“Why are you putting me on speaker phone?” she im-
mediately asked. “Who else is with you?”
“No one,” I assured her. “But I’m giving myself a
pedicure and I need both hands. What’s up?”
“Nothing much. I’m just sitting here nursing the
deduction while Avery works on our income tax. You
know how anal he is about getting it done early.”
The deduction, little Carolyn Deborah, is about
eighteen hours younger than my marriage. Back in
December, my brothers were making book on whether
or not Portland would deliver during the ceremony.
“How’d it go this week?” I asked.
After the baby’s birth, she’d taken off for two months
and this was her first week of easing back into the prac-
tice she and Avery shared. He did civil cases and a little
tax work; she did whatever else came along, although
she was particularly good in juried criminal cases.
“It’s okay. I hate leaving the baby, but she doesn’t
seem to mind one bottle feeding a day as long as I’m
here for the others. And let’s face it, after working fifty-
and sixty-hour weeks, thirty hours is a piece of cake.”
She told me about the new nanny (“a jewel”), how
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her diet was coming if she expected to get into a decent
bathing suit by the summer (“I’m an absolute cow and if
anybody gives me one more ‘got milk?’ joke, I’m gonna
stomp him”), and whether or not Reid Stephenson, my
cousin and former law partner, was having an affair with
that new courthouse clerk (“I saw them going into one
of the conference rooms at lunch yesterday”).
I told her about my newfound hockey enthusiasm
(“Did you know Bret Hedican’s married to Kristi
Yamaguchi?”), how Cal was settling in (“He still acts
like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs,
but I think we really connected last night”), and what
my docket had looked like yesterday (“Doesn’t anybody
just talk anymore? Why does it always have to be knives
or fists or baseball bats?”).
“That reminds me,” said Portland. “I have a new cli-
ent. Karen Braswell. Was her ex one of your cases yes-
terday? A James Braswell? Assault?”
“Assault?”
“A Mexican took a broken beer bottle to his arm out
at that Latino club. El Toro Negro.”
“Oh, yes.” The details were coming back to me. “Your
client’s his ex-wife? That’s right. He violated a restrain-
ing order she took out against him? He’s supposed to
come up before Luther Parker the first of the week, but
I’ve got him cooling his heels in jail till then.”
