Words Unsaid

by KG MacGregor

  As they headed for their cars, she tugged Hal’s sleeve and asked him to come upstairs for a private word.

  Andy met them at the employee entrance in the back. His growth spurt had slowed at five-four, same height as his other mother Lily, who also happened to be his biological aunt. “Hey, Mom. You ready to go?”

  “In a minute. Tell Holly she can go home,” she said, a reference to the dealership’s general manager, and one of Anna’s best friends. “We’ll set the alarm when we’re done and go out the back. First I need a quick chat with your Uncle Hal.”

  Hal tousled Andy’s curly brown hair as he walked by. “Somebody needs a haircut.”

  “So I can look dorky like you and Jonah?” he replied cheekily.

  “Hey, what’s that?” Hal asked as he caught Andy’s hand and admired his commemorative gold ring for the Class of 2020. “That’s your senior ring—a whole year early. What if you don’t graduate? They’ll make you give it back.”

  “Is that what happened to yours?”

  Anna laughed. “He’s got you there, Hal.”

  “Can I drive home, Mom?”

  “In the rain after dark?”

  “Come on, please. I need at least eight more hours at night. I’ve gotta learn sometime.”

  He’d gotten his learner’s permit last summer but was well short of the fifty hours he needed to qualify for his license. Though he was already sixteen, Anna continued to hold him back, concerned about his maturity level after a disappointing report card and a fight at school. As he brought home better grades on exams and papers, she was gradually allowing him more time behind the wheel.

  “I’ll think about it, pal. You got your homework?”

  “Who can think about homework? I’m starving to death.” He raised a hand to his forehead and added, “I feel like I’m going to faint.”

  “Probably best not to let you drive then. You might pass out and run us off the road.” She mocked his dramatic gesture with one of her own—the world’s tiniest violin—before passing him a couple of bucks for the vending machine.

  With Hal on her heels, she trudged upstairs to her office and closed the door. “So what do you think? Is this Pinnacle deal going to happen?”

  He helped himself to a bottle of water from the small fridge beneath her bookcase. Nearing his fiftieth birthday, he’d lost the hair on his crown, but he still was a handsome man. “It’s obvious they really want it. The real question is, do you?”

  That, in a nutshell, was why the lurking headache behind her left eye had been threatening for a week to become a full-blown migraine. “It almost feels like an omen, getting this offer out of the blue. I keep thinking about our worst-case scenario. The industry’s stable right now, but we can’t count on US trade policy to remain that way. If Merkel says something that bruises you-know-who’s ego, the whole German sector could get torpedoed overnight.”

  “Maybe that’s your answer. You’ll look like a genius for getting out when you did. What does Lily have to say?”

  “Mmm, just that she trusts me to make the right decision. We try not to talk about this at home. I can’t deal with it all day and all night too. Besides, I’m not ready for the big family discussion yet. Someone isn’t going to take this well,” she said, gesturing with her thumb toward the door.

  Hal snorted. “Not just Andy. George won’t take it lying down either. I know he technically has no say over this deal, but he could sure make our lives miserable.”

  Her father probably would make some noise at first but he’d see the wisdom in it eventually. It was Andy she worried about most. Since the day he came to live with them twelve years ago, Anna had encouraged his dream of taking over Premier Motors someday. This move might very well leave him feeling betrayed, but what choice did she have? A sale would spare him from the truth—that she had serious doubts he could ever run as complex and demanding a business as this.

  Careful to keep his voice low in case Andy had followed them upstairs, Hal asked, “Any more word from Helios?” referring to the German automotive startup on the cusp of bringing solar-powered vehicles to market in Europe. They’d approached Anna two months ago about heading up their California initiative—exactly the sort of challenge she had in mind for life after Premier Motors.

  “We spoke last week but I put them off so I could deal with the sale. But I’m seriously thinking about it.”

  “Helios could be fun for a motor nerd like you,” Hal said.

  “Not until I know exactly what they have in mind. I’d drop everything to be part of something revolutionary, but not if all they really want is a pretty face to charm investors.”

