Goddamned tears, because her husband had dumped her, Tony had died, Luis could be snatched away at any moment, and the guy who’d taken her to bed apparently couldn’t be trusted either.
“I don’t like lawyers,” she went on. “Lawyers have authored more misery for me and my family than all the biblical plagues combined. And while I could never hate you, I’ve grown to positively loathe surprises. This is not a nice surprise, MacKenzie.”
She could have called it a betrayal and not been far wrong, and yet, Mac had to state his case.
“Given how you’re reacting, when was I supposed to tell you this truth?” He kept his voice down too, but he wanted to shout, to plead, to shake her so she’d see reason.
Was his profession the only part of him that mattered to her?
“You had a hundred opportunities to tell me, and I don’t even care so much that you’re a damned lawyer. In fact, I’m sure you’re a very good lawyer—also an ethical lawyer. I care that you weren’t honest with me. At the very least I need time to sort out how I feel about your…dissembling.”
Dissembling wasn’t quite lying. Mac took small comfort from that distinction as they emerged into the sunshine of a pleasant spring day.
“I wanted to tell you, but the moment was never right.”
Sid’s expression went from disappointed to sad, and that chilled Mac right down to his Johnston and Murphy’s.
“What else can you say? Of course you wanted to tell me.” She turned her back on him, as if Bradford pears past their prime and rows of parked cars were more interesting than he was. “It might be a good idea if you looked for another place to keep those horses, MacKenzie.”
“That will take a while.” Forever, if he could manage it. Sid hadn’t insisted, she’d only suggested, and she was a woman who could insist with the best of them when she needed to.
“Then you’d better start on it immediately, hadn’t you?”
The words “I’m sorry” welled up in Mac’s conscience, the words that might build on the punches she’d pulled, the crumbs of understanding she’d thrown him. He had lied by omission, and he’d dodged this confrontation.
He, a highly skilled courtroom attorney, and he’d dodged the confrontation. Sid wasn’t a judge, and yet, he needed to present her with a Motion to Reconsider.
“Sidonie—”
“Not now, MacKenzie. Not here.” Her tone said, maybe not ever. She walked away, her posture militarily erect as she crossed the parking lot and climbed into her little red Mustang.
She made the turn onto the road at a decorous speed, and quite possibly, drove out of Mac’s life.
* * *
“Get back in here.” James took Mac by the arm and tugged him down the hallway toward the conference room. “That could have been worse.”
“James, I love you like the precious baby brother you are, but if you don’t get your damned frigging hand off me, I’ll wipe the floor with you.”
“You’re welcome to try. I’m sure Trent would referee, and Hannah and Vera would patch you up when I was done with you.” James did not take his hand off Mac’s arm until Mac was in the conference room, the door closed behind him, both his brothers watching him like a defendant who’d been under secure transport from the psych eval unit—the locked one, where the nurses of both genders looked like Russian weight lifters.
Trent broke a tense silence. “I told Gail not to send us any more interviewees until I call her. Sit down, MacKenzie, and answer a few questions.”
The expressions both Trent and James wore sent Mac to his customary seat at the head of the table. They were worried about him. They looked pissed, and they’d probably sound pissed, but they were worried.
So was he.
“I take it Sidonie did not know how you make your living?” The question came from James, who obligingly poured Mac a cup of water from the pitcher on the credenza—as if Mac were on the witness stand, and opposing counsel was warming up for some grueling cross-examination.
“She assumed I’m a farrier, which I am. I did not volunteer that I belong—that we each belong—to a profession she loathes.”
“You were planning to get around to it?” Trent conjectured.
“Of course he was.” James leaned a hip on the table and studied Mac for a moment. “The way I see it, associating with us has done nothing but benefit Sid. She still has her foster care license because we scraped her hog house.”
“At a profit to her,” Trent added.
“The terms of the land deal I put before her are beneficial to her,” James went on. “You’re providing her income through Daisy’s and Buttercup’s board, and you arranged the free loan of Inskip’s loader so she could sell her topsoil. Then there’s the fact that Trent will represent Luis. I don’t see how us being lawyers has worked to her detriment. Sid’s sensible, and she’ll figure that out.”
“Sid’s also lonely, emotionally wrung out, and proud as hell,” Mac said. “She as much as said the greater wrong wasn’t practicing law, it was not telling her we practice law.”
“Like her entire life is an open book to you?” Trent groused as he flopped into the chair on Mac’s right. “You haven’t known each other that long.”
“What I do for a living is not a detail. I can’t see Sid forgiving and forgetting.” Not anytime soon.
“She’s stubborn,” James said. “But what’s the issue with lawyers? Everybody tells the occasional lawyer joke, but this is personal. What’s behind it?”
“I don’t know.” Mac stared at his hands, hands that were aching at that very moment to caress Sid’s hair, her face, her arms, her anything. “I know somebody who might be able to help me find out.”
* * *
“Sid’s upset over something.” Luis scratched Thomas right on the midline of the pony’s substantial belly. Thomas craned his neck, making Luis smile despite the seriousness of the topic.
