One More Time

by Deborah Cooke

  “I never wanted to go, but I never had a choice.”

  “But, but, you never told me that!” Leslie was startled to learn that she wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been sharing secrets.

  “Do you really think I’m like my brother, James?”

  “No, but most lawyers—most men—aren’t like your brother, James.” Leslie rubbed her temple with her fingertips. Her words faltered. “Matt, you graduated at the top of your class. I thought you loved law.”

  “Well, I don’t. I never did. I did what I had to do to get people off my back.”

  He was so definite, almost accusatory, as if he was disappointed in her for not guessing what he hadn’t told her. And that made Leslie mad. “Funny you never mentioned it.”

  “I thought you must know, on some level, that I wanted to do something else.”

  “How would I have known that without you telling me?” What else had he wanted to do?

  “Why do you think I stayed home with Annette?”

  “You had a home office. Lots of people work at home when they have children: you had a choice to do so and I didn’t.”

  “I had a home-based real estate law practice because I never wanted to play the game.”

  “But if you didn’t want to play the game, what were you doing even taking the Laforini case? Then why didn’t you just say no to your father in the first place?” Leslie found her voice rising. This was not her fault! “Why didn’t you just decline the privilege of being his partner two years ago?”

  Why did you have to give me such hope? she wanted to shout at him, but bit it back.

  “For the same reason I went to law school and wrote the bar exam. My father never took no for an answer when he wanted that answer to be yes. The only way to persuade him that I wasn’t cut out to be his successor and partner was to prove it to him in a courtroom. So, that’s what I did. He always wanted hard evidence, preferably from a court of law, so that’s what he got.”

  It made a treacherous kind of sense.

  Worse, Matt was proud of himself. Leslie spun in her chair, her frustration rising to dangerous levels. She should have hung up, she knew it. She should have just cut the conversation short before she said too much.

  But she couldn’t do it.

  Not today.

  Not when she had hoped for so much and it looked as if she’d get nothing at all. Not when she’d spent two years hoping that he’d win the case, get himself a partnership that would pay a decent wage, and leave her with an option when Dinkelmann got demanding.

  “So, you just decided,” she said, unable to hide her unhappiness with this. “You didn’t think that maybe we should talk about such a decision before it was too late? Or had you already decided that you were going to walk out of our marriage?”

  The words were like poison on her tongue. Leslie was sure that her mouth would swell with hives just for letting them pass.

  Matt’s voice hardened. “I was sure that we were in agreement. I thought you’d be glad that I hadn’t compromised my principles. I thought you’d be glad that I wasn’t following the Coxwell legal eagle career path.”

  “You don’t maybe think you might have bent that principle a bit, just to get yourself a paycheck? Even just for a while?”

  “What for? I don’t need fancy cars and big houses and acres of lawn to feel like a big man. I’m not my father, Leslie. I don’t measure my own worth by what other people think of my toys.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time for you to think about what other people want,” Leslie said before she could stop herself. “Don’t take this wrong, Matt, I want you to be happy. I just wouldn’t mind if I got to be happy, too.”

  “But you are happy. You’re the most content person I know. You love your job…”

  How could he be so unaware of her feelings?

  “Content? You make me sound like a cow!”

  “That’s not what I meant…”

  “I’m as far from content as anyone can get. I hate my job!” Leslie shouted, interrupting him, only realizing how true it was when the forbidden words left her mouth. “I despise it! But I don’t have a choice, do I? Principles don’t pay for groceries or property taxes or electricity or gas for the car or even the car itself.” Her voice rose with every sentence and she didn’t care. She had kept such a tight lid on these thoughts that they were almost revelations to her, as well. “Principles don’t cover mortgage payments or provide for university tuitions, much less retirement plans. Principles don’t mean anything!”

  “You can’t possibly believe that…”

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe.” Leslie took a deep breath. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll get back to work, so I can pay off the credit card bill for that new suit you’re wearing.”

  Then, because she remembered belatedly that Matt was headed straight to Sharan, because she realized that she had given him a whole lot of reasons to not just hurry there, but stay there, and because she knew she was going to cry, Leslie threw the receiver back into the cradle.

  Well done, she had time to tell herself before her tears started. She never cried, though it was hard to remind herself of that truth when the tears were streaming down her face.

  She dropped her forehead to her desk and wailed like a baby.

  The only mercy was that her office door was closed.

  Leslie hated her job. It was true, and now that she had uttered the thought, it was inescapable. She hated the lectures and she hated the politics and she hated all the energy she had to expend on people who really didn’t care about history. She hated that she couldn’t pursue her own research—and she despised Dinkelmann and his agendas.

  But she was trapped here, trapped as surely as a rat in a cage. Annette and Matt, the house, the car, the 401K’s, everything was dependent upon her and her paycheck.

  And if Matt was gone, her responsibilities were doubled. There wouldn’t even be a trickle coming in from his practice.

  It was depressing to think that Mrs. Beaton was right: Leslie would have to sell the house to give Matt his half, and she and Annette would have to move to an apartment.

