Chapter 18 - The Florida Sunset
In Boca Raton, the afternoon heat was oppressive, but the shaded terrace of a modest two-bedroom garden apartment three miles inland offered a cool, salt-tinged breeze.
Eleanor Vance sat in an aluminum folding chair, wearing an outdated linen caftan, staring blankly at the communal swimming pool.
The three-bedroom penthouse overlooking the ocean was gone. The lease had been dissolved. The Mercedes had been repossessed by the fleet agency. With her twelve-thousand-dollar monthly allowance terminated, Eleanor had been forced to rely on her late husband’s meager survivor benefits and a small emergency annuity that paid eighteen hundred dollars a month.
Her country club friends no longer called. The invitations to the charity luncheons at Mar-a-Lago and the Norton Museum had mysteriously dried up once the word spread that Arthur Vance had cut off the cash flow and that Julian was living in an outer-borough basement.
Beside her, a half-empty glass of box wine sat on a rusted side table.
Her phone rang. It was Julian.
Eleanor stared at the caller ID for a long, agonizing moment. For thirty years, she had defended Julian, excused his failures, praised his vanity, and demanded that her oldest son sacrifice his youth and his sanity on the altar of Julian’s happiness. She had believed that Julian was her ticket to social immortality—that his charm and his aristocratic posturing would carry her into the upper echelons of American aristocracy.
Instead, Julian had dragged her into the mud.
She reached out with a trembling hand, hit the decline button, and placed the phone face down on the table.
She picked up her glass of cheap wine, took a bitter sip, and looked out over the murky, chlorinated waters of the community pool. The sky was turning a dull, flat gray as a thunderstorm rolled in from the Everglades.
For the first time in her life, Eleanor Vance understood the cost of a contract. Arthur had paid every bill she had ever handed him, without complaint, without hesitation, until the one day he realized that the only thing she valued about him was the ink in his checkbook.
May you like
Now, she was left with the silence she had earned.
***
