monday. Mark bought out my remaining voting shares for ten cents on the dollar to cover the firm's legal liability. I took a job as a remote compliance analyst for an insurance firm in Roanoke. I start on Monday. Three thousand dollars a month. That’s it."
"Roanoke?" Linda gasped, her eyes bulging with horror. "You're moving to the mountains? What about us? What about your father and me?"
"You can take the bus back to Pennsylvania, Mom," Ethan said. He didn't raise his voice; he didn't scowl. He spoke with the quiet, terrifying indifference of a man who had realized that his entire life had been a series of expensive mistakes made to please a woman who couldn't be satisfied by the ocean itself. "Gary has his brother's old house in Scranton. The roof leaks, but there's a stove. You can live there."
"You're abandoning us!" Linda wept, throwing the check onto the gravel, her tears finally washing away the last traces of her expensive powder. "After everything I did for you! After all the sacrifices I made to make sure you were successful! You're leaving your own mother in a parking lot!"
Ethan looked at the check lying in the grey dust between his shoes.
"Family is everything, Mom," he whispered, a faint, bitter smile touching the corner of his cracked lips. "Isn't that what you wrote?"
He turned on his heel, walked over to a ten-year-old Honda Civic he had bought from a used-car lot on Wednesday with the remnants of his savings, got into the driver's side, and pulled out onto Route 9 without looking back in the rearview mirror once.
May you like
Gary watched the Honda disappear down the highway, then slowly bent his aching knees, reached down into the dust, and picked up the eighteen-hundred-dollar check.
He wiped the gravel from the paper against his stained thigh, looked at his wife sitting on her plastic milk crate, and said, "Get in the truck, Linda. The bus leaves at noon."
