Felicia said, “I have a draft of your revised will here. Let’s go over that, and if it looks good, we can pull in a couple of witnesses and sign it right now.”
Marjorie read every line, her finger moving along the double-spaced text, her lips moving, and Beth tried hard not to let her hatred show.
Of course she was having trouble. She had a headache, and coming back to work after almost four weeks away would be an adjustment for anybody. She missed the lake, she missed Gracie, and she missed Evan. All of it was an ache in her chest that competed with the pounding in her head.
She wanted to see dragonflies. She wanted to smell cedars. She wanted to hear Gracie’s belly laugh. She wanted to feel Evan’s arms around her. She wanted to go home.
She breathed the pain out, breathed the air in. Portland was green, her condo was halfway paid off already, and she’d be a partner next year. This was her life.
Marjorie looked up at last, shoved the paper back at Felicia, and said, “Fine. Give me the original.”
“I’ll go grab those witnesses,” Beth said, standing up and glad for the break.
“You sit,” Marjorie said. “The other girl can go.”
“Excuse me,” Beth said, “but I’ll go. You see,” she added with a smile that felt pasted on, “Felicia’s a partner, and I’m not. Not yet.”
She didn’t wait to listen to whatever would come next. She left. A minute to grab the nearest two secretaries, and they were back for the signing. The room still stank, Marjorie’s eyes were sharp brown pebbles, and the lines around her mouth spoke of a lifetime of discontent. And when the secretaries were gone, the old lady hauled herself to her feet, picked up her dogs’ leashes, and told Felicia, “That’s one thing you managed to do, anyway. Cut those men out. I’ve never met one yet who could be trusted. Bunch of liars, every last one of ’em.” She glared at Beth, the light glinting off her blue cat’s-eye glasses, and said, “Don’t you forget it. A woman works rings around a man, and then she comes home and he expects her to keep on doing it. Don’t fall for it. Waste of a life. Work hard and keep what you earn. Otherwise, what do you think you’ll end up with? An empty bank account, saggy boobs from those babies he wanted, and a date with a judge when he runs off with that next young thing. The one you used to be.”
Beth couldn’t feel her arms. Couldn’t feel anything but the pain in her head and an empty space everywhere else. “Let me walk you to the elevator,” she said, the words automatic. She forced her feet to move, adjusted her pace to the old woman’s across the office, pushed the button for the elevator, pressed the woman’s wrinkled hand, and felt a rush of absolute loathing.
“Next time,” Marjorie said, “I want you, and that’s it. Mexicans are all right in the yard, as long as you watch ’em. They weren’t made to be lawyers.”
Beth was frozen. Her face, her legs. “That’s not my decision,” she said. “I’m an associate. Felicia’s a partner.”
“Don’t want to rock the boat, eh?” The elevator doors opened to reveal DeAndre Patterson, a partner in Litigation, looking sharp today in a gray suit. DeAndre looked at the two of them, then pushed a button to hold the doors.
Marjorie ignored him and told Beth, “Did you ever hear that the customer was always right? I’m the customer, and I want a white lawyer. I’m the one paying. That gives me the right.”
Beth didn’t smile, and she didn’t look at DeAndre. She couldn’t say anything. She didn’t trust what would come out. The elevator gave out the harsh complaint of a door held too long, and Marjorie hauled the dogs inside and said, “If you’re too scared to say it, I’ll tell that girl myself. And get moving on my dogs.”
That’s the worst part over.
She walked back into the conference room feeling drunk. When you placed your feet just right, formed your words with extra care, and knew you were still slurring.
Felicia was gathering up files, closing her laptop. “Told you,” she said when Beth came back inside. “Let me guess. She wants you, because you’re undiluted.”
“That’d be great,” Beth said, “if her idea of purity wasn’t a nasty little pug. I’m sorry. I feel like I should apologize on behalf of my . . . my ethnicity. My religion.”
