Her Man Friday(19)
Author: Elizabeth Bevarly

Maybe it was time she did a little shopping, she thought, and spent a little money on herself, instead of squirreling it all away, as had become her habit. It had been so long since she’d splurged on something luxurious and unnecessary, for the simple purpose of making herself feel good.

Somehow, though, Lily couldn’t quite bring herself to part with her money for frivolous pursuits. Certainly, there had been a time in her life when she wouldn’t have given a thought to doling out hundreds of dollars for a new dress that she would wear only once. But those days were long gone, never to return. Because they’d taught her a lesson she would never forget.

Her father’s financial woes had begun while Lily was still in junior high school, but Harrison Rigby hadn’t told his family about the downturn until it was too late to bring it back around. Instead, he’d spent years trying to recover all by himself, then had panicked when things hadn’t gone according to plan. Ultimately, he had waited too long, had tried too little, had lost too much. And before any of them had known it, everything they’d owned was just… gone.

Everything.

Seemingly overnight, the Rigbys had fallen from swimming amid the cream of the Main Line social elite to stumbling along with the tired, the weak, the poor, the hungry. They’d pretty much become the wretched refuse Lily had studied about in her American history class. They’d been booted from their roomy six-bedroom home in Ardmore and their Center City townhouse. They’d watched as the cars and boats were repossessed one by one, had stood by helplessly as every privilege they’d come to take for granted had been jerked right out from under them.

At the lowest point, things had gotten so bad that the Rigbys had found themselves living in a homeless shelter, eating the kind of food they would have tossed out before. Such had been their lot in life for three full months. Lily had gone from wearing DKNY off the rack to DAV cast-offs, and she’d left the posh Emerson Academy for a public high school in a very questionable Philadelphia neighborhood. Her friends had disappeared as quickly as her lifestyle, and she’d learned fast and hard that life, if left untended, could become a very dark and ugly place.

Ultimately, her father had found another job—albeit one that held far less prestige and paid much less than his last—and they’d gradually improved their standing. Now her parents lived in a middle-class suburb of Philadelphia, and both of them had jobs that, if they weren’t high-paying, at least provided them with the necessities required to make life livable. But the Rigbys would never, ever again be wealthy. And Lily had sworn a long time ago that she would never, ever again fall into the kind of poverty they had suffered for those short, yet all-too-long, months.

On the contrary, she was determined to recoup the family losses. Like Schuyler, she had attended Harvard on an academic scholarship, and she had chosen a double-major of economics and business, specifically to boost her earning potential on the outside. She’d vowed years ago to dedicate her life to recapturing the good name of Rigby—and the Rigby fortune—that her father had lost. Not because she wanted to relive the excesses of her youthful life, but because she’d come to learn that there were far more important things that money could buy than big houses, silk dresses, and imported cars.

It could buy food to fill an empty belly, and blankets to warm a cold back. It could buy courage, and it could buy dignity. Lily had met too many people in her time at the shelter who’d had none of those things. For a while, she’d been one of them herself. Ever since college, her ultimate goal in life had been to found, fund, and manage a vast organization whose sole purpose was to lend a hand to the people who needed help.

Schuyler, of course, thought her intentions were ridiculous. Which was actually kind of odd, seeing as how he’d come from exactly the kind of family that would benefit from the type of foundation Lily had always envisioned. His father had abandoned his mother, his younger sister, and him when Schuyler was barely three years old, and the three of them had spent much of their lives living as refugees. He’d never had a place to call home for more than a few months at a time, had made the circuit from shelters to halfway houses to the street and back around again. Hunger, insecurity, and fear had been his constant companions while he was growing up.

Yet as an adult holding an MBA from Harvard that enriched his BS in mechanical engineering from MIT, as a man who had worked and sweated and sacrificed to build an empire from nothing, Schuyler scorned everything that smacked of welfare. He was a staunch Republican and conservative, and he showed nothing but contempt for people who had fallen on hard times. Although he spent lavishly on things to enrich his own lifestyle, he was otherwise a parsimonious hoarder of every nickel he made.

And for the life of her, Lily couldn’t imagine why he would want to deny someone who was needy the basic essentials of life. Especially since he knew firsthand just how terrifying and soul-emptying such a way of life could be.

As she always did when pondering the puzzle of Schuyler Kimball, Lily sighed and pushed her troubling thoughts away. She’d made a promise to him a long time ago, and he had made one to her. So far, they had both stuck to their words with no problem. Schuyler was a big boy now; it wasn’t up to Lily to be his conscience. It wasn’t up to her to remind him what was right and what was wrong. It wasn’t up to her to tell him what a big, fat jerk he could be sometimes.

Nor, she told herself further as she considered her options for dress again, was it up to her to be Leonard Freiberger’s… anything. She snatched the black dress from its hanger and tossed it onto the bed, then went about changing her identity from social secretary to dinner hostess. Because even though, technically, it was Schuyler who owned and operated Ashling, he and Lily really had a partnership in that respect. Schuyler owned the estate. Lily operated it. It was an arrangement that worked out quite nicely.

As she made her way back downstairs to Ashling’s generous dining room, she realized she still wasn’t certain whether or not Schuyler would be joining the rest of the household for dinner. She knew he was home and had been for over an hour, had in fact known that from the moment he’d set foot in the house. Not just because he’d screamed, "Lileee! Darlüing! What happened while I was gone?" the moment he was inside the front door, the way he always did when he returned from a trip. But because the entire estate seemed to hum with energy and activity whenever Schuyler was in residence. It was as if there was simply too much to the man for his body to contain it all, so whatever it was that made him Schuyler spilled out over everything—and everybody—else.

He was, quite simply, a remarkable human being. Everyone knew that. Especially Schuyler. And there was no point in anyone trying to dissuade him of the idea.