Family Affair

by Caprice Crane

  “Right now, I’m pretty upset.”

  “Oh, no—we’ll definitely take the sick bastard for everything he’s got. But we step lightly at first. Now, with all sympathies to the situation … any infidelity or physical abuse?”

  “Never!” I say, as I laugh for the first time in days. Brett hitting me? Never. “It’s not like that. It’s sort of more about the relationship.”

  “Not exactly my forte. Been married three times, and the third one … let’s say that one was the reason this move has been on hold so long.”

  Just what you want to hear from your prospective divorce attorney.

  “Hear me out,” I say. “My husband and I are, I think, getting a divorce. So that’s easy.”

  He smiles. “I’m glad you think so. But you won’t by the time we get done with this. No offense or anything.”

  I rub my forehead to clear the thought, close my eyes, then restart. “I mean, that’s done. Sort of. Rather, I don’t think the dispute will be complicated, because there are no kids and God knows not a whole hell of a lot to split between us. I’m not sure if he’s filed the paperwork yet. I haven’t heard.” I open my eyes again. “Anyway, there’s something trickier that I need your help with. This family that I married into: the Fosters. They’re the only real family I’ve ever had. Between growing up with them when I was in high school and then my years of being married to their son, they really became my family. I love them. They are mine, too. Practically. Truly. Legally. And dammit if I’m not going to fight for what’s mine.”

  “I’m not sure I’m getting what you’re saying,” Thames admits. “We can talk about distribution of real property, sure. They have some of your belongings in their house?”

  “Yes. Them,” I say. “They are my family. If I am splitting up with my husband, then so be it. But I want his family.”

  “Well, you can’t have that,” Thames says.

  “Why not?” I ask, and I mean it. Why not?

  “Because custody is for minors. Maybe if the parents were incapacitated in some way—are they?” When he asks this, I can see he’s probably thinking about how and why they got incapacitated, and if he can get a piece of that lawsuit.

  “No, they’re not. They are able-bodied and sound-minded.”

  “Then you’re out of luck,” he says.

  “You said on your commercial that you would stop at nothing. Nothing means nothing. Which would include not being stopped by having no previous legal precedent.”

  He purses his lips and twists his mouth to the right side. I can tell I’m getting to him. And I know this guy. I saw his dream of being the next Johnnie Cochran when I spotted him on his commercial, so I’m not giving up.

  “You seem like a high-profile guy,” I say.

  “I don’t like to toot my own horn but … toot.” He gives a smile that makes me slightly queasy.

  “You wouldn’t mind a headline, a little notoriety, some hate mail.”

  “Not sure what you’re driving at,” he admits. “Well, this could potentially be a very high-profile case,” I explain.

  “Hmm. Keep driving.”

  “He wants a divorce? Well, I am going to file a countersuit—not just for divorce but for joint custody of his family!”

  He taps his pen to his lips and shakes his head. Luckily, it’s a thoughtful and not a dismissive shake.

  “A lawsuit like this is unprecedented, if not impossible,” he finally decides. “As I said, custody exists only for control of and responsibility for dependents.”

  “Isn’t that the definition of the word? Things are unprecedented only until they are precedented. And I don’t care if that is an actual word any more than I care that a lawsuit like this has never been filed. I want to file anyway—if for nothing else than to make a statement.”

  “Statements are expensive,” he says.

  “I’m prepared to pay,” I reply, not even knowing what I’m agreeing to, thinking I’ll take out another loan if I have to. This is my destiny.

  “Judges don’t like them,” he adds.

  “Reporters do,” I rebut. “And I don’t think this will get ignored. A marriage certificate is a legal document. I am legally bound to that family. They are my in-laws. Imagine how groundbreaking this could be. The first case of its kind.”

  I’m calculating that he doesn’t give a damn about breaking ground, except in that his firm is no well-oiled plaintiff’s machine, throwing off private plane—level contingency fees, and a breakthrough is just what his reputation needs. Even something off the wall. I see the wheels turning in his head: the press conferences, the angry denunciations of justice denied on the courthouse steps, the movie deals….

