by Amy Lane
“She took one look at what she was about to sleep with and decided salvaging her marriage was a better idea? Yes. I’m proud of her. If she even knew who I was, I’d tell her so.”
Brenda sort of gasped. “But Mr. Embree—Kaplan’s getting made partner. Aren’t you even up for promotion too?”
Carter just looked at her. “I’m second chair, Brenda. I get embarrassed in court. Jacobsen thinks I’m a pansy-ass.” Because Carter had voiced his objection—again—to withholding information from the Clayburghs. “I’m never getting promoted, and Kaplan has no reason to know my name.”
“But . . .” Brenda bit her lip. “Carter, I type up your stuff. And theirs. And yours makes the most sense. And your research is so on point. And you may sit second chair at the trial, but all the stuff that goes into it beforehand—what are they thinking?”
Carter smiled at her crookedly. “They’re thinking I won’t shut up about the Clayburghs’ dog.” It was true. He’d lobbied fiercely for handling the case a different way—one that meant less money for the firm but less actual villainy toward a nice couple who’d only wanted to keep their dog safe.
Brenda patted his arm gently as he leaned over her desk. “How’s your own dog?”
“She’s great.” Carter knew his smile stretched his cheeks, but he didn’t care. “Here—want to see? Sandy came over Sunday, and I took pictures of her. She’s all washed—we had to use special soap because she’s allergic to anything else. But we brushed her and pulled her hair back from her eyes. See? There’s Sandy, trying to play fetch with her in the living room, but she hasn’t gotten the hang of bringing the toy back yet.”
“Who’s Sandy?” she asked, like he wasn’t showing her perfectly adorable pictures of his dog.
“He’s a friend. You know. A friend.”
“Yeah?” she asked, skeptically. “Wasn’t Greg your ‘friend’ two weeks ago?”
Carter grimaced. He didn’t talk about his personal life in the office—apparently for good reason. “Greg left,” he mumbled. “Last Monday.”
“So. Two weeks before Thanksgiving, your douchey boyfriend leaves you, you get a dog, and a new, dog-friendly boyfriend moves in to take his place.”
“How do you know he was douchey?” Because seriously—Carter never talked!
“Because you barely mentioned him,” she said bluntly. “It wasn’t like he was part of your life. I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.”
“He, uh, wasn’t really . . . into my work stuff.” It had actually bored the crap out of Greg, so Carter had tried to talk about other things.
“And this guy is?” Brenda winked. “It wouldn’t matter if he wasn’t—he’s cute.”
“He is,” Carter admitted, looking at the picture of Sandy throwing the ball again. He had a nice jaw line, and big green eyes. Sandy Corrigan—still Irish in his bones, Carter suspected. “Cute, I mean. He likes listening about the job.” Carter grimaced. “When I’m not talking about my boss.” He could still see that hesitant expression on Sandy’s face when they’d talked after the movie, and he loathed himself for putting it there.
“You talk about your boss to your new boyfriend?” Brenda asked, snapping him back from his lovely weekend.
“Not anymore,” Carter said with some iron in his voice. “I’ve decided that I need to either shut up about it or change it.”
Brenda was suddenly completely and totally sober. “How could you change it?”
Carter flushed. “It’s not the only law firm in the Sacramento area,” he said with dignity. “It’s not even the only law firm in Fair Oaks.”
Brenda thought about it. “It would suck working here without you, Carter. You keep an eye out for me if you go.”
And like that, he could hear her voice echo. Go . . . go . . . go . . . go . . .
Sandy had said it first, but Carter had regarded it like a fairy story. People didn’t just quit a job with benefits and equity and health insurance because the boss was a douche, did they?
Well, not people like Carter.
Or maybe not people like Carter had been.
Before he got the dog.
He went home for lunch that day to throw Freckles a ball, to remember that he had a soul, and to eat some soup with his homemade sandwich. He fed Freckles the crusts of his bread—he wasn’t sure how good it was for her, but she seemed to think he was a god when he let her nibble out of his hand. It wasn’t easy to achieve godhood in the modern world—he wasn’t looking that in the mouth.
