“Why are you dressed for a business meeting?” Roxy asked.
“So I can take you to church.”
Roxy had her back to him and was pouring a glass of water from a purifier on the counter beside the sink. She turned around.
“Church?”
“Yeah. We don’t have to be there for over an hour. Will that give you time to cool off and get ready?”
Roxy glanced at the clock on her microwave. It would be hard to turn him down after he showed up with fresh coffee and her favorite pastry.
“Okay, I guess.”
“We’re going to meet Noah and Julie. Do you want your coffee now?”
“Yes, and I’ll nibble the Danish.”
Roxy left Peter reading a local magazine and sipping coffee in her living room. He spent so much time in front of a computer screen that she knew he liked to occasionally hold reading material in his hands.
This sudden interest in church baffled her. Unlike Roxy, Peter’d had no prior contact with organized religion. His parents lived for golf and bridge, with an occasional Caribbean or Mediterranean cruise thrown in for variety.
After taking a shower, Roxy stood in the doorway of her closet and tried to decide what to wear. Buckhead was the heart of old money, aristocratic Atlanta. So even though Peter wasn’t wearing a coat and tie, she selected one of her nicer, conservative dresses. She walked downstairs to the living room.
“Wow,” Peter said. “You’re gorgeous.”
“Thanks.”
“But this isn’t the kind of church where you have to dress up like you’re going to a nice restaurant.”
“Oh. Do you think I’ll stick out if I wear this?”
“Yeah,” Peter replied. “I mean, you look fantastic, but—”
“No, I get it. I’ll switch to something else.”
Roxy trudged upstairs to her bedroom and took inventory of her wardrobe. It was not the kind of decision she’d expected to make on a Sunday morning. Finally she settled on a standby outfit of skinny jeans, ankle boots, and a deep red tunic.
“Perfect,” Peter said when he saw her. “You wear that a lot.”
Roxy stopped in her tracks. “Do I wear it too much?”
“No, it’s good, and we need to go.”
“Do I have time to warm up what’s left of my coffee?”
“Sure. I made a pot if you want to top it off with home brewed.”
They got into Peter’s car. Roxy placed the full cup of coffee in a holder and fastened her seat belt.
“Don’t drive like a maniac,” she said. “If I spill coffee or get a stain on my clothes, I can’t go.”
“When was the last time I drove like a maniac?”
“When we were late for our dinner date with your boss and his wife. You ran two red lights and almost hit a truck backing into a loading bay.”
“Okay,” Peter admitted as he pulled out of the parking space. “Although I think one of the lights was still yellow.”
They rode in silence for several blocks while Roxy sipped her coffee and nibbled on the pastry.
“How’s the coffee mix?” Peter asked when he carefully slowed for a light as it turned from yellow to red.
“We should have gone back to the shop for a refill.”
Roxy’s level of frustration at the unexpected disruption of her Sunday morning plans steadily increased. She stared out the window as they passed the most exclusive shopping districts in the city.
Peter turned into a side street for a parking deck between two office towers. They waited in a line of cars to enter the deck.
“There’s a church here?” Roxy asked.
“Yes, it meets in the lower level of the building to the left.”
“I didn’t see a sign or anything. Do they rent the space on Sunday?”
“Maybe. Like I said, it’s different from my idea of a church.”
“I don’t want to go to anything weird.”
“Noah’s a computer nerd like me. Does that make him weird?”
“Probably.”
“And Julie grew up in a little town in Alabama that sounds a lot like Alto.”
“Exciting,” Roxy said flatly.
A young man wearing a large orange vest with VOLUNTEER printed on it motioned for them to enter the deck. Roxy took a final sip of coffee as Peter pulled into a parking space.
“I hope this isn’t as boring as the motion calendar I sat through last week in federal court,” she said. “Our case was supposed to be called at ten thirty, and the judge didn’t reach it until one o’clock in the afternoon.”
She reached for the door handle. Peter didn’t turn off the motor.
“Do you want to leave?” he asked. “I’ll text Noah and tell him something came up.”
Roxy pressed her lips together tightly for a moment. “No. You want to do this, and I shouldn’t be a brat about it. I promise to put on my best Sunday morning church face and be as Southern nice as sweet tea to everyone I meet.”
Peter chuckled. “That will be interesting.”
As they joined the crowd leaving the parking deck, Roxy reached out for Peter’s hand. She took it and squeezed it.
“Is that part of being Southern nice?” he asked.
“Only to you.”
As Peter had promised, the people coming to the service were casually dressed. There were singles, young couples, families with small children, and a few older folks sprinkled in the mix like the first appearances of gray hair.
“There’s Noah,” Peter said.
When she saw him, Roxy remembered meeting him at Peter’s office Christmas party. He was shorter and heavier than Peter. His wife, Julie, was about the same age as Roxy and very pregnant. Peter introduced everyone.
“When is your baby due?” Roxy asked Julie.
“Four weeks. And this may be one of the last times I get out. I’m having twins, and my doctor will probably confine me to the house until I deliver.”
Roxy’s eyes widened. “Is everything okay?”