  He smiles.

  He’s in.

  brett

  Scott lost his virginity at seventeen to Carmelita, our Ecuadoran housekeeper, who wasn’t exactly what you’d call attractive. To say that Carmelita had more of a mustache than Scott at the time they unmade the bed would be entirely accurate. I bring this up because I kept that secret, along with every other secret, as was my brotherly duty. Never once was the sentence uttered: “When you peed your pants before the third-grade Christmas pageant, who ran to Kmart to get you new underwear?” That was just a given.

  Trish? I went to every single softball game she ever played. I will never ever get that time back. Plus, when she mangled her dirt bike trying to run Dwight Kozuchowsky over for calling her a “stupid lezzy,” and accidentally hit and dented the Friedmans’ Lexus, I fixed the bike and never told anyone about the hit-and-run. When she put one-fourth of a quaalude in my Cherry Coke to put me to sleep so I wouldn’t bug her friends, I never said a word. Ditto for when I caught her raiding Dad’s Playboys. And the prizewinner of the non-uttered sentence department? “When you got gonorrhea from that Mormon chick, who drove to Tijuana to score you penicillin?”

  The point is, I had their backs. Like brothers and sisters are supposed to. So why is it that now that I need them to have mine, they’ve gone totally AWOL? Same goes for my parents.

  It’s with this in mind that I head over to Casa Foster, ready at first to give them no more than a verbal slap on the wrists, but by the time I reach the front door, I’m hell-bent on busting it down and demanding that my family take me back as a full-fledged blood member. It’s been more than a week since Layla and I announced our break, and they’ve had their time to make peace with it—or at least to soften and treat me better. This all just makes me angrier at Layla for having devoted the entire end of our marriage to stealing my family.

  “Son,” my dad says, as he bows his head slightly forward and nods. Not “Hey, champ!” or “Great to see ya, pal!” Just an acknowledgment that I am, for legal purposes, his son, and he’s really not so sure how he feels about that.

  I let this go and walk past him and up to Scott’s room, where I And Scott glaring at me, his eyes squinted so small it almost looks like he’s straining to see something just past me.

  “Something in your eye?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says, and he blinks a few times and touches his eyelashes. “I think it’s … disgust.” He goes back to sketching demons.

  “Good one. But maybe it’s just eye boogers from all that crying yourself to sleep you’ve been doing.”

  “Dude, I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Scott says. “You’re so wrong. You’re so beyond wrong.”

  “Am I?” I get in his face. “Well, I don’t think so. And it’s my life. And you know what? Right or wrong shouldn’t matter. What if I am wrong? Shouldn’t you still have my back?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Nice, bro,” I say. “See if I have your back next time you get caught stealing mugs from IHOP.”

  “Whatever, dude.” He shrugs. “I’m sorry, but I think it’s really shitty what you’re doing. It’s unthinkable, actually. It’s, like, apocalyptic. Layla and you? You’re not supposed to break up. And the fact that you instigated it? I can’t even wrap my head around it. Maybe I’d ha
ve your back if she dumped you and you were all miserable like you should be. But not this way.”

  I’m so pissed at the little bastard I don’t know what to do with myself. There are less than a handful of people in the entire world that I feel like I can count on to take my side whatever comes. I know I’ve remarked that Scott loves Layla, but … this betrayal is staggering. I figured he’d eventually come around to my side.

  I just stand there looking at him, my blood boiling, my jaw clenching and unclenching. Finally, I speak. “Let me ask you one question: Who turned you on to Motorhead?”

  “What?” he asks.

  “You heard me. Who turned you on to Motorhead?”

  “Uh, you?”

  “Yeah,” I say, ready to break a stack of Motorhead CDs over his skull. “Me.”

  “Your point?”

  “My point is: If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be getting the shit beat out of you in a Nickelback T-shirt.”

  “Whatever, dude.”

  “Who gave you your first mullet? Wait, sorry.”

  “Exactly.”

  “No,” I say. “Not ‘exactly.’ I have always had your back.”

