“So they’ll be buddy sour.”
Was that what being a couple meant to James’s newly married brother? “Not in a herd, and not once they get the routine down. Do you want your daughter to have a horse or not?”
“I do.”
“Then I’ll take them to my place for a while first,” James said. “I’ll get ’em cleaned up, have Mac get after their feet, bring their shots up-to-date, and have the horsey dentist look at their teeth. These are good horses. They just need some time and TLC.”
Same as most people did after a rough patch.
“You said you never wanted pets,” Trent retorted, confirming that litigating attorneys had good memories for what was better forgotten. “You haven’t had an animal of your own since you were kid.”
The horse and pony wouldn’t be James’s either.
“Who needs a pet, when both of my brothers escaped from the primate house? If you don’t like these horses, then you can leave them with me. I’m offering to guarantee the sale, because I feel that confident you won’t regret buying these two.”
Trent turned a baleful eye on the cows, which had that half-indolent, half-wild quality typical of the livestock on small, tired farms.
“How much cash you have on you?” he asked.
“Enough.”
James convinced the woman the horse and pony would be happier together, and she was threatening James with coffee cake and pictures of the grandkids by the time he and Trent climbed back into the truck.
“What is it with you and women, James? They love you on sight.”
“Gertrude’s lonely and tired. Most of them are just lonely and tired.” James hadn’t meant to put it quite like that, but Trent—older brother at large—seized the opening.
“Which brings us back to Vera Waltham. You haven’t asked me the first thing about her.”
“Because you’re her lawyer, and unless Vera’s case comes up in one of our partner meetings, I don’t want to know about her legal problems.” Also because James was mentally rehearsing a negotiation with Mr. Inskip about use of a pasture and shed for a couple of months.
Or maybe longer.
“But I’m your brother,” Trent said, slowing down to ease the truck over the rutted lane. “I won’t discuss Vera’s case, but I might answer some general questions.”
James’s questions regarding Vera were not general. “Why would I ask about your client?”
“Why would you buy a battery for a Ford Falcon a few weeks back, if not for Vera?”
“The girls told you?” James sure hadn’t let that slip—or had he?
“You told me,” Trent retorted. “Though little people have perfect recall for all the things you shouldn’t say in front of them. Ask any parent. They forget their chores, their homework, their socks, and their own names, but don’t drop the f-bomb around a kid, or you’ll soon be famous for it.”
“Must be awful, having your every inconvenient word played back for you. I wouldn’t drop the f-bomb around the girls.” Though did Trent have to sound so happy to have his own junior censorship board underfoot?
“You wouldn’t ask me about Vera, either,” Trent said.
“I don’t have to. I googled her, Alexander Waltham, and Donal MacKay.”
“And?”
And James did want to discuss Vera’s circumstances, now that Trent had brought her up.
“She was the third woman Waltham married,” James said. “The odd thing is, all of his wives were the same age when he married them.”
Trent hit a button on the dashboard when they reached the road, and soft strains of Rachmaninoff filled the truck.
“Why is the age of a man’s wives significant?” Trent asked.
“Vera was barely of age when she married him. He was forty-two. What kind of man has his first kid when he’s forty-four?”
“Kids happen,” Trent said with the pragmatic tolerance of a family law practitioner. “What did your research tell you about Donal?”
James turned the music down so it was barely audible. “Donal’s another guy who prefers lamb to mutton. He’s fifty, and Vera’s twenty-eight. I gather as Vera’s manager, Alex was some kind of check on Donal, who would have had her doing four hundred performances a year, left to his own devices.”
“They both passed up other promising clients to focus on her. Some might say that was a sacrifice on their parts.”
“Then some would be idiots,” James retorted. “Vera’s the real thing, Trent. She has music in her soul, and talent coming out her ears. Alex and Donal knew a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when they found it. They differed only over how quickly they were going to burn her out.”
Did Vera admit that, even to herself?
Trent turned the music up just a bit. “I don’t think she’s burned out, exactly. Heartbroken is more like it.”
Not the observation of a lawyer, but the observation of a guy who’d taken his turn on the heartbroken bench.
“Don’t tell me you think she was in love with Donal?” Every instinct James had—and his instincts regarding women were formidable—told him the marriage had been as pragmatic as the divorce had been messy.
Trent brought the truck to a stop at a four-way, and waited for another tractor-cum-manure spreader to lumber through the intersection.
“I think Vera wanted to at least hold Donal in high regard,” Trent said, pulling forward. “She was simply too stubborn to admit she’d made a mistake until he lost his temper with her.”
“We need to change the subject.” James studied the fallow fields on the passenger side of the truck, which looked like a thousand other fallow fields all over Maryland. “When I think of him raising a hand to her, putting his hands on her in anger—Why didn’t he go to jail, Trent? Why the hell didn’t he go to jail?”
Why didn’t they all go to jail? A man who had to ask that question was much better off down the hall from both family law and criminal law, buried in the desiccated catacombs of subrogation and assignment clauses.
Or out of the practice of law altogether.
Trent was silent for a mile or so before he answered.
