One-Way Ticket

by William G. Tapply

  “They’re, um, actually from Judge Lancaster,” I said. “From her garden. She’s got an amazing rose garden.”

  Evie’s hands slid down to my hips, and she leaned back from me in a way that pressed the lower halves of our bodies together. She cocked her head and grinned at me. “You would have brought me flowers, though, wouldn’t you?”

  I nodded. “Sure. Of course. I am, after all, the sweetest man.”

  “Because I’ve been depressed and grouchy.”

  “There’s always a reason why people are grouchy,” I said. “Nobody wants to be grouchy and depressed.”

  “And you’ve had to put up with me.”

  “It requires no effort to put up with you,” I said.

  Both Evie and I, for our own reasons, agreed that we needed to get away from the house and the city and the telephone, so that afternoon we put Henry in the car and drove out to Bolton Flats in Harvard. The Flats are many hundreds of acres of fields and woods bordered along one side by the Still River. The Commonwealth has set this acreage aside for pheasant hunting. For six weeks in the fall they stock it with pen-raised birds, and hunters with shotguns and English setters swarm the place hoping to shoot some of them. For the rest of the year, it’s pretty much abandoned.

  Bolton Flats is one of the Commonwealth’s so-called Wildlife Management Areas, a deliciously ironic euphemism for a place where the wildlife are born and raised in chicken-wire pens and their so-called management involves men and women wearing blaze orange vests trying to kill them.

  Evie and I held hands and walked along the rutted roadways, inhaling the country air of a perfect June afternoon, and since it was not October or November, we had the whole place to ourselves. Henry’s bird-hunting genes kicked in the minute he leaped out of the car, and he snarfed and snuffled the thick corners where, according to the ancient wisdom imbedded in his DNA, he suspected a pheasant might be hiding. He found no pheasants, but he did point a mourning dove, flush dozens of warblers and red-winged blackbirds, and chase some squirrels.

  By the time we’d completed a big circle and made our way back to the car, Henry was panting and mud-soaked and smiling, and Evie and I had that healthy stretched-out feeling in our legs.

  On the way home, we listened to NPR and picked up some takeout pad thai and hot-and-sour soup at a Thai place in Lexington.

  When we got home, I checked the answering machine. No message from Robert Lancaster, or Dalt or the Judge, either. Okay by me. They knew how to reach me if they needed me. If they didn’t try to reach me, it meant they didn’t think they needed me. They probably didn’t. I’d given the three of them all the advice I had.

  We warmed our soup and pad thai in the microwave and took it out onto the patio with bottles of Long Trail ale.

  When we were done eating, Evie took the dishes into the house. She was gone for a long time. When she came back, her eyes looked puffy. I wondered if she’d been crying again.

  She came over, sat on my lap, and snuggled against me.

  “Did you talk to Ed?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “Any news?”

  She shook her head. “He sounded… brave. He tried to cheer me up. It was scary. It’s like he’s resigned, like he expects to die, like he’s trying to… to prepare me for it. They’ve got tests they want to do. It sounds to me like they want to do exploratory surgery, although they didn’t tell him that. He doesn’t really know anything. Nobody’s telling him anything. Just the usual platitudes and evasions. He expects them to tell him that he’s going to die.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  I felt her shake her head against my chest. “I don’t know. What he’s doing, I guess. Wait and see. I can’t think of anything else.”

  “Bring him to Boston,” I said. “Best hospitals, best labs, best doctors in the world. You know people. Pull some strings. He could stay with us.”

  Evie was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “He’d never do that.”

  We spent Sunday morning drinking coffee, eating donuts, and swapping sections of the Globe. In the afternoon we watched the Sox beat the Yankees. When the game was over, I grilled some chicken and cut it up into a big salad with Bibb lettuce and black olives and red peppers and avocado and sliced shiitake mushrooms with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing. We ate on the picnic table with a bottle of Chardonnay and a warm baguette of French bread. Henry took up an alert position at the end of the table where he could keep an eye on both of us in case we decided to sneak a morsel to him, which, of course, we both did. Henry loved grilled chicken, but he didn’t sneer at olives or mushrooms, either.