Luis liked all the therapy ponies—some of them were big enough to qualify as horses—but Thomas was special. The horse’s big dark eyes held compassion for fellow creatures to whom life wasn’t always easy or kind.
“She doesn’t say anything, she’s eating junk, and she’s jittery,” Luis went on. “What is it with women, you know? Mac hasn’t called all week, and I’m thinking maybe that’s the trouble. I could call him.” Luis moved his hand up under Thomas’s shaggy mane. “Maybe it’s just PMS, though. Sid takes all that stuff too seriously. But then, what do I know?”
Luis fell silent as he heard the sound of the stall door being unlatched.
“Could be the caffeine’s giving her fits.”
MacKenzie Knightley stood there in his usual jeans, boots, and faded denim shirt. The cuffs of his shirt were rolled back to reveal sinewy forearms, and the dirt on his hands suggested Mac had been working on a horse.
“Mac. You here to do Tom’s feet?”
“No, I am here to ask a favor. Walk the fence with me?”
Luis did not want to be asked for any favors. People who moved on every few months weren’t the best ones to rely on for favors, but Mac had done Luis some favors. A lot of favors, really. Big ones. This looked like an immediate kind of favor, which was good, because there was no telling where Luis would be next week.
“Let me top off Tom’s water first.”
Mac stepped out of the stall and waited silently while Luis tended to the horse. Mac was good at being silent, being quiet. Luis wanted to emulate that quality, though if being more than six feet tall was part of the trick, that might take some doing.
“Where to?” Luis asked when the horse’s bucket was full.
“South mares’ pasture. I want to see how Luna’s doing.”
He would. The guy had caretaker written all over him, and if Luna liked anybody, it was MacKenzie. Luis tried remaining quiet for about two minutes, before he decided silen
ce wasn’t accomplishing much.
“What’s this favor?”
“Sid’s pissed at me.”
Luis risked a glance at Mac as they walked along. Mac wasn’t hustling, but Luis still had to work some to keep up with him. Mac’s expression was hard to read—a different kind of silence—and his body gave off tension.
“I wouldn’t call it pissed,” Luis said. “More disappointed. Disappointed is worse.”
“That’s for damned sure. Why does she hate lawyers?”
Was this the favor? Some family history, such as family applied to two people living in the same temporary household? Luis cast back, trying to recall what Sid had told him over the months of their acquaintance.
“When her mom died, the lawyers wanted to pop her into foster care. They were calling Social Services before they even asked Sid if she had anybody she could stay with. She was sixteen and very independent, had her own car and a job. She’d probably been taking care of herself by then for years anyhow. Then when Tony died—”
Maybe this was the favor, because it was harder to tell this part. Why was he sharing this information with MacKenzie?
“Don’t violate confidences for me, Weese. Just tell me what you can.”
“Why do you want to know?”
They’d reached the fence along the closest boundary of the south pasture. Most of the mares were nose down in the grass, a tail occasionally flicking at the few flies out this early in the season. Luna lay flat out in the sun, so still that if Luis hadn’t seen her resting like that many times before, he’d have thought she was dead.
“Sid is upset with me.” Mac propped a foot on the lowest fence board, his relaxed posture belying the tight misery in his words.
“Usually when Sid is upset, everybody for a hundred yards on either side knows about it, and then she’s over it. She’s gone quiet, Mac. I thought it was her”—he waved a hand over his middle—“female stuff.”
“You know she can’t have kids?” A sidewise glance accompanied this, suggesting Mac hoped he wasn’t betraying a confidence himself.
“She told me, kind of made a joke about it early on. ‘I can have kids, but only if the stork has hung up his wings for a social worker’s license,’ or something like that.”
“I’m a lawyer.”
“Yeah, so?”
“You knew?”
“I was at your house, dude. I saw the books in your study: William Blackstone, Black’s Law Dictionary, biographies of Supreme Court Justices, the Maryland Bar Journal. A bunch of books that weigh more than I do and have titles longer than my arm. You have money coming out your ears. Of course you’re a lawyer.”
Luis had apparently stumped the great Perry Mason of Damson Valley.
“You didn’t say anything?” Mac asked.
“No harm, no foul. Except now I guess there is harm. Sid doesn’t like you lawyering?”
“If I’d told her right up front, she might have reconciled herself to it, or she’s assured herself she would have. She doesn’t like that I didn’t disclose this, or that my brothers are also lawyers.”
“All three of you? Not good, bro. How’d she find out?”
This was odd, Mac talking to Luis as if he were an adult. Odd, a little uncomfortable, and a little nice too. To think he had some help to offer MacKenzie Knightley, who likely never needed anybody for anything.
“How she found out was bad. She tossed her hat in the ring for the position of head of human resources for us, and came to interview at the law office without knowing exactly what the midsized, family-owned professional services firm did for its coin.”
Luis climbed up on the fence, though sitting on fence boards was a short-term undertaking.
“You screwed up?” he asked.
“I am in shit up to my eyeballs with that woman, and my brothers are none too impressed with me either.”
“Welcome to my world.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Everything turns to shit, and you can hardly figure out how before it’s turning to shit again.” Court hearings could turn things to composted, top-quality shit in about five minutes flat.