He was getting ready to leave just as Alexis arrived.
“Oh, Mr. Embree!” she said excitedly—after greeting Freckles, of course. “I’m so glad I caught you. It’s just that . . .” She grimaced and paused, fidgeting. “I don’t want to impose, you know. But you were so nice about helping me with my business, and you seem to know stuff . . . it’s just that . . .”
He smiled and tried to put her at ease. No, he wasn’t great in a courtroom—but he was quiet, and that usually seemed to help people calm down.
“You’re not imposing by asking.” He scooped Freckles up because she was jumping, repeatedly, like a pogo stick, trying to lick Alexis’s fingers.
“Aw, Freckles,” Alexis mumbled, taking the dynamic bundle of fuzzy joy out of his hands. “You’re such a good dog. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, ever.”
“That was . . . weirdly specific.” He smiled at her greenly, not liking where this might be going.
“Mr. Embree, it’s just awful,” she said, her eyes tearing up. “One of the dogs I walk—he’s a big mutt, like a cross between everything in the world . . .” She sniffled. “Or he was.”
Oh yeah. This already made Carter queasy.
“What happened?” he asked, guiding her to the kitchen.
“Well, the owners—they live in one of those neighborhoods . . . you know. Not great but not shitty? Like in the older parts of Fair Oaks—no sidewalks.”
Carter sat her down and went to the fridge to get her a glass of milk. He’d bought some cookies on Sunday, after Sandy had left, just so he could offer them the next time someone was over.
He put the snack in front of her, on a napkin, with the milk, and he stopped absolutely short at the look of adoration she gave him.
“You’re so nice,” she mumbled, holding Freckles tighter. “You’re such a good guy. Some people are just awful, and . . .”
She sniffled and wiped her face on her sleeve—leaving a generous portion of makeup behind. Carter stood up hurriedly and came back with a box of Kleenex. He offered it to her, and she took it gratefully and blew her nose but left the mascara and foundation glopping down her face.
He smiled. “Here,” he said gently, taking her chin and wiping carefully. This was not his forte, but seeing all of that bold humor this decimated—it was wrong somehow. Just . . . just wrong.
“It’s that—” She took a deep breath. “So, one of my dogs, just this big, floppy mutt, his people had a nice house, and they took care of it, but the house next door is sort of . . . you know. A junkyard. Old cars there, some of them rusting into the ground. And the people—they’ve always been live and let live, you know? But this guy, I guess he was working on the cars, and he started just dumping antifreeze next to the fence they built in the back . . .”
She trailed off, and he fought the urge to get a little teary himself. “Oh no,” he said.
She nodded. “He ate the dirt, and by the time they realized he’d been poisoned, it was too late. And it just seems so wrong—I mean, they paid over two thousand bucks in vet bills, and they lost their friend, and this guy, he won’t even pay to clean up the spot or pour concrete there or anything. Says there’s nothing they can do about it.” She looked at him, lower lip wobbling, eyes watering. “Is there?”
Carter thought about all the law he knew—contract law, civil law, and now that the Clayburghs’ dog had been on his mind, criminal negligence (which, damn it, his client should be charged with!)—about cruelty to animals (a
nd the laws were actually pretty stringent), and about all of the things that could help Alexis’s client.
“Yes,” he said, gnawing on his lip. “I could definitely do some research and—”
“They’ll pay,” she said urgently, maybe because it dawned on her that this was a professional question, and he was going to take some of his time to answer it. “They . . . they just . . . they want to get a new puppy, and they even have one lined up, but they don’t want to put him in the yard unless . . .” She looked up at him with big green eyes, much like her uncle’s.
“Unless he can be safe,” he said, his resolution firming up. “Tell you what. I’ll do a little research, and meet your friends for a consultation. It has to be after business hours, and here, otherwise they have to sign on with my boss, and he charges a fortune and he’d probably take the junkyard guy’s side because he’s a douche. So, my house, maybe, uh, tomorrow? Will they have time?”
