ensconced within the crown and have his black and white portrait regularly printed in the
Wall Street Journal. Mauney loathed Cahoon, and whenever possible, Mauney dropped
poison pellets about his boss, spreading malicious gossip hinting at eccentricities, poor
judgement, idiocy, and malignant motives for the good in the world Cahoon had done.
Mauney requested a doggie bag, as he always did, because he never knew when he might
get hungry later in his room at the luxurious Park Hotel, near Southpark Mall.
He paid the seventy-three-dollar-and-seventy-cent bill, leaving two percent less than his
usual fifteen-percent tip, which he figured to the penny on a wafer-thin calculator he kept
in his wallet. The waitress had been slow bringing his fourth drink, and being busy was
no excuse. He returned to the sidewalk out front, on West Trade Street, and the valets
scurried, as they always did. Mauney climbed into his rental black Lincoln Continental,
and decided he really was not in the mood to return to his hotel just yet.
He briefly thought of his wife and her endless surgeries and other medical hobbies, as he
cataloged them. What he spent on her in a year was a shock, and not one stitch of it had
improved her, really. She was a manikin who cooked and made the rounds at cocktail
parties.
Buried somewhere deep in Mauney’s corporate mind were memories of Polly at
Sweetbriar, when a carload of Mauney’s pals showed up for a dance one Saturday night
in May. She was precious in a blue dress, and wanted nothing to do with him.
The spell was cast. He had to have her that moment. Still, Polly was busy, hard to find, and cared not. He started calling twice a day. He showed up on campus, hopelessly
smitten. Of course, she knew exactly what she was doing. Polly had been mentored
thoroughly at home, at boarding school, and now at this fine women’s college. She knew
how men were if a girl acknowledged their attentions. Polly knew how to play hard to
get. Polly knew that Mauney had a pedigree and portfolio that she had been promised
since childhood, because it was her destiny and her entitlement. They were married
fourteen months after their first meeting, or exactly two weeks after Polly graduated cum
laude, with a degree in English which, according to her proud new husband, would make
her unusually skilled in penning invitations and thank-you notes.
Mauney could not pinpoint precisely when his wife’s many physical complications began.
It seemed she was playing tennis, still peppy and enjoying the good fortune he made
possible for her, until after their second child was born. Women. Mauney would never
figure them out. He found Fifth Street and began cruising, as he often did when he was
deep in thought. He began getting excited as he looked out at the night life and thought
about his trip tomorrow afternoon. His wife thought he would be in Charlotte for three
days. Cahoon and company believed Mauney was returning to Asheville after breakfast.
All were wrong.
<^ While family traveled from the distant airports of Los Angeles and New York, the bereft chief and her sons went through closets and dresser drawers, carrying out the painful task of dividing and disposing of Seth's clothing and other personal effects. Hammer could not look at her late husband's bed, where the nightmare had begun as he got drunk and fantasized about what he could do to really hurt her this time. Well, you did it, Seth. You figured it out. Hammer thought. She folded extra-extra-large shirts, shorts, underwear, socks, and placed them in paper bags for the Salvation Army. They made no decision about Seth's valuables, such as his four different Rolex watches, the wedding band that had not fit him in more than ten years, the collection of gold railroad watches that had belonged to his grandfather, his Jaguar, not to mention his stocks, and his cash. Hammer cared nothing about any of it, and frankly expected him to zing her one last time in his will. She had never been materialistic and wasn't about to begin now. "I don't know the details about any of his affairs," she said to her sons, who cared nothing about them, either.