by Cathy Holton
The justice, of course, lay in sucking every last dime out of the faithless bastards who’d left them, a job Schultz and McNair were only too happy to help them with. Occasionally the firm represented a wronged husband, but these were still the golden days of alimony and large property settlements, and most of their clients were women.
It didn’t take Sara long to realize that she wasn’t suited to the cutthroat world of divorce law. Six months into her new job, she ran into Dennis McNair in the small office kitchen. He was standing at the sink, tossing peanuts into the air and catching them in his mouth. She told him about a particularly brutal meeting she’d just had with a client, a pious fifty-two-year-old Baptist Sunday School teacher who wanted her husband’s balls nailed to the courthouse door. Her words.
“She’s being unreasonable about her alimony requests. The husband’s lost his job. He can’t pay her alimony if he’s drawing unemployment.”
Dennis caught his last peanut. “Why not?” he asked, chewing.
“I don’t know, Dennis. I’m starting to feel sorry for the guy.”
“Don’t.” Dennis waggled a hairy finger at her. “Whatever you do, don’t feel sorry for the opposing party.” He rooted around in his breast pocket for his pipe and tobacco pouch, an activity he’d taken up recently to help break his two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. “It’s our clients you worry about.”
“I know,” Sara said, wearily pouring herself another cup of coffee.
“Besides, he’s the one who ran off with his secretary,” Dennis reminded her, loading his pipe with tobacco. “Don’t forget that.”
Dennis was himself the product of a broken marriage; his father had abandoned his mother and him when he was just nine, and Sara often had the feeling that he was vindicating himself in some way by going after deadbeat husbands. His mother was still a major influence in his life. She was always telephoning him. He called her, fondly, the Succubus. She lived in a nursing home in Florida, and the office receptionist had strict instructions not to put her through any time except Friday afternoon, a time when no clients were ever scheduled. Telephone conversations between Dennis and his mother always involved a lot of screaming and cursing, and usually culminated in Dennis shouting, “My God, Mother, what do you want from me?” and slamming down the phone before she could tell him what she wanted. This was generally followed by an evening of heavy drinking. Since these episodes occurred as regularly as clockwork, the sound of a raving Dennis on a Friday afternoon invariably signaled the office that happy hour was about to begin.
Sara had gone out drinking with Dennis and Mike a few times but she quickly learned that she didn’t have their stamina. Even after four years at Bedford, where the favorite pastime was drinking, she couldn’t keep up. Their favorite watering hole was a pub just around the corner from the courthouse frequented by attorneys, court clerks, paralegals, and other assorted heavy drinkers. The place was a usual stop for most of the cab companies, and Dennis and Mike would leave their cars parked at the office on Friday afternoons and walk around the corner with their arms around each other’s shoulders like two Irish stevedores on their way for a pint. If Sara went she might drive them—she never drank enough to risk a DUI—but if she wasn’t careful, she’d get roped into being their designated driver for the evening, which meant that she might not arrive home until the wee hours of the morning. She didn’t like being responsible for Dennis; he had a bad habit of drinking until he passed out, and that could be anywhere. Once she had dropped him off at home and Moira had come out the next day to find him asleep in the shrubbery. He had passed out on his way to the front door and fallen off the porch into one of her boxwood hedges.
Tom was pretty understanding about all of this but he didn’t like her going out and drinking with Dennis alone. If she called him, he would suggest meeting them at the pub, which was never a good idea because Dennis had a tendency to get belligerent after he had a few whiskey sours under his belt. He had a habit of telling people things they didn’t want to hear, especially if he didn’t like them, and he didn’t like Tom.
“Go ahead,” he growled at her, late one night. Mike had gotten up to go to the bathroom and Sara and Dennis were sitting at a tall table near the bar. “Go ahead and go home to your long-haired boyfriend.”
“Thanks,” Sara said, motioning for the cocktail waitress. “That’s a good idea.”