  She’d have gone full circle, just as her father had always threatened. Maybe they’d end up in a grubby little tenement like the one she’d grown up in.

  Only now did she realize how very much she had wanted Matt to want that partnership with his father. How terrific that he could choose to pursue his principles, while she was going to have to give undeserved A’s, sacrificing her principles to keep her job.

  It wasn’t Leslie’s habit to feel sorry for herself, but she figured that she was past due and allowed herself five minutes of self-indulgence. Her face was on her desk, wet with tears, when the phone rang again.

  It was the department secretary, she was sure, calling to request a course syllabus for a student to copy.

  The phone kept ringing, long after the secretary would have been distracted by another call.

  It was the library, then, about the reserved text list for her summer course load. Some volume was unavailable. It happened all the time.

  The phone kept ringing, long after any reference librarian would have given up.

  By the twelfth ring, Leslie knew damn well who was calling, but she still didn’t answer the phone. She called herself a chicken, but she really didn’t have the gumption to hear Matt tell her flat out that their marriage was over.

  Maybe hope wasn’t really dead, after all.

  She fingered the lacy edge of her power bra, closed her eyes and wished for things to miraculously get better. Maybe she could rewind her day and wake up all over again. No, she’d have to rewind the day before as well, go right back to the end of the trial then seduce Matt in the Subaru.

  Even that might not set this straight.

  The phone rang twenty-five times before he gave it up—she counted—and Leslie stared at it for most of those rings. She was shocked when it finally went dead.

  Maybe Matt was gone forever. The possibilit
y made Leslie want to crawl under a rock—preferably one made of bittersweet chocolate—and cry forever. Maybe gnaw on the rock periodically to console herself. She had been prepared to make a thousand sacrifices to stay married to Matt Coxwell, but if he was really gone, none of it seemed to have much point.

  On impulse, she rustled up the change in her desk drawer and hit the vending machine in the foyer again. There were only Nestle Crunches left, but she wasn’t proud.

  She bought all three of them and told herself she didn’t care who was looking.

  One thing was for sure: if this wasn’t the worst day of her life, if days were going to get worse from here, Leslie was in serious trouble. She just didn’t have the artillery in her lingerie drawer to hold up for long under such duress.

  And if she kept having chocolate for lunch, she’d need bigger panties. There was a depressing thought, but it didn’t stop her from finishing the third chocolate bar.

  Lunch. That was lunch. Not a particularly balanced meal, but there you go. If this wasn’t a day to make exceptions, she didn’t know what was.

  * * *

  The gods had it in for Matt, because his day only got worse.

  Which was saying something after that disastrous call to Leslie. Worse, he’d known she was there when he called back and she hadn’t picked up. He’d only given it up because they’d called his flight, but this wasn’t done yet.

  Not by a long shot.

  She hated her job.

  And she’d never given him so much as a clue.

  What the hell kind of trust was that?

  His outgoing flight from Chicago was delayed two-and-a-half hours for a mechanical issue, which wouldn’t have been so bad except that they had boarded and the aircraft had been pushed back by the time the malfunction had been discovered. Someone had made a bad choice and concluded that the repair would be done quickly—and undoubtedly the gate was needed for another flight—so they sat on the tarmac, feeling the aircraft interior get more stuffy with every passing moment

  Ultimately, they did depart, but the meal that had been scheduled for their enjoyment had to be trashed because it had been un-refrigerated too long. Matt doubted that he would have enjoyed it anyway. There was no replacement meal apparently available, or it would have delayed them further to have loaded it, but Matt didn’t care. He could do without another pizza thing in his life of ingestion, could do without more mystery meat having even a passing acquaintance with his gut.

  Besides, they offered free drinks as compensation for the inconvenience.

  Which meant that by the time Matt’s cab was cruising down Canal Street in the rosy late afternoon, he’d had at least twenty shots of Scotch and two tiny bags of pretzels since lunch the previous day.

  On the upside, he really couldn’t tell anymore whether this was the worst day of his life or not.

  Leslie had hated her job and he hadn’t had a clue. Now he could see that she’d stopped making jokes and stopped talking to him, and that he should have asked why. But instead, he’d been so absorbed in pursuing his newfound dream that he hadn’t noticed.

  And he’d always thought he was a pretty sensitive guy.

  So much for that self-delusion.

  He strode into the hotel lobby, which boasted acres of wall-to-wall broadloom in glorious red, the hue of which prompted an unwelcome association. He smelled the faint whisper of mildew that is so pervasive in New Orleans, recalled the smell of blood, dropped his bags abruptly with the bellman and headed for the bar.

  He was already too far gone to call Leslie back and have a decent conversation. He’d call her tomorrow.

  Tonight, it was simpler to be drunk.

  Chapter Four

  Dinkelmann heard about Leslie’s humiliation in record time.

  He rapped on her office door within 30 minutes of her leaving the lecture hall, all solicitous concern, which only confirmed her suspicion that he had antennae tuned to staff failure. She stuffed the last piece of chocolate into her desk drawer, swallowed the bite in her mouth and tried to sound composed.

