Helen of Pasadena Read Online Free PDF

Slusky’s Wash & Wipe, 64 stores strong, the awful ads always clamored. I’d learned from my years in the Golden State that if you were the first at anything in California—from car washes to orange juice bottlers to real estate development—you were loaded. That was it! Merritt was trading in our debt for her fortune. In turn, she would become the proper Roshelle Fairchild, rather than the unfortunately named Shelly Slusky.
    Billy was not so calm and cool now. He was now the reluctant apologist for his dead best friend, a lying, cheating and financially reckless father. “Helen, I tried to tell him. I tried to get him to slow down with everything. To think. Just stop and think. The investments, the, umm, changes in his life. He just made one bad decision after another. Lots of guys did, Helen, guys in the capital business went nuts. Everybody went crazy. Merritt was just one of them.”
    “ Changes? Is that what you boys call leaving a wife and child broke and humiliated for a weathergirl? And nuts? He borrowed against his life insurance policy. That’s not nuts, that’s mean. That’s crazy. My God, poor Aiden. How can we afford high school, never mind college?”
    He shook his head, afraid to meet my eyes. All the anger I’d felt toward Merritt about his betrayal, I now wanted to dump on Billy for things that were absolutely not his fault, yet somehow he had allowed.
    “Billy, all the tailgating, the dinners, the laughs … I thought you were my friend too, not just his. How could you let this happen and not even tell me? And you,” I whirled around to Bruno. “Didn’t I have a right to know that everything was gone? Wasn’t my name on those papers, too?”
    “No.”
    “What?”
    Bruno looked me straight in the eyes, like the good Italian accountant he was. “You signed away everything years ago. All those papers you signed, turning everything over to Merritt, I never understood why you did it.”
    Because Merritt told me he would take care of everything, and I believed him.
    By the time I was 12, I was the financially responsible one in our family. I paid the bills, balanced the checkbook and made sure my brother had lunch money. I kept the books for the craft business as soon as I figured out Nell and Peter were on the verge of doing time for tax evasion. (My parents weren’t criminals, just woefully disorganized.) When I became Mrs. Fairchild, I gratefully gave up the business of life. Let somebody else worry about money; I’ve got a million other things on my worry list.
    That was the unsaid deal Merritt and I had struck. Like lots of husbands and wives. I kept up my end, leaving my studies, raising a family, creating a home. I thought Merritt was keeping up his end.
    I trusted my husband. That’s why, Bruno, but you would never understand.
    “I wish you had asked more questions, Helen.”
    “So do I, Bruno, so do I.”
    Patrice knocked and entered, bearing a latte in a tall mug on a William Morris reproduction tray. “Here’s your coffee, Mrs. Fairchild. Can I get you anything else?”
    “Yes,” I said standing up and downing the beverage like a shot of courage. “Make copies of every document in that stack and send them to my house. Better send them today. I may not have a house tomorrow, Patrice.”
    Poor Patrice, in her Talbots tweed skirt and cardigan. She looked like someone had just asked to borrow her toothbrush. I was not usually this forceful in this office.
    Billy stood up. “Helen, I’m sorry. If there’s anything I can do.…”
    I cut him off. “No. No, thank you. Remember, I grew up in a yurt, not Pasadena. I’m used to having nothing.”

    I sat in the driveway of the Monterey Colonial that Merritt and I had bought twelve years ago, when the market was down and we were flush. “It’s a fixer, but what a neighborhood!” said our agent, Nancy Taunton, a striking, early 50s divorcée in a size-6 Dana Buchman suit. Nancy enjoyed stating the obvious, as the house was a wreck