Later - Stephen King Page 0,9
hundred grand in assets she could put her hands on, and that included the insurance policies on her and me. What she had on the liability side of the ledger, you don’t want to know. Just remember our apartment was on Park Avenue, the agency office was on Madison Avenue, and the extended care home where Uncle Harry was living (“If you can call that living,” I can hear my mother adding) was in Pound Ridge, which is about as expensive as it sounds.
Closing the office on Madison was Mom’s first move. After that she worked out of the Palace on Park, at least for awhile. She paid some rent in advance by cashing in those insurance policies I mentioned, including her brother’s, but that would only last eight or ten months. She rented Uncle Harry’s place in Speonk. She sold the Range Rover (“We don’t really need a car in the city anyway, Jamie,” she said) and a bunch of first edition books, including a signed Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angel. She cried over that one and said she didn’t get half of what it was worth, because the rare book market was also in the toilet, thanks to a bunch of sellers as desperate for cash as she was. Our Andrew Wyeth painting went, too. And every day she cursed James Mackenzie for the thieving, money-grubbing, motherfucking, cock-sucking, bleeding hemorrhoid on legs that he was. Sometimes she also cursed Uncle Harry, saying he’d be living behind a garbage dumpster by the end of the year and it would serve him right. And, to be fair, later on she cursed herself for not listening to Liz and Monty.
“I feel like the grasshopper who played all summer instead of working,” she said to me one night. January or February of 2009, I think. By then Liz was staying over sometimes, but not that night. That might have been the first time I noticed there were threads of gray in my mom’s pretty red hair. Or maybe I remember because she started to cry and it was my turn to comfort her, even though I was just a little kid and didn’t really know how to do it.
That summer we moved out of the Palace on Park and into a much smaller place on Tenth Avenue. “Not a dump,” Mom said, “and the price is right.” Also: “I’ll be damned if I’ll move out of the city. That would be waving the white flag. I’d start losing clients.”
The agency moved with us, of course. The office was in what I suppose would have been my bedroom if things hadn’t been so fucking dire. My room was an alcove adjacent to the kitchen. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, but at least it smelled good. I think it used to be the pantry.
She moved Uncle Harry to a facility in Bayonne. The less said about that place the better. The only good thing about it, I suppose, was that poor old Uncle Harry didn’t know where he was, anyway; he would have pissed his pants just as much if he’d been in the Beverly Hilton.
Other things I remember about 2009 and 2010: My mother stopped getting her hair done. She stopped lunching with friends and only lunched with clients of the agency if she really had to (because she was the one who always got stuck with the check). She didn’t buy many new clothes, and the ones she did buy were from discount stores. And she started drinking more wine. A lot more. There were nights when she and her friend Liz—the Regis Thomas fan and detective I told you about—would get pretty soused together. The next day Mom would be red-eyed and snappy, puttering around in her office in her pajamas. Sometimes she’d sing, “Crappy days are here again, the skies are fucking drear again.” On those days it was a relief to go to school. A public school, of course; my private school days were over, thanks to James Mackenzie.
There were a few rays of light in all that gloom. The rare book market might have been in the shithouse, but people were reading regular books again—novels to escape and self-help books because, let’s face it, in 2009 and ’10, a lot of people needed to help themselves. Mom was always a big mystery reader, and she had been building up that part of the Conklin stable ever since taking over for Uncle