Goodbye To All That

by Judith Arnold

  O’Leary’s response was a cynical smile.

  “Okay,” she conceded. “She probably buys them from the same sleazeball who supplies her with fake Rolexes.”

  “I don’t get why anyone would spend thousands of dollars on a handbag,” he said. “I mean, come on. There are children starving in Africa.”

  “And in China, where your client pays the parents of those starving children pennies a day in a dingy, dirty factory, piecing together counterfeit bags.”

  He laughed. Even in the bar’s murky light she could see his dimples. Unlike Judge Montoya, however, she wasn’t easy to play. He could smile and wink at her all he wanted. She refused to melt into a puddle at his feet.

  The waiter arrived with their drinks. Hers was lusciously pale, with crystals of salt glinting along the edge of a glass as big as a minivan’s headlight. Just looking at it caused the knotted muscles at the base of her neck to relax.

  O’Leary tipped his glass toward hers in a silent toast before drinking. “So,” he said as he lowered the glass. “Come here often?”

  She would have scowled, but her first sip of margarita tasted too good. She smiled instead. “I’ve never been here before.”

  “Me neither. This isn’t my neighborhood.”

  She hated herself for being curious. “Where do you live?”

  “Inwood.”

  “Inwood? Isn’t that halfway up the Hudson River?”

  “It’s as north as you can go and still be in Manhattan,” he confirmed. “I moved there before gentrification hit. Got a cheap rent, and when the building went co-op the insider price was unbelievable. I could easily sell my place for ten times what I paid for it.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because it’s halfway up the Hudson River.”

  He shrugged and lounged in his seat, stretching his legs alongside the table so his feet wound up next to her chair. Lucky for him they didn’t wind up under her chair. If they had, she would have had to stomp on his instep. As it was, he was encroaching too much on her space. “If I sold my place, where would I live?” he asked.

  “Murray Hill,” she said, then pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. Why had she said that? She’d had only two sips of her drink so far, so she couldn’t blame her statement on alcohol.

  O’Leary’s smile grew quizzical. “Murray Hill? Why the hell would I want to live there?”

  Screw it. She was tired, she wasn’t drunk but wanted to be, and she’d spent too many hours today fighting with O’Leary. She didn’t want to keep thinking of him as her adversary. And her brain was crammed to overflowing with all sorts of painful thoughts, anyway, so she might as well let one out. “Last night I saw this apartment for sale in Murray Hill. The minute I stepped inside, I wanted it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t breathtaking. It wasn’t spectacular. It was just a bunch of square rooms with decent closet space and a kitchen that could use major updating. But the second bedroom . . .” No, she wasn’t drunk enough to share with him her visions of a nursery in that bedroom. As enormous as her margarita was, she didn’t think there was enough booze in it to get her as drunk as she’d have to be to tell him that.

  “The second bedroom . . .” he cued her.

  “Really spoke to me,” she said lamely.

  “What did it say? ‘Hey, lady, buy me!’”

  “Something like that, yes.” She smiled and sipped her drink. Flecks of lime-flavored ice cooled her tongue.

  “So, are you going to buy it?”

  “If I can scrounge some money from . . . Shit. I can’t scrounge money from anyone. If I could get my year-end bonus tomorrow, I could swing it, but my firm doesn’t calculate the bonuses until the end of December. And I don’t know who to hit up for a loan. My brother’s rich but he’s—I don’t know, in the middle of something he probably doesn’t even know about, but it feels to me like it’s going to be bad, and my parents are in the middle of something that’s definitely bad, and my sister’s trying to budget for her daughter’s bat mitzvah with this inn that jacked up the price on her after she signed the contract.”

  O’Leary’s smile grew bemused. Apparently he hadn’t been expecting her to enumerate all the crap going on with her family. She hadn’t been expecting to enumerate it, either. But she had. He’d just have to deal.

  “If your bonus is going to cover the shortfall,” he suggested, “maybe you could sign a short-term bridge loan with a bank. They could probably come up with a reasonable rate for a two-month loan on the down payment.”

