With a twinge of regret, I gave up for now on the search for my dad and composed a letter to Perry.
I had not heard back from Joseph before my flight left Indy, nor was there a message from him when I turned on my phone upon arrival in Denver. I did, however, have a text message from Shannon, inviting me over for our traditional Christmas night supper and family-time debriefing and decompression. I texted her back to accept, and asked if it was okay to invite Joseph to come over later, assuming I could get in touch with him. She said okay. So I texted him her address, hoping while I did so that he didn’t get charged per text, and awaited a reply. A few minutes later, I was rewarded: “Got your messages. I will see you there at 8pm.”
I fetched my car and drove home, the holiday lights twinkling in the darkness instilling in me a feeling of peace. Maybe it was the decision I’d come to, or the knowledge that I had a father (and possibly more family) somewhere, or that I was back in my adopted hometown. Or maybe it was the calm before the storm to come. But the world seemed paused, somehow. Were the angels singing, while the world lay in solemn stillness? I had no way to know, but I felt like singing along.
Shannon met me at the door with a hug. “Merry Christmas! How’d it go with Mom?”
“Believe it or not, we’re still on speaking terms,” I said, doffing my coat. I handed her a bag of cherry cordial truffles (airport gift store shopping strikes again!) and said, “Et voila, dessert.”
She made the appropriate yummy noises as she read the tag. Then she said, “Hey, I thought you said you were in Indiana. The cherries in these things are from Michigan.”
I shrugged. “Imported, obviously. Hey, I’m doing the best I can here,” I continued, in response to her skeptical look. “So how’s Clan McDonough?”
The change of topic carried us through the leftover roast beef and green bean casserole that Shannon’s mother had insisted she take home with her. Dysfunctional behavior abounded in her family of origin, and this year’s get-together was about average. The more I heard about Shannon’s family, the more I understood why she had gone into social work – and also why she had never married.
“Okay,” she wrapped up, “your turn. Did Mom spill it?”
“I had to push her,” I admitted with some reluctance, “but yeah, she did. And the goddess was right. My father was Sioux.”
“I knew it!”
“And he didn’t die in Vietnam.”
“Is he still alive?” she asked.
I shrugged. “No idea. And Mom tried to get me to promise not to try to find him.”
“Did you?”
“Are you kidding? Of course not.”
She relaxed. “Good. I have a feeling we’ll be meeting him before all of this is over.”
I was about to ask her to explain that remark, but there was a knock at the door. Shannon answered it, and admitted Joseph.
As he apologized for being early and she told him not to be ridiculous, I studied him. And myself. Was there an attraction there? Not on my end, I decided. He was tall, which I like, but a little too thin. A little too exotic, too, with his dark skin and braided hair – although it occurred to me that with the discovery about my own background, the pot was calling the kettle black. I acknowledged ruefully that I still had some work to do in order to overcome my lower-middle-class prejudices.
But no, I decided, I didn’t feel any physical attraction toward Joseph.
Then he looked at me, his blue eyes hinting at amber in their depths, and I immediately had to reconsider. Maybe I felt no attraction in the here-and-now, but on some deeper level, we were already connected.
Thanks a lot, White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman. Thanks one hell of a lot.
“Hi,” I said, feeling rattled.
“Hi,” he said, taking a seat across the room. “Sorry I didn’t get back to you yesterday. I was in transit.”
I waved it off, but Shannon said, “In transit? From where?”
“Here and there,” he said.
“Ah, a man of mystery,” she teased.
He ignored her bait and turned back to me. “Congratulations on joining the tribe,” he said with a quirky grin. “What’s your big decision?”
“What decision?” Shannon asked. “You didn’t tell me anything about a decision.”
“I was just getting to it,” I told her. Then I sucked in a big breath and said, “I’m going to resign from the firm tomorrow.”
“What? Why?” Shannon squawked. But Joseph’s grin widened until it lit his whole face. I couldn’t help smiling at him in return.
“I just can’t keep doing this,” I told her. “All of this stuff with Looks Far has made me realize how much of myself I’ve compromised by keeping my job. I hate the adversarial part of being a lawyer,” I continued. “I fully support the maxim that everyone is entitled to an attorney, and I applaud those who can do it. But I can’t do it any more. I work for a firm that represents Leo Durant and will do anything legal to help him implement his scheme – a vicious scheme that treats people like minor obstacles and money like a god. I’m twisting my own moral code into a pretzel just to go to work every day.”
Joseph’s amber eyes were shining. But Shannon said, “I feel like this is déjà vu all over again. Didn’t we have this conversation five years ago? I thought the mediation training was supposed to get you out of this ethical quagmire, wasn’t it?”
“It was, and it did, to a degree. But it’s not enough, Shannon. I’m still not far enough away from it. I thought I was, but I’m not. I’m tainted by even working in the same building. I’m tainted every time I cash my paycheck.”
“Yes,” Joseph said urgently. “Yes.”
Shannon looked back and forth between us. “Tainted?” she said. “I’m missing something here.”
“You’re not,” I said. “You felt it when we walked in on Brock.”
