icon we have worshiped. I reveal to her for the first time that her mother was fired from two jobs at hospitals because of her temper.
“She couldn’t keep her mouth shut when she thought a doctor was screwing up. Once, right in front of the patient, she exploded and told a surgeon he was pre scribing too much medication. They fired her on the spot, and she never admitted she might have at least waited until she got out in the hall to ream him out. I had decided to start law school by then, so it wasn’t a cool move from the standpoint of money.”
Her eyes on the road, Sarah listens intently. Rosa, for all her reality therapy when she was dying, usually protected Sarah as much as I did. So that she wouldn’t worry, Rosa made me promise that we not tell her the time she was fired.
Now I think Rosa was embarrassed. Naturally, since qualified and competent nurses are typically rare, she had a new job two weeks later, so it was no real strain. Sarah grins.
“She sounds like she had a lot of guts.”
“But no tact,” I say, determined to be objective.
“Her strengths were her weaknesses and vice versa.”
Sarah ignores my observation which, in fact, sounds as soon as it is out of my mouth like a slogan from Orwell’s 1984: “War is peace, slavery is freedom.. She says, “I hope I’m as assertive as Mom was.”
Hell, I hope she is, too. My reaction at the time was one of delight that Rosa had stuck it to the arrogant son of a bitch.
“There’s a right and wrong time for it,” I pontificate.
Sarah glides onto the access road off 140 to Rison Drive, which will eventually get us home.
“Did she lose her temper at you much? I don’t remember you having any real big fights.”
I can’t either. Despite my best efforts I’m having trouble painting over my dead wife’s memory and giving her the warts she surely had. I look out the window and notice an attractive woman behind the wheel of a beat-up old yellow Volkswagen Beetle in the lane beside us. Damn, poor or rich, women are everywhere. For my daughter’s sake, I try not to stare.
“You remember how she was,” I say, reluctantly turning my head toward her.
“If something was wrong, she got it off her chest immediately; nothing built up that way.” Her directness took getting used to, but I found I preferred it.
Like me, Sarah broods too much.
“I saw you looking,” she says, the barest hint of a smile playing at her lips.
When we are finally home, I pull out Sarah’s suitcase from the backseat. It weighs a ton. If she has done her laundry even once, I’ll be surprised. Within seconds Sarah is on the phone with her friends, and I am left at the kitchen table to ponder how to tell Sarah I was fired. In five minutes she is back in the kitchen to tell me she needs the keys to visit her best friend, Donna Redding. I start to protest she hasn’t been home a minute, but I know she is dying to go see her friends.
“I’ve got a new job,” I say casually.
“I’m in solo practice, and I’ve already got a big murder case.”
Sarah is not fooled by my tone.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she demands, standing in the kitchen with her hands on her hips. Woogie, delighted she is home if ever so briefly, wags his tail beside her, hitting her bare legs.
“It’s no big deal,” I say, knowing now I’ve deliberately tried to avoid this subject. I resort to sarcasm to defend my self.
“If you’d bothered to watch the news the last few days, you’d seen me on TV. I’ve even been interviewed by Kim Keogh,” I brag.
Sarah sits down opposite me.
“Did you get fired?” she asks, her voice reminding me of her mother’s when she was worried.
“It was more of a layoff of lawyers,” I say and tell her about Martha.
“Poor woman. She had just gotten married the week before.”
Sarah’s face is flushed.
“This is exactly what I’m talking about,” she says, leaning forward on her elbows.
“A disaster occurs, and you try to protect me! You should have called me.”
What could you have done? I think. Sarah has begun to twist her hair, a characteristic sign of frustration.
“You’re overestimating the significance of this,” I lie.
“I’ve already got a half-dozen clients.” I do not add that none except for Andy and Mona Moneyhart are worth discussing in terms of the money their cases are generating. What good will it do to tell her that I am scared to death of not being able to pay our bills, much less sending her to college? If she wants to worry about God and the meaning of existence, that’s okay with me, but she’s not my wife, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to treat her like one. I reach in my wallet and bravely take out a ten.
“You’re going to need some money this week end.”
She flinches as if I had pulled out a condom.
“I’ve still got some money from my job,” she says uncertainly. “That’s supposed to be for clothes this fall,” I said, thrusting the money into her palm. I had given her some spending money before she went to Governor’s School. What has she done with the thirty I gave her? Spent it on Lobotomy Beer, I suppose.
“Are you sure?” she asks, nervous now. She takes the money and puts it into a wallet crammed with pictures of her friends.
“I should have gone out on my own two years ago,” I lie, thinking of the marginal status of some of the attorneys on the sixteenth floor of the Layman Building.
“I’ve been on TV this week because of this new case I picked up.”
“When and how did you get it?” Sarah asks innocently.
As much as Sarah worries, I’d rather not have to parse the niceties of contract law. “He remembered the Hart Anderson murder,” I say, answering only half the question.
“You’re looking at the new Chet Bracken,” I say, throwing out the name of the most famous trial lawyer in Blackwell County.
“You didn’t like him much,” my daughter reminds me, “in the Hart Anderson case.” She stuffs her wallet into her purse, which looks weighted down with slugs. What does she carry that weighs so much? I have learned not to ask. It’s none of my business.
“I respected him though,” I say weakly, remembering how he intimidated me until I finally stood up to him. Maybe I just think I did. Lawyers have the psychology of dogs: in our dealings with each other we are much more conversant with the emotion of fear than affection, though in public we sniff each other and trot around together as if we are the best of pals.
“You couldn’t stand him,” my daughter says, now slinging her purse over her shoulder.
“You said he was a bully.”
I said a lot worse out of her presence. Chet Bracken works at being an asshole twenty-four hours a day, but if I got charged with a crime, he’d be my first phone call. It disturbs Sarah that difficult people can be so competent. When Sarah stops expecting virtue to be rewarded, I’ll know she’s grown up.
“Wooly, bully,” I stand and sing, shuffling my feet and swinging my hips and arms in an effort to pretend I’m dancing as I remember a song that was popular when I was about her age, or so my memory conveniently lies.
“Watch it now, watch it now….” These inane words are all I think I can recall of the song, but it is enough to make her smile and forget a period of my life when I wasn’t particularly sterling silver myself.
“Do you act silly when you’re here by yourself?” Sarah asks, a familiar, indulgent smile settling in on her face.
This is the old man she is comfortable with an affection ate buffoon who is tolerable as long as he controls himself in public.
“Not as much,” I say, and pivot on my toes, one of the Temptations.
“Woogie isn’t much of an audience.”
When I’m finally still, she gives me a quick hug and then she’s out the door in her Lobotomy Beer T-shirt, leaving me to sit at the kitchen table and wish I had some of Chet Bracken’s ability to convince a jury that his client
