Rituals of the Season

“God, Deb’rah!” He swayed in the burst of cold air and his words were slurred. “I jus’ heard. Tracy Johnson. Shot dead. And her li’l baby, too.”

“Love and joy come to you . . .” sang the radio.

CHAPTER 3

Be careful in conversation to avoid topics which may be supposed to have any direct reference to events or circumstances which may be painful for your companion to hear discussed.

Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, 1873

Reid took two steps toward the couch, then the smell of beef and onions hit his nose and he made an abrupt detour for the bathroom.

He was still pounding the porcelain when Dwight returned.

Dwight’s lips were cold, but his kisses weren’t.

When I could breathe again, I said, “You okay?”

“Now I am.” He buried his face in my hair. “You smell good enough to eat.”

“You’re just hungry,” I said, turning toward the kitchen.

“Yeah,” he said and pulled me back to him.

His chilled hands were busy warming themselves under my sweater when the sound of flushing stopped him. His eyebrows arched a question.

“Reid,” I said. “Too much bourbon.”

My cousin and former law partner swayed unsteadily in the doorway of the bathroom. His handsome face was a pasty green and his hair was still disheveled, but he’d tucked his white shirt back in and his speech was marginally clearer.

“Sorry,” he said. “Client’s Christmas party an’ then somebody came in that’d heard— God! Tracy Johnson?” He caught himself on the doorjamb and looked at us in glassy-eyed confusion. “Don’ know why I came here. I’ll get out of y’all’s way.”

He patted his pockets for his car keys and started for the door, but Dwight put out a hand. “Not like this, ol’ buddy. You can’t drive off from here ready to blow a twelve.”

I poured him a glass of tomato juice. “Drink this. You need food.”

He protested and almost gagged again, yet he let me lead him to the table, and once he’d swallowed some juice, his color improved.

Reid’s a few years younger, but between my late start in law school and a year in the DA’s office back before Doug Woodall was elected, we both joined the law firm about the same time. He became the current Stephenson of Lee and Stephenson, Attorneys at Law, when his father, Brix Junior, retired to play golf in Southern Pines. The current Lee is John Claude Lee, my mother’s second cousin; Brix Junior was her first cousin on the Stephenson side. People new to the region (and still unfamiliar with our continuing penchant for genealogical linkage) tend to glaze over when I try to spell out how I’m related to both of my ex-partners even though they’re no blood kin to each other, but old-timers nod sagely and work it out immediately that Reid’s my second cousin.

“Good dumplings,” said Dwight, helping himself to another one.

“Dotty made a beef stew you wouldn’t believe,” Reid said wistfully.

“Dotty never made a beef stew in her whole life. It’s boeuf bourguignonne,” I reminded him, exaggerating the French pronunciation. I like Reid’s ex-wife, but even her cookouts are haute cuisine. Everything has to be marinated in wine and fines herbes.

“Cassoulet,” Reid mourned. “Coq au vin.” He picked at a carrot but not much was getting to his mouth and he still seemed queasy. “Wish I never had to see another pizza or take-out box. Hate fast food.”

“So quit complaining and get Aunt Zell to give you some cooking lessons.” Over the last few years, I’ve learned that a touch of commonsense bitchiness can stave off the maudlin self-pity that overtakes Reid whenever he drinks too much and starts remembering what his philandering’s cost him. Dotty was the love of his life and he’s crazy about their son Tip, but she finally had enough. He came home early one morning to find all his personal belongings boxed up on the front porch. When she remarried last year, he disappeared down a Jameson bottle for a solid week.

As Reid stared moodily at his plate, I glanced over at Dwight, who had kept up his end of amiable table talk despite what he must have seen in the last few hours.

For their own mental stability, EMTs, trauma nurses and doctors, police officers, social workers, and yes, judges, too, learn how to compartmentalize. I haven’t experienced half the things Dwight has, but in my four years on the bench, I’ve seen men and women with eyes swollen shut in faces pounded into raw meat. I’ve seen infants whose tender little bodies have been used as ashtrays. I’ve seen children whose backs and buttocks are so scarred they look as if they’ve been flogged with barbed wire.

You do what you can to alleviate the suffering and to punish those responsible, and all the time you know you’re just shoveling sand against the tide. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” says the pessimist of Ecclesiastes. “What profit hath a man of all his labor? . . . That which is crooked cannot be made straight.”

And yet, what’s the alternative? To sit above the fray and do nothing but wring our hands? Or to wade in and keep shoveling?

At the end of the day, though, we have to lay our shovels down and come back to friends and families who not only don’t understand, but don’t want to understand. So we try very hard to distance ourselves from the emotional assaults of our work and we tell ourselves that we’ve left it at the courthouse or hospital. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, that’s almost true.

Nevertheless, it helps to have someone you can share it with. Long before he became my lover, Dwight was my friend, my sounding board, my safety valve for venting; and whatever other changes marriage may bring, I’m hoping