“We cut a deal. Vera allowed the criminal charges to go to the inactive docket, and Donal agreed to the maximum length of time for the restraining order. Donal’s kids would have had to go back to their mother full time if he’d been locked up, and Tina MacKay hadn’t been out of rehab very long at the time.”
Did Donal make every woman who married him miserable?
“That restraining order expires shortly.” James could not help sounding pissed about it. “How quickly time flies when you’re having a divorce. How do you stand working with this crap every day?”
They hit a construction zone and more ruts, though the truck’s suspension was equal to the challenge.
“Family law is hard sometimes.” Even that much was an admission from Trent, an admission he probably would not have made before marrying Hannah.
“What gets to you the most?”
“The kids,” Trent said, no hesitation. “They invariably want Mom and Dad back together, and they go to awful lengths to see it happen. They get sick. They get straight A’s carrying a heavy course load. They get into trouble. They become promiscuous. They flunk out of school. They develop mental illnesses and eating disorders. They cut themselves. They run. They try to be perfect. If you ask them, most of them will say they want their parents to be happy, but their actions tell a different story.”
The family law department referred a lot of cases over to Mac’s criminal defense team for delinquency issues. Did everybody regard that as a mere coincidence? James certainly didn’t.
“You do this work,” he said, “when you yourself are divorced. Can you wonder why Mac and I worry about you?”
“Don’t worry about me,” Trent said, flashing a cat-in-the-cr
eam smile. “Hannah and I are away on our honeymoon next week, and it’s you and Mac who’ll be deserving of worry.”
“Because we’re taking on two perfectly wonderful little girls for a straight week?” When had James ever looked forward to female company more? “It’ll be a walk in the park.”
* * *
“I don’t do underdoggies,” Mac muttered, but of course, Merle and Grace, both in the backseat, heard him.
“That’s OK, Uncle Mac,” Grace said. “Uncle James can be in charge of underdoggies, and you can be in charge of pushing the merry-go-round.”
“And no fair hopping on and riding it,” James chimed in from behind the wheel. “You make it slow down sooner when you do that.”
“Yeah. No fair, Uncle Mac,” Merle echoed.
They arrived at the park, and when the girls were tearing across the grass to the swings, Mac took a bench, and James came down beside him.
“How do they do it?” Mac asked softly. “Trent and Hannah keep up with these two and work full-time jobs. It boggles the mind.”
“Puts a few things in perspective,” James said. “I am more concerned for how they do the jobs they do, having children. Hannah’s wading hip-deep into mediation, which will mean a steady diet of families trying to reorganize themselves in the midst of litigation. Trent deals with the cases that can’t be resolved in mediation, and they both come home each night and interact with not only each other, but the girls.”
“Takes stamina.”
“Takes love and courage.”
Mac would doubtless have leveraged that comment into some sort of older-brother lecture about James’s personal life, but—thank the unicorns—Merle bellowed from her swing.
“Uncle Jaaaaaammmmeees. Time for underdoggies!”
“Whoever invented underdoggies should be shot,” James muttered. Then, “Be right there, pumpkin!”
Mac’s smile was more of a smirk. “Go get ’em, Uncle James.”
When both uncles were exhausted from the park, and the girls were chattering away happily in the backseat with ice cream cones, James drove back to Trent’s farm. The top scoop of Merle’s double-dip ended up all over James’s leather seat, and when he cleaned that up, he found the sprinkles from Grace’s sundae necessitated vacuuming the backseat as well.
Thank God he wasn’t trying to deal with both girls entirely alone, and thank God that Gertrude had let him keep Wellington and Josephine with her for another couple of weeks. Mac took on the barn chores, while James took on the cooking and the housework, and both uncles were cheerfully “assisted” by their nieces.
When the girls were tucked in and both uncles were sitting on the couch, too tired to even reach for the remote, James leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
“The silence. Listen to the sweet, sweet silence.”
“We have about sixty-eight hours until Trent and Hannah are back,” Mac said, stifling a yawn. “I figure the kids will sleep for at least twenty-four of those hours, which means forty-four big ones to go.”
“Forty-four is a lot.”
“Look how far we’ve come.”
A short, awestruck silence ensued, while James contemplated getting up and making himself a cup of decaf tea. He’d cut back on his caffeine at the suggestion of, of all people, his piano teacher.
“Did Grace seem fidgety to you?” Mac asked.
“Neither one of them stopped moving all day. Fidgety when?”
“After dinner, when Merle and I were annihilating you and Grace at Concentration.”
James hadn’t felt this wamped since beating Trent at racquetball, but he could not let that pass. “You weren’t annihilating us. We were letting you develop a false sense of security.”
“You lost three in a row.”
“The championships are coming up. Perfect setup for you and Merle to get overconfident.” Grace had been fidgety. She’d sat next to James and been twitching and rocking the whole time.
“Damn.” James shot to his feet.
“You said a bad word, Uncle James.”
“I’ll be saying more, because I didn’t remind the girls to use the bathroom before they turned in.”
Mac stayed right where he was. “Uh-oh.”