  “Nobody who knows you would hire you as a pre—” He cocked his head and wrinkled his brow. “Wow, I can’t believe I almost said that.”

  “No kidding. Be glad you weren’t talking to your wife.”

  “Oh God, don’t even joke about that.”

  Anna’s stepsister Kim, normally a good-natured wisecracker herself, was in the throes of menopause. A remark like that would have landed Hal in the pool.

  She snorted and said, “See you tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Five-year-old Dreama Doe had been a ward of the state since being found two years ago, dirty and hungry, abandoned in a downtown park. Today she was getting a new start in the home of Prince and Tamara Peavine, her foster parents for the last eighteen months. One day she would look back and call this the luckiest day of her life.

  If there was one person in the courtroom who understood what an auspicious day this was, it was Superior Court Judge Lilian Kaklis. Like Dreama, she’d been neglected and abused as a toddler, and shuffled off to a series of foster homes. On her luckiest day, she walked out of the courtroom holding hands with her new mom, Eleanor Stewart, who’d helped her become the woman she was today.

  Child services supervisor Sandy Henke, Lily’s longtime friend, rose to represent the State in today’s proceedings. In their respective lines of work, there was no greater success story than the adoption of a child like Dreama into a loving family. “Your Honor, the State of California is satisfied these petitioners meet all necessary criteria to complete this adoption.”

  “And is the State also confident this permanent placement is in the best interest of this child?”

  “Oh, we’re extremely confident, Your Honor.”

  “All right then, it looks like we have some celebrating to do.” Smiling broadly herself, Lily peered down from the bench at the excited child. “Dreama, would you like to come up here and help me make this official? Who’s taking pictures?”

  “I am.” A gray-haired Black gentleman—Dreama’s new grandfather, Lily guessed—rose from the gallery flaunting an expensive-looking camera. Quite a few members of the Peavine extended family had turned out for the happy occasion.

  Wearing a lavender crinoline dress with patent leather shoes, the girl skipped up the steps to the bench, where Lily pushed back her chair to make room in her lap. With Dreama settled on her knee, she picked up her pen. “Do you know what happens when I write my name on this piece of paper?”

  Dreama’s brown eyes danced with excitement. “It makes me a family,” she said, causing a chuckle around the courtroom.

  “It makes you a family! That’s right. Should we ask your mom and dad to come up here and help us?”

  Without waiting for an answer, the couple hurried up to join them. Once they were in place, Lily signed the order to a chorus of cheers. Dozens of celebratory photos later, she adjourned the court for lunch.

  Sandy squeezed through the side door before it closed. Now in her mid-fifties, she’d finally surrendered to the extra thirty pounds that clung to her under her well-tailored suit despite years of dieting. Lily couldn’t help but note how much more relaxed she seemed. Holding up an insulated bag, Sandy said, “I hope we’re still on for lunch, Your Honor. Suzanne made us chicken sandwiches on fresh sourdough.”

  “Bless Suzanne!” Lily looped their arms and led her down
the narrow hallway to the labyrinth of judges’ chambers. Best friends for twenty years, they always relished the occasions when their work brought them together. “You don’t have to call me Your Honor back here, you know. High Priestess of Familial Justice will do when it’s just us.”

  “High Priestess it is, then. It still blows my mind every time you walk in wearing that robe. Don’t get me wrong, it suits you. But it seems like just yesterday you and I were juggling impossible caseloads, going to battle every day against the system.”

  “We’re still juggling impossible caseloads, but now we are the system,” Lily said, “and all these young, idealistic lawyers and caseworkers probably feel like they’re out there doing battle with us.”

  Lily’s surprising appointment to the Los Angeles County Superior Court bench had come just five months ago following the retirement of persnickety family court judge Rusty Evans, who’d championed her to his colleagues as his replacement. Though Judge Evans had been notoriously tough on attorneys, she’d always held him in grudging esteem for his consistent focus on what was best for the children who came to his court. Lily was determined to follow in his footsteps.

