Household Gods

by Judith Tarr

  “Good day,” Nicole said, and fought an urge to giggle. His slightly old-fashioned style had infected her. It was appealing, really. Even though, as a confirmed governmental cynic, she wasn’t sure he really would do as he promised, or do it in any kind of timely fashion, she still felt good about the call. Finally she was doing something about a long and frustrating problem.

  She went back to her analysis with a lighter heart, and a sense that she should have done this a long time ago. There were legal mechanisms in place here, and they would work in her favor, even if they took a while. She wouldn’t have to beard an Emperor in his den, and then rely on his goodwill, to get what was rightfully hers.

  The calls from well-wishers had tapered off, but they still kept coming. Her patience was wearing thin by the time Frank added himself to the list. Obviously he hadn’t heard from Herschel Falk, or he’d have been screaming in her ear. The good Mr. Falk must have been operating in lawyer time when he promised to call this afternoon. No doubt he meant some afternoon this week, or possibly some afternoon this month.

  Then, at about a quarter to four, Cyndi rang in to report, “I have your ex-husband on the line, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.” Her tone had a slight hint of question, and an edge of warning.

  Nicole smiled and shoved the environmental impact report to one side. “Really? Good, then, I’ll talk with him.” She waited for the small click that meant the secretary had transferred the incoming call, then spoke in her sweetest, most reasonable tones: “Hello, Frank.”

  “Nicole!” Frank sounded neither sweet nor reasonable. “What the hell are you doing? I just got off the phone with this crazy bastard from the DA’s office, and he says — “

  “What am I doing?” Nicole broke in. “I’m doing what I’m legally entitled to do, and what I should have done the first time you missed a payment. You’re violating a court order, Frank. It’s just as much against the law as knocking over a liquor store.”

  “Oh, give me a break,” her ex snarled.

  “I’ve given you too many breaks already,” Nicole snapped. “So many breaks that I’m broke. I need the money you owe me. If you pay up, Mr. Falk goes away. If you don’t, he goes after your assets. I can tell him — I will tell him — where a lot of those are, and I’m sure he can find any I’m not aware of. People in the District Attorney’s office have all sorts of interesting connections, and their software is getting better all the time.”

  She didn’t know how true that last was, but it certainly rattled Frank’s cage. He howled a suggestion that sounded a lot like Falk’s last name. Then he calmed down a bit, or at least got his voice under control. “That bastard says I owe you some ridiculous amount. I may have missed once or twice, but — “

  “Shall I e-mail you the dates of all the checks you missed?” Nicole asked sweetly. “You can add them all up and figure the interest due on each one. If your number doesn’t match the one Mr. Falk gave you, I’m sure he’ll be happy to discuss the discrepancy.”

  Glum silence on the other end of the line. At length, Frank said, “I find Woodcrest for you, I pay for the first month, and you go and do this to me. Thanks a hell of a lot, Nicole.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “You can take that off the total; fair’s fair. Now, suppose you tell me when I can expect the rest. If it’s later than Thursday, I expect you’ll be hearing from Mr. Falk again.”

  “Thursday!” he howled. “Do you have any idea how much money that bastard says I owe?”

  Just about enough for a nice vacation in Cancun, and a couple of payments on the Acura, Nicole thought. She elected not to say it. “I’m sure Mr. Falk will be pleased to discuss the matter with you,” she said.

  “He can talk to my lawyer,” Frank snarled.

  “That’s perfectly all right with me,” Nicole said equably. “You can pay me, or you can pay me and your lawyer both. I’m sure you can figure out which one is cheaper.”

  “Bitch.”

  “Thank you. Remember — Thursday. Send it here to the office, so I can get to the bank on the way home. Now that the kids are at Woodcrest, that will be a lot easier,” Nicole said.

  Frank had to be on his cell phone. There was no satisfying slam of receiver into cradle. Just a prissy little click. Nicole threw back her head and laughed. Oh, that had felt wonderful! And the beauty of it was, he would pay. She was as sure of that as of sunrise tomorrow. Sunrise in West Hills, what was more — not in Carnuntum.

