“I called the office. They said you left before lunch.”
“I went out for lunch with the boys, then we met in the conference room on the eleventh floor.” Her father poured and poured and poured. “You want me to sketch you a diagram of my afternoon?”
As soon as her father moves away, the child can hear the tread of her mother’s high heels thunking softly across the Chinese carpet. As she refills her glass, smoke from her cigarette drifts down and under the damask. “I can’t believe this is the best excuse you could work up. Or maybe you just don’t care enough to try anymore.”
“This is some welcome. Here I am, working on the biggest deal of my entire career, and you’re hounding me over where the conference took place.”
“Harry, I spoke with Deveraugh.”
“You called the chairman’s office? You got some nerve.”
“No, Harry. He called here. Wondering if you’d taken sick.” A long drag on her cigarette. “Want to rethink your little tale?”
When her father speaks again, his voice holds a hard edge from the whiskey still in his throat. “So I took a little time off. So what.”
“How much did you lose this time? A thousand? Five thousand?” Her mother grinds out her cigarette so hard the crystal ashtray beats musically upon the sideboard’s top. “Ten?”
“It’s my money.”
“No, Harry. It’s our debt. Here I am, juggling bills like crazy, hoping we can make it through another month. And what do you do but go out and blow us deeper into the hole.”
“Like you don’t know how to spend.” He sets down his glass, or tries to, but misses the table’s edge. The glass thumps on the carpet and rolls toward the child, spilling ice and the last caramel drops. “One afternoon at Saks and you can outspend the Pentagon.”
A slender hand with fingernails dyed a deep blood red reaches for his glass. “You’re such a loser, Harry. Such a-”
The child flinches even before the blow, as though she knows it is going to come, only not precisely when.
The strike holds a musical quality. Bells chime and jingle, for her father has struck with the phone. Then more bells, for her mother careens against the sofa-table and drags off the damask and the crystal in her fall.
She catches herself on her hands and knees, turns, and gives her child a single look. This look frightens the child more than anything else that night. For her mother is smiling, sharing with her daughter a furious satisfaction.
Her mother rises and announces in a vicious hiss, “You will never touch me again.”
She leaves the room without another word.
Her father walks over, plucks his decanter off the floor, then stands in the puddle of spilled scotch as he fills his glass. Only when he ambles back to the room’s opposite side does the child crawl across the carpet and out the door.
The next morning, her mother comes into her bedroom. The flat void is still in her eyes and her voice. Powder is caked over her features, and her hair is coiffed so that it falls across one side of her face and down her shoulder. But when she leans over, the child can see that the ear is very swollen. The skin around her eye and cheekbone is also puffy. Her mother grips the child by both arms. “If anyone ever asks you, we have a perfect family. Your parents are the best mother and father anybody could ever have.”
“But-”
She shakes the child violently. “Say it!”
“A perfect family.”
“And who has the best parents in the world?”
“I do.”
“Don’t you ever forget it.” Her mother rises and leaves the room.
Later that day, the child throws the prince and princess doll into the trash. The maid, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador with three small children, hastily retrieves them. That night she and her husband spend hours talking about the strange habits of rich people, and how they teach the lesson of waste even to their young.
The phone rang and Marcus Glenwood glanced out his window as he slid upright in bed. The stars were still a faint wash against the western border. He had been awaiting this call for over a month. Ever since Marcus had made the horrible error of asking Kirsten to marry him.
That particular night had been a gift of fabled perfection. Not even Kirsten’s customary reserve had been able to resist the enchantment. After an intimate dinner they had walked Raleigh streets perfumed by a coming summer storm. When he had reached for her hand, she had responded by wrapping an arm around his waist, drawing close, and laying her head upon his shoulder. Not even that had been enough, however, and a second arm had reached across to form a ring of union around his middle. Then she had sighed his name, sung it almost, so comfortable with him and the night she had turned his name into a melody of promise. So he had asked her. Boom. Surprising himself almost as much as her.
Kirsten had said nothing for a time, but even before the arms had retreated he could sense her withdrawal. The past four weeks had not improved matters. The further they moved to time’s relentless tread, the quieter she became, the more repressed. Which was why he had been dreading this call.
So before Marcus answered, he took a moment to settle his feet upon the floor. He felt the coolness of time-honed wood and fixed himself firmly in the here and now. He stared out the back window at trees not yet detached from the night and hoped for wisdom. Then he picked up the phone.
“Marcus, good, I was afraid it would be your answering machine and I didn’t have idea one what I was going to say. Are you awake?”
It was a woman’s voice, and familiar. But his relief that the caller wasn’t Kirsten left him unable to identify anything further. “Totally.”
“You know who this is?”
He did then. “Judge Sears.”
“At four-thirty in the morning it’s Rachel, all right? We need to talk.”
Rachel Sears was a fragile-looking brunette with piercing emeralds for eyes. She was also a district court judge and a friend. In the past two elections, a number of women had shoved aside the dinosaurs who had come to assume the bench was theirs by right. These new judges were introducing a novel brand of compassion and judicial sharpness.
Marcus took a hard breath. “I’m here.”
“Yesterday a young woman caught me outside the court. She was crying and lost, and had two babies doing the frantic routine at her legs. You got the picture?”
“Yes.” It was a common enough scenario. Single mother, poor reading skills, drawn to court by some legal document that terrified her. The bored Highway Patrol officer who pulled detail at the information booth downstairs, a duty they all loathed, likely as not had sent her to the wrong floor. In the central foyer by the elevators she would confront a series of yard-long computer printouts listing the day’s cases by courtroom, randomly assigned and not in alphabetical order. Between four or five hundred names in all.
“She’s being evicted. I glanced over the document. Pretty standard stuff, failure to pay for ninety days, three warnings. Now she’s been locked out. Her belongings have been confiscated to pay back rent. But something about this one bothered me all night. Then an hour ago it hit me. Just by chance, I mean, this is in the million-to-one category, I had another eviction cross my desk three weeks ago. I’ve got the case file in front of me now. Similar deal, young single mom, preschool kids. The same southeast Raleigh address, thirty-four units in the complex. With me so far?”