“Yeah, uh-oh. They’re probably still awake. Why don’t you go remind them?”
Mac rearranged himself so he was sprawled on the couch, flat on his back. “You’re the nighty-night expert. You remind them.”
“I’m not the nighty-night—You are such a sissy, MacKenzie.”
James headed up the stairs, more so Mac wouldn’t see him smiling than anything else. The past four days had shown James a shyness in his brother he hadn’t known was there, and the knowledge was precious. They hadn’t shared a roof for years, hadn’t been on a joint vacation, hadn’t spent this much time together in a long, long while, and James was reassured that he still truly liked and enjoyed Mac’s company.
The girls had chosen to share a room—yet another decision to be made when two families joined forces—so James knocked softly, then cracked open the door.
“We’re awake,” Merle said, though the room was lit only by the night-lights beside each bed.
Had they had to negotiate that too?
“You’re supposed to be asleep, cast into the arms of Sweet Morpheus by the ordeal of managing two uncles all by your lonesomes.”
“Was she one of your girlfriends?” Merle asked, sitting up.
“A friend, anyway. The Greeks put Morpheus in charge of sleep, and those who slept.” James sat on the edge of Grace’s bed and peered down at her in the gloom. “Sweetheart, have you been crying?”
“She has,” Merle said.
“You miss your mom?” James asked, brushing a thumb over Grace’s damp little cheek.
Grace burrowed closer to her pillow.
“That’s not why she’s crying.”
“You’re not supposed to tell, Merle.” Grace sniffed. “It’s a secret.”
“You’re going to wet the bed, and then it won’t be a secret,” Merle said.
“I’m not going to wet the bed, because I’m not going to pee.”
“Why aren’t you going to pee?” James asked, but his insides were not half so calm as his voice.
“She won’t pee because it hurts.”
“Merle.” James and Grace both spoke her name at once, James gently, Grace with considerable animosity.
“She’s worried for you, Grace, and so am I. Does it hurt to pee?”
Grace pulled the covers over her head.
“She’s embarrassed,” Merle said. “She says she just got you as uncles, and she’s not going to tell you about it. She wanted to tell Mom, but not over the phone with everybody listening.”
Her mom, who was hundreds of miles away. “Of course she didn’t,” James said. “It’s personal.”
“Yeah.” Grace peeked out from the covers and stuck her tongue out at Merle. “It’s personal.”
Then James had a truly terrifying, sickening thought.
“Grace, has your mom talked to you about good touches and bad touches?”
“Sure.”
His heart thumping against his ribs, James put the next question as neutrally as he could. “Have there been any bad touches you need to tell someone about?”
“No, and if there ever are, I can tell Mom, or Dad, or my teacher. But Bronco looks after me, and bad touches are yucky.”
Bronco being the winged, spotted unicorn no uncle dared denigrate.
Grace pulled the covers back up, then lowered them. “Am I going to have to go to the hospital?”
“I doubt it.”
Merle sat up crossed-legged amid her covers. “Grace hates the hospital. I do too.”
“It isn’t anybody’s favorite place, but they can help when you’re not fee
ling well,” James said, and thank God, both Trent and Hannah had left notarized statements providing James and Mac the authority to consent to medical treatment.
The immediate practicalities needed to be dealt with too. “Do you need to pee now, Grace?”
“No. I haven’t had anything to drink since lunch.”
Lunch had been eons ago. “That’s not so good. You must be thirsty.”
Grace’s chin jutted in a mulish fashion that put James in mind of her mother with a tough case. “I’m not going to drink anything, and you can’t make me.”
“I wouldn’t even think to try,” James said, running a hand over her tousled braid. “Let me talk to Uncle Mac, and we’ll see what our next move is. Would you take a drink to get down some painkiller?”
“Yeah. Mom showed me how to take grown-up medicine.”
“Dad showed me,” Merle chimed in.
“Then I’ll be right back with some pills.” James tweaked each nose and took his leave, the girls whispering furiously in his wake.
“Houston, we have a problem,” he said to Mac, who was still horizontal on the couch.
“Somebody have an accident already?”
“No. Somebody has a little-girl problem. Grace says it hurts to pee, and she means business. She hasn’t had anything to drink since lunch.”
Mac got to his feet in one lithe motion.
“Where are you going?” James asked.
Mac stopped halfway to the stairs. “I don’t know. I was going to cross-examine the witness. I guess you already did that?”
“Abetted by Merle. What makes it hurt to pee, Mac? Grace said there hadn’t been any bad touches.”
Mac dropped back onto the couch like he’d been clobbered with sack of feed. “Bad—Christ on a pogo stick.”
“Do we call Trent and Hannah?” James asked.
“Trent and Hannah can’t help. I guess we go to the emergency room because the urgent care has closed by now. The insurance cards are on the fridge.”
They couldn’t both go to the emergency room, because somebody had to stay with Merle.
“How will Grace deal with that?” James asked. “She says she just got us as uncles, and they’ll want a urine sample, and I’m a grown man, and I can’t even…”
The First Kiss Page 15