  At forty-five, she was among the youngest of the hundred-plus judges in the Stanley Mosk building, the downtown courthouse where for years she had argued family law and criminal cases in her work at Braxton Street Legal Aid Clinic. As a relative newcomer to the bench, she had a windowless office that could barely hold three guests without one getting into another’s personal space. Still, this was her “chambers,” and she’d decorated it with her diploma from UCLA and framed photos of her family, including her favorite candids of sixteen-year-old Andy and twins Georgie and Eleanor, who’d recently celebrated their tenth birthday.

  “I like your hair, by the way,” Sandy said. “Funny, it looks even blonder now that you aren’t coloring it anymore.”

  Lily ran a hand through her fresh cut. Anna liked it short, said it made her green eyes look bigger and brighter. “It looks blonder because it’s starting to come in gray. At least it saves me a couple of hundred bucks a month. And a lot of time.”

  Sandy cleared a space on the desk and unpacked the lunch bag. “I passed Claré Zepeda and her entourage in the hall earlier. She did not look happy.”

  “Oh, she wasn’t.” Zepeda—or simply Claré, as she preferred—was the hottest thing going in Latina hip hop, and Lily had caught her divorce case. “I strongly urged her to go to mediation and try to reach a settlement. Someone’s blowing smoke up her ass if she thinks she’s going to leave her husband high and dry. Her attorney should be disbarred for malpractice. It’s bad enough he let her marry her pool boy without a prenup. Now he’s got her convinced she can buck California’s community property laws. She’d do well to give her ex the pool and the house around it. Walk away from her mistake and be done with it.”

  “I bet you never thought you’d find yourself in the middle of that media circus. Can’t you just see Rusty Evans catching a hip hop case? ‘What’s all this got to do with rabbits?’”

  Lily laughed as she hung her robe on the back of her office door. “I always thought that was just his schtick. Ol’ Rusty knew a lot more than he let on.”

  “Absolutely. I swear he played that naive card just to make us look like idiots. Like that time he kept interrupting me when I was trying to place a six-year-old named Compton with an uncle named Compton who lived—guess where.”

  “Compton,” they said together, dissolving into laughter.

  Wiping her tears, Lily said, “I bet we could tell Rusty stories all day.”

  “He was one of a kind. You making any new friends here?”

  “I already knew a lot of these folks. I’ve been darkening their courtrooms for ages. To be honest, no one has time to socialize. There’s so much minutiae to handle with filings and transcripts. And the dockets have to run like clockwork or it all breaks down.”

  “Sounds a lot like being a caseworker…or a legal aid attorney. But you still like it, right?”

  “No,” Lily paused thoughtfully before her smile leaked out. “I love it. This is my dream job, Sandy. The absolute top of the pyramid…though I wouldn’t mind having one of those big offices across the hall someday.”

  They both knew that would be a while. Superior Court judges were appointed by the governor and served six-year terms before coming up for reelection. In the absence of a shocking scandal or controversy, voters almost always retained incumbents, so an appointment to the bench was all but guaranteed for life.

  Lily peeled back the bread on her sandwich to find sliced apples and soft white cheese atop thin slices of roasted chicken breast. “Suzanne makes the best sandwiches. My mouth is watering already.”

  “Speaking of significant others, how’s yours? We haven’t seen Anna since the week before Christmas.”

  “I’ve hardly seen her myself, but that’s February for you. She goes straight from year-end sales to tax season.”

  “Why don’t you guys come over next weekend? Suzanne has the whole weekend off. She’ll fire up the grill.”

  Lily checked her phone’s calendar and saw a yellow bar, the marker for a family event. “Sorry, next weekend’s no good. Georgie has a tennis tournament in Newport Beach on Saturday, then Sunday’s a big birthday bash for Hal. He’s turning fifty and their daughter Alice turns thirteen the day after. You guys are more than welcome to join us for that. We’d love to have you.”

  “I’ll check with Suzanne, but she’s turned into such a homebody these days. I doubt I can get her to leave the house. I still want to get together though, the four of us. At least have Anna look at her schedule and let’s try to make a date.”