  After we ate, Evie went in and called her father again. She was dry-eyed when she came back out. She said he sounded about the same. There was no news.

  I’d had no news from Dalton or Robert or Adrienne Lancaster, either, and I managed to remain dry-eyed about it.

  I spent a frustrating Monday in the Concord district court. Judge Kolb was in one of his notorious crappy moods, so instead of okaying the divorce settlement that Barbara Cooper and I had spent three months hammering out for our respective clients, he sent us out to the lobby to rework our alimony and child-support calculations relative to our property-settlement calculations. Most judges rubber-stamped whatever the adversarial lawyers managed to agree upon. Not Judge Otto Kolb. He thought he knew more and was wiser than any lawyer, which is usually a slippery slope for a judge. But Kolb had been on the bench for almost thirty years, and he showed no signs of slipping down any slopes. He dismissed all criticism, debate, and doubt with Machiavelli’s prescription for the prince: “It is better to be feared than loved.”

  Nobody loved Judge Kolb:

  After supper that evening, Evie kissed my cheek and said she was going to take a hot bath and go to bed, maybe read for a while and try to get some sleep for a change. I asked her if she wanted me to wash her back, and she said No thanks, which was disappointing on several levels.

  So I spent the evening nursing a bottle of beer and catching up on my e-mail and trying to imagine how Evie would handle it if—when—her father died. It was strictly selfish thinking. I was really wondering how our relationship would handle it.

  I watched the eleven o’clock news, then let Henry out, put together the coffee for the morning, and let Henry back in. Then he and I went upstairs. He slipped into the bedroom and curled up on the rug at the foot of the bed. I undressed in the bathroom, brushed my teeth, padded barefoot into the bedroom, and slid in between the sheets next to Evie.

  I lay there on my back staring up at the ceiling. I thought about Judge Adrienne Lancaster. I wondered what she planned to do with the unsettling information I’d given her on Saturday.

  Beside me, Evie murmured something, rolled onto her side, flopped her arm across my chest, and hooked her leg over my hip. She was wearing her usual sleeping outfit—one of my T-shirts. When she stood up, it would hang down over her hips. Now it had ridden up to her waist. She wiggled herself against me. Her hair smelled soapy.

  She moved her pelvis against my hip. The palm of her hand began sliding down over my belly.

  “Honey,” I whispered, “are you awake?”

  “Mm,” she said. “You’re here.”

  “I certainly am.”

  She wiggled herself against me. “My big guy.”

  “Right now I guess I am.”

  Her hand continued its travels. “Umm,” she said. “My goodness. So you are. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Me, too.”

  She moved her face close to mine. Her tongue made a wet circle on the side of my throat. “Show me,” she said.

  When my eyes popped open, the night was purple-black outside the bedroom window. The illuminated face of the digital clock on the table beside the bed read 3:52.

  It took me a minute to realize that Evie was not beside me. Nor was Henry snoozing on his dog bed.

  Then I became aware of muffled voices echoing from somewhere in the house. I slid out o
f bed, pulled on my boxers and a T-shirt, and padded downstairs.

  I followed the voices into the living room. The only light came from the television, which was playing some old black-and-white movie. The sound was turned so low I couldn’t understand what the actors were saying.

  Evie was sitting sideways in the corner of the sofa hugging her legs. Her chin was propped up on her knees, and her T-shirt was bunched up around her hips. She held a half-smoked cigarette in her fingers. The smoke twisted up in the flickering blue television light.

  Henry was curled up on the floor in front of the sofa. He looked up at me without lifting his head.

  It took Evie a minute to realize I was standing there. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  “Can I get you something?”

  “Like what?”

  “Glass of milk? Shot of bourbon? Aspirin?”

