Legally Yours (Spitfire Book 1)

by Nicole French

  She clicked her tongue a few times, and Dad winked at me over his morning paper before he dropped one hand down to grab his coffee. I was reading the finance section, the one part of the paper my dad didn’t read, while he leafed through the Op-Eds.

  It was a familiar scene, the kind that made me wish I could stay longer just to soak in the ease of it all. Bubbe, all tight gray curls and friendly admonishments through a thick Brooklyn accent, Dad, with his feigned apathy and late morning coffee after an even later gig the night before, and me, dodging comments about my weight and the men in my life. The typical Crosby household.

  “Ma, be nice,” Dad muttered absently over his pages. “Pips, don’t listen to her. You’re gorgeous, and don’t let anyone else try to tell you otherwise. She’s gorgeous, Ma, you got it?”

  Bubbe tugged the blintz out from the oven, engulfing the small room with the scent of sweet pastry, and set it on the table with the eggs. She skittered back to grab our dishes and cutlery, and Dad and I both folded away our papers so we could eat.

  “Of course she’s beautiful, Daniel. Did I say she wasn’t?” Bubbe leaned over and pecked me on the cheek, no doubt leaving a brownish-red stain I couldn’t dare wipe off while she was looking.

  “No, you didn’t say that, Ma,” Dad replied as he set the paper down on the table and stood up. “Pips, is your bag packed? I’m going into the city, so I can give you a ride to Grand Central. I’ll just throw it into the car before I forget.”

  The clatter of a dropped spatula cracked through the friendly conversation. We both looked up to find my normally coordinated grandmother frantically scooping splattered eggs off the stained linoleum floor.

  “You all right, Ma?” Dad asked as he walked over to help her stand up.

  She batted away his hands and tossed the paper towels into the garbage next to the sink. “Sure, I’m fine, I’m fine. Just clumsy. Go pack up the car. I’ll take care of this.”

  Dad backed out of the room, his hands raised. “You’re the boss.”

  Bubble finished cleaning up the floor, then marched over to sit next to me at the table, fresh spatula in hand.

  “You are gorgeous, sweetheart,” she said with a warm rub on my back. “Just need a little more meat on these bones. Here, this’ll help.” She scooped me a large portion of eggs and cut a huge slice of blintz.

  “Bubbe, that’s too much!” I protested.

  She waved away my concerns with a manicured hand and proceeded to serve herself a substantially smaller portion. She scooted her chair closer to me and bent in, checking quickly behind her as my Dad bounded out the front door with my bag.

  “Before he comes back,” she said in a low voice. “I found some tickets in his pants the other week while I was doing the laundry. Stubs from the track.”

  She scooted back to her place and calmly picked up her fork, satisfied that she had met her moral obligation in telling me about the tickets. My stomach, however, now wouldn’t let me eat a thing.

  I held my fork in my hand, tines hovering over the steaming food on my plate, which now looked about as attractive as the contents of our garbage pail. “Are you sure they were from the track? Not movie tickets or something else?”

  In return I received a look of pure disdain the way only my grandmother knew how to give. “What do I look like, a fool? I may be an old woman, but I know the difference between a ticket for that superhero what’s his face and a bet on a horse.” She bent back down to take another bite of her blintz. “I was married to your grandfather after all.”

  I sighed and pushed my fork through the mounds of food on my plate. It wasn’t talked about much, but I had pieced together the stories of how my grandfather had been forced to resort to petty crime to resolve some of his gambling debt. The house we lived in had only been saved from foreclosure when Bubbe had collected his life insurance premium. No one ever said it directly, but it wasn’t one hundred percent clear that his death by drowning in the East River wasn’t an accident, although I wasn’t totally sure if that meant suicide or something more sinister.

  Despite all of that, it quickly became evident that a weakness for gambling ran in the family. The last time my dad had gotten into trouble, it had cost Dad a few black eyes, Bubbe and me some major headaches, and about fifty thousand dollars out of my trust fund to pay off Victor Messina and finance Dad’s three-month stint in a rehabilitation center.

