Impasse

by Royce Scott Buckingham

  “He could lose a few,” Katherine said so they could all hear. It was the opposite of what she’d said to him privately that morning.

  Also backward, Stu noted.

  Jill looked him up and down, evaluating him like a shopper debating a loaf of bread from the day-old bin. “I could rip you up in a month,” she said. Then she tilted her head for a better view of his backside. “Maybe two.”

  “Sounds great,” Stu said, thinking that being “ripped up” sounded excruciating.

  Margery flipped her sweaty hair, spraying more droplets onto the couch. “You work with Clay Buchanan, don’t you?” she said, casually bringing up his handsome—and single—partner.

  “He’s the first name on the sign.”

  Katherine frowned. “I told Stu to fight to have our name first, but he doesn’t have a taste for confrontation anymore.”

  “Funny trait for a lawyer,” Jenny remarked. Jenny was known for making anti-lawyer remarks. It was rude, but a lot of doctors hated attorneys. Stu didn’t blame them. Lawyers sued doctors.

  “Well, tell Clay hello for me,” Margery said, sticking out her sweaty pink chest.

  “Will do,” Stu said, wondering if he was supposed to also relay the message she was sending with her fuchsia-colored boobs. “I’ll be seeing him later this evening.”

  “On a Friday night?”

  “Stu’s turning forty,” Katherine whispered loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “No party,” Stu announced. “You all heard me. I’m not dying. No black balloons. No novelty candles that I can’t blow out with my aging lungs. No rented wheelchair.”

  Katherine rolled her eyes toward her friends. “And no fun.”

  The women shared a laugh at his expense, and he hated them and their brightly colored clothes for a moment. Then he walked into the kitchen and forgot about them; there was leftover pizza.

  Stu microwaved a slab of Canadian bacon and pineapple, his favorite. It was a small, temporary slice of happiness. He should have felt elated about Molson; as soon as Clay obtained Sylvia’s agreement to the settlement, it would officially be a big win for him. But he didn’t feel elated; he felt fucking depressed. Clay was right about nothing changing after the case was won. One of the settlement terms would be a non-disclosure agreement; nobody in town could know what he’d done for his client or that he’d bested three other lawyers. Ergo, no public boost to his reputation. And the money didn’t really change anything. Clay was right about that, too. It just made paying bills more comfortable. Today he’d turned forty years old, and he was the same goddamned guy he was yesterday.

  For a moment he was miserable enough to allow himself to think the dark thoughts. They could cheat Sylvia and collect a huge fee, and he could leak the settlement terms. Odds were he’d get away with both—Clay was also right about that. But he’d always been the good kid, the Cub Scout, the responsible student, the nice young man with whom parents were comfortable sending their daughter to prom, all the happy sappy stuff. At the DA’s Office he’d taken an oath to uphold the public trust, and years of making decisions that affected people’s lives forever while under the glare of public scrutiny had cemented those indigenous ethics in him. He was a rule-follower. He didn’t push the envelope. Never had. Never would.

  Same goddamned guy.

  He snarled and flipped the butter knife, catching the handle deftly with one hand after two full rotations directly over Katherine’s slab granite countertop.

  Ha! Take that, caution! he thought. Still, he snuck a look around to make sure his wife hadn’t seen him.

  He’d have to tell her about the Molson case, he thought. Not tonight, though. Like Clay, Katherine had hoped they’d finally made a big score, and Stu hated to let her down. She was also likely to pout and withhold sex. Besides, he had an unwanted surprise birthday party he needed to pretend to enjoy.

  CHAPTER 4

  Once Stu was gone, Katherine glanced from friend to friend, embarrassed. “It’s still on for seven o’clock,” she whispered.

  “Is he depressed about turning forty?” Holly asked, her trademark nosiness carefully disguised as sympathy.

  “Stu is working on a big case,” Katherine explained. “Molson could be the one.” She hummed the last word as though she were giggling with college girlfriends and Molson was a boy she’d just met.

  “Suing anyone I know?” Jenny grumbled.