  “No, thank you. Nothing. I’m all set.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “Go back to bed.”

  “I’ll stay with you if you like.”

  “No,” she said. “Please.” She returned her gaze to the television.

  I nodded and went back upstairs.

  Eight

  TUESDAY MORNING I MET with clients, and I spent the afternoon doing what lawyers mainly do, except on television, where they’re either arguing life-and-death cases in front of packed courtrooms or drinking martinis and eating braised squab with mayors and senators and mobsters in the most expensive restaurants in the city: I caught up on my paperwork.

  We lawyers do spend a lot of time on the phone and at conference tables—and occasionally even in courtrooms—blustering, arguing, threatening, pontificating, and cajoling. But what really counts in the law business is what we write. Behind every rich lawyer is a clerk or a junior partner who loves research and knows how to write.

  In my little one-lawyer office, it was just Julie and I.

  So after lunch I set a big mug of coffee on the corner of my desk blotter, draped my suit jacket over the back of my chair, loosened my necktie, rolled my shirt cuffs up to my elbows, and slogged through the big pile of papers that Julie insisted she had to get faxed or mailed first thing the next morning at the latest.

  There were a few checks to sign and some boilerplate documents that required only my signature, but mostly they were drafts of briefs, and letters to clients and to other lawyers, and motions for submission to courts, in which every word and mark of punctuation and paragraph break could determine who won and who lost, and would be scrutinized for slipups and loopholes by their recipients, and therefore needed to be scrutinized by me.

  I wrote the rough drafts. Julie double-checked the citations, plugged in the footnotes, polished the prose, and attended to all the small but crucial details that make the difference between clarity and confusion. Julie knew her commas. You couldn’t get a dangling modifier past her, and she was a master of the gerund. She was a semicolon expert and a conjunction wizard, and she was world-class when it came to prepositions and participial phrases. If Julie put a document on my desk, I knew it was already perfect.

  But the name that appeared at the top and got signed at the bottom was mine, and anyway, Julie would quit on the spot if she thought I didn’t parse her compositions as carefully as she had composed them. So I did. I contemplated her colons and pondered her pronouns.

  It was boring. It was painful. It was how I spent a large percentage of my professional life. By comparison, having three months’ worth of hard negotiations negated by one of Judge Otto Kolb’s quick sneers was fun.

  A little after four o’clock, my telephone console buzzed. I picked up the phone and hit the button, and Julie said, “How’s it going?”

  “Great,” I said. “Haven’t had so much fun since I slammed the car door on my fingers.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “Can you talk to Mr. Lancaster? He’s on line two.”

  “Got it,” I said. I hit the blinking button and said, “Dalt? What’s up? Everything all right?”

  “No,” he said. “Everything is not all right. We gotta talk.”

  “Sure. Okay. Fire away.”

  “Not on the phone. Can you come over?”

  “You at the restaurant?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be done here in about an hour,” I said, “I guess I can be there around five-thirty. How’s that?”

  “Good,” he said. “Thanks. See you then.”

  It took me about half an hour to walk from my office in Copley Square to Dalt’s restaurant, the Boston Scrod, in the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which was also called, for reasons I never understood, the Quincy Market. The Scrod was right around the corner from the venerable Durgin Park restaurant, famous for its platter-sized slabs of prime rib and its surly South Boston waitresses. Evie and I had eaten at the Scrod a few times, and we liked it. The restaurant on the second floor claimed that it served nothing but fresh catch-of-the-day seafood. The entire first floor was a three-sided horseshoe-shaped oyster bar. The Scrod was famous for its extensive oyster menu. Oysters from Nova Scotia and Maine, Long Island and Nantucket, British Columbia and Bristol Bay. Before I went there, I had no idea that oysters came in so many sizes, shapes, textures, and tastes. All, as my friend J. W. Jackson would say, were delish. You could also get an excellent Bloody Mary at the bar, as well as dozens of New England microbrewed beers and ales.