“What does a girl like you see in a guy like that anyway?” He had his pipe clenched in his teeth and he was attempting, unsuccessfully, to light it.
“Oh, I don’t know. Affection, stability, sobriety. Take your pick.”
“My point exactly,” he said. “A pussy.”
Sara laughed. “Just because he’s sensitive to my needs, Dennis, doesn’t make him a pussy.”
“Those sensitive guys make me sick,” Dennis said, his tobacco catching light and flaring. He swung his hand, extinguishing the match, and dropped it in an ashtray. “What is he, a poet?”
“He’s an English teacher.”
“Same thing.”
Smoke curled through the bar like low-lying fog. Sara lifted her hand and motioned again for the waitress. The girl nodded her head wearily, holding a tray of beers above her head and pushing her way through the crowd of revelers like a branch trying to navigate a log jam. Dire Straits was on the stereo, singing “Money for Nothing.”
Dennis clenched his teeth, holding his pipe in the side of his mouth. “Women always fall for the damn poets.” This coming from a man who had supposedly proposed to his wife by writing “Will You Marry Me” in Day-Glo paint on the back of his underwear. Sara looked at Dennis and saw a decent-looking, middle-aged man who had never had much luck with women.
She supposed it probably had something to do with his mother.
When Mike came back from the bathroom, Sara paid her tab, made sure the two of them had left their car keys back at the office, and left. The bartender knew the drill. He would call a cab when they got too rowdy or when Dennis passed out, whichever came first.
It was a cool, rainy night in early November. Leaves clogged the gutters and rose in piles beside the streets. The rain drumming against the roof was a soothing sound, and Sara turned the radio off and drove in silence, listening to the rhythmic slap of the windshield wipers against the glass.
When she got home, the porch light was off but the lights from the front windows glimmered cheerfully. Tom was waiting for her on the porch. He stood up and walked across the yard to greet her, Max running in circles around him, barking and waving his tail. The rain had died to a misty drizzle that drifted around the streetlamps.
“I was beginning to worry about you,” he said, holding her raincoat out to her. It was one of their favorite things to do, walk in the rain.
“I’m sorry. I had to babysit Mike and Dennis.”
He kissed her. “I should have known,” he said. He didn’t like Dennis. He was convinced that Dennis was in love with her.
“I needed their help on the Bagley case and they, of course, refused to talk business anyplace but the pub.”
“Of course,” he said, and she could tell from the sound of his voice that she should have called him.
They walked across the lawn and into the deserted street. The dog trotted in front of them, weaving back and forth across the empty street to bury his nose in the leaves piled in the gutters.
“Believe me, I wouldn’t have gone if I wasn’t desperate,” she added, feeling guilty that she had been so late and he had waited for her.
“You still haven’t settled that case?”
“No.”
Amanda Bagley’s divorce case had dragged on for three long years now and she was getting desperate for a settlement. Her husband was a wealthy physician and his attorney was a sleazy trickster named Hamp Hudson. They had shown up yesterday for a court date and Hudson, a master of dirty tricks and manipulation, had arrived with his client and promptly begun complaining of chest pains. The judge, who was a fishing buddy of Hud
son’s, had immediately postponed the case.
When she’d told Mike and Dennis, they’d looked at each other for a moment, and then burst out laughing.
“Chest pains,” Mike said. “Why haven’t I ever thought of that?”
“Cagey bastard,” Dennis said, nodding his head in admiration.
Tom took her hand. They walked through the quiet, rain-swept streets, Tom listening while she droned on and on about the Bagley case. When she finished, they walked for a while in silence. The rain had begun again, falling softly against the pavement. “I’m never getting married,” she said.
“Don’t say that,” Tom said.
“I’m sorry. This job makes me cynical.” A car passed slowly along the street and they moved to the side and waited, calling to Max. There was a scent of wood smoke in the air, a sweet pungent odor that reminded her suddenly of Bedford. “Is a happy marriage even possible?” she asked, looking up at him.
