Page 27 of Mornings By the Linden Tree
I stood there watching the two of them, my hands crossed and resting on the handle of the shampooer, as if I did not have a client to see at nine. Despite the chaos of my life right now, and the incredibly outrageous changes I’d been making when I should have been settling into middle age with all of this madness left behind in my youth, I discovered I could enjoy seeing Lennon and Valeria sharing a moment more often. Withthe new day’s rays glinting off the soft gold hairs on his forearms and his utter attention to what the child was saying…
“Mr. Wesley, you’ll be late to the office,” my housekeeper reminded me as she gently pulled the shampooer toward her. “Go shower. We’ll get things right.”
And just like that, I was dismissed. Lennon took Valeria into the kitchen while I raced through the shower and pulled on some suitable clothes. It wasn’t until I was halfway to the office that I realized my socks were not the usual ones I wore with my Ralph Lauren blue wool twill. In my haste, I’d grabbed a pair that were not the navy cashmere crews but were, in fact, Cambridge blue. I noted the sock discrepancy because I had to remove my blue Oxford wingtip at a red light to remove a small irritant in the toe. The irritant was half a Cheerio, Honey Nut flavored, that had been ground into tiny, little bits.
Someone honked at me as I dumped the cereal crumbs out of my shoe onto the carpet of my Lexus. Now I would have to have one of the office interns take it to the nearest carwash and vacuum it thoroughly. After calling the man lying on the horn a few choice phrases, I drove to work and was only twenty minutes late for my conference withtheWilton Jones, of Wilton Jones Elite Laundry Services Inc., a multibillion-dollar Fortune 500 company that served over a thousand hotel chains worldwide. Wilton and his wife were in the middle of a horrendous divorce. They had three children who were being hotly battled over. And he was an old college friend of Marty’s, so I was not happy to show up late with Cambridge socks instead of navy.
Rissa met me in the lobby, looking frantic. “You’re late,” she said as she handed me a cup of coffee, then hustled me past reception and into a plush hallway filled with closed doors. “I was about to call the police, thinking you’d been in an accident. You’re never late. You’re always here forty minutes early.”
“We had a cookie dough problem at home,” I said as I attempted to hustle along while removing the lid from my cup of Sumatra dark roast. “Is Wilton here yet?”
“Yes, and he’s pacing.”
“Well shit,” I whispered, blew into my coffee, took a swig for fortitude and then pushed into conference room four. There Wilton was, circling the long walnut table like a caged puma, his gray eyes flying from the pads, pens, and pitcher of ice-cold water on the tabletop to me. “Apologies, Wilton. My niece was sick this morning, and it set me back.”
I handed Rissa my satchel as I motioned for the thin man in the charcoal suit to have a seat.
“Don’t you have a nanny to handle that kind of shit?” he asked as he stalled in front of a window looking down on busy streets, clearly pissed at me. Wilton was a nasty man, truly, but his assets were tremendous. If I won his case for him and wrested the kids from his wife, I would probably pull in close to a few hundred thousand in hourly billing fees, contingency fees, etc. If Wilton was exceptionally pleased with my work, he would offer me a hefty gratuity, which I would try to decline on ethical principles, but he would insist or just decline the unused retainer deposits.
“I have a temporary one now,” I informed him with a wilted smile. “It’s been a hectic month or so. I do appreciate your patience with my personal matters. Please, sit, let’s go over the latest papers we received from your wife’s attorney.”
“Both of them are bitches,” Wilton muttered as he flopped down into a chair, then nervously began toying with the pens and pads embossed with our firm’s name.
I ignored his comment. The woman Tessa Jones had hired to represent her was a highly skilled attorney who took no shit. I admired her and would not speak ill of her.
Rissa laid out papers in front of us and sat beside me to take notes, her keen eyes on the pens Wilton was now taking apart. By the time this meeting was over, our pens would be lying in bits, the pads torn and shredded, and the mint bowl picked clean. Rissa would have to put all the pens back together after he left. She claimed her son didn’t make the messes Wilton did. Seeing the whirlwind of destruction Valeria could drop on a home, I rather doubted my paralegal’s comments.