  The Scrod was popular with the locals, always a good sign. Dalt seemed to be doing a good job managing it.

  At five-thirty on this sunny Tuesday afternoon in June, the brick plaza outside the restaurant was, thronged with tourists from Iowa snapping digital photographs, businessfolk from the financial district just getting out of work, and street performers looking for handouts and applause. I weaved my way among them, went inside, climbed the stairs, and knocked on the door to Dalton Lancaster’s office.

  His muffled voice called, “Come on in,” so in I went.

  The door opened into a room that reminded me of my recent visit to Paulie Russo’s office in another restaurant, except Dalt’s was a little smaller than Russo’s, with more expensive furniture, and it was occupied only by Dalt Lancaster. Not a thug in sight.

  He was on the phone. When I closed the door behind me, he looked up, nodded quickly, and turned his head away. From where I stood inside the doorway, I couldn’t see the bruised and beaten side of Dalt’s face, the left side. I figured he’d turned away from me so that I couldn’t overhear what he was saying into the telephone. So I made a point of not listening.

  Dalt could’ve been renting his office by the week. Its only decoration was a large authentic-looking sepia-toned map hanging on the wall beside the desk. It showed colonial Boston back in the day when Back Bay was still under water. On one wall, a floor-to-ceiling window looked down on the Faneuil Hall plaza. A pair of oak file cabinets and a freestanding steel-and-glass bookcase stood against one wall. The shelves were packed with three-ring binders and stacks of manila folders and magazines. A few small framed photos were lined up on one of the shelves. The big desk and the chairs and the side table were steel and glass and black leather. A computer and a printer and a telephone console sat on the desk. The carpet was a red-and-blue Oriental. It was the office of a man who’d had many other offices, considered them workplaces, understood that all workplaces were temporary, and let somebody else furnish and decorate them.

  After a minute, Dalt mumbled something into the phone, hung up, turned, and smiled quickly at me, as if he hadn’t noticed me come in. “Brady,” he said. “Thanks for coming. Have a seat.”

  Now I saw that the left side of his face had turned a sickly greenish yellow. It was a week-old bruise, and it was the same color as Robert’s. Father and son with their matching black eyes.

  I pulled an armless leather chair up to Dalt’s desk and sat down. “How’s it feeling?” I touched my own left cheekbone.

  He waved his hand in the air, dismissing the importance of how he felt. He leaned forward and frowned at me. “
What the hell did you say to my mother?”

  “You invited me over here to yell at me?”

  He blew out a breath. “I’m sorry. I’m not yelling. I’m upset.”

  “You asked me to handle your problems,” I said, “so that’s what I did. You don’t have any right to be upset when I do what you ask me to do.”

  “Well,” he said, “whatever you did to handle my problems, my mother the judge is furious with me.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “What did you say about me?”

  “You?” I said. “I didn’t say anything about you. Your mother’s pretty sharp, you know. She didn’t need me to say anything. You understand what this is all about, don’t you?”

  “I do now,” he said. “She called me this morning, said that because of me she had to recuse herself from an important case—something involving the Russo family, I assume—and not only that, but instead of doing it quietly the way she normally would do something like that, she had to announce it at a press conference, which she did at three this afternoon, in time for the rush-hour news cycle. She said it was embarrassing and humiliating not to be able to give any reason or answer any questions, and she was holding me personally responsible, whatever that means. Probably cutting me out of her will, not that the old witch is ever going to die.”

  “What did you say to her?” I said.

  He spread his hands. “What could I say? That I had no idea why those goons beat me up? That I was innocent and misunderstood? That I was still her good little boy?”

  I smiled. “That’s all pretty much true, isn’t it?”

  “I told her I was sorry. One way or the other, it’s my fault, right?”

  “No man is an island,” I said.

  “You know, don’t you?”

  “Don’t push it,” I said. “Judge Lancaster did what she had to do, and you can’t blame her for not liking it. Now let’s hope that takes care of it.”