“Yes, but I wouldn’t want to miss the service this morning for anything.”
“Let’s go,” Noah said.
Peter glanced at Roxy and raised his eyebrows. She ignored him. They followed Noah and Julie into a large room where chairs were set up for four or five hundred people. Over half the seats were already taken. A band was gearing up to play.
“We like to sit close to the front,” Noah said to Peter. “Is that okay?”
“Sure,” Peter answered without consulting Roxy.
They followed Noah and Julie down a center aisle. Julie had the distinctive waddle of a seriously pregnant woman.
Roxy touched her own rock-hard abdomen and wondered if she would ever be the incubator for a baby. They stopped four rows from the front and sat down.
Peter leaned over to Roxy. “The other time I came we sat on the second row.”
“Thrilling.”
“Southern nice, don’t forget.”
There was a lot of hubbub in the room as people clustered in small groups to talk and laugh. It was a different atmosphere from her mother’s church in Alto, where little more than whispers preceded the service. The members of the band took their positions and began to play. Roxy sat down, but when everyone remained standing she got back up. The words to an unfamiliar song appeared on a screen. The congregation sang along with the band.
And Peter joined in on the chorus.
TWENTY-FIVE
Corbin spent Sunday morning at the office. Work was the only source of sporadic discipline and structure in his life, and he knew if he stayed home, he would end up sitting on the couch in the living room with a bottle in his hand, staring at the opposite wall. An alcohol-induced stupor had a certain level of attraction, but he couldn’t get the image of Mitchell Kilpatrick at the soccer match out of his mind.
Laying out the information obtained from the attorney general’s office, Corbin carefully went through each page, making notes on a legal pad. He wrote down the multisyllabic names of diffe
rent chemicals, cross-checked the list against the material safety data sheets from the Colfax plant, then logged onto the Internet to determine if there were any other verified or alleged health risks associated with each chemical. It was a tedious but necessary process.
Shortly before noon, he wrote down an herbicide with the tongue-twisting name of 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. A scholarly article popped up about pesticides and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Contained in the article was a reference to herbicides, including 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid. Known by its abbreviation, 2,4-D, it had been linked to a two- to eightfold increase in non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in studies conducted in Sweden, Kansas, Nebraska, and Canada. Corbin’s heart started beating faster. He tried to track down the studies mentioned in the article, but couldn’t access them because he wasn’t a subscriber to the sites where they appeared. At any rate, detailed analysis of the technical data would be a job for an expert witness who could explain everything to him.
“This could be it,” he muttered as he printed off several pages of information.
Reading other materials available to the public, he quickly found himself in the midst of a debate between scientists defending the use of 2,4-D as a broadleaf herbicide and those who cautioned against its environmental impact. Academic passions flared and he learned that 2,4-D was one of the primary ingredients in the herbicidal cocktail known as Agent Orange that was used during the Vietnam war to deforest jungle where the Vietcong liked to hide.
Corbin leaned back in his chair. If he could land a Vietnam vet on his jury, the man might add personal horror stories to the testimony brought out in the courtroom. Emotion could influence a jury’s deliberation as much as facts.
Corbin returned to his list of chemicals. It was midafternoon by the time he finished going through the information. The review left him with one major disappointment. The state EPA did not go after Colfax for its use of 2,4-D. Their complaint had to do with Dacthal and Endothall, two herbicides with a greater propensity to seep into groundwater than 2,4-D but with no known or alleged connection to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Dacthal, in large concentrations, could result in thyroid or liver problems, and Endothall seeping into well water could cause an upset stomach. One thing was clear. With unsurprising corporate arrogance, Colfax treated Rusk County as its own unregulated dumping ground.
Corbin was hungry. He’d been so engrossed in his work that he hadn’t taken a break for lunch. He locked up the office but didn’t know where to go. Dining options on a Sunday afternoon in Alto were limited.
Getting in his truck, he drove to a convenience store and bought a pack of crackers. He munched one as he passed the local mental health facility. In the parking lot he saw Max Hogan getting out of his car. Guessing there might be an AA meeting about to start, Corbin pulled into the lot.
“What did you think?” Peter asked Roxy as soon as the church service was over and people began moving out of their seats.
Roxy didn’t want to put a damper on Peter’s enthusiasm, but her mind had wandered while the young minister spoke about the Sermon on the Mount and contrasted Jesus’s perspective on morality with the view of the Pharisees. The message had been less stuffy than the preaching at her home church in Alto, though, and she could tell Peter had been listening intently.
“It was fine,” she replied.
“I’d heard of the Sermon on the Mount,” Peter said when they left the room and entered a large lobby near a bank of elevators. “But I thought it was just the Beatitudes. I didn’t know it filled several chapters of the gospel of Matthew.”
Hearing Peter talk about the Bible as if it was a book he was studying for a college class sounded odd to Roxy’s ears. They continued through the door that led to the parking deck.
“I didn’t know that either,” she said, “and I went to church a lot when I was growing up in Alto.”
“Why did you stop?”