“Your social status,” Felicia finished. “Nope. I’ve got a great-aunt who’s almost that nasty. Only difference is, she doesn’t have enough money to make anybody kiss her ass, so she’s alone, and that’s everybody’s fault too. Besides, this means I’m done. From here on out? Mrs. Marjorie Sinclair is all yours, and her little dogs, too. Welcome back.”
Beth was straightening papers automatically. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“Never mind,” Felicia said. “You’ve got the weekend, at least part of it. Only you would come back to work a day and a half before Labor Day. That’s what the flu’s for, sister. Except that then I’d have had Marjorie to myself. Want to go for a drink tonight? Say, six?”
“No, thanks,” Beth said. “Too much to catch up on.” She hadn’t even thought about Labor Day. But then, Labor Day didn’t matter. Except for the “labor” part.
“Hey,” Felicia said, putting a hand on Beth’s arm. “You OK? It gets better. One more year. My husband’s a doctor, you know? He’s not sleeping on gurneys anymore, catching a couple hours’ sleep in the middle of a forty-four hour shift. He works, and then he comes home. It’s boot camp, but boot camp doesn’t last forever.”
“I know,” Beth said. “Thanks.” She picked up her things, walked back to her office, set them down, sat in her wheeled chair again, and lined up her files on the desk like always. Some people used vertical files. Beth liked to deal with each project, then file it away, watching the overlapping pile diminish and disappear every day. Until the next morning, when she got them out again.
She sat and looked at them some more. Her head still hurt, a hammer hitting her in that one spot. Taptaptaptaptap. And she was standing up like she was on somebody else’s string, her feet carrying her to Simon’s office. Her brain shrieked at her, tried to pull her back, but her feet were stronger.
She knocked, and Simon looked up over his glasses from the file he was studying and said, “What.”
She didn’t ask. She came in, sat down, and said, “Marjorie Sinclair is a horrible person.”
“So’s my ex-mother-in-law. And to hear her tell it, so am I. Your point?”
“I can’t do it.”
“Of course you can. She’s a client. She has many, many dollars. She wants to spend them on us. Correction—she doesn’t want to spend them, but she will. She’ll call me and screech when she gets the next bill, just like she did when she got the last one. And I’ll put my phone on speaker, because I don’t care. She’s a client. She’s not my mother, and she’s not, all appearances to the contrary, my mother-in-law. But let me guess. She told you she wants you instead of Felicia, because you have no melanin.”
“Yes.”
“And you feel bad. Felicia doesn’t feel bad. I don’t feel bad. We both feel happy. She’s a horrible client, and now, she’s your horrible client. Welcome back.”
“I need to leave.”
He sighed and set down the file he still held. “We don’t have tantrums because our clients are unpleasant. Felicia’s not having one, is she? Felicia’s letting it roll off her back. And you’re wasting my time again.”
She stood up. “Then I’ll stop. I need to leave. I shouldn’t have come back. I only did it because it’s what I always do. But it’s time for me to do something else.”
“Beth.” She had his full attention for once. “You are a good attorney. You’ll be a very good attorney. This job takes a lot, and that’s all right, because you have a lot. Whatever existential crisis this whole thing is—get over it.”
“I can’t. I miss the mountains.”
“Oh, for— Look. It’s a holiday weekend. Go for a walk in the forest park. Breathe nature. Whatever. You’re a lawyer. This is what you do.”
“I don’t have to do it here.”
“I’m going to decide,” she said. “When I’m home.”
“Good. Decide. Come in on Tuesday and tell me you’ve forgotten it, please. Neither of us has time for this.”
“No. When I’m home. I’m sorry to dump Marjorie on somebody else, but like you said—it’s billable hours. It’s job security. It’s somebody else’s ticket to their partnership.”
Now, Simon took off his glasses. The signal, those who’d been there said, that you were in trouble. “Six years. You’re going to throw away six years. Next year, where will you be? Starting over. This is a journey straight to nowhere.”
“But you know the thing about nowhere?”
“Spare me the philosophy.”
Her head still hurt, but her heart didn’t. “It’s empty. It’s open. And I get to fill it.”