  “On top of a mortgage? In this economy?” Yet she was touched that instead of telling her she was crazy he’d come up with a decent suggestion.

  “You might be able to negotiate something. You’re not bad when it comes to negotiating.” He grinned.

  She was not going to let him play her. “Sure,” she snorted. “Your guy should be paying my guy a hell of a lot more than we negotiated. Seven figures.”

  “Six figures isn’t shabby, considering your guy didn’t suffer any monetary damages.”

  “Wait ’til he sees my bill,” she grunted. “That alone will count as monetary damages.”

  “He’s shutting my guy down in New York. If that’s not good enough for him, he’s a schmuck.”

  Everyone in New York City knew a smattering of Yiddish, and the word schmuck was universally understood. Yet hearing a Guinness-drinking guy named Aidan use the term struck her as hilarious. Somehow she managed not to laugh out loud.

  He wasn’t laughing. Evidently he didn’t think he’d said anything funny. “So, your family is all screwed up, huh?”

  She felt a pang of embarrassment over her earlier rant. “Forget I said any of that.”

  “I won’t forget it. Things are going bad for your brother and your parents, and your sister is getting ripped off by an inn. You must be feeling a lot of pressure.”

  She shrugged. “I’m not in the middle of their tsorris,” she said, although her amusement was gone, replaced by a wobbly bleakness. “They’re all up in the Boston area. I’m down here.” And sometimes Doug’s wife Brooke was down here, too, which might well cause more tsorris.

  “But they’re your family and you’re upset.”

  “Well . . .” She attempted a smile. “They’re my family.”

  He angled his head and scrutinized her. “You’re not just trying to rouse my sympathy so I’ll agree to go to my guy with a bigger settlement, are you? Because it’s not going to work.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she said, meaning it. She was a good lawyer, she worked hard, she deserved to make partner, but unlike O’Leary, she didn’t play judges. And she wasn’t going to play him. Not out of scruples, but because he would have her pinned to the mat in seconds if she tried. He was clearly much better at playing his opponents than she was.

  “So you fled the family—what was that word you used? Circus?”

  “Tsorris. It means heartache, problems, that kind of thing.”

  “Tsorris,” he repeated like a diligent language student. Schmuck he could pronounce easily, but not tsorris. He’d probably never experienced tsorris in his life. As a lawyer, he undoubtedly encountered schmucks all the time, so the word sounded more natural when he said it.

  “And I didn’t flee the family. I got my law degree from Columbia and decided to stay here.”

  “Because your family was driving you crazy?”

  “No,” she said emphatically, then succumbed to a reluctant smile. “Yeah. They’re good people. I love them. But . . .” She sighed, feeling tears press against her lower eyelids. God, she’d already said too much to O’Leary. She damn well wasn’t going to cry in front of him, too. A couple of deep sips of margarita helped her to recover. “My parents are getting a divorce.”

  He chewed on that and frowned. “Now?”

  “Well, not this minute, but my mother moved out a month ago.”

  “I mean, they�
��re your parents. If they’re just getting a divorce now, they must have been married—” he did a quick calculation “—what, thirty years?”

  “Forty-two. I’m the baby of the family.” Tears were rising again, bubbling up toward her eyes like lava, threatening to erupt. “I don’t understand it. Forty-two years, and they want to throw it all away. And it’s not what you’re thinking.”

  “What am I thinking?”

  “That my father’s having an affair or something? No one’s having an affair, as far as I know. My mother just decided she wanted a change, and my stubborn-ass father refuses to change.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it adorably unkempt. The hiccupping female singer had been replaced by a growling male singer and the bar was beginning to fill up. Melissa glanced around, but in the bluish gloom the other patrons were mere silhouettes. When she turned back to O’Leary, she found him gazing at her with unnerving intensity. “You aren’t going to cry, are you?”

  That was all she had to hear. Her vision went blurry and she gulped in a breath. Damn. She looked so wretched when she cried, her eyes swelling, her cheeks blotching, her nose running like a leaky hose.