Roxy started to give him a flippant answer, but the words didn’t come out of her mouth. They entered the elevator in the parking ramp, and Peter pushed the button for the level where they’d left the car.
“I’m not sure why I lost interest in religion,” she said thoughtfully. “It might have been my desire to leave behind everything I could from Alto. When I packed my car for college, I didn’t want to bring along anything that had made my life so painful.”
“And what you experienced in your home church fell into that category?”
“Not really.”
“Then why didn’t you pack God in your car when you left home?”
Roxy bit her lower lip and hesitated for a moment. Peter deserved an honest answer.
“Because I didn’t believe that God, if he existed, was interested in coming with me. Otherwise he would have answered my mother’s prayers for my father.”
Monday morning, Corbin thought about the AA meeting on his way to the office. Having been three times now, he was getting more familiar with the format of the gatherings, although each one was unique in its own way. The previous afternoon had been a speaker meeting, and a retired salesman who lived at Lake Lanier told the story of his struggle with alcoholism and subsequent four years of sobriety. It was a different verse of the same song played over and over in the Big Book, but for Corbin, hearing it from the lips of someone standing in front of him made it come alive. He thought there would be a time for questions and answers when the speaker finished, but the meeting ended abruptly, leaving Corbin wanting more.
“What brings you in so early?” he asked Janelle after he entered through the back door and poured a cup of freshly brewed coffee.
“I wanted to follow up first thing on the medical records we haven’t received in the Colfax case. Sometimes it’s easier to reach someone at the doctor’s office before they get busy.”
“I worked all day yesterday.” Corbin told her about his research.
“I’m not following you,” Janelle said when he finished. “Who believes this 2,4-D stuff causes cancer in little boys, and why didn’t the EPA in Atlanta go after that if it’s so dangerous?”
“The health risks are still a matter of debate among the scientists, and I didn’t find any link to kids.” Corbin stopped. “Which means I really don’t know what I’m talking about until I hire someone to explain it to me.”
“And who can lay it out to a jury made up of people who are as dumb as I am.”
“Give yourself credit for a few extra brain cells. Your instincts are usually right.”
“Including when I warned you against taking the Colfax case in the first place?”
“Except for that.” Corbin sipped his coffee. “By the end of today, I want to have a complaint ready to file. Keep tracking down medical records while I dictate a first draft.”
Ray was sitting in front of the computer in the corner of the bedroom checking the news when an e-mail popped up from Nate Stamper. Ray took a deep breath and clicked open an attached document. His heart rate picked up as a contract popped into view.
Employment agreements are often like stories that keep the reader in suspense until the very end. Ray waded through the expected boilerplate provisions about his obligation to perform his job duties to the best of his ability and a paragraph stating not to engage in any activity that might be in conflict with his work at the firm. There was a very detailed noncompete section. Courts and judges hate restraints against unfettered economic freedom, and Ray knew each sentence was the product of guidance handed down by appellate judges. He shook his head at a stipulation that the firm would own the rights to any legal works he wrote or published. Ray’s expertise was as a trial lawyer, and there wasn’t a market for anything he might put on paper.
The important sections didn’t begin until page eight. He slowed down to make sure he understood the firm’s health insurance options and how participation in the profit sharing plan worked for an associate attorney. Like Jacob in the Bible, he would have to wait seven years before he was fully vested and able to take all his profit sharin
g money with him if he left. Not that he would start a job with a plan on leaving. There was no better place for a lawyer in Alto, and he and Cindy were going to plant their roots deeper, not pluck them up. Ray advanced the screen to the next page. Finally a number appeared in the middle of a long paragraph: the amount of his base salary. When he saw the figure, Ray stopped and read it again.
“Yes!” he cried out, raising his arms in the signal for a touchdown.
A few seconds later Cindy appeared, looking bedraggled and pale. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Are you okay?” Ray responded.
“No, I just finished doing what pregnant women often do during the first trimester.”
“Would you like some good news?”
“Yes.”
“I got the employment contract from the Simpkin firm. And guess how much they’re going to pay me?”
“I’m not in a guessing mood. Is it good?”
“Much better than good.” Ray told her the terms of the offer. “As soon as you feel better, schedule an appointment with the real estate agent. You’re getting a bigger nest.”
“Fantastic,” Cindy replied in a flat tone of voice. “And if that doesn’t sound like I mean it, it’s because my stomach is dragging down my heart and mind. Do you think you should get someone else to look over the agreement in case you missed something?”
“Who would I ask? My father? He knows less about employment law than I do. It’s a long document, but simple enough for me to decipher. Besides, I trust Nate to make the best proposal possible.”
“Okay, congratulations. I need to lie down for a few minutes, then I’ll call the Realtor.”
Ray signed the contract, scanned it, and sent it to Nate with a note reiterating his appreciation for the job and promising to be there bright and early Monday morning. The next stage of his life was set.
Wanting to tell someone, he took out his cell phone and called Roxy. He didn’t really expect her to answer, but to his surprise, she did.
“I thought I’d leave you a voice mail,” he began.
A House Divided Page 18