Sandy was coming over the Friday after Thanksgiving—Carter would love to try to redeem his tarnished soul after what his boss was doing to the Clayburghs. Would beginning the path to redemption on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving be enough to earn a sleepover by Friday? He should probably take it even more slowly but . . . but . . . it was Sandy, and Carter really wanted to feel those long, bony fingers tighten on Carter’s body as Carter was possessing him and thrusting into him, breath after tortured breath.
“Oh, thank you!” Alexis launched herself out of her chair. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Carter. You’re so awesome. I hope you and Uncle Sandy get married and have babies and raise a thousand Chihuahuas and are so happy. You’re the best!”
Carter had to leave shortly after that—for one thing, his lunch was long over.
For another, he sort of fell in love with the idea of marrying her Uncle Sandy and having babies and Chihuahuas. And he knew he wasn’t the best, because he was going to let the Clayburghs suffer with the idea that their dog had died and it was their fault. He didn’t want to let her find out what a douche he was, because his boss was a bad man and Carter hadn’t done anything to stop it.
One of Sandy’s clearest memories of Thanksgiving was the time his mother had invited a homeless veteran in front of the grocery store to dinner, when she’d cooked Thai-fusion dressing with mango-chutney potatoes. She’d run to the store to get some dressing in a package, because Sandy and Shelley had staged a mutiny of “We’re not eating that crap!” and she’d brought home the poor panhandler because (a) she felt bad for him because he seemed a decent guy, and (b) she wanted to prove to her two ungrateful offspring that they should be happy for the food they were graced with, because not everybody was as fortunate as they were.
Sandy had taken one look at the guy—he’d had a beard and water-slicked hair, and a clean, if battered, Army-surplus jacket on over worn jeans—and had seen through his mother’s ploy in a hot second. He’d looked the guy in the eye and said, “Oh, Mom, did you bring Daddy home just for us?”
The guy had inhaled the essence of burned mango-chutney potatoes, shaken his head and said, “I’m sorry, lady, but I hear they’re serving garlic mash at the shelter,” and run.
Sandy and his mother had come to a détente after that: she would endeavor to cook a traditional Thanksgiving dinner if he would be polite to the random people she dragged in on any given year.
This year, she’d managed a trifecta of awkward. They had the gay, gluten-free, vegan animal activist that she’d met at the gardening supply store where she bought the sacrificial flowers that she brought home to die. That guy was for Sandy. There was her balding, fortyish, well-heeled, single gynecologist for Shelley. And, of course, the freshman poly-sci major from Sac State—who spoke knowledgably of starting a retirement portfolio immediately upon graduation, and who mowed Helena’s lawn on the weekends—for Alexis.
Sandy and Shelley endured the introductions with wide eyes, carefully not looking at each other, because odds were good they’d burst into laughter, and that was no good at all. They tried not to involve Alexis in their skepticism, because she adored her Grandma Helena, and they didn’t want to poison that.
But not wanting to turn Alexis against her grandmother and not wanting to strangle their mother were two very different things.
The vegan plant whisperer tried repeatedly to engage Sandy in conversation about animal rights. Normally Sandy was a fan, except he sort of liked eating meat, and while he didn’t mind organic or cruelty-free products, he was not giving up his turkey and sausage stuffing in the name of a better world.
Sandy’s mother believed that beanbag chairs stimulated conversation, as opposed to couches and love seats, so he stood in his mother’s dark-paneled, green-carpeted Citrus Heights duplex and smiled politely, nodding every now and then as though he really would consider walking away from the most normal holiday his family ever celebrated. His mother liked to throw the winter holidays in a bowl and pull one out every year to celebrate. Yule, yes; Christmas, fine; Boxing Day, okay—but he and Shelley had been trying to convince Helena for years that celebrating Yule one year, Hanukkah the next, and Kwanzaa or Boxing Day whenever they got pulled out of the bowl violated some serious rules of respect for all cultures involved. Helena wasn’t buying it, so Sandy, Shelley, and Alexis tended to gather for movies and gifts at Shelley’s house every December twenty-fifth, and had pretended to be out of town on the other dates. As far as Helena was concerned, the three of them took a shit-ton of cruises and went to Disneyland a lot during late fall, early winter, and they were fine with that.