  “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, her voice thick with a suppressed sob. “I’m breaking up with my boyfriend and I can’t talk to anybody about it, because my parents are already broken up and I don’t know what’s going on with my brother and his wife, and my sister’s husband is sweet but he’s just so . . . I mean, he’s a teacher, for God’s sake, and he and my sister are so much like my parents, I bet they wind up getting a divorce in another twenty-five years, and I can almost afford that apartment in Murray Hill except almost doesn’t count, and I have to go to my client tomorrow and say, ‘This is all we’re getting out of that scumbag who’s been ripping off your bag designs,’ and you know, some days just suck.” The last word came out zuck and she didn’t care.

  O’Leary sighed, dug into a trouser pocket and pulled out a linen handkerchief, which he handed to her. She didn’t know men still carried handkerchiefs. Men of her generation, anyway. Her father always had a fresh square of linen folded and tucked into a pocket of his slacks. Maybe that was why her mother left him—she was tired of laundering and ironing his handkerchiefs, in an era when Kleenex could be sneezed into and then discarded.

  She waved off O’Leary’s gesture and wiped her face with one of the cocktail napkins the green-haired waiter had placed on the table with their drinks. The white paper square was damp with condensation from her margarita, but that moisture felt cool on her fevered cheeks. By the time she was done wiping her eyes, the napkin was a lot damper, and it also had faint traces of mascara on it. She’d paid a fortune for the stuff, too, because it had been guaranteed not to smudge.

  Maybe she’d sue the cosmetics company. She could probably get at least as much out of them as she’d gotten out of O’Leary’s asshole client.

  She dabbed her eyes one final time, hoped the mascara wasn’t striping her cheeks with smeary black rivulets, and risked a glimpse of O’Leary. He didn’t look alarmed, the way most men looked when the woman they were with began weeping. He didn’t look helpless or annoyed. He actually looked kind.

  “I wish I could solve your problems,” he said. “I can’t, but I can think of a way to take your mind off them for a little while.”

  Not kind. He looked seductive, or at least he looked like what he thought seductive would look like. Slight smile, plenty of dimple, eyelids slightly lowered, head angled in a beckoning manner.

  She sat straighter. “If you’re implying what I think you’re implying, the answer is no. No way in hell.”

  He chuckled. “No way in hell? That sounds pretty definitive.”

  “I’m not Judge Montoya.”

  “And I would never offer to take her mind off her problems.” He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay. All I’m saying is, once we’ve gotten all the parties to sign on to this settlement, let’s have dinner.”

  Skepticism reared up inside her. What did he want? She wasn’t going to lower the settlement amount one penny. And his client was going to have to make the apology, too. Maybe she’d add that he had to make a video of his apology and post it on YouTube, just so the entire world could see him expressing regret for his dishonorable behavior.

  If he didn’t want to influence the settlement, why would he want to have dinner with her? She’d already blubbered like a baby in front of him—terribly unprofessional, to say nothing of embarrassingly immature. She hadn’t let him treat her to this margarita. She hadn’t done anything to indicate any interest in him. She hadn’t even officially broken up with Luc, for what that was worth.

  “Dinner?” she asked dubiously. “You and me?”

  He made a big show of searching the area around their table. “Is there anyone else here?”

  “I thought you didn’t like lawyers.” When he arched his eyebrows in a question, she reminded him, “You didn’t want to go to any of the bars downtown because they’d all be filled with lawyers.”

  “True.” He contemplated her charge and shrugged. “You’re right. I don’t like lawyers.”

  “And my life is full of tsorris.”

  “A definite negative.” His smile widened.

  “So why on earth would you want to have dinner with me?”

  “I’m not really sure,” he admitted, still sending her that mischievous smile. “I think it’s because your hair turns me on.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jill stood in front of the sink, trying to avoid her reflection in the mirror, which was impossible to do. Whose brainstorm had it been to place mirrors right above sinks? A person had to use a sink to wash her face and brush her teeth, even at those times when she absolutely didn’t want to look at herself.