  Cyndi popped her head into the office, wide-eyed and reminding Nicole vividly, just in that moment, of Julia. “What’s so funny, Ms. Gunther-Perrin?”

  “Not funny, really,” Nicole said. “But you know what?” She waited for Cyndi to shake her head. “This is a pretty good place.”

  “What, the office?” Cyndi sounded amazed. But then, Cyndi had no idea how much she automatically accepted as the physical and mental furnishings of her place and time. Nobody did. Nicole certainly hadn’t, not till she got her nose rubbed in it.

  She leaned back in the comfortable padded chair, glanced at the computer screen and the color photos of her children next to it, and took a long breath of clean, odor-free, air-conditioned air. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “It really isn’t.”

  Nicole started to wonder about that as she pulled into Woodcrest’s godawful excuse for a parking lot. If Kimberley and Justin had turned out to have a difficult day, she’d be back to square one again. But this time, for absolute certain, she wouldn’t be whining to any gods or goddesses. She had every intention of staying right where she was.

  The preschool building was much better than its parking lot, though it had a tired, end-of-the-day feel to it. Kimberley let out a squeal and did her best to tackle her mother. Justin was right behind her. Nicole braced automatically and took the brunt of the double blow, and smiled down at them. They smiled back. From the look of those smiles, they’d had a good day.

  Kimberley got hold of her hand and dragged her toward the four-year-olds’ cubbyholes. “Mommy, come here! Look at the picture I made!”

  A heavy weight of worry dropped from Nicole’s shoulders. It was all right; the kids were happy. As she initialed the sign-out sheet, Miss Irma appeared from the depths of the room to say, “Kimberley was a very bright, well-behaved girl today. I think we’ll enjoy having her here.”

  Justin hadn’t tried too hard to tear the place apart or burn it down, either, from Miss Dolores’ account of his day. For a two-year-old, that was moderately high praise. Nicole left Woodcrest in a warm glow. She’d forgotten how good that felt — and how good it felt to feel good.

  Getting home was dead easy, once Nicole escaped that miserable parking lot. Small price to pay, she thought as she did her best to keep her car from getting clipped coming out. If this was the worst she had to do to keep the kids happy, she’d take it.

  “We had tacos for lunch today,” Kimberley informed her. “Chicken tomorrow, and hotdogs the day after. That’s what Miss Irma said.” If Miss Irma said it, Nicole gathered, it must have come down from Mt. Sinai with Moses.

  “Hogs!” Justin agreed gleefully. He couldn’t say hotdogs very well yet, but he loved to eat them.

  Too much fat, Nicole thought automatically. She couldn’t get as exercised about it as she used to. It was food — something she’d learned to appreciate, deeply, when she hadn’t had enough of it.

  Dinner went as well as dinner could with a pair of rambunctious kids who were tired from a long and exciting day. When she’d got them both bathed and put to bed — so clean and sweet-smelling, and no nits to pick, not even one — she did a little work with reference books and notepad. Then, yawning, she put herself to bed. Just as she turned out the light, she slid a glance at Liber and Libera on their plaque. “It was a good day,” she said. “It was a very good day.”

  She slid back into the routine of her late-twentieth-century life almost as easily as if she had in fact been away for only a week. Everyone’s assumption that she’d been away only that long helped
a lot; if she slipped up, they attributed it to her illness, and brushed it off.

  She didn’t slip up much, at that. Old habits died hard. Her life in Carnuntum began to fade, to seem more distant than it actually was, like an intense and vividly memorable dream.

  On Wednesday morning, she went to see Dr. Marcia Feldman. The doctor wasn’t any happier to see her than she’d been before, or any happier to report, “By all the tests, Ms. Gunther-Perrin, you’re still perfectly normal.” Her eyes on Nicole were accusing, as if she suspected there was something Nicole wasn’t telling.

  Nicole wasn’t about to tell it, either. No matter how tempted she might be to share her experience with someone, this meticulous medical scientist was not the person she’d have chosen. She fit her response to one of the things Dr. Feldman must be wondering. “No, I didn’t take any drugs you couldn’t detect. I don’t do that kind of thing.”