“Life isn’t supposed to be like that, Luis, and you never told me exactly what happened when Tony died. I know the estate lawyers aren’t exactly breaking land-speed records to get the estate settled, but Sid wouldn’t let me do anything about that.”
“Those guys. They’re enough to make anybody hate lawyers. You know Tony had life insurance money go into a trust for me, and Sid’s the trustee, but she hasn’t even been given a copy of the trust document?”
“Life insurance proceeds don’t normally pass through the estate.”
“Like I understand what that means?”
“It means the estate being settled should have nothing to do with your trust getting off the ground. Sid should be free to make disbursements from that trust right damned now, unless the terms of the trust forbid it.”
Like one more instance of lawyers holding things up would endear Mac to Sid?
“Tony told me the terms,” Luis said. “Sid can spend that money any way she thinks will benefit me. Not just for college or grad school or clothes. It’s up to her. Tony wanted it that way.”
Mac’s expression wasn’t puzzled, exactly, but very focused. “You and Tony talked about this?”
“Tony left me pretty much alone, because the whole gay thing meant he had to be extra careful.”
Mac scraped his boot against the bottom board, and Luna’s ear twitched. “Careful how? Gays don’t molest children any more than anybody else does. Trent does enough child abuse work that I know that much.”
“Yeah, well, tell it to the newspapers, would you? We talked some. Tony was a good guy.”
The look Mac gave him then was enough to make anybody squirm, so Luis focused on Luna, focused on trying to mentally communicate with the horse to get up and come see her visitors.
Not even an ear twitch.
“You were telling me what happened when Tony died that made Sid’s dislike for lawyers even worse, though trying to throw her in foster care probably did enough damage for a lifetime.”
Mac was a man swamped with misery and trying not to show it, like a kid new to foster care tried not to admit he missed his mom’s rotten, stinking dump in public housing because it was home. Didn’t even admit it to himself, if he was smart.
“They tried to say Tony committed suicide,” Luis said, “so the insurance company wouldn’t have to pay the death benefit, which is a lot of money.”
“Then they would have failed. I don’t think there’s a judge in the country who would say contracting AIDS is a method of committing suicide.”
“Not the AIDS, the slamming his car into a bridge abutment at sixty miles an hour. There was another car involved, but that driver died too, and it was hard to figure out what happened.”
“Accident reconstruction is not an exact science, but I gather Tony’s death wasn’t ruled a suicide?”
“It was not, but Sid’s limited patience with lawyers and their stupid games has been exhausted. Then too, the foster care hearings don’t always go the way Sid thinks they should, and that just gets her muttering about the damned lawyers all over again.”
“So what do I do?” Mac asked quietly, as if he put the question to himself—or to the universe. “I haven’t simply screwed up, I’ve made about the worst mistake I could have, given Sid’s history.”
“Hell if I know. I was rooting for you, but you weren’t straight with Sid. I’d cut another pony out of the herd if I were you.”
Mac scrubbed a hand over his face, then stared hard at the small white horse lying in the sun. “Get up, girl. It’s a pretty day for a little walk, and your friends have come to see you.”
The horse could not possibly have heard him. He’d kept his
voice down, just above a whisper, and the breeze was blowing toward them.
She got up and walked right to them. Slowly—she had her dignity, after all—but she came right to Mac’s outstretched hand. Luis figured that was a good thing, because a guy needed all the friends he could get.
Chapter 16
Two weeks went by while Sid dutifully sent out résumés, took Luis for a steak dinner to celebrate his sixteenth birthday, and planted her garden. She tended seedlings in the big south-facing kitchen window, and she dug up old flower beds around the house. She bought a weed whacker and barely learned how to use it before Luis stole her new toy and headed around the side of the house, goggles on, head down, shredded plants in his wake.
Luis was around less and less, spending more time at the stables, making a few friends at the local high school, and starting after-school shifts on the Inskip farm. He was making money, that much Sid knew, and she also knew he was determined to earn his keep, because Sid had failed so miserably in her job search.
Her heart wasn’t in it. What was the point in getting into a work routine when in a few months, they’d be moving again?
She sat back on her heels, surveying the tomato seedlings she’d transplanted. The book said to use a string to ensure the rows were straight, but as far as Sid was concerned, Mother Nature would grow the plants whether they were in a perfectly straight line or an almost straight line.
Even dirt was more capable of generating new life than she was.
The board check for the horses had shown up the previous week—thank God—with a terse note that Mac wasn’t having any luck finding a place that could accommodate the mares.
That he’d write so little hurt. A man who would lie about his profession would lie about many things. Sid hadn’t had the first inkling Mac might be sidestepping issues on her, even though Luis had tried to point out to her evidence that hadn’t added up.
She felt stupid and ashamed and angry and even more painful emotions that had no names. The ache hurt worse than being rejected by a husband over something Sid couldn’t change and couldn’t accept. It hurt worse than the remnants of her grief over Tony’s passing; it hurt worse than anything.
Kiss Me Hello (Sweetest Kisses) Page 26