Evan was painting the top of a column when he heard Dakota call out, “Hey.”
He didn’t have to turn to know it was her. He’d been painting with her too long for that. He said, “One sec,” and stroked gold paint onto acanthus leaves.
Acanthus, because it was a Corinthian column. Not Doric or Ionic. And he didn’t need to think about a woman who loved shiny things like gold-topped columns and copper-colored shoes and nail polish with glitter. He needed to paint. He needed to move forward.
Sharks have to swim forward, she’d said, or they die. Well, he wasn’t going to die. He was going to keep on keeping on.
He finished the capital, and then he set the brush in the paint tray and climbed down the scaffolding. Carefully, because he was a father. When he got there, he unhooked and said, “Hey.”
Dakota had a thumb in the belt loop of her jeans and was rocking on the heels of her cowboy boots. Her dark hair was loose, and her earrings were porcupine quills trimmed with beads. But she was wearing her glasses, and she wasn’t wearing makeup. In other words, she was one hundred percent Dakota Savage, and she’d come loaded for bear. She was looking at him hard, and she was looking too deep.
“Come outside with me,” she said. “I brought coffee. Iced.”
“I’m pretty busy.”
“I don’t care.”
This was about him, or it was about her. If it was about her, he needed to know it, and he needed to help. And if it was about him, she was going to say it one way or another. If he hadn’t come down, she’d have climbed up to him and said it. Anyway, he’d told her what he thought of her life choices in the past. He’d told her plenty. He guessed she was due.
She didn’t start talking right away. She grabbed two plastic glasses with straws from the bottom of the scaffolding, handed one to him, and stalked out of the theater. Outside, she headed to the bench outside the First National Bank, sat down, and, when he was sitting too, said, “So Beth left.”
He shoved the straw down into the ice. “Yep.”
“And you’re just going to let her go?”
He could feel the doors in his mind slamming shut like the hatches on a submarine. “Yes. I am. Because it’s what she wants to do.”
“Did you ask her to stay?”
“No. I didn’t. It wouldn’t have been fair. I told her I didn’t want her to go.”
“Did you tell her you loved her? Come on, Evan. You have to try.”
He let out a long, slow breath. “Dakota,” he said, keeping it measured. Keeping it even. “You’re one of my best friends. But you don’t know all of my life, and you don’t know all of Beth’s.”
“She looked so sad,” Dakota said. “When she came over to say goodbye. She looked just like you. All shut down, and all that joy she’s had, all that happiness I’ve seen coming back because of you, because she loves you and she loves Gracie—it was gone. And it made me so sad, too. You both deserve better. You deserve each other. One of you needs to go out on that limb and do it. Please, Evan. Take that leap. Jump into that deep water, and then turn around and tell her to jump, too. That’s what she needs to hear. She needs you to tell her you’ll catch her, and that you’ll never let her go. “
He couldn’t sit here. He stood up, and after a moment, Dakota did, too. “Well,” she said, “I had to try. I love you too much not to.”
He nodded, and then he walked away. He went back to work. Back to where he could think. Where he’d have a brush in his hand and quiet in his head. Where he could breathe.
And by the time he knocked off for the day, he’d thought it through.
He was in the driveway at seven that evening, holding Gracie and talking to his mom, when he heard the engine.
He knew what make it was, and he didn’t turn around. He didn’t need another stupid letdown. There were downsides to being able to recognize a car’s make by the sound of its engine or the look of its headlights.
He was still talking, but his mom put her hand on his arm. “Honey, wait. Look.”
When he turned around, the gray Audi was pulling up to the curb. Facing the wrong way, like its driver was a woman who didn’t follow the rules, or a woman who’d thrown caution to the wind. A woman who wore copper-colored shoes with bows around the ankles and lavender nail polish and gold ankle bracelets. A woman who jumped in, even though the water was over her head, even though she was scared to do it. A grown woman with a woman’s courage and a woman’s heart.