  He was in her office before she realized that her eyes were probably swollen. He took a good look at her face and Leslie cussed under her breath.

  It was easier to like Dinkelmann when he was an officious jerk. At least it felt honest. When he turned on the charm, this new department head with his love of sound bites and affection for appearances, Leslie just wanted to excuse herself and wash her hands.

  Twice.

  As it was, she was trapped in her woefully small office with the primary reason that she no longer loved her job. Or at least, Dinkelmann was the most recent reason, the coup de grace culminating a long battle with disillusionment.

  He apologized prettily for not realizing that the dead Coxwell in the newspaper was a Coxwell related to her, made several insulting assumptions about the ability of women to deal with stress—which was remarkable for a man of his age—then suggested that Leslie take a week off.

  She might have done it, if he hadn’t implied that she couldn’t be expected to do otherwise, what with her being female and all. She might have done it if she hadn’t had swollen eyes and chocolate crumbs on her skirt.

  Leslie declined.

  Then she insisted.

  Finally, she argued with Dinkelmann, which did precious little to improve her mood, but at least got him out of her office. He paused in the hall and looked back, pert as a sparrow and as untrustworthy as a weasel on the hunt.

  Perky in pink.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve made much progress on your research lately?” he said, clearly knowing that Leslie had not. “I was looking back and it’s been several years since you had an article published. I recognize that it would be premature for you to have completed a book on such a complex subject, Leslie, but a few more recent credentials would be timely additions to your c.v.”

  Leslie smiled, which was a better choice for job security than throttling the department head with her bare hands. “Thank you for the reminder, Dr. Dinkelmann.”

  “You did have a splendid run of articles a few years ago. I was impressed by the caliber of the faculty I was inheriting in this department.” He smiled, showing all his perfect teeth, with all their perfect caps, in all their bleached perfection.

  Leslie didn’t miss the threat. “Yes, it’s been a hectic few years, what with the new course load we’re all juggling, and I have more graduate students than I did before.”

  “We all have our obligations, Leslie.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Dinkelmann waggled a scolding finger. “No, Leslie, no prevarication. You will do it. The dean is watching the achievements of the faculty with a close eye these days.” His eyes narrowed ever so slightly and then he was smart enough to leave.

  Leslie slammed her office door and leaned her back against it, fuming silently. On the upside, she hadn’t bitten Dinkelmann—that had to be worth something. The man had left her office with nary a chomp mark upon his flesh—or at least, no more bites than he had had when he arrived.

  Did anyone think Dinkelmann was bite-able? Was there a Mrs. Dr. Dinkelmann, who couldn’t wait to get her hands on him, to get his pink shirt of choice off his back?

  That was a scary prospect. Leslie definitely needed more sleep.

  She also needed to be cloned to keep everybody happy—or maybe just to keep Dinkelmann happy. Of course, if she was just going to give every student an A in every course, that would cut down on the time she spent marking papers. Leslie was beginning to feel that academia was a lot more about showmanship than she’d ever imagined.

  Or hoped.

  But there was no escape. She had appointments with four of her graduate students this afternoon, who did need her help and direction and had contributed nothing to her current (bad) state of mind. She needed to summon up some serenity for them, and could only hope she wouldn’t bomb in her other lecture today.

  Where had she stuffed the last piece of that Nestle Cru
nch?

  * * *

  No messages.

  There were no messages for Leslie when she got back to her office, and even though she lingered, her phone didn’t ring. She’d survived the lecture by relying on her notes, which had made for a painfully dry delivery, but those kids would live.

  She wished on the drive home that she had a cell phone, something she’d never desired before.

  But then, wouldn’t it be worse if she had a cell and it didn’t ring? Maybe ignorance was bliss, in this case. She charged through the front door of the house, hurrying as she never did, and headed straight for the answering machine.

  It was better than noticing that the kitchen was gapingly, vacuously, alarmingly, empty. It was better than giving any attention to the fact that Matt wasn’t home, and wouldn’t be home anytime soon. She realized a little bit late how much she savored coming home to him each day—then wondered if he had any idea.

  The light was flashing madly on the answering machine, which gave hope a surge, but not one that lasted. Leslie listened to message of condolence after message of condolence, all well-intended, all heartfelt. Each one made her expect that the next voice would be the one she most wanted to hear. She’d need to deal with the replies later, so she saved the messages, every last one.

  Until there were no more. That was when Leslie’s heart plummeted to her toes with awful certainty. She really had done it. She really had driven Matt away for good.

  One glance into the pristine kitchen told her all she needed to know about the merit of honesty. It had been easier to think about the truth before she got here and had to witness it.

  She supposed she should be consoled that she didn’t have to be afraid of Matt leaving her anymore.

  Leslie crossed the kitchen and hauled open the freezer door, looking for more tangible consolation. She intended to snag the carton of Chocolate Fudge Swirl ice cream that she knew was there.