  And now it looked like we were facing that road again. Damn.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said quietly, and Bubbe nodded as Dad strode back in. He took his seat and accepted massive plate of food from his mother.

  “Everything all right in here?” he asked. “You two are unusually quiet.”

  “I’m still trying to get your daughter to eat,” Bubbe said without looking up from her food.

  “Bubbe, I’m not this hungry. Really.”

  “You need to eat,” she said as she pushed my plate toward me a bit more. “Especially if you’re going to impress that young man again.”

  I jerked my head next to me to look at my dad, who simply pressed his lips together and took a sip of coffee while avoiding my gaze.

  “He told me everything, Skylar,” Bubbe said, patting my hand. “What a doll, escorting you home like that. A real gentleman.”

  “I can’t believe you told,” I grumbled at Dad, who shrugged and mouthed “Sorry” to me before taking a large bite of eggs.

  A bike messenger had delivered a first class ticket to New York yesterday morning while I was out for a jog, providing the means to get back to Boston by train instead of bus. It was no mystery who had sent it, which must have prompted the discussion of Brandon between my dad and grandmother.

  “I even looked him up on the online,” she informed me proudly.

  I pressured my mouth into a firm line at her misspeak; trying to correct Bubbe on technological jargon was like trying to teach a cat to ride a bike.

  “Goyish, of course,” she continued, “with that blond hair and those blue eyes, but still, very handsome. I had hoped, of course, that you might marry a nice Jewish boy, but still, this Mr. Sterling looks very nice too.”

  “Would nice mean rich?” I asked slyly, acting as though I was about to poke her with my fork. She batted it away.

  “Eat,” she ordered again with an imperious point of her finger. “And of course not, Skylar, but it’s not a bad thing that a man has enough to take care of his family. You would have nothing to worry about, you wouldn’t even have to work.”

  “Bubbe,” I chided her gently. “I’m not going to law school to become a housewife.”

  “And is that the worst thing in the world?” she asked. “To take care of your home and family?”

  “Ma,” my dad said with a rare sharp tone that generally stopped Bubbe’s tirades. “Stop. This generation is different than yours. We should be proud of Skylar that she’s doing so much with her life. She don’t need a man to take care of her because she can do it herself.” He reached a hand over and squeezed my shoulder. “I’m proud of you, Pips.” He grinned and then bent down to take a large bite of blintz.

  I quickly took a few bites to appease my demanding grandmother while the conversation turned toward the latest gossip at temple. Thoughts of impeding classes loomed in my mind, as did the conversation I’d have to have with my father before my train.

  “I need to finish getting ready. I promise, Bubbe, I’m stuffed,” I said, leaning around to give her a peck on the cheek after I stood up. “But I couldn’t eat as much of anyone else’s cooking, I swear. Pack me some more for the train, all right?”

  ~

  The door to my room creaked open just as I finished stripping the sheets off my bed. I threw the last pillow case into the pile by my desk and looked up to find Dad in the doorway.

  “Hey, Pop,” I said, sitting down on the naked mattress. He walked inside and took a seat next to me, looking all around as if he hadn’t been up there a million other times.

  “You kno
w,” he said, “I never come up here anymore. I forget how it looks sometimes.”

  It was an attic room that had never been completely finished, with one of the walls still gaping with exposed studs and a few electrical wires. The others had been dry walled but never sanded, and one of Bubbe’s old oriental rugs covered the thick subfloor that had never been carpeted. I had moved up there when I was just a kid, preferring the space and quiet of the attic to the tiny, finished room wedged between Dad’s and grandmother’s. Over the years, I had made the attic feel friendly by hanging faded tapestries over the insulation and Christmas lights from the vaulted rafters. The other walls still boasted various decorations I had hung in college: a few concert posters and some street art I’d picked up in Paris. It wasn’t posh by any means, but it had always been mine.

  “Does it look different?” I asked.