So Sandy didn’t want to bail on his one mandatory full-throttle family gathering—but he was bored as fuck, and the plant whisperer was talking to him about vegetable-based lubes, which made him think of Mazola and was creeping him out.
About the time he found himself gritting his teeth, he looked over to where Shelley and Alexis were standing.
Alexis’s chosen date was staring at her soberly and reciting actuary tables for dog walkers. Alexis nodded at appropriate pauses in the conversation, but over Jason-the-super-mature-college-student’s head, Sandy could read SOS in the fluttering of her lashes.
His sister was in the same fix. Shelley actually resembled their mother more and more as they’d grown up. With her long blonde hair pulled up into a top-knot leaving little tendrils hanging around her face, and a brilliantly green, flowy, gauzy sort of dress, she could be Mom at any given holiday. But unlike their mother, Shelley had an acerbic tongue, a healthy dose of sarcasm, and a limited capacity for bullshit.
Her date was talking about health care rates and how Obamacare would be the death of them all. Shelley was one of the few people in the Sacramento area who wore her Obamacare bumper sticker with pride, and she let out a pained breath between her teeth. Then, in one of those agonizing silences that befall an entire room, Mr. Ob-Gyn said, “And, of course, I’d be willing to offer a mother/daughter discount on pap smears, if I knew one of them intimately.”
Shelley’s big green eyes snapped open, and as a united whole the three of them walked into the kitchen.
“Mom, we’re getting ice cream!” Sandy called, surprising his mother as she turned from what appeared to be the smoking carcass of a dead bird.
“Ice cream?” Helena said dazedly, her own once-blonde hair a curly, graying mass around her face. She was wearing a brown dress without a waist—flowy and gauzy like Shelley’s, but about twenty years out of date. Sandy, who had been in high dudgeon about how it served her right to leave her with the three bozos talking plants, actuaries, and group pap smears, suddenly found a little compassion in his heart.
“Would you like us to pick up a couple of precooked chickens and some sides?” he said kindly. Their mother—who, for all her bizarre religious forays and a tendency to drag weirdos into her house with matchmaking intentions, was actually a sweet person who gave to charities and made bird feeders every winter—burst into tears.
“Please?” She pulled up her threadbare apron and wipe
d her eyes with it. “Please? I don’t know what went wrong—last year I got it right, remember?”
Shelley moved to her side and threw an arm over her shoulder. “Yeah, Mom. We remember. Some days you win, some days the turkeys get you. Here, I’ll stay and clean up, and Sandy and Alexis can go shopping, how’s that?”
Helena smiled winsomely at her oldest child, and Sandy’s heart thumped solidly in his throat. Shelley and their mother hadn’t always gotten along—when she’d turned up pregnant in college, with no visible sperm donor, the shouting match had actually brought the police along. It wasn’t until years later, when Sandy had come out at the end of high school, that he recognized the look on his mother’s face that night.
It was the look of a parent who wanted easy and normal for her children, even if she didn’t know how to provide it.
There hadn’t been any screaming with Sandy’s big revelation—only a wobbly lower lip and an exacted promise for Sandy to introduce anyone important, because his mom wanted to know who would make her son happy.
By then, she’d exacted the same promise from Shelley. Sandy—in a moment of adulthood he would never forget—realized that it had been worse with Shelley because she was going to endure the exact same hardships that Helena had: raising a child alone.
Except, really, Shelley had never been alone, had she? Sandy and Helena had been there at the appointments, and rubbed her feet, and helped her get her first apartment. They’d taken turns watching Alexis while Shelley went to night school and got her degree in library science, and they’d all had a hand in raising her to be the slightly flaky but always openhearted girl she was now.
So watching Shelley, seven years Sandy’s senior, bite the bullet and elect to stay behind at the Thanksgiving from hell in the land of the terminally awkward, Sandy had two revelations.
One was that he and Shelley weren’t little kids anymore—and their mother was never going to become as mature and as together as they were, as frightening as that sounded.