  “It’s not a medical malpractice,” Katherine assured her. “He doesn’t do that sort of work. And I’m not at liberty to discuss it, but it could be a potential life-changer.”

  “Would you move across Rockland?” Margery asked.

  “I hadn’t given it much thought,” she lied. It was exactly what she’d been thinking, but Margery was still a bit of a bitch for asking. “He’s still putting the case together. He’s very thorough.”

  They all nodded. Stu’s work ethic and intellect were well known—Katherine had made sure of it, dropping comments over the years about his top 10 percent class ranking in law school and ninety-fifth percentile LSAT scores. Margery had once commented that grades were a great measure of a man’s “potential.” It annoyed Katherine; forty was too old for “potential.” Everyone else’s husband was already a success, and the whole lot of them already lived by the water.

  Katherine sighed as the women gathered up their things. Stu was loyal, like a hound, and cute in a nerdish way. They’d married when he was a newly minted prosecutor. She’d been a couple years out of college, struggling along in a crappy apartment with her degree in visual design from the UMass Dartmouth campus, and she saw his potential—potential that should have blossomed by now. At twenty-nine he’d already been handling front-page felony cases and was on track for a career in politics. He’d built a reputation as steady and confident back then. Not necessarily dynamic, but she could be social enough for the both of them. And he’d been a relatively easy catch, because he thought she was beautiful.

  He’d actually used the B word. No one else, man or boy, had ever called her beautiful. Her prom dates and awkward young suitors used words like cute or nice-looking or attractive, all horrible watered-down versions of the B word. And Stu continued to find her beautiful at thirty-six, which was important. He still said so often, and she could tell by the way he sat up in bed to watch her undress at night that he meant it.

  He’d better, she thought; she cardio-blasted her midthirties body for an hour every afternoon, added weights on odd days, and took one vital day off each week to let her muscles rebuild and rejuvenate. She also worked hard to keep her wardrobe both current and unique. Exercise and fashion were something many women let slide in their thirties, especially mothers. She hadn’t been a stunner in her youth—she knew that. She’d been bookish then and always small-breasted. But now was her time. She was quickly passing up women who’d once been beautiful but were succumbing to age, saggy tits, childbearing hips, and simple complacency. And while it always felt good to have her own husband say she was hot, it felt even better knowing objectively that she was finally moving up in that category against her peers. If she continued to work at it, she thought, she’d soon be the hottest middle-aged woman at the SAC.

  Stu didn’t just give her compliments. He gave her space to network and develop a respectable collection of important friends for them. And he honored her decision to pursue her photography instead of wasting her time working at some dead-end job. He’d also given up pestering her about children once she’d made it clear motherhood wasn’t for her. And, even after thirteen years, when they made love, he still politely thanked her afterward.

  He was a perfectly good man, but none of it hid the fact that he was a beaten man too. She’d worked hard to mold him, promote him, and motivate him, but it was clear he would never again be an alpha male, certainly not after the Butz fiasco. And it was gut-wrenching to watch all her hard work go down the toilet.

  She walked her sweaty friends to their Volvos and Mercedes, and saw them off with fist bum
ps and the traditional round of mutual compliments regarding how hard they’d worked out and how good they all looked. Holly wasn’t actually in great shape—a little meaty, and her thighs brushed together when she walked—but Katherine said she looked great anyway.

  She envied them. They were comfortable and cocky, with vacation condos in Boston or apartments in Manhattan, kids off at boarding schools, and bulging 401Ks, while she and Stu were still clawing out an existence at the inland end of William Street. But when her husband finally won a big case, this big case, some of those pieces would fall into place for her, too.

  CHAPTER 5

  The William Street house was a “fixer.” With the prices in the South Dartmouth neighborhood inflated by its status-inducing proximity to the ocean and its distance from the crime of north New Bedford, a beat-up mid-1800s place had been the entry-level home. Its wooden floors were uneven, none of its old three-panel doors shut properly, and the cobweb-filled unfinished basement still flooded when it rained; their plastic bins of high school yearbooks and family photos were stacked on pallets to keep them off the wet floor.