  “Everything I was able to learn about you from your coworkers and your ex-husband makes me believe that,” the neurologist said, “but it leaves what did happen a mystery. I don’t like mysteries, unless I’m reading one.” That was meant to be a light touch, but it fell flat. She shrugged. “Under the circumstances, I don’t know what I can say, except that I hope it doesn’t happen again. Everything’s been all right since you went home?”

  “Everything’s been fine,” Nicole answered truthfully.

  “All right.” Dr. Feldman sighed. “In that case, all I can do is give you a clean bill of health and tell you I do not know whether it will last and how long it will last. Just that, for this moment, you are as healthy and normal a specimen as I could hope to see.”

  “Thank you,” Nicole murmured, quashing the small jab of guilt. The truth would upset this good doctor a whole lot more than her current uncertainty. Nicole had to remember that.

  “Good luck,” the doctor said at last. “That’s not very scientific, I know, but it’s the best I can do for you.”

  “It’s good enough,” Nicole said. “Thank you, Dr. Feldman. Really. You did your best for me; I do appreciate that.”

  Dr. Feldman didn’t look exactly pleased, but she had the grace to see Nicole out, and to shake her hand at the door of the waiting room. Feeling oddly as if she’d been given a blessing at the church door, the kind of thing a priest did to equip a parishioner with some small defense against the big bad world, Nicole made her way back to the office.

  Cyndi was at her desk, trying hard to look busy. She raised a questioning eyebrow as Nicole came in. Nicole gave her a thumbs-up. Cyndi silently clapped her hands. Nicole grinned and sailed past her, and tackled that analysis. She’d hit her stride there. No matter what Sheldon Rosenthal had done to her, she was going to give him the best piece of work she could. She had her pride, after all. And if she wanted to show him up just a bit, well, who could blame her?

  Thursday was D-Day: the deadline for Frank to pay up. Nicole twitched all morning and all through lunch. By mid-afternoon she’d made the sanity-saving decision to call Herschel Falk first thing in the morning and find out what, if anything, was happening.

  But late that afternoon, a little before she had to pack up her work for the day and head out to fetch the kids, a FedEx deliverywoman set a cardboard envelope on Cyndi’s desk. Nicole resisted the urge to leap out and grab it. Properly, as an attorney should, she waited for Cyndi to bring it in to her for signature and release. Only after both secretary and FedEx driver were gone did she rip open the envelope.

  Inside she found a certified check, a receipt for her to sign and return, and a note. I’ve taken out the cost of the microwave along with the first month at Woodcrest, Frank had written. If you don’t like it, call the damn DA.

  Nicole grinned like a tiger, and called Falk — but not to complain about that. It wasn’t too unreasonable, considering. “Good,” the attorney said when she thanked him. “I wish they were all that easy. Most people these days don’t have any respect for anything, let alone law or authority.”

  “I thought my ex would,” Nicole said. She turned the check over in her fingers. It wasn’t enough to get her all the way out of the hole, but it would help quite a bit. “Now, if he just keeps up from here on in, I’ll be in fairly decent shape.”

  “If he doesn’t,” Herschel Falk said, “you know where to call.”

  “You bet I do,” Nicole said. It wasn’t going to be or stay easy, particularly if Frank got hardened to hearing from the District Attorney’s office if he got behind in his payments. But it wouldn’t be easy for him, either, if he got slack. With luck, he’d be smart enough to figure that out for himself. Without it, she’d remind him — as forcibly, and as often, as necessary.

  Nicole finished the analysis Friday afternoon, saved it and printed it and checked it over before she took it upstairs to Rosenthal’s office. That would gain her points: turning it in early.

  But as she read it through, prepared for the flush of achievement and the satisfaction of a job well done, her mood crashed into the barrier of the first paragraph. It was written in lawyerese. Eye-glazing, brain-numbing lawyerese. Half of it was deliberate obfuscation, which was part of the game. The rest could have read a lot better, too.

  She hadn’t written her petition to Marcus Aurelius in lawyerese. Chiefly because she didn’t know the exact formulations of Roman law, but also because she wanted to be as clear as possible. She’d wanted him to understand exactly what had happened to her and why she was demanding restitution.

