Household Gods

Cyndi was at her desk, trying hard to look busy. She raised a questioning eyebrow as Nicole came in. Nicole gave her a thumbs-up. Cyndi silently clapped her hands. Nicole grinned and sailed past her, and tackled that analysis. She’d hit her stride there. No matter what Sheldon Rosenthal had done to her, she was going to give him the best piece of work she could. She had her pride, after all. And if she wanted to show him up just a bit, well, who could blame her?

Thursday was D-Day: the deadline for Frank to pay up. Nicole twitched all morning and all through lunch. By mid-afternoon she’d made the sanity-saving decision to call Herschel Falk first thing in the morning and find out what, if anything, was happening.

But late that afternoon, a little before she had to pack up her work for the day and head out to fetch the kids, a FedEx deliverywoman set a cardboard envelope on Cyndi’s desk. Nicole resisted the urge to leap out and grab it. Properly, as an attorney should, she waited for Cyndi to bring it in to her for signature and release. Only after both secretary and FedEx driver were gone did she rip open the envelope.

Inside she found a certified check, a receipt for her to sign and return, and a note. I’ve taken out the cost of the microwave along with the first month at Woodcrest, Frank had written. If you don’t like it, call the damn DA.

Nicole grinned like a tiger, and called Falk — but not to complain about that. It wasn’t too unreasonable, considering. “Good,” the attorney said when she thanked him. “I wish they were all that easy. Most people these days don’t have any respect for anything, let alone law or authority.”

“I thought my ex would,” Nicole said. She turned the check over in her fingers. It wasn’t enough to get her all the way out of the hole, but it would help quite a bit. “Now, if he just keeps up from here on in, I’ll be in fairly decent shape.”

“If he doesn’t,” Herschel Falk said, “you know where to call.”

“You bet I do,” Nicole said. It wasn’t going to be or stay easy, particularly if Frank got hardened to hearing from the District Attorney’s office if he got behind in his payments. But it wouldn’t be easy for him, either, if he got slack. With luck, he’d be smart enough to figure that out for himself. Without it, she’d remind him — as forcibly, and as often, as necessary.

Nicole finished the analysis Friday afternoon, saved it and printed it and checked it over before she took it upstairs to Rosenthal’s office. That would gain her points: turning it in early.

But as she read it through, prepared for the flush of achievement and the satisfaction of a job well done, her mood crashed into the barrier of the first paragraph. It was written in lawyerese. Eye-glazing, brain-numbing lawyerese. Half of it was deliberate obfuscation, which was part of the game. The rest could have read a lot better, too.

She hadn’t written her petition to Marcus Aurelius in lawyerese. Chiefly because she didn’t know the exact formulations of Roman law, but also because she wanted to be as clear as possible. She’d wanted him to understand exactly what had happened to her and why she was demanding restitution.

What was it Tony Gallagher had said, just after he hit on her? She wasn’t cooperative enough — by which he meant that she hadn’t been obliging enough to come across for him. But maybe he’d been trying to tell her something more, something important.

She reached for the phone and punched up Gary Ogarkov’s extension. “Gary,” she said when he picked up, “I’ve got an analysis here that I need to give to Mr. Rosenthal on Monday. Any way you could help punch it up so it reads better?”

“I’ll be right there,” he said with every appearance of willingness. “If I can’t do it all now, I’ll take it home and do it over the weekend.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Nicole said. She tapped a finger on her desk as she pondered what he’d said, and what he’d left unsaid. He was still feeling bad about the way things had gone. If he wanted to atone for it this way — why not? As long as he didn’t try to lay another guilt trip on her.

By the time she came out of her meditation, she was listening to a dial tone, and Gary Ogarkov was saying hello to Cyndi at her desk outside the office. He breezed in just after Nicole had dropped the receiver into the cradle, all ready and set to go. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

Nicole handed him the analysis. He skimmed it, then slowly nodded.

“It’s not bad at all — I didn’t think it would be. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll break up these sentences here, and here. There’s some passives I can turn into actives, and shorten up some of these fancy jawbreakers you’ve got here — see? Not too hard, is it?”

Nicole shook her head ruefully. “Not hard at all, if you paid any attention in English class.” Or if I’d stopped to notice what I was doing with my Latin, either.

“English class is a good thing to pay attention to,” Gary said.

Nicole didn’t argue with that, but neither was she going to let him take control. “I don’t want the meaning changed,” she said. “Just the way it’s written.”

“Of course,” he said cheerfully. “But you win a cigar if you can tell me how utilize is different from use.”

“It’s longer,” she said. “And cigars are gross.”

“Unlike some other things,” Gary said, “when it comes to readable prose, longer is not necessarily better.” He grinned at Nicole’s foreboding expression, and pulled a pen out of his pocket. “How about I get started? I edit better on paper. I’ll pass you each sheet as I get done with it, and you can key the changes into the computer. If you don’t like em, just leave ‘em off.”

Nicole nodded and, after a slight pause, thanked him. He didn’t notice. He was running down through the first page — scribble here, slash there, swirl and jot and flip, on to the next page. When the complete page flew her way, it looked like one of her freshman English professor’s slash-and-burn specials. But she had to admit, as she typed it in, that it read a whole lot better and more clearly than the original version.

They finished a few minutes after five. As Nicole was making the last revisions and deletions, Ogarkov said, “This is a hell of a piece of work, by the way. I should have said that sooner. If it doesn’t knock Mr. Rosenthal’s socks off — “

“Then it doesn’t, that’s all,” Nicole said calmly. “But I didn’t do it for him. I did it for me. You know what I mean? And you helped make it better. I appreciate it.”

“Hey, no problem,” he said. “Any time.” He saluted her as she typed in the last couple of sentences, scanned them, then set them to print. “Good luck,” he said, “and have a great weekend.”

“You, too, “ Nicole said sincerely.

Then he was gone. Cyndi had left just as the printer started. The rest of the office was emptying with Friday quickness. Nicole tapped her foot, starting to lose patience with the printer’s deliberate speed. At last, however, it was done, slapped into a folder, and ready to take upstairs.

As she’d expected, Sheldon Rosenthal’s secretary was still there, clacking away at that antique of a correcting Selectric. Nicole could just barely remember when it had been state of the art. She could also remember when state of the art had been a reed pen and a sheet of papyrus.

“Good evening, Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” Lucinda said in her cool, genteel voice. “What can I do for you?”

“I finished the analysis Mr. Rosenthal asked for,” Nicole said, setting the folder on the secretary’s desk.

Lucinda’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. “He’s with a client right now,” she said. “I will see that he gets it.” That part of her duty done, she went back to her typing. Salaried attorneys got efficiency, no more. Cordiality, she reserved for partners and clients.

Nicole wasn’t about to let it irk her. Umma’s sisters in Carnuntum had been a lot sniffier. She’d got her point across, and she’d got the work done. She had a whole, free weekend ahead of her — and an empty one, once Frank and Dawn came to pick up the kids Saturday morning. She’d get them clean tonight, and see that they were packed and ready to go.

She sighed at a memory: Lucius going off to the baths with Titus Calidius Severus, the small dark boy and the sturdy dark man, both of whom she had, in her way, come to love. Whatever had happened to Lucius, he’d lived long enough to have at least one child of his own who’d lived to grow up and… and in seventy or eighty generations, here was Nicole, hurrying toward the elevator on the way to her car. She hoped he’d had a long life and a happy one, not too heavily touched with sickness or sorrow.

And what would a descendant seventy or eighty generations removed from her think about the life she was living? Considering what she’d thought of Carnuntum, ignorance was probably bliss.