Lawyer for the Dog (7 page)

“Tea is fine,” I say, speaking for all of us. My mother doesn't seem to care, or even know where she is. “I really am so sorry…”

“Don't be silly,” says Mrs. Hart, pouring herself a generous helping of wine. “These things happen. You just never know, do you, what life is going to throw at you? Marriage, for instance. Who would think, after forty years … but you've been married, right, Sally?”

I'm sure her lawyer told her everything he knows about my marriage to Judge Joe, a story which no doubt included some juicy and fictitious details, now part of the local lawyer-lore. “I was married for a short while, yes.”

“And you, Denise?” Mrs. Hart leans forward.

“Delores,” says Delores. “No, ma'am. Ain't fallen into that trap so far.”

“Trap,” my mother repeats. “Trap in the bathroom.”

“Do you need to use the bathroom, dear?” asks Mrs. Hart.

My mother shakes her head. “Trap in the bathroom,” she repeats. So I have to explain to Mrs. Hart that a couple of weeks ago my mother locked herself in a restroom stall at the restaurant where I'd taken her to celebrate her birthday. For ten minutes I tried to coax her out—“All you have to do is turn that metal lock, Mom”—before I gave up and crawled into her stall from the adjoining one. She didn't seem surprised to see my head at her feet and smiled as if we did this sort of thing every day.

“How awful for you,” says Mrs. Hart to my mother, “but aren't you lucky to have such a devoted daughter? I wish I could say the same for myself.”

“I'll get our things out of the dryer,” I say.

“You can change in the bedroom on the right, at the end of the hall.” Mrs. Hart points the way. The room is dark and cool, decorated in the same expensive-rustic style as the living room. Delores helps my mother while I dress. There are some framed photographs on top of the dresser: a baby on the beach, a young girl—eight or nine—in a Brownie uniform, a color picture of a pretty teenager in what looks like a prom dress. I pick this one up, study it in the dim light.

“Must be her daughter,” says Delores, coming up behind me. “Same eyes.”

“She doesn't have any children.”

“Maybe a niece, then.”

I make a mental note to ask Mrs. Hart if she has any relatives who will be testifying about her relationship with Sherman, then remind myself that I probably won't be his lawyer much longer. I can't even be trusted to spend twenty minutes with him.

When we're ready to leave, Mrs. Hart opens the front door to let us out. I apologize again. She gives me a huge hug, a hug I think may be inspired by wine, but it feels good.

And then out of nowhere comes Sherman, his little legs covered with sand, his gray coat wet and matted, and his eyebrows dripping. In his mouth he carries something almost as big as he is—my mother's stuffed chihuahua. He drops it on the porch and then sits and looks up at me, his eyes connecting with mine, steady and calm, as if to say, “What were you so worried about? I found your dog!”

Mrs. Hart picks him up and he licks her face. “You know where home is, don't you, Sherman?” There's sand and mud all over her blouse but she doesn't seem to care.

*   *   *

“She was a nice lady,” says Delores as we head back to town.

“Her husband says she's an alcoholic.”

“He left her over liquor?”

“She left
him
. She moved out here and left him with the house downtown,” I explain. “They own both.”

“So if they got two houses, how come they need to bother with a divorce?”

“I guess they're just sick of each other. Anyway, she doesn't want to stay in the beach house permanently. And they're fighting over the dog. The judge is going to have to decide who gets Sherman.”

“They could just toss a coin, save themselves a lot of trouble. Whoever loses just goes and buys themselves another dog,” says Delores. “If they got two houses, they got the money to buy another dog.”

“This dog is like a child to them.”

“How long they been married?”

“About forty years.”

“If I was the judge I wouldn't let people that old get a divorce,” Delores says with great authority. “Seems like you get to a certain point, you been married for almost forever, you shouldn't be allowed.”