  What was it Tony Gallagher had said, just after he hit on her? She wasn’t cooperative enough — by which he meant that she hadn’t been obliging enough to come across for him. But maybe he’d been trying to tell her something more, something important.

  She reached for the phone and punched up Gary Ogarkov’s extension. “Gary,” she said when he picked up, “I’ve got an analysis here that I need to give to Mr. Rosenthal on Monday. Any way you could help punch it up so it reads better?”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said with every appearance of willingness. “If I can’t do it all now, I’ll take it home and do it over the weekend.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Nicole said. She tapped a finger on her desk as she pondered what he’d said, and what he’d left unsaid. He was still feeling bad about the way things had gone. If he wanted to atone for it this way — why not? As long as he didn’t try to lay another guilt trip on her.

  By the time she came out of her meditation, she was listening to a dial tone, and Gary Ogarkov was saying hello to Cyndi at her desk outside the office. He breezed in just after Nicole had dropped the receiver into the cradle, all ready and set to go. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  Nicole handed him the analysis. He skimmed it, then slowly nodded.

  “It’s not bad at all — I didn’t think it would be. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll break up these sentences here, and here. There’s some passives I can turn into actives, and shorten up some of these fancy jawbreakers you’ve got here — see? Not too hard, is it?”

  Nicole shook her head ruefully. “Not hard at all, if you paid any attention in English class.” Or if I’d stopped to notice what I was doing with my Latin, either.

  “English class is a good thing to pay attention to,” Gary said.

  Nicole didn’t argue with that, but neither was she going to let him take control. “I don’t want the meaning changed,” she said. “Just the way it’s written.”

  “Of course,” he said cheerfully. “But you win a cigar if you can tell me how utilize is different from use.”

  “It’s longer,” she said. “And cigars are gross.”

  “Unlike some other things,” Gary said, “when it comes to readable prose, longer is not necessarily better.” He grinned at Nicole’s foreboding expression, and pulled a pen out of his pocket. “How about I get started? I edit better on paper. I’ll pass you each sheet as I get done with it, and you can key the changes into the computer. If you don’t like em, just leav
e ‘em off.”

  Nicole nodded and, after a slight pause, thanked him. He didn’t notice. He was running down through the first page — scribble here, slash there, swirl and jot and flip, on to the next page. When the complete page flew her way, it looked like one of her freshman English professor’s slash-and-burn specials. But she had to admit, as she typed it in, that it read a whole lot better and more clearly than the original version.

  They finished a few minutes after five. As Nicole was making the last revisions and deletions, Ogarkov said, “This is a hell of a piece of work, by the way. I should have said that sooner. If it doesn’t knock Mr. Rosenthal’s socks off — “

  “Then it doesn’t, that’s all,” Nicole said calmly. “But I didn’t do it for him. I did it for me. You know what I mean? And you helped make it better. I appreciate it.”

  “Hey, no problem,” he said. “Any time.” He saluted her as she typed in the last couple of sentences, scanned them, then set them to print. “Good luck,” he said, “and have a great weekend.”

  “You, too, “ Nicole said sincerely.

  Then he was gone. Cyndi had left just as the printer started. The rest of the office was emptying with Friday quickness. Nicole tapped her foot, starting to lose patience with the printer’s deliberate speed. At last, however, it was done, slapped into a folder, and ready to take upstairs.

  As she’d expected, Sheldon Rosenthal’s secretary was still there, clacking away at that antique of a correcting Selectric. Nicole could just barely remember when it had been state of the art. She could also remember when state of the art had been a reed pen and a sheet of papyrus.

  “Good evening, Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” Lucinda said in her cool, genteel voice. “What can I do for you?”

  “I finished the analysis Mr. Rosenthal asked for,” Nicole said, setting the folder on the secretary’s desk.

  Lucinda’s expression didn’t change in the slightest. “He’s with a client right now,” she said. “I will see that he gets it.” That part of her duty done, she went back to her typing. Salaried attorneys got efficiency, no more. Cordiality, she reserved for partners and clients.