  Katherine crept down the narrow basement steps. She hated going down, but there hadn’t been enough room in their smallish kitchen refrigerator to hide the birthday party food. In her brown suede wedge heels she carefully stepped over a puddle toward their spare tag sale fridge. Then she filled her outstretched arms with plates of hors d’oeuvres, the way she had when she was slogging through college with her miserable job at the Silver Spoon restaurant. She kicked the fridge door shut with her foot, and when she turned around with her arms loaded, Clay Buchanan was standing on the third step up, blocking her way.

  He wore a tight smile and a button-down shirt tucked into equally tight jeans. The top and second buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a hairless chest. Katherine found his lack of fur strange; at his age he should have at least a little patch. Perhaps he waxed it. His jeans carefully defined every contour of his lower half. Katherine thought she would appear vulgar if he caught her staring, so she didn’t let her eyes linger. The snug ensemble might have been tacky on a man with the standard middle-aged tummy, but Clay was trim, muscular, and wore it well. He seemed to know it too.

  “Ah, there you are,” he said pleasantly.

  “Here I am.”

  “I need to ask a favor of you.”

  “If it involves food, I’m your man.”

  “You’re definitely not a man, nor does this involve food. It involves a potential client. Dugan.”

  Reginald Dugan. Katherine recalled the large land developer. Big guy. Lots of money. She’d met him while volunteering at the Veterans KIA charity auction, a good place to mingle with movers and shakers, and he was definitely a mover. No college education, but he’d elbowed his way to wealth and power. The story was that his family had lived in the New Bedford area for generations. He’d taken over their ailing Bristol County farm and somehow turned it into a multimillion-dollar development, which was quickly annexed by the city council, upon which his cousin sat. It wasn’t as tidy as that, but those were the basics Katherine heard while she was on the treadmill at the SAC.

  Clay had heard a more recent rumor—that Dugan was dissatisfied with his current attorneys—and Clay had called Katherine that very morning to insist she invite the man to her next event. It made no difference to Clay that a birthday party was an inappropriately personal gathering for a stranger.

  “I mentioned the party to him,” Katherine said coolly, “against my better judgment.”

  “Well, he’s here,” Clay said, wiggling his thick eyebrows, “against your better judgment.”

  Katherine was surprised but tried not to show it.

  “Favor done then,” she said curtly. “You’re welcome.”

  “No. Not done. I’ve already taken a run at him tonight, but he needs more persuasion. A different sort than I can provide.”

  “What sort?”

  “He likes beer and beautiful women. And he’s already got a beer.”

  Katherine’s heartbeat quickened. She glanced down at her form-fitting cocktail dress, self-conscious and proud at the same time. It pushed her modest breasts into reasonably pert mounds and showed off her firm legs. When she looked back, Clay was grinning, his dark eyes boring into her. Her husband’s handsome partner was the last person she’d expected to call her beautiful. Her neck felt warm. This is what those thousands of reverse crunches and glute kickbacks are for, she told herself. But it was a compliment with a catch.

  “You want me to flirt with Reggie Dugan?”

  “I learned something today,” Clay said. “Had a bit of a revelation, really. Success isn’t going to drop into our laps, not real success. People who trap themselves with rules and propriety are rats in a maze. They work late into the night for scraps, they walk on an endless wheel, and they earn themselves a ratty little life. I don’t want that for us anymore. We need to up our ante to play with the big boys. And Dugan is a big boy—easily worth two hundred grand in fees. Annually.”

  “And you want me to flirt with him,” she confirmed, annoyed. “He’s fifty and fat.”

  “Forty-eight. Not a lot older than your husband … and he’s a big strong contractor guy, not fat.”

  “Contractors have dirty fingernails,” Katherine said with a tone of finality. “Not my type.”

  “So if I get him to clean his fingernails, you would flirt with him?”

  “I didn’t say that. Look, my arms are getting tired holding all this. I need to go upstairs.”

  “No, you don’t. You used to wait tables, didn’t you? And you exercise every day. Your bis and tris are seriously cut. I know you can hold up a few baby carrots and snap peas a bit longer while we discuss this.”

