Derek’s eyes met Ben’s. “Where will you be, Mr. Kincaid?”
Ben assumed this was a rhetorical question and did not attempt to answer it.
Derek ground his dead cigarette into the ashtray. “Now get to work.”
3
BEN REMEMBERED THINKING, AFTER four years of undergraduate school, two years of special studies, and three years of law school, that the days of desperate, last-minute cramming were finally over. He was wrong.
Thanks to his eleventh-hour assignment from Derek, Ben had about forty-five minutes to immerse himself in adoption law prior to counseling a client of indirect but genuine importance. He was confident that Family Law I and the Socratic method didn’t come close to providing enough real-life practical experience to enable him to advise other human beings. He polled Greg, Alvin, and Marianne, and learned that none of them knew anything about adoption, or if they did, they weren’t telling him. He grabbed a family law hornbook and a copy of the relevant Oklahoma statutes from the library and walked hurriedly toward his new office.
A middle-aged woman with a frosted bouffant hairdo was sitting in the cubicle between Ben’s office and Derek’s, separated from the hallway by heavy wooden dividers. She was smoking, and her ashtray indicated she went at it as fervently as did Derek. She did not look up as Ben approached.
“You must be Maggie,” Ben said amiably.
The woman’s gaze shifted from the paperback romance novel she was reading. “Yes.” Her voice had a detectable nasal twang. Ben wondered if she had come from back East with Derek.
He smiled. “I’m Ben Kincaid. I guess we’re going to be working together.”
“I work for Mr. Derek,” she said crisply. She returned her attention to her novel.
“Evidently you’re working for me, too. I’m the new associate on Mr. Derek’s team.”
Maggie looked up slowly. “I haven’t worked with a new associate in seven years.” She removed the clear plastic reading glasses hanging on a chain around her neck and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “New associates are always … writing things, and always wanting them typed by yesterday. And always changing them once they are typed.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” Ben said, shifting his weight from one leg to the other. “It wasn’t my idea. I’ll try not to be a bother.”
Maggie lifted the receiver to her ear and punched a button on the complex phone console on her desk. “We’ll see about this. This isn’t supposed to happen to me. We have an arrangement.”
Ben decided that his need to hit the books was more pressing than this rewarding conversation. “I’ll be in my office,” he said.
Maggie didn’t even nod.
Ben surveyed his new office. Well, there will be few distractions, he thought.
Raven, Tucker & Tubb provided him with a desk—a table, actually, and a matching chair, both made of a cheap pine Ben wouldn’t have used in his college dorm room. The walls were a barren, uninterrupted white. The table held a green banker’s lamp and a complicated telephone unit, smaller than but similar to the one at Maggie’s station. There was a short, empty bookshelf beside the table and two undeniably hideous orange corduroy visitors’ chairs. Apparently, furnishings were passed down from one associate to another—the good stuff going up the totem pole and the wretched stuff going down. Ben hoped his first client didn’t have a keenly developed sense of decor.
On the table, he saw a small box. He opened it and found hundreds of preprinted business cards with his name on them, just beneath the firm logo. Ready for business. He cracked open the hornbook and began to read.
A few minutes before eleven, he was startled by an electronic beeping noise. He pushed the illuminated button on his telephone console. It was Maggie.
“Visitors for you in the main foyer,” she said brusquely.
“Thank you, Maggie. Please show them in.”
There was a pause, then a slow, inhaling noise. “You understand this is only temporary, Mr. Kincaid.”
“Yes, I do, Maggie. But while it lasts, I plan to treasure every precious moment we spend together.”
“I’ll get your visitors,” she said, and rang off.
There was no reason for Ben to be surprised. Derek had not made any representations regarding his visitors’ appearances, although he had linked them with one of the most sophisticated and prosperous corporate entities in the state. Nonetheless, when Maggie ushered the visitors into his office, Ben was surprised and vaguely disappointed. The two adults, a man and a woman, were older than he had expected, perhaps in their early sixties. Both had pure white hair. The man wore blue jeans and a white shirt with a plastic pencil holder in the front pocket and noticeable yellow-gray stains under each arm. The woman wore a simple green print dress, a plain brown coat, and white costume beads.
“My name’s Jonathan Adams,” the man said, taking Ben’s hand, “and this is my wife, Bertha.”
The single sentence had been sufficient to tell Ben a great deal about Mr. Adams’s origins. He had the thick, slow drawl usually found in rural areas in the western part of the state.
Ben shook his hand, then Bertha’s, and introduced himself.
“Honestly!” Bertha said, eyeing him with suspicion. “Are you an attorney?”
Ben tried not to react. People usually thought he looked young for his age. “Yes, I am,” he said amiably. “Promise. I’ve got a diploma and everything. Just haven’t coughed up the money to have it framed yet.”
“Oh,” she said, looking meaningfully at her husband. “I see.”
Ben knew exactly what that expression meant. It meant: Jonathan, I thought we were getting a real lawyer.
She turned her attention slowly back to Ben, eyeing him carefully. Ben knew that expression, too. It meant: This case may not mean much to your firm, but it’s the whole wide world to us, and we’d like to have a real lawyer, not some baby-faced kid who hasn’t lost his training wheels yet. Or something like that.
“Princess, don’t be standoffish like that,” Bertha said.
Ben looked up, startled. For a moment, he thought the woman was talking to him. Then he saw a small dark-haired girl standing behind the adults. “Mr. Kincaid, this is our Emily.”
The girl was beautiful. Her features were simple and smooth; her pale skin was virtually translucent. Her long black hair served, to highlight her flawless white complexion. She was a marble sculpture of what a little girl ought to look like, Ben thought, a Botticelli angel. And there was something else about her, he realized, a light, or a glow, that seemed to radiate from her.
Ben suddenly felt embarrassed. He was romanticizing a little girl. And he was staring, too.
“Good morning,” he said, smiling.
Emily gazed at him with a puzzled expression. Her eyes didn’t quite seem to focus on his face. “Good morning, Mr. Kincaid. Have I met you before?”