She climbed out, looking stiff. Her skirt—which was gray, like the car—was crumpled and stuck to her, and she tugged it loose as she walked. Her pale-blue blouse didn’t look too great either, and it was hanging out of the waistband of the skirt. Her feet were bare, and her hair was loose.
She walked up to him, swaying a tiny bit, stopped a few feet away, and said, “I came back.”
“I see that,” he said. “For the weekend? Or what?”
She didn’t seem to have heard him. “It doesn’t have to mean anything to you,” she said. “Or wait. It does. I mean, it doesn’t have to, but I want it to. I’m not going to be scared to say it. I’m going to say it. I came back for me, but I came back for you. You and Gracie.”
“Beth—” he began.
She put up a hand. “No. I’m going to say this. I quit my job. I quit—my job.” She was shaking some, and he wondered when she’d eaten. When she’d last stopped. “I left. Six years. And I don’t care. Because you’re right. Next year, I’ll be a partner, and then what? How will my life change? How will it be better? It won’t. It won’t be better. I’ll have more money. I’ll do less work. Some less work. And there won’t be anybody to take me to see dragonflies. There won’t be anybody to hold my hand. There won’t be anybody to dance with me on the dock. And I won’t see Gracie’s smile. What kind of life is that going to be? No life, that’s what. No life. So I came back. I came back, and maybe I can get on with Joan’s firm. Or maybe I can’t. My name’s Schaefer, I’m in Wild Horse where that matters, and I’m a good lawyer. I can learn real estate law, too. The lake is going to get developed, whether that’s Brett Hunter doing it or somebody else. The town’s going to need a good real estate attorney. I’m not one yet, but I wasn’t a good estate-planning attorney either, and now I am. And then there is that estate planning. Development on the lake means rich people. People with money. Californians. And regular people, too. People who need wills. People who get sick and need help applying for their Social Security disability. Big people and little people. All kinds of people, and companies, too.”
“I—” he said, but she talked right over him.
“So that’s me,” she said. “That’s what I’m doing. If nobody wants me, I’ll do it by myself. The thing about Idaho is, it’s not Portland. You know it’s not.”
“Yes,” he said. There was a helium balloon filling up inside him, and
in another minute, he was going to be floating straight up into the sky.
“It’s cheap,” she said. “And I don’t need a yacht. I don’t need a boat, and I don’t need a house. Not if you’ll take me in your boat. Not if you’ll let me live in your house. And if you won’t? Then I’ll get a house. A little house.”
“Beth,” he said. “Baby. Stop.”
“Oh.” She swallowed, and then she looked at Gracie. Evan looked down, and there Gracie was, smiling like the sun. Smiling, and holding her arms out. And Beth’s face was crumpling. “Oh,” she said. “Well, I don’t care. I’m moving anyway. I am. I quit. I’m here.”
He put an arm around her and kissed her forehead, and she put her hands up over her face and started to shake. “I can’t—” she said. “I can’t—”
Evan handed Gracie to his mom, took Beth in his arms, and held on. She shook, and she cried, and he didn’t say anything. He rocked her, and he held her, and he felt his T-shirt getting wet. And he felt like he could fly.
“Baby,” he asked when the sobs had died down at last, “when did you eat?”
“I . . .” she said. “I had some coffee. And a . . . one of those peanut butter cracker things. Some of those.”
“Uh-huh. And how many times did you stop?”
“Uh . . . one time, I did. To get the coffee. And I’m sorry, but I have to pee. Really bad. Just wait a minute, OK?”
He had to laugh. No choice. He was buzzing like a . . . like something that buzzed. “Yeah. But wait. Door’s locked.” He ran ahead of her and opened it.
“But you never lock it,” she said. She was dancing some. She really did have to go. He wondered how long ago that coffee stop had been. Four hours? Five?
“I had to, though,” he said. “Because I was leaving. I was coming for you.”
She came out about three minutes later, and he handed her the glass of water he’d poured for her while she’d been in there. She drank the whole thing down, and she wasn’t looking quite as shaky when she handed it back.
No Kind of Hero (Portland Devils Book 2) Page 32