  Another compliment. He’d noticed that she kept her thirty-six-year-old body in top shape.

  “It’s no longer a discussion,” she said. “I won’t flirt with the grungy construction guy. And you’re being an asshole.”

  Clay chuckled, and then shook his head as though disappointed in her. “My, my, Kate. What does Stuart do with you when you won’t behave?”

  She cocked her head, bewildered. “Nothing.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I figured.”

  Clay stepped down from the stairs to face her and moved close, inside her personal space. His eyes never left hers. They were narrow and buried beneath low brows, dark brown, almost black. Katherine backed up against the old fridge, but he inched even closer, near enough that she could smell him—a clean male scent with a hint of something lavender, a body wash, perhaps. Her eyes flickered to the door at the top of the stairs. He’d closed it behind him. They were completely cut off from the party. He spoke slowly and deliberately, the cadence of his voice almost soothing.

  “Kate, you are going to go up there and talk to him. You are going to smile. And you are going to make him want to be around you and around our firm. This isn’t just for me. It’s for your own good too.”

  “I don’t like the way—”

  He reached up suddenly and grabbed her by the hair. He grasped it in the rear, behind her neck where it was thickest, and he pulled her head back firmly. Her words caught in her throat, unsaid, and the carefully prepared food on her arms teetered.

  “And I don’t like the way you’re defying me, Kate.” His tone did not change. “Stuart might put up with it, but not me.”

  She couldn’t push him away with her arms loaded—she didn’t dare; it had taken an hour to prep the veggie tray alone. And when she tried to speak, he tugged her hair again, not hard enough to dump the plates, but hard enough to silence her.

  He was still talking at a low volume with an even rhythm, and smiling sympathetically as though delivering a lesson to a child.

  “This isn’t a game, Kate. This is life, our livelihood. Mine, Stuart’s, yours. This isn’t about your reputation or your sense of honor, which I’m guessing you surrendered to some college bad boy who broke your cherry and your heart bef
ore you met Steady Stu. We’re not kids anymore. You’re not a little nerd guarding your virginity. This is about success. If you’re going to stay home and play the society wife, you’re going to need to grow up a bit and contribute with the tools you have at your disposal. You don’t get a home overlooking the water by being a nice girl.”

  Katherine’s heart beat madly, but she wasn’t sure what the emotion was. Confusion? Anger, perhaps? Stu would never do this to her. He wouldn’t dare. Even her father had never disciplined her; he’d concentrated on her delinquent older brother. Katie will be fine, she’d overheard him say when she was ten. I don’t need to spend my time on her.

  “I’m going to let go now, Kate,” Clay was saying gently. “I’m not asking for much. Stu and I will do the heavy lifting. We just need a small effort from you. But if you’d like to tell me that you don’t want to help us earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, just say so.”

  His body was against hers now, his hand still tangled in her hair, his chest flattening her smallish breasts between them, his pelvis pressed into her.

  Is he turned on?

  He was right about Dugan, she realized. He was right about the college bad boy too. She was a little nerd girl. And she did want a house with a view. The trays of food needed to be served, her husband’s partner smelled terrific, and he was an asshole with amazing eyes that never looked away.

  When he let go, she calmly handed him one of the trays to carry upstairs. When he took it, she slapped him. He blinked, but didn’t move. Instead he simply stood, waiting for her to refuse him. But in the end she couldn’t.

  CHAPTER 6

  Stu hated adult birthday parties, especially his own. Ever since he’d turned thirty he hadn’t felt that having a birthday merited any sort of celebration—he certainly hadn’t done anything to deserve one. He’d merely gotten older—again. It just made him feel tired. But Katherine loved any excuse to host a function, and other people seemed to like them. So, although he’d put up a token protest, he accepted that turning forty was his destiny, and when people began ringing the doorbell, he acted surprised and reluctantly pleased about the festivities for Katherine’s benefit. It made her smile, and for that he was always willing to put a lid on his inner Grinch.