  Dad shrugged, his small shoulders rising and falling with a pause in between the movements. “No. It’s just strange to think I could forget what my kid’s room looks like.” He sighed. “I guess I just miss you, kid.”

  I leaned over to lay my head on his flannel-covered shoulder. “I miss you too, Dad. I’m sorry I don’t get back so often these days.”

  “You’re busy.”

  The sadness in his voice was obvious, and a pang of guilt shot through me. I sat up.

  “Dad?” I asked, turning to face him. “Are you okay?”

  He frowned, the movement shaking the floppy locks over his brow. “Yeah, Pips, why do you ask?”

  I pulled nervously on one of the buttons on the mattress. “It’s just…well, Bubbe said you’ve been going to the track again.”

  “Oh, that’s nothin’, sweetheart. Just hanging out with some of the guys. You know how they like to watch the horses.”

  I clenched my teeth when his eyes flickered nervously around the room. He was always a terrible liar.

  “Yeah,” I pressed, “but Nick mentioned that Victor’s been coming around the bar sometimes too.”

  Dad seemed to shrink a little at the mention of the name, but he didn’t say anything, just toyed with one of the mattress buttons by his leg.

  “Dad,” I said, trying to be gentler than I felt. “Do you need help? I thought I gave him what he needed last time, didn’t I? Or are you into something new?”

  It had been three years since I’d had to deliver a thick envelope of cash to an unmarked office in the Navy Yard in exchange for a promise to leave my dad alone. Dad had run around with these guys, getting into trouble when they were kids, which was why they had been originally willing to let him pay off his debts by doing unsavory tasks for them around the neighborhood. It had taken several months of it until he almost got fired from his real job for missing his pickups too many times. Once I’d found out what was going on, I’d paid off Messina without a second thought and pushed Dad straight into rehab. He’d had been straight ever since. Or so I’d thought.

  “Yeah, well, it’s a funny thing, sweetheart,” Dad whispered beside me. His long fingers—the ones that made such beautiful music, tapped out a silent melody on the mattress top. “These guys, you know them. They’re always needing a little something more.”

  “Dad…” I started slowly, measuring my words. We’d had this conversation many times before, to no avail. “You don’t have to stay here. Whatever you owe, I can just give it to them, and you can come live with me in Boston. You can get away from all of this.”

  “Pips, I can’t just leave your grandmother. Plus, I’ve got four years left until I make pension, and my band is here. I’m not leaving New York, kid. You know that.”

  “But Dad—”

  “Skylar, it’s fine,” he said, clearly forcing himself to meet my eyes. “It’s nothing to worry about. It’s done. He just asked me if I could look into something for him—you know they’re always interested in government employees. I said I couldn’t do it, and he said okay. I don’t owe him anything, I promise.”

  “Yeah, but Bubbe and Nick said—”

  “Pips, your grandma gets so far into other people’s business she has to make it up as she goes, and Nick’s a paranoid alcoholic who’s scared of his own shadow. That ticket was just a friend’s, Skylar. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

  I couldn’t stop the giggle from escaping. Nick, a hulking barrel of a man, wasn’t exactly a scaredy-cat. Dad slung a thin arm around me and pulled me into his side. I sighed contentedly at the familiar scent of clove cigarettes and coffee that permeated the soft flannel of his shirt.

  “You don’t need to worry about me, kiddo,” he murmured into my hair. “That’s a promise. So you just need to get yourself back up to school and kick some ass, all right? That way you can defend your old man if I actually do get locked up one day.”

  I could feel the press of his crooked smile against my forehead, but I didn’t find his weak joke the slightest bit funny. I sighed. There wasn’t much else I could do if he insisted everything was fine. He had promised me years ago those days were behind him, that he was out of the life for good. I wasn’t convinced, but I didn’t have anything else to go on either. And I wasn’t about to hand deliver an invitation for Victor Messina and his thugs to come back into our lives, considering how hard it had been to get him out in the first place.

  “All right, Dad,” I said, squeezing him tightly in response before sitting back up. “Just be careful, old man, will you?”