  “And I’ve had yours,” Scott returns. “Who snuck you water and candy for three days when you hid under the house after you got busted for faking your paper route?”

  “And I thank you for that. And for the three cavities I got at my next dental visit. But—”

  “Brett, why are you doing this?”

  Scott stares at me, and I can see he’s all busted up inside. That just makes me angrier. How do you say to your family that you feel your wife has been drifting away, taking you for granted, and before you even started going out with each other the witch was lying to you—and when you got angry about the whole thing, looking for some support … well, everyone seemed to support her! My parents even tried to mediate the day after we announced the split, asking me to be rational and not such a hothead.

  “You’re my fucking family, and you should support me, okay?” I growl.

  “Brett, this is different. We’re Layla’s family, too. Who else has she got?”

  “That’s right,” I hear my mom say as she enters the room. “Her father never came back for her. When Dad walked Layla down the aisle at your wedding, she became his legal daughter. That’s what a daughter-in-law is. We all accepted her as family and love her like she’s our own.”

  “But I am your own!” I shout, not wanting to hear any more about her.

  “Yes, and so is she,” my mom says, her lips pursed, left eyebrow cocked.

  “Fine. Well, I hope none of you traitors ever need any blood. Because I’m O negative—the universal donor. But it looks like my universe is getting smaller. And for the record: Trish and Scotty are B!”

  And with that I storm out—feeling like a total asshole.

  • • •

  In an effort to right my wrongs, or at least shore up alliances, a couple days later I go back to the ’rents place with my tail between my legs and a pot of mums for Mom. I hold the flowers in front of my face as Mom opens the door and say, “I’m sorry,” in my best apologetic voice. “I’ve been a jerk.”

  “These are gorgeous,” Mom says, as she takes them from me and motions to the backyard. “I’ll plant them under Layla’s tree.”

  I look toward the backyard, where a small army of landscapers is muscling a green monster into a hole the size of a moon crater. More precisely, it is a tree that Mom explains is a “gorgeous flowering crab apple” being planted courtesy of Layla, thus making my pathetic handful of mums look like a tricycle at a rally of Harley-Davidsons. How did my damn wife know I was going to bring flowers? Am I such a cliché? I guess I am.

  So this is how she wants to play it? Because two can play at this game. And I’m pretty good at winning games, even if it takes me a couple of seasons. Starting to understand the gravity of this contest, I take my sad pot of flowers, tell Mom I forgot an errand I need to run, and get back in my car.

  Dad loves cigars. Me, I never quite got as into them, but I do see the appeal. There’s something relaxing about smoking a cigar. I guess it’s because when you smoke you can’t really do anything else, and I’m usually doing ten thousand things at once. For me to sit still is a rarity. On the odd occasion I smoke one, I usually find that I’m just sitting wherever I am, talking to whoever I’m with, enjoying the flavor. It’s nice. So forty-five minutes later I find myself in Encino at Fat Stogies, buying my dad a humidor. I pass the cigar-store Indian on my way inside and ask Jack, the owner, why such a thing—probably never appropriate, but now definitely not PC—is at the entrance of every single cigar shop I’ve ever encountered.

  “Because it’s a cigar store,” Jack informs me.

  “Right. But why is what I’m asking,” I counter.

  Jack shrugs. There’s a flat-screen TV on the wall and two guys smoking in the store, watching the L. A. Kings. One of them chimes in that if I Google it, there’s a whole history. I make a note in my head not to do that later.

  They’ve got autographed headshots lining the walls: John Goodman, Bill Cosby, Kevin James, Bobcat Goldthwait, David Hasselhoff, and some guy from The Sopranos. You go to any cigar shop—anywhere—and there’s an autographed picture of a guy from The Sopranos. I lean in closer to see what the Hoff wrote on his picture. It says, “You guys are smokin’.” I smile at the inscription and have Jack direct me to an impressive humidor, which I promptly purchase.

