Let’s Start with the Dog
In my twenty-five years as a lawyer I’ve tried hundreds of cases, represented the full spectrum of humanity: petty thieves from the projects, highborn heroin addicts, the sane and the insane, the abusers and the abused. Every case is a story, and the more preparation I do for a trial, the more complicated that story seems. If I’m not careful I get lost in the labyrinth of facts and law. So the night before a trial I draw a line down the middle of a legal pad. At the top of one column I write “Good,” and at the top of the other, “Bad.” This is what it’s going to boil down to. In last week’s divorce case, for example, the list started like this:
Good
Articulate client, will make good witness
Excellent homemaker, mother
Put husband through dental school
Client’s husband admits he left because “she got fat”
Bad
Client responsible for large credit card debt
Addicted to Home Shopping Network
Had affair early in marriage with husband’s best friend
Drinks too much
And so on. This is what’s going to matter. This—after a couple of days of testimony, tears, truths and half-truths and downright lies, lawyers arguing over the rules of evidence, objections overruled and sustained, the judge yawning, the perspiration, the exhaustion—is the story that will matter.
If I were to perform such an analysis on myself, on the Case of My Life, it would look something like this:
Good
Honest
Built successful law practice from scratch
Healthy, not bad-looking
Attentive to aging mother
Generally optimistic
Independent
Bad
Workaholic
Blunt, bordering on obnoxious
Impervious to fashion
Resentful of aging mother
Hot-tempered
A failure at romance
That’s what it boils down to: The Good and the Bad of Sarah Bright Baynard, Attorney at Law, AKA Sally, just turned fifty.
* * *
“I hate the sound of it,” I say.
“What are you talking about?” asks my best friend, Ellen. We’re at Giminiano’s, the new restaurant on King Street that’s tucked behind a shoe store, down a narrow brick walkway. It’s advertised as “lively and intimate,” which means—as we now understand—tiny, noisy, and crowded.
“Fifty. It sounds so heavy, like