  Thanks to the mirror, she had no choice. There she was in the silver glass, her eyes weary, her complexion pallid, not a trace of summer color left in her cheeks. The skin at her neck wasn’t quite crepe-y, but it wasn’t silky-smooth, either. Then again, she’d never had silky-smooth skin. Doug and Melissa had inherited her father’s coloring: tawny hair, honey-brown eyes, peachy skin. Jill was definitely her mother’s daughter: hair the color of wet pine bark, eyes the color of raisins and skin with a khaki undertone.

  Someone, break this mirror, she thought, although she couldn’t think of who in her life deserved seven years’ bad luck. Well, actually, she could: Noah, for forgetting to remove the half-eaten granola bar from his pocket before he’d tossed his jeans into the wash. Abbie, for pretending her cell phone battery was dead when Jill had called her at Caitlin’s house to tell her to come home for dinner. Her father for considering having coffee with another woman. Her mother for planning to hit Boston’s night spots with a couple of punks barely out of high school. Melissa for phoning Jill from a bathroom and telling her Brooke was salon-cheating on Doug with Luc. Doug for phoning her during dinner. Brooke had fed the twins spaghetti at five, he’d told her, and he and she were planning to eat later in the evening, and it hadn’t occurred to him that normal families like Jill’s might be gathering around the table for the evening meal at six-thirty. He hadn’t even apologized for interrupting her meal; he’d just asked her if she’d be willing to take his daughters for a week in February, because he and Brooke were booked at a resort in Nevis and Mom and Dad were no longer available to baby-sit.

  Gordon was probably the only person in her family she wasn’t pissed off at, although he wasn’t completely pure of soul, either. He’d left several congealing blobs of toothpaste in the sink. Not beard hair, thank God. If it were beard hair, she just might threaten to leave him if he didn’t break the damn mirror for her.

  But that was the thing about Gordon. If she asked, he would tell her she was insane, he’d resist as long as he could, but ultimately he’d break the mirror. He’d take seven years’ bad luck upon himself, even though he thought superstition was silly. Perhaps this was why, unlike her parents, unlike Melissa and Luc, and possibly—who
the hell knew?—unlike Doug and Brooke, Jill and Gordon were still together.

  She should have donned a sexier nightie. She was wearing one of her old flannel nightgowns—Gordon was delaying turning on the furnace as late into the fall as the family could tolerate an unheated house, to save money and the environment. But with October winding down, the nights were getting awfully chilly. Yesterday morning when she’d awakened, the thermostat in the upstairs hall had read sixty-two degrees. Bright sunlight warmed the house up during the day, but it was bound to cool off again overnight. She needed flannel.

  Besides which, she wasn’t feeling the least bit sexy.

  She rinsed her mouth, washed away her toothpaste residue and the dried blobs Gordon had left blemishing the porcelain bowl of the sink, and averted her eyes as she reached for a towel. If she didn’t look into the mirror, she wouldn’t notice her dowdy nightgown, her dowdy hair—untouched by the likes of Luc Brondo—her unpolished nails and the way the tendons in her neck protruded when she was tense. No doubt they were forming two strident ridges right now.

  She flicked off the light and left the bathroom. Gordon was sprawled out in bed, wearing gray sweatpants. He didn’t believe in pajamas—as if pajamas were a religion you were supposed to believe in. During the coldest stretch of winter, he would usually wear a sweatshirt as well as sweatpants, but late October wasn’t cold enough for that.

  He had a nice chest. Sometimes just gazing at it was enough to turn her on, but not when she was anxious and harried and wishing seven years of bad luck on her parents, siblings and children. Gordon’s upper torso was lean, not muscle-bound. He wasn’t buff, but he wasn’t too fat or too skinny. And he wasn’t too hairy.

  And really, of all the people in her life, all the people she cared about, he was the only one who’d break a mirror if she asked.

  She wished, for his sake, that tonight had been one of those times when gazing at him turned her on.

  She climbed onto her side of the bed and slid under the blanket. He reached over, arched his arm around her and drew her against him, cushioning her head against his bare shoulder. “Come here often?” he asked, wiggling his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.