Arthur Wade Hampton was fifty‑nine and he’d been cleaning his Browning shotgun for an early‑morning hunting trip to Long Island—so he’d claimed the night before—and ... she was awakened by the explosion of a discharge. A horrible accident in the kitchen of their co‑op in the West Village.
Like Hemingway. Thinking back, they both realized it was the wrong time of year to hunt anything—but they both also knew he wanted the world to think that. Moreover, it was precisely the kind of vital lie they'd need to get through the pointed questions and skeptical looks that lay ahead. It was a knowledge all the more palpable for being unspoken. There's no time like those first moments after a tragedy to create a special reality for yourself.
It was only in the aftermath that she managed to unravel the reason. He owned and operated an interior‑design firm in SoHo called CitiSpace, and he had mortgaged it to the hilt. He was on the verge of bankruptcy. (That was why Ally had not spoken to her younger brother, Grant, in the last 4 1/2 years.)
She felt she had no choice but to try to salvage what was left of the business and her father's reputation. She left the architectural firm and took over CitiSpace. It turned out she was easily as good an interior designer as she had been an architect, and before long she had a backlog of work and was adding staff. She restructured and, eventually paid off the firm's debt; it was now on a sound financial footing.
These days CitiSpace specialized in architectural rehabs in the Greenwich Village area, with as many SoHo and TriBeCa lofts as came her way. The work was mostly residential, but lately some lucrative commercial office jobs were beginning to walk through the door. Anything dependent on luxury real estate can be vulnerable in dicey times, but she'd been able to give everybody a holiday bonus for the past couple of years. She'd even given herself one this year, in the form of this new condo apartment, which she loved.
Another major reason she'd taken over CitiSpace was to try to provide her mother some peace and dignity in her twilight years. But then, irony of ironies, Nina, who was a very lively sixty‑six, was diagnosed eighteen months ago with early‑onset Alzheimer's. Now her consciousness was rapidly slipping away.
All the things that had happened over the last few years had called for a special kind of heart. She had known Steve Jensen, a freelance political consultant, for eight years, and they'd lived together for three of those, before they got married. He was warm and tender and sexy, and she'd envisioned them in rocking chairs forty years down the road. They'd been married for only six months when he got a job to help reelect the president of Belize. At first he was reluctant, concerned about human rights issues, but then he decided the other candidate, the alternative, was even worse. So he went.
How many things can be destined to go wrong in your life? Exactly seven months after her dad died, she received a phone call from the American Embassy in Belmopan, Belize. Steve had been flying with the presidential candidate over a stretch of southern rain forest in a single‑engine Cessna when a sudden thunderstorm came out of the Caribbean and the plane lost radio contact. That was the last, etc.
She rushed there, but after two weeks the "rescue" officially became a "recovery" mission. Except there was never any recovery. After two months she flew back alone, the loneliest plane ride of her life.
She still had his clothes in her closet, as though to keep hope alive. When you love someone so much you think you could never live without them—and then one day you're forced to—it resets your thinking. Her dad's death and then Steve's . . .