When I get out to the waiting room two minutes later, my potential client is pacing the floor. A short, compact, balding man wearing a plaid sports coat and dark slacks, he looks up and says, “Mr. Page? I’m Gordon Dyson.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say as we shake hands. I escort him back to my office, thinking this guy looks familiar.
Maybe I’ve seen him running at the track. He declines my offer of a cup of coffee and perches on the edge of the chair across from my desk.
“What can I do for you?”
He sighs so heavily that I think he is going to confess he has been embezzling from a bank. Instead, he says in an anguished voice: “I can’t get rid of my son. He won’t leave.”
Dyson looks about my age, maybe a year or two older.
“What do you mean, he won’t leave?”
“He’s twenty-three,” Dyson says, rubbing his head, which is a little too big for his body.
“I paid for his college education, gave him a nice used car, but he came home after he graduated from Duke and now he won’t move out.”
Duke! That must have cost a bundle. At his height, I doubt if the son was on a basketball scholarship. I doodle on my legal pad.
“Is he working?”
“He’s a waiter,” Dyson says, his voice resigned.
“I’ve paid close to a hundred thousand dollars for his education, and he’s a waiter at Brandy’s.”
Brandy’s is a relatively new restaurant in Blackwell County. The night I went there with Clan they never quite got around to serving dinner. The waiters wear bow ties and white shirts. By the time the bill comes, you realize you’ve paid thirty bucks for hors d’oeuvres. It’s hard to justify leaving a big tip when all you’ve eaten is snack food.
“What does your wife say?”
Dyson looks down at the floor.
“She says she knows it’s time for him to leave, but every time I’m ready to go to the mat over this, he makes her cry and she backs down.”
“What’s wrong with kids today?” I say philosophically, wondering if Sarah will turn out this way. She seems independent now, but when she graduates I may have to scrape her off the wall to get her out of the house.
Dyson, still looking down, is, I notice, slightly humpbacked.
He looks as if it is from carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Almost inaudibly, he says, “We’ve spoiled him so bad that he can’t imagine life without a house, an automobile, TV, stereo, a computer, new clothes. The idea that my son might have to start his life without a new automobile paralyzes him. He couldn’t get out of bed for a week after we had that discussion.”
Suddenly, I know where I’ve seen that hump. Dyson’s a cop! Or used to be. I haven’t seen him around in a couple of years.
“Can’t you just pull a gun on him?” I say, only half-joking.
“Surround the house and starve him out?”
Dyson gives me a sour smile, as if he has tried that al ready.
“He doesn’t take me seriously since I quit the force and started my own security business. The more money I make, the worse he gets. I should have waited until he got out of college.”
“What’s his name?” I ask, reaching for a law book on the shelf behind me.
Dyson gives an embarrassed laugh, then says, “His Christian name is Gordon Jr.; his friends call him “Gucci.”
” I can’t repress a chuckle as I flip through a volume of the index to the Arkansas statutes.
“Does he pay any rent?”
“He was supposed to pay a hundred a month,” Dyson says, “but that didn’t last. He owes fifteen hundred if I wanted to count it.”
I locate the Unlawful Detainer Statutes.
“Does your wife ever go on any trips by herself?”
“Sometimes,” he says.
“The business won’t let me get away.”
I run my finger down the page until I find the language I’m looking for.
“Why don’t you surprise her with a trip to New Zealand next month? It should be spring down there. She’ll love it. While she’s gone, we’ll evict him.
We only have to give him three days’ notice. We’ll have him out before he knows what’s hit him.”
Dyson smiles for the first time.
“Won’t I need my wife’s approval?” he asks.
“Her name’s on the deed.”
I put a paper clip on the page so I won’t have to look it up again.
“I’ll send you a power of attorney for her to sign before she goes,” I tell him.
“She won’t suspect a thing if you play your cards right.”
Dyson brings a finger to his lips and begins to chew on a nail.
“What’s your fee?”
If he can afford to send his wife to New Zealand, he can afford to pay me.
“A thousand if he contests it, and I have to make two court appearances. Five hundred if he doesn’t show up and moves out without any hassle.”
He nods. Money is no object, his expression says. I get a few more details and walk him to the elevators. He will call me the moment his wife steps on the plane. As we shake hands, I ask, “Why don’t you just hire your son?”
Dyson’s face darkens.
“I wouldn’t pay that kid to take out the trash.”
“I see.” Confident he will call me, I wait politely until he gets on the elevator and the door closes in my face.
There is nothing like faith in the younger generation.
At the appointed hour I arrive at my sister’s house bearing a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and am greeted by Herbert, a short, thin, virtually hairless guy in his fifties. An electrician by training, Herbert now owns his own contracting business and builds homes all over Blackwell County.
“Movin’ a lot of paper these days?” Herbert asks, inspecting the wine as he pumps my hand. He is dressed in cowboy boots, denim jeans the color of sawdust, and a sweatshirt with a picture of Ross Perot on the front of it.
“I wish I had invented the fax machine,” I say, taking his question to heart. From my one other visit with him (city hall on their wedding day six months ago), I know he views lawyers as an unnecessary evil. Fixed overhead, he calls us.
“If your profession would agree to be deported,” he says, leading me through the living room into the kitchen, “business activity would jump overnight by fifty percent in the United States, and we’d have the Japanese and Germans on their knees begging for mercy in five years.”
I look around my sister’s living room, which is as big as an airport terminal. Marty’s passion for plants has been indulged to the limit. I feel as if I’m in a green house. The water bill alone must be the size of my mort gage. In the kitchen Marty greets me with a rare hug.
“What do you hear from Sarah?” she asks, pecking me on the cheek.
“I was just up there,” I say gloomily, handing her the wine.
“She isn’t lacking for male attention.”
“If I looked like her,” Marty says, glancing at her husband, who has come in behind me, “I probably would have gotten married five more times before I met the right guy.”
Herbert beams as if Michelle Pfeiffer had told him she wanted to run away with him. True love. It took her only fifty years to find it.
“Sweetness, why don’t you go put the meat on the grill while I visit with my brother for a few minutes? He looks too serious for this to be purely a social call.”
With a beatific smile on his face, Herbert takes the plate of meat and disappears out the kitchen door to the backyard.
“Herbert must worship you,” I say, amazed that a grown man would allow himself to be called “sweetness” in front of another living human being.
“He does,” Marty says happily.
“God knows why.
When I met him I was a hundred pounds overweight, drank too much, and felt sorry for myself twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. Now look at me!”
I do. Relaxed and calm, Marty hasn’t looked this good since she was a senior in high school. I hope Amy will do for me what Sweetness has done for her. With her short dyed-blond hair cut in a pageboy, Marty, who is two years older than I am, looks almost pretty. Her blue eyes, not as deep-set as my own, along with a small nose and generous mouth are her best features. She is flat-chested, like our mother, and is wearing a man’s blue workshirt (Herbert’s, I presume) and a pair of Bermuda shorts that reveal a decent pair of legs.