I took a moment to read over the counteroffer coming from the other side. Something I should have done last night, but I was too busy coloring and rocking a scared little girl to sleep downstairs.
“It seems Tessa is willing to negotiate on the length of time the three children can visit you during school holidays.” I looked up to see Wilton stretching out the tiny spring from inside one of our deluxe office pens. His stormy gaze flew from the little compression spring pinched between his fingers. “I think this would be a good time to consider her offer.”
His lean face tightened. “What? What do you mean, consider the offer? The last time we talked, you said you felt I could, and should, stick to my guns for the fight for full custody.”
Yes. Yes, I had said that. And back then, I had felt my client should not show any weakness. Not that I prided myself on using children as pawns to frighten parents into buckling to my client’s demands, but if it won my firm the case, then all was fair in love and divorce proceedings. The children would be fine in his care, even if he were a bit of a bastard. Right?
And Tessahadcheated on him. That was factual. Collie had tailed her for several months and accrued mountains of receipts and photos, all of which we could use to show that she was not only an unfaithful wife but an unfit mother for exposing the children to her paramour, her French instructor. A handsome scalawag with brown curls named Jacques Aubertwho possessed amazing cheekbones and had a way with dogs and children as he had two of his own. Dogs. And children from a previous marriage. The children. Not the dogs. The dogs he had rescued from a shelter. And while he seemed a much better person for the children than their miserable father, the fact he engaged in sexual relations with a married woman could not be overlooked as an unsavory thing to have the young ones grow comfortable around.
Now though. Well, now I had taken in Valeria, I found myself changed. Not that I had ever hated children. I was just indifferent to them. They seemed so loud and messy, constantly in need of something. I’d not spent much time around little ones, by choice, and that had seemed fine to me for many years. Now, though, that I had been thrust into guardianship and all that entailed, I found I felt softer. Perhaps a little mellower. Or that could just be utter exhaustion making me punchy.
Rissa nudged my shin with her foot under the table, jarring me from my wool gathering.
“Yes, I did say in our preliminary meetings that since we do have ample evidence of your wife’s infidelity, which would sway the judge toward us having full custody, perhaps, for the sake of the children, we should consider a more amiable approach?”
I noticed Rissa gaping at me out of the corner of my eye. Wilton stared at me as if I had a galaxy of starfish doing the hokey pokey atop my head. The room fell into a deafening silence that only eased up when the air conditioning came on.
“Amiable? Was she amiable when she hooked up with that Frenchie Jean Claude van Dimples?!” Wilton bellowed, then flipped the spring in his hand at the table. It bounced off the surface and into the pitcher of ice water. I thought to correct him that Jean Claude van Damme, who he was obviously referencing, was in fact from Belgium and not France, but I held my tongue. “No, she was not. She took my kids to Paris andspent weeks larking around with her lover behind my back! Fuck her, and fuck being nice. I was nice to that bitch and all it got me was screwed. I want her to know how it feels to get knifed in the back. So no, I will not consider a more amiable approach!”
With that, he stalked out of the conference room, hooking a left. I sighed aloud. “He’s going to Marty’s office,” I announced as I watched a teensy spring float to the bottom of a glass pitcher of imported spring water.
“He’s a dick,” Rissa replied flatly.
Yes. He was. And I had a small suspicion I was as well. And that suspicion tasted tart on my tongue.
“At least his socks match his suit,” I said. Rissa shot me a look that made me snort, most unprofessionally. “Mine don’t.”
“Meh, no one will notice. Welcome back to the joys of the divorce world!” She waved a hand at the mess strewn about just as my phone buzzed. I didn’t have to look. I knew who it was. I pushed to my feet.
“I’ll be in Marty’s office if anyone needs me.”