  Don’t worry, baby. I always am.”

  I smiled weakly and nodded. I wanted to believe him. I really did.

  ~

  Chapter 12

  I arrived back in Boston early Sunday afternoon. The plush, first-class ride on the express train from Grand Central Station also gave me plenty of time and space to finish my preliminary reading before classes started. There was no signature on the card that accompanied the messengered ticket, but a typed note was paper-clipped to the envelope that read simply, “Be safe, Red.” It was only after I had opened the ticket that I realized Brandon and I hadn’t exchanged numbers. I had no way to say thank you, no way to confirm our plans—not unless I called his office line at Sterling Grove, and I had no intention of setting off water cooler gossip.

  On Monday morning, I took my usual place in the front row of the in-class component of the Family Law Clinic. I was excited for this class—one of my final electives—because it was my best chance to decide once and for all if this was really the kind of law I wanted to practice, or if I was better suited to the full-service environment like Sterling Grove. Eric sat in the row behind me, tapping away on his phone after waving a brief hello. I wondered who he was talking to so early in morning.

  When the professor strode in as the clock struck eight, my stomach fluttered with a bit of characteristic first-day jitters.

  “Good morning, everyone,” he said.

  The class was small, only fifteen or us or so, but big enough for an elective. I knew all of the third years, who made up half of the class and included Eric; we all sat up just a bit straighter as Professor Ashe dropped his bag on the front table and set a stack of notes on the lectern.

  “Welcome to your Family Law Clinic,” he said. “I know some of you; to those I don’t, welcome. In this class you’ll learn the skills and background necessary to participate in the clinic that accompanies the course. Orientation at the clinic is either directly after this class at one or tomorrow at eight AM, so please be on time in order to sign up for your scheduled hours.”

  Professor Ashe continued to go over the basics of the class as he distributed the syllabus to everyone. It was no different than most of the electives: reading the cases, a midterm, a topical paper related to Family Law in Massachusetts, and a final that stood for most of the grade. Thanks to my luxurious train ride, I had already read several all of the cases for the first two weeks of class.

  “Can anyone tell me the significance of In re: Marriage of Ferguson?” Professor Ashe asked, taking his place behind the lectern.

  And so
the class began, following a Socratic question and answer routine I had come to know well over the last two and a half years. When Professor Ashe finally released us, I was one of the first out the door, eager to get to the clinic in Jamaica Plain to have my pick of the hours.

  ~

  “Someone is asking about you.”

  Interrupted from my thoughts on the current status of welfare law in Massachusetts, I jerked my head around to find Eric standing next to me, his hand wrapped in one of the stability straps above my seat on the train. He loomed over me, his groomed features twisted into a smirk.

  “Oh, hey,” I said. “On your way to orientation too?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I’m doing another internship at the firm this semester too, so I need to make sure my hours at the clinic work with it.”

  Regardless of what could definitely be termed his unprofessional behavior at work, I was happy for Eric that he had won one of the spots at the firm. Since his family made too much money, he hadn’t won any of the scholarships or grants available to HLS students, and a job like this would help him pay off his student loans in ten years rather than thirty. He was what Bubbe would have called a “go-getter,” and would undoubtedly hit the ground running at Sterling Grove, regardless of his tendency toward seducing the paralegals.

  I followed his movements as he took the seat beside me, twisting my body so I could face him properly. “What do you mean, someone is asking about me? Someone at the firm, you mean?” Shit. Had Margie heard something she wasn’t supposed to? It felt like so much longer, but it had only been a week since I’d stormed out of Brandon’s office. Maybe I was water cooler gossip after all.

  Eric’s smirk returned and his brown eyes twinkled. “Something like that. Ana keeps asking me weird questions about you.” His phone buzzed, and he pulled it out of his jacket pocket to look at the message. “Case in point. ‘Do you know if Skylar like boats?’” he read. He looked back to me, one eyebrow arched knowingly. “Something tells me it’s not Ana who is concerned with your sea legs, Crosby, nice as they might be. Anything you want to say back?”