 

The Dowager of Domestic Relations

After yesterday's tumultuous day at the beach, my office this morning is a haven of calm until the call from Rick Silber, my (as Gina writes on the message pad) “psycho psych prof.” At our last meeting he decided to drop his divorce case, but fortunately I haven't had time to call his wife's lawyer, because now Rick's talked to his daughter, who talked to his wife, and he's not so sure.

“You won't believe this,” he says. “I thought she'd be grateful when she found out I wanted to drop the whole thing, but she wants to proceed with the divorce. Said she doesn't want to go to her grave married to me. Her words exactly.” There's that tightness in his voice, punctuated by a swallow, that tells me he's holding back tears. “And my girlfriend's left me. So I guess I'm going to die alone.”

“You're not anywhere close to dying, Rick.” Do I need to remind him that
he
isn't the one who's just been diagnosed with invasive breast cancer?

“I'm forty-five,” he says with a sigh. “And I have serious health problems.”

“You do?” Isn't he a marathon runner, a health nut who panics if he gains so much as half a pound?

“Yeah.”

“I don't remember you telling me about any health problems.”

“It's, uh, kind of personal.”

“If it might affect your ability to earn a living, I need to know about it.”

“It won't affect my job,” he says. “It has to do with my sex life.”

“Oh.” I'm not at all sure I want to hear about Rick Silber's sex life. I know already, of course, that his paramour is a much younger woman, his former graduate student, a fellow marathoner. And I know that if the divorce case ever goes to trial I'll have to bring her in for an interview, get the down-and-dirty, prepare her for a deposition and then for a nasty cross-examination.

“I can't … you know, get it up all the time,” he says.

“I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah, on top of everything else that's going on, it's pretty tough. I've tried Viagra, but it gives me a headache. You have no idea how depressing the whole thing—”

“Rick, listen, I've got a conference call scheduled in five minutes.” This is a lie. “And I'm not really the person you need to talk to about this. What about your therapist?” He's been going to his therapist once a week for twenty years.

“You think I'm an ass, don't you?” he asks.

“Of course not, but I think you really need to talk to your—”

“What's the use? My life is totally screwed up.”

“Maybe your daughter…,” I say.

“I know. You're busy. I'm screwed up and you're a lawyer and you don't deal with the personal stuff.”

“That's not fair.” I deal with the personal stuff all the time. In the divorce business, there's no avoiding it.

“Sorry,” he says.

But now he has me on the defensive. “I can get you in early next week. We'll review everything, see where we stand.”

“We did that a couple of days ago.”

“But you just told me your wife wants the divorce. So even if you dismiss your complaint, she can go ahead with her counterclaim.”

“Sounds like you just want to charge me another five hundred dollars.”

“Rick, if you're unhappy with my representation, you can—”

“It's not
you
. I'm fed up with everything. Mostly myself.”

“Just call Gina when you're ready to come in again. And in the meantime, we'll sit tight, but you should start working on your answers to those interrogatories.”

“Sally?”

“Yes?”

“You're a saint for putting up with me.”

I'm no saint. I put up with Rick Silber because he pays my bills. In exchange, he puts up with my bluntness because he knows I'm thorough and I'm tough and I won't rip him off. I'll stand up to bullies on the other side, but won't waste his money bullying back with frivolous motions and outrageous accusations. I won't yell at him even when he's driving me nuts.

I put up with Rick Silber because he needs me. I need him, too, and not just because he pays my bills. The relationship may be dysfunctional, but it works. If you interviewed all my clients you'd have a hard time finding a normal one in the bunch. They're all screwed up. So am I. We're like a big, messy family. Sometimes I hate them, sometimes I love them, but I do my darnedest to help them through their crises, their divorces, and their custody battles.

How did I come to this? How did Sarah Bright Baynard, that fresh-faced idealist just out of law school, the twenty-four-year-old devoted to representing the downtrodden and the unfairly accused, come to be the Dowager of Domestic Relations?