  • • •

  I can take the stupid tree in the Garden of Good and Layla. I can deal with her pathetic attempts to one-up me with my family, and it gives me no small amount of joy when Layla shows up the following week with a Cuban for my father and he proudly walks her to the Versailles humidor I bought him. But when I call for Sammy Davis Junior and he doesn’t come because she’s somehow hypnotized him into not leaving her side and wrapped him up with a dog-heart-thieving scheme, there’s a line drawn in the kibble. Layla has crossed it. I remember one time when my parents were out of town and Layla and I were watching the dog. We jokingly fought over who he’d sit next to, who got to play fetch with him more, who he liked better. Sammy wound up sleeping between us every night that week so it didn’t seem like he was choosing sides. Very intuitive dog. But this is my Sunday, since I temporarily agreed to her stupid plan about maybe alternating weekends. So what if I didn’t call ahead and plan an outing like she suggested after Movie Night? That doesn’t give her the right to be at the house. And Sammy is suddenly much less intuitive as he sits with his traitor head resting on her knee.

  “You don’t actually think that dog loves you more than me, do you?” I ask.

  “Uh, I really hadn’t given it much thought,” she answers, without looking up. She’s smiling at Sammy, who would appear to be smiling back.

  “Well, he doesn’t.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  “Just making sure you know,” I reply.

  “I understand that you think Sammy Davis Junior loves you more,” she states.

  What’s this doublespeak crap? “No,” I say. “I don’t think Sammy loves me more. I know he does.”

  “Heh, right.”

  Oh, no, she isn’t going there. “Yes. I know I’m right.”

  Then she laughs this annoying laugh that I’ve only heard eight thousand times before. It’s that derisive laugh she’d give if we were watching some dumb show on TV, one of her nineteen bazillion dramas, and some guy made a romantic gesture toward the female lead on a day when I was in the doghouse. She’d give that laugh without looking away from the TV, but I’d know what she was thinking: Wow. Must be nice to have a guy do something that sweet. I’m sure that guy on the TV would do those things for me if I wasn’t married to this asshole. Oh, and if it wasn’t scripted by sappy dickwads who I swear write that shit just to make the rest of us shmucks look bad.

  She gives that laugh. It makes my blood boil.

  “Clearly you think I’m mistaken,” I say.
r />   “I’m just trying to play with Sammy. What’s it to you?”

  “That’s my dog.”

  “No, he’s not,” she says. “He’s a family dog, and technically he was Scotty’s when we got him. ‘We’ as in: I was there, too, the day we brought him home.”

  “Home to my family’s house.”

  “Whatever,” she says. “Sammy and I know the truth. Don’t we, baby?” And then she kisses Sammy on his snout. And if I didn’t know better, I’d swear he nodded yes.

  “The truth?” I say, raising my pitch a whole octave. “Why don’t we put your truth to a test?”

  “Um … okay?” She stares at me.

  “Great. We’ll have a duel.”

  She snorts. “A duel? When, Brett? At sundown? Give me a break.”

  “I’m serious,” I tell her.

  “Fine,” she scoffs. “What’s the duel?”

  “We’ll stand on opposite sides of the lawn and call Sammy. We’ll see who he loves more.”

  “You can’t be serious. This is the most juvenile thing I’ve heard you say in, well, minutes.”

  “Scared?”

  “Yeah—not so much,” she says.

  “Great. Then you stay away from Sammy for the next hour or so, and when it’s time we can have my dad bring Sammy to the lawn—the lawn that I grew up on and you didn’t—place my dog in between us, and we’ll just see.”

  “It’s amazing our marriage didn’t work out. You’re the height of maturity,” she mutters.

  “You’re the height of something else.”

  trish

  There are no words to describe the level of jackassery I am witnessing on the front lawn at Casa Foster. On one side we have Brett, who I love dearly but am also obligated to love by blood relation. And then we have Layla, whom I love and admire enough to have chosen as my lifelong business partner. Yet when I see the two of them, on opposite sides of the lawn, calling out to poor Sammy Davis Junior as he haplessly runs back and forth to the point of exhaustion, I want to kick them both in the vagina.

  “Here, Sammy! C’mon, boy,” Layla shouts. Sammy runs to her. “Good boy! Attaboy. Atta baby. C’mon, baby boy …”