  “Will do.” Lily silently congratulated herself for successfully dodging more questions about her wife. She was on pins and needles about letting something slip about Pinnacle that could land them all in prison.

  * * *

  Lily relaxed on the couch, where she called out seventh-grade spelling words to fifth-graders Georgie and Eleanor. She loved these moments after dinner when they all hung out together in the family room, though Anna was working late tonight so she and Andy had missed dinner. It was understandable since a lot was at stake. She’d be so glad when this grueling process was finished, no matter what Anna decided.

  “Your turn, Georgie. The word is laboratory. Eleanor conducts experiments in her laboratory.”

  “L-A-B-O-R-A-T-O-R-Y.”

  “Correct. Ellie, your word is tournament. Georgie has a tennis tournament this weekend at Newport Beach.”

  “It’s a match, not a tournament,” Georgie complained. “I should have gotten that word.”

  As Eleanor spelled, Serafina Casillas entered from the kitchen, drying her hands on a tea towel. She was petite like Lily, with dark hair and wide brown eyes that lit up whenever the children were near. “Everything’s clean and put away. And I put two plates in the oven for the stragglers.”

  “Thanks, Serafina. They don’t deserve you.” Lily nudged Georgie with her foot. “You guys go say goodnight to Serafina.”

  Eleanor rose first and ran to give their housekeeper a hug.

  Lily couldn’t imagine their household without Serafina. Her husband Enzo, who’d worked in the service department of the BMW dealership for over fifteen years, died unexpectedly from insulin shock while visiting her parents in Mexico. As a natural born US citizen, he’d sponsored Serafina for a green card soon after they married, but her march toward citizenship had been derailed by his death and now was bogged down in a system deliberately slowed by politics.

  Feeling a duty to Enzo, Anna had offered Serafina the job of managing their household, since the twins were starting kindergarten and Lily was itching to go back to work full-time. In a matter of weeks, they built her a private apartment above the garage and gave her a car to ferry the kids to their activities. Now after five years, Serafina was family.

  “Whose turn is it?” Georgie asked when Serafina had gone.

 
; “Yours,” Lily said, noticing a flash of headlights in the driveway. “The word is negotiable. Your bath and bedtime is right now and it’s not negotiable.”

  Both children groaned but lumbered to their feet and collected the papers they’d scattered.

  “I’m going out to meet Mom with the umbrella. You guys run on upstairs and we’ll be there in a few.”

  Georgie asked, “What about Andy? I can get another umbrella and go meet him.”

  “Andy can get wet. It’s your bath time. Up you go.”

  Andy burst through the door and raced past her on his way to the kitchen.

  “Hi, Ma. How was your day?” Lily yelled sarcastically. “Serafina left two dinners in the oven. Don’t you dare eat both of them.”

  Carrying a wide golf umbrella, she dodged puddles in the driveway to reach the garage, where Anna was folding her silk jacket inside out so it wouldn’t get spots from the rain. Behind her was a 230i, BMW’s entry level coupe. Anna usually borrowed this demo for Andy’s practice driving, but she’d taken him out a few times in her M4 so he could learn to drive a manual transmission.

  Though Anna was soon to be fifty years old, she still made Lily’s heart race. She especially loved when Anna swept her long dark hair into a loose bun at her neck. Her business look, she called it, but Lily found it chic and sexy. Even standing in the rain. Her face was gently lined with laughter, showing off her high cheekbones and sterling blue eyes.

  “You let Andy drive home in the rain? That’s brave.”

  “He has to learn sometime, or so he says,” she said, bending down for a kiss. “Sorry I’m late. It’s been quite a day.”

  “Good or bad?”

  “Possibly excellent. I’ll give you the details when we get upstairs. But first, I’m starving.”

  “Too bad. Serafina saved you some but Andy went straight to the kitchen. He’s probably eaten it all by now.”

  “Are you saying I might have to cook something for myself?”

  Hooking their elbows, Lily conjured the string of kitchen disasters Anna had wrought over the years. “I’d never let you do that, sweetheart.”