Raymond was leaning against the stone railing of the lakefront promenade, wearing his usual tweed jacket with the frayed elbows and a paper cup of black coffee in his hand. The wind off Lake Michigan was biting, carrying the sharp scent of freshwater and distant engine grease.
“You look tired,” he said as I walked up beside him.
“I spent four hours reviewing pension allocations for our warehouse staff,” I said, accepting a second cup of coffee he’d brought for me. “It turns out when you actually pay people what they’re worth, retention goes up.”
“Novel management strategy,” Raymond smiled, blowing into his cup. “You think the business schools will catch on?”
“Not if Preston’s alma mater has anything to say about it.”
We walked in silence for a few minutes, watching the gulls wheeling over the gray chop of the water. It was strange to think that just a few miles down the shore, my ex-husband was sitting in a federal holding facility, wearing orange and folding laundry. The world hadn’t stopped spinning. The lake hadn’t swallowed the city. Life had simply recalibrated around the new center of gravity.
“Lorraine is doing her community service at St. Jude’s,” Raymond mentioned casually.
I stopped walking. “St. Jude’s? On the south side?”
“The very one. Sorting canned peaches on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The supervisor says she tried to unionize the volunteers last week.”
I let out a sharp bark of laughter. “Of course she did. Did she win?”
“Not quite. The supervisor threatened to make her clean the grease traps in the soup kitchen. That ended the labor dispute rather quickly.”
I leaned against the railing, looking out toward the horizon where the sky met the water in a blurry smudge of slate and silver. “Sometimes I wonder if any of it was real, Raymond. The marriage, the house, the years before my father died. Was there ever a version of Preston where he wasn’t calculating my net worth?”
