Chapter 23

ara had dated her husband, briefly, when she first moved to Charlotte after college. Six months later he left Charlotte to teach at a prep school in Virginia and she went on to law school. They did not see or speak to each other for nearly three years, until he returned to Charlotte to teach at the college and they ran into each other unexpectedly at a downtown movie theater. They were both with other dates, and the shock of seeing each other with someone else had been too much for both of them. He called her the next day and they agreed to start over. Fresh. No baggage or history. She was simply Sara and he was simply Tom, and that was all they agreed to know about each other.

It worked better than they might have expected. He had mellowed over the three years, he was less prone to bouts of moody anger, and she had come into her own. Law school had been good for her; it had given her confidence and taught her self-reliance. And somewhere along the way she had realized that she was attractive, although how she could have gotten through high school and college without knowing that was still a mystery to her. It probably had something to do with the fact that she’d spent the first twenty-two years of her life being overshadowed by the stunning Melanie Barclay Mel was married now to some guy named Richard, and was living the life of a bohemian writer in New York. Although she and Sara still spoke on the phone occasionally (this was shortly before the falling-out that would further strain their friendship over the next twenty years), their lives had begun to move in two very different directions.

“Why do you want to stay in the South?” Mel had asked her the last time they spoke.

“Because I’m a Southerner.”

“There are other parts of the country, you know.”

“Nowhere else I’d want to live.”

Sara was living in a condo in Southpark then, but six months after running into Tom at the movie theater, she had moved into his house in the Myers Park area of Charlotte. The house was small; it had two bedrooms and one bath, but it had a large fenced yard for Tom’s Akita, Max, and a big oak that spread its branches protectively over the house in the winter and provided cool shade in the summer. They had very little furniture—they both still had large school loans to pay off—but they painted the rooms in deep, rich colors and furnished it with garage sale bargains. Five days a week Sara rose and drove to work and Tom, if the weather was good, rode his bicycle along tree-lined streets to the college. Every afternoon she returned home with a feeling of anticipation fluttering in the pit of her stomach, knowing that he was waiting there for her. She had never been so happy.

She had decided not to go to work for a large firm after graduation, opting instead for a two-man operation in a grubby building not too far from the courthouse. Schultz and McNair. Mike Schultz was a large, friendly man with a beer belly and a big red face. He was married to Laura, who played tennis three days a week and spent the other four shopping. His partner, Dennis McNair, was a loud, moody Irishman prone to episodes of heavy drinking. He was from upstate New York, and still talked with the hard, clipped syllables of his youth, even though he’d come south for college and law school and had lived in North Carolina for nearly thirty years. His wife, the long-suffering Moira, was a quiet little mouse of a woman, the exact opposite of her bullheaded, slope-shouldered husband. Mike and Dennis practiced family law, which was a nice way of saying that they were divorce attorneys, and under the mounting pressure of Reagan’s supply-side economics and the layoffs that followed, business was good. Schultz and McNair needed an associate to help with the overload, and Sara got the job not only because of her law school ranking but also because, as Dennis (speaking of their female clients) so sensitively put it, “the skirts will like having another skirt to spill their guts to.”

As it turned out, the skirts did not like spilling their guts to another skirt. It wasn’t that Sara wasn’t sympathetic; she was. And the clients liked her well enough when they weren’t being forced to give her the sordid details of their damaged lives. It’s just that no woman who’s been replaced by a smart, beautiful, self-assured younger woman wants to open up to a smart, beautiful, self-assured younger woman. It was too painful. Sara reminded the clients too much of the trophy wives their husbands had replaced them with. These were women who’d married soon after graduating from college and never worked outside the home a day in their lives. They’d raised children, kept themselves and their houses in tip-top shape, made dinner every night of the week except Saturday, supported their husbands in their wobbly climb up the treacherous corporate ladder, and yet still managed to be served with divorce papers soon after their last child left for college. Where was the justice in that?

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 Hudson’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.