He turned her around, tugging gently on the lapels of her rain slicker. “Of course it is.” Rain collected in his hair and eyelashes. “Look at my parents. Look at your parents. You just have to choose the right partner.”
“Is it really that simple?”
“Yes.” Behind his head a streetlamp glowed, wreathed in mist.
She wanted to believe him. She was young. She was in love. Anything was possible. Looking up into his face, haloed by the streetlamp, she had a sudden fleeting glimpse of her future: a handful of golden-haired children, a Colonial house behind a white picket fence, Tom standing in the backyard behind a barbecue grill with a silly hat on his head. It was so perfect that for a moment she could only stand there, staring up at him with a look of faint surprise and astonishment on her face.
Tom, noting her expression, asked, “What’s the matter? Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” she said. “I’m just happy.”
“Good,” he said, kissing her. “I like you happy.”
She knew then that she would have to find another job. She could not believe in love, she could not believe in the possibility and promise of marriage, if every day she was rooting around in the sad debris of other people’s ruined lives.
Chapter 24
el lay on her back on a rubber float, letting the undulating, waves soothe her to a near catatonic state. The sun was hot, and after a while she rolled off the float and submerged herself in the cool green water. She floated there for a minute, like a giant jellyfish, then she shot to the surface, careful to push off with just her toes (she didn’t like putting her feet down on the bottom; there was no telling what she might step on). She looped her arms over the edge of the float and hung there with her legs splayed, trying to make herself look less like a seal, a shark’s favorite food, and more like some oddly shaped but dangerous sea creature. She had seen a television show on the great white, and although the dogfish and tiger sharks that inhabited the Carolina coastal waters were probably less familiar with the taste of seal, you couldn’t be too careful. There was something instinctive in the shape of a seal (or a person lying on a surfboard or a float) bobbing across the surface of the water, some inherent prey memory that seemed to trigger an attack response in the shark brain, regardless of the species.
She could see Annie huddled in her little cabana reading, her feet and legs covered by a towel and her head covered by a big floppy sun hat. Farther down the beach, she could see Sara and Lola, two tiny shapes in the distance, trolling the sand in search of shells. They appeared to be walking back toward the umbrellas, although it was hard to tell from this distance.
Mel closed her eyes and lay her cheek on the warm float, letting the waves lift her like a sea anemone. She could fall asleep, if she wasn’t careful, and drift away, out past the sandbar and into the open sea. The tides here were fierce and the sandbars treacherous, and remembering this she opened her eyes suddenly and saw that she had indeed drifted several hundred feet down the beach. Annie’s little cabana fluttered in the breeze but Mel had only a side view now, she couldn’t see Annie, and Lola and Sara were nothing more than two small specks shimmering in the distance like a mirage.
Something brushed her leg and she startled suddenly and put her feet down. She began to walk toward the beach, fighting the tide as it pulled against her feet and legs. She tried to remember the rule for breaking free of a strong current. Swim parallel to the shore and then come in when the undertow lessens. If she had been in deeper water she might have been in trouble. On the beach in front of her two children played with their shovels and pails, watched over by their parents, who studied Mel warily as she rose from the sea, dragging her float behind her. A lone beach house stood behind them, smaller than Lola’s but nice, and farther down the beach several other houses built to look like fishing cottages clustered atop the dunes.
When the water was only hip-deep, Mel turned and began to walk back toward Annie’s cabana. It was good exercise; the tide was so strong here she could feel her muscles straining with each step. It was no wonder the treacherous waters off this coast were littered with sunken ships.
“The Queen Anne’s Revenge is out there,” Sara had said last night as they sat in front of their false bonfire on the beach. “That’s Blackbeard’s ship,” she added, as if she suspected that Mel knew nothing of pirates or history.