“You did?” Joseph asked Shannon. At her nod, he said, “You get it, then. The older lawyer was bad, but I think he started out good and acquired the evil along the way. The short man was worse. Much worse. But Brock….” He shook his head. “That man has some extra-special evil attached to him.”
“Older man? Short man?” Shannon asked me.
“Perry. And Leo Durant,” I said. “When I went up to Looks Far’s home with them on Sunday, Joseph saw it all somehow.”
I was turning to him to question him further about his “bird’s eye view” of that meeting, but Shannon sat back with a whuff. “Well, okay. I’ll play along with both of you for now. What are you going to do, Naomi? Give up your loft? Come and live with me?” She raised a single eyebrow.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You won’t have to clean out your guest room for any homeless lawyers. I’ve got enough in savings to support me for about a year. That should give me enough time to set myself up in a private mediation practice. I’ve been getting some high-profile cases lately, but court-ordered mediation has always been my bread-and-butter, and I can still do that without running into any conflicts with the firm. I’ll need to rent an office somewhere, but I plan to get one of those places where you share a receptionist and stuff with other businesses as part of the rent. And I’ll need new business cards,” I began thinking aloud. “And stationery. And I need to call a bunch of people.”
“You’re serious about this,” she said. “You’re really going to go out on your own.”
“It’s the only way I can be true to myself,” I told her. “I’ll need your advice on some of the practical stuff.”
“Of course,” she said. “I’ll help any way I can – you know that.”
“And this way,” I said, “I’ll be free to help Looks Far keep his home.”
Joseph sat back with satisfaction. “I told you you would find a way to do the right thing, didn’t I?”
I offered Joseph a ride home, and he accepted – although if I’d known how long the drive would be, I might have offered to call him a cab instead. He directed me out Peña Boulevard, to a double-wide
in the middle of undeveloped land not far from DIA.
“This will all be subdivided soon, I suppose,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll probably have to move then. But right now, it’s perfect. Lots of rambling room. And see that thin column of smoke over there?” He leaned toward me, pointing northwest with his right arm. I barely made out a wisp of something, rising from the mountain slope. “That’s Grandfather’s place. I can keep an eye on him from here.”
I turned toward him to make a comment, and realized our faces were alarmingly close; my head was nearly on his shoulder. Stifling a gasp, I put my hands firmly back on the wheel to steady myself. “Look,” I said, “I enjoy a good mystery as much as anybody, but would you mind explaining a few of your cryptic comments to me?”
He seemed genuinely baffled. “Which comments do you mean?”
“Oh, you know,” I said. “How you saw the confrontation between Durant and your grandfather. How you know Brock is evil. Stuff like that.”
He was baffled still. “I explained it to you already.”
“Then I missed something. Start over, from the top, if you don’t mind.” I wasn’t pushing yet, but I was pretty darned close.
“It’s too cold out here,” he said. “Please come in. I’ll make tea and we can talk as long as you like.”
His offer was delivered courteously, but he hadn’t sat back, and the bit of amber in the depths of his eyes put me on my guard. “As much as I’d like to get to the bottom of this tonight, I’m going to have to take a raincheck,” I said. “I’m exhausted. And I have a big day at work tomorrow.”
He bowed his head in a surprisingly courtly manner. “Tomorrow, then. After you’ve delivered your news to your boss. I’ll meet you at the Greek amphitheater downtown at four o’clock.”
“Okay,” I said. “Four o’clock tomorrow. Well….” The cheerful “have a good night” I meant to say stuck in my throat.
He raised his hand to my cheek. Then he leaned closer and kissed my forehead. The amber was gone; his eyes were their normal blue again. Then he got out of the car and went in.
I forced myself to put my ambivalence about Joseph, and everything connected with him, on the back burner, in order to concentrate on polishing my resignation letter. I was clearly on firm ground with that, at least.
Bright and early the next morning, I went to Perry’s office, two floors above mine, and handed him the sealed envelope. While he read it, I sat upright (but not stiffly, I thought) in his guest chair and took one last look around his office: the leather sofa, the teak desk, the framed pictures of him with various politicians, the certificate with the U.S. Department of Justice seal that was signed by all the people he had worked with there. He had worked hard, I knew, to get all of these trappings of the law firm version of the good life.
I believed Joseph was right; Perry had once been a “good guy” – a young, idealistic attorney – and I thought about everything he’d had to go through to get where he sat now. And I knew that, while I was capable of doing it all, too, it would be a huge mistake for me.
Perry looked up at me, above his reading glasses, and said, “Well. We’ll miss you, Naomi. You’ve been a valuable part of the firm for the past several years.”
“Thank you, Perry,” I said.
“I thought we might have been able to mainstream you back into the traditional practice this coming year,” he went on. “I brought you on board the Durant team as the first step.”
I blinked. “I thought the firm was committed to building mediation as a separate practice group.”
“Well,” he said as he removed his glasses and sat back in his amply-padded leather desk chair, “as I’m sure you recall, the management committee agreed to give it a try. But it hasn’t turned into the profit center we were hoping for. Court-appointed mediation doesn’t generate much in the way of revenue, and the interest among our other clients just hasn’t built as quickly as we would like.”