I can't blame it on Joe. Sure, he'd convinced me to leave the public defender's office to join his family firm, but soon after our separation I'd managed to get my old job back. Within a year I was chief public defender, the top job, but after another year I wasn't sure I wanted it. The truth is, I'd run out of steam. I'd work my butt off to save a client, get him probation, only to find him back on the jail list. The first time it happened, I convinced myself it wasn't the defendant's fault. He lived with his mother—an addict herself—on the East Side, in the worst housing project in Charleston. He'd never known his father. He'd grown up right under the Cooper River Bridge but had never even been across it, and though the Atlantic Ocean was minutes away he'd never seen it.

But the second and third times I had a sour feeling in my stomach when I saw the names on the list. I couldn't suppress the feeling that I was being duped. Here I was, working weekends and staying up late on weeknights, to save my clients from themselves. I was giving them my all. Were they reciprocating? Maybe that was the wrong question to ask. In my first stint at the P.D.'s office I'd never asked it. But I was older, more experienced. I needed to feel that all my hard work was actually
changing
something.

I convinced myself that this feeling would pollute my closing arguments, my presentencing speeches, that I was no longer capable of sounding earnest and honest at the same time. I needed to leave the job of enthusiasm to the younger lawyers, the ones who still believed.

I decided to hang my own shingle. I'd have a small, general practice; I'd still do some criminal work, but I'd have more variety: some real estate closings, contract disputes, some estate work, and, of course, some family law—adoptions, divorces, child support, custody.

I got most of my cases through referrals from older lawyers, and most of them hated family law. Divorces were, to them, untouchable. They wouldn't even let those clients through the front door; they sent them straight to lawyers like Sarah Bright Baynard, who'd just opened her practice and was hungry for anything that would pay the overhead. And I had another attribute: I'd just been through a divorce of my own. Somehow, they thought, this made me superqualified to represent the sad, angry, hysterical people who found themselves in “domestic difficulties.”

I did not turn them away. I've learned the trade. Occasionally the cases are simple—uncontested divorces, adoptions, name-change petitions—but most of them are complicated, not just because of the emotional issues but because the field of family law has become much more complex. I work with accountants to put a value on businesses and professional practices, with psychologists on custody matters. I love trial work, but I'm also trained in mediation and arbitration.

My clients are doctors and lawyers and business people, about a fifty-fifty mix of men and women. They aren't all rich. I have my share of teachers, middle-managers, semistarving artists. I'm on the pro bono appointment list and somehow my name seems to come up with greater regularity than other lawyers—maybe because I don't complain too much—so that at any given time I have plenty of “free” clients. Joe Baynard, my ex, has sent a lot of them my way.

I'm sitting at my desk, thinking about
Hart v. Hart—
Sherman, the poor little animal, caught in the middle of the case from hell—when my cell phone rings.

“Sarah Baynard,” I say, sounding professional. A lot of my clients have my cell number.

“You got a minute?”

“Joe?”

“I'm out here in your reception area. Brought you something. Gina won't let me come back there without permission from the boss.”

“Tell her it's okay.” But it's
not
okay. Something's not right. Judges don't just drop in to lawyers' offices. Joe might occasionally stroll down Broad Street to pay a call on his father at the family firm, but he's never stopped at my door, never ventured into the office I rent on the second floor, just a couple of blocks from Baynard, Baker, and Gibson, LLP.

It's been a while since I saw him without his robe, and I'm struck by how much weight he's lost. “Here's the latest motion in the
Hart
case,” he says, handing me a big brown envelope, then taking a seat on my sofa without being invited to.

“Oh, I thought that might happen.”

“You haven't even looked at it,” he says.

“Somebody wants to fire me, right?”

He laughs. “Don't get your hopes up. No, it's about the vet bill. Mrs. Hart wants her husband to pay half. I've set it for next week, thought you might like a heads-up.” He's looking around at the artwork on my walls. “You always did like this abstract stuff!”