“Yes, Fly, I know that.” There were times when Sara irritated her almost to the point of violence. And yet still, even now, she was grateful to her. Until she met Sara, Mel had never had a healthy female relationship. She had never had one with her mother. Juanita had provided for her basic needs, scurrying back and forth between the kitchen and her own room like a small, frightened rodent. But there had been no mother-daughter teas, no volunteer room mother, no Brownie leader. Juanita had never offered and Mel had never asked. Mel sewed her own badges on her Brownie vest and tagged along with Sara and Lynnette or made excuses as to why she couldn’t attend the many mother-daughter teas that were so popular in those days in the South.
“Blackbeard was a pirate,” Sara said.
“Yes, asshole, I know that. I went to college, too.” She loved Sara like a sister and yet there were times when she could have struck her. “I’ve read a few books in my time.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“Good books?”
Mel supposed this was an indictment of her own paltry novels, although if she’d called her on it, Sara would’ve feigned innocence. Sara had always been snooty about what she read. She was always turning her nose up at what she considered the inferior quality of the commercial bestseller lists, always quoting obscure writers no one had ever heard of. Mel hadn’t asked her, but she doubted that Sara had bothered to read her last few novels (not that they were bestsellers, of course). Mel had learned not to be offended by this. She knew that snotty elitism never got you anywhere. It didn’t make you a better writer or a better painter or a better artist of any kind. All it did was freeze you up with paranoia and self-doubt. Mel had a friend in New York who’d refused to go to art school. She was self-taught and she had a kind of primitive, “flat” style that was all the rage these days. In the beginning, the critics had ridiculed her because she couldn’t paint a human face, her subjects were always in profile, but now she sold her work for huge sums and gave art lessons to graduates of Montserrat and the New York Academy of Art.
When she was in front of Annie’s cabana again, Mel stopped walking through the water and went back to floating like an anemone. Annie appeared to be sleeping; her head was tipped forward and her book had fallen open on the sand beside her. Either she was sleeping or she’d had a heart attack. Farther down the beach, the shimmering dots that were Lola and Sara separated into two small shapes as they made their way slowly back to the cabana.
Something bumped Mel again and she clambered up on the float on her stomach. It was probably nothing, she told herself. Just a tiny fish more afraid of her than she was of it. Just some poor mollusk churned up by the surf
.
Still, she kept her toes out of the water.
Mel was a junior in college when she decided to become a writer. Pat Conroy had come to Bedford to give a reading and Mel’s American Lit professor had assigned the reading as extra credit. The class was called “The Vicious Circle: The Effect of the Algonquin Round Table on the Literary Landscape of the 1920s.” Mel was hooked from the first Dorothy Parker quote she ever read: “My land is bare of chattering folk; / the clouds are low along the ridges / and sweet’s the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges.” She quickly found a copy of Enough Rope in the library and followed it up with Parker’s short-story collections, Laments for the Living, After Such Pleasures, and Not So Deep as a Well. Big Blonde was Mel’s favorite short story. She read it over and over again, along with some of Parker’s literary criticisms (“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force”) She typed up “I shall stay the way I am because I do not give a damn,” and hung it above her bed where she could see it every morning when she awoke.
Not that Mel had any illusions of becoming as good a writer as Dorothy Parker. She read very few of the “literary” novels that Sara and J.T suggested she read. Her taste in novels ran more to Elmore Leonard, Tony Hillerman, PD. James, and later, Carl Hiassen and James Lee Burke, good writers who knew how to tell a good story without boring their readers to death. Pat Conroy talked a lot about writing from personal experience, and there in the darkened auditorium it suddenly occurred to Mel that she could do this. She could become a writer. Why not? She would graduate in another year and a half with a degree in English and a minor in art history, and she had no desire for grad school or teaching or working in some dusty museum or gallery. Or, worse yet, moving back to Howard’s Mill and taking over Leland’s car dealership, a prospect that filled her with dread not only because Leland was so actively promoting it, but also because she was so seriously considering it. (The money would be good and she would be the boss. It would be better than some grubby nine-to-five office or retail job, where she’d have to work long hours for low pay and answer to a hierarchy of pinheaded bosses.)