My gut clenched, as about a thousand arguments fought to get me to give voice to them. But they all boiled down to two points: 1) from the start, my mediation practice was supposed to be a service, not a profit center; and 2) the firm’s marketing of my practice to our clients had always been desultory at best.
Now that Perry held my letter in his hands, neither point mattered any more. Except that I wanted to be clear on one thing. “I assume that if I had not agreed to be mainstreamed into a traditional practice this coming year,” I said, “my future here at the firm would have been short.”
He held both hands palm-up and shrugged. “It’s not that we don’t value your work, Naomi,” he said. “You’re smart and dedicated, you have an incisive mind, and the clients love you. And it’s not that your mediation work has been bad for the firm.”
“It’s just not generating any revenue,” I said. “I understand, Perry.” I stood. “Normally I’d give at least two weeks’ notice. But the end of the fiscal year is coming up, and all of my matters are on hiatus right now because of the holidays. I assume the firm would have no objection to my taking the court-appointed matters with me when I leave?”
“We have no objection,” he said.
“So I would like for my last day to be next Monday, December 31st.”
He nodded. “That’s fine.” He stood and shook hands with me, then walked me to his door.
“Just out of curiosity, Perry,” I said, “how long had you intended to keep the mediation practice going?”
He had the grace to look away before he replied. “Until next Monday.”
“I see,” I said. “Thank you.”
I saw no reason to delay cleaning out my office. I delivered the news to Tess, who gave me a big hug and told me she would miss me. Then, on the theory that activity was better than banging my head against the wall, I began sorting through my desk drawers and putting stuff in boxes. I was in the process of filling the third box when Brock walked in.
“I heard through the grapevine that you’re leaving,” he said.
“News travels fast,” I said, not looking up.
“I wanted to thank you,” he said.
“For what? For not broadcasting to the whole firm the compromising position I found you in on Monday?”
“For…that, yes,” he said. “And for everything else. I’ve grown so much, as a lawyer and as a person, from knowing you.”
I stopped for a moment and regarded him. I looked in vain for a hint of the taint of evil that both Joseph and Shannon had seen in him, but I just didn’t have the receptors built in. To me, Brock still looked devastatingly handsome – and, if not sincere, then at least making a good show of it.
“Thanks, Brock,” I said. “I’ve learned a lot from you, too.” I was being kind, not sarcastic – I swear it.
But then his next comment showed his true colors. “I hope your decision to leave didn’t have anything to do with me,” he said.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “No, it didn’t. I’m not quite sure how to break this to you, but the sun does not yet rise and fall on your behalf.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said. He was starting to get angry. “What I was going to say was that you don’t have to leave the firm to avoid running into me. I’m leaving, too.”
“Oh?” I asked. “Where are you going?”
“I’m taking a job with Durant Development’s office of general counsel,” he said.
“Interesting choice,” I murmured. Then I said, “What made you decide to go there?”
“They’re a subsidiary of a nationwide corporation,” he told me, warming to his subject, “with its fingers in a lot of pies. Not just commercial real estate, but agribusiness, energy development – they’re even buying up Internet technology firms. Durant’s business is a very small part of what they do,” he went on, “but it gives me a foot in the door. I’ll be making real money much sooner than if I stayed here, hoping to make partner. And it gives me a way out of this cow town, once and for all.”
> I made my next comment deceptively mild. “And it doesn’t bother you that you’ll be working for a soulless corporation that regards human beings as nothing but obstacles?”
“What are you talking about?” he frowned, and then daylight dawned. “Oh, those Indians. You know, Naomi, you’ve always had a do-gooder streak, and I’ve never understood it. First it was that part-time job with Legal Aid when we were in law school, and then it was your insistence that the firm set up a special practice for you so you could help deadbeat employees and supposedly abused wives. You’ll never make any money that way. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
Had he truly understood so little about me? “I didn’t get into law to make a ton of money, Brock. I got into it to help people. I thought you knew that.”
“But everybody says that, their first year in law school. I didn’t think you actually meant it.”
I shrugged. “Surprise.”
He shook his head. “Whatever possessed me to propose to you?”
And just like that, I knew. Or rather, the elephant in the room became unmistakably visible. “Why don’t you just ask me to marry you already?”
I felt like whacking my head against the nearest solid object. It was me, Brock. I possessed you to propose.
Another conversation that it’s too late for me to have.
“Well,” I said, smiling brightly to cover my dismay, “I hope you enjoy your new job, working for a scumbag.”
“Good luck to you in your future life on the street,” he returned, with an equally bright smile.
I didn’t slam the door behind him, although I wanted to. I did close it, though. Then I sat in my desk chair and buried my head in my arms on the desktop for a while. I was an emotional wreck, and it wasn’t even noon yet.
I spent the afternoon emailing clients to let them know of my departure and organizing my files. By 3:30 p.m., I was done. I shut down my computer and told Tess I was leaving for the day. Then I headed out of the building for a walk. I hoped the exercise would clear my head. I was pretty sure nothing would get the bad taste of this day out of my mouth.
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