I had barely sat down at the party when my husband’s new assistant sl*pped me across the face and hissed, “You have no manners!”
PART 2
My mother was Odessa Wells.
She did hair.
For thirty-one years, in a shop on Delmar Avenue with four chairs and a dryer that rattled, and on the side — because a woman with four chairs hears everything — she mixed her own products, in a kitchen, because what the stores sold in 1979 was not made for the women in her chairs.
By the time I was in high school, she was selling it out of the back of the shop in jars she washed and relabeled herself.
By the time I was in college, she had a warehouse.
By the time she d*ed, eleven years ago, Wells Naturals was in nine hundred stores, and my mother still did Mrs. Pruitt’s hair on Thursdays, in the original shop, because “the day I stop hearing what women say in a chair is the day I start making products for nobody.”
She left me the company.
She also left me a letter, which I did not open for nine years, because the instruction on the front said not to.
“MARGUERITE — WHEN A MAN TELLS YOU WHAT YOU ARE IN FRONT OF PEOPLE.”
Desmond had never quite understood the company.
That’s the kindest way I can put it.
He understood that I had money.
He understood that the money came from “your mother’s hair thing,” which is the phrase he used at parties for eighteen years, always with a small laugh, always in a way that made the room understand it was a cute story and he was the serious one.
He ran Kincaid Logistics.
Forty employees.
He called it “the family business,” though the family was him, and he had inherited nothing but the name from a father who’d gone bankrupt twice.
Eleven months before that gala, Kincaid Logistics was nine days from its bank calling a line of credit.
He came home at one in the morning and sat on the edge of our bed and cried.
I had not seen him cry in eighteen years.
I gave him four million dollars.
I want to be precise about the verb, because Desmond has since used a different one in three depositions.
I did not give it.
I lent it.
My mother’s attorney, Ruth Adler — seventy-one, who had drafted every document my mother ever signed after 1988 — drew up a convertible note, and Desmond signed it in her office in eleven minutes, and made a joke about “Marguerite’s homework,” and never read past the first page.
Here’s page four.
“At the Lender’s sole option, exercisable at any time, the outstanding principal may convert to equity at the valuation stated herein.”
Four million dollars against a company Ruth valued, generously, at six and a half.
“Marguerite,” Ruth had said, when she showed me the draft, “do you understand what this gives you?”
“It gives me the right to own his company.”
“It gives you the right to own his company at a moment of your choosing, without his consent, without a vote, without a negotiation.
Your mother made me put this clause in every note she ever wrote after 1991.”
“Why 1991?”
Ruth had looked at me for a long moment.
“Ask her letter.”
So the night of the gala, after the security escort and the ride home and the ice on my face, I sat at my mother’s kitchen table — I’d kept the house; I’d kept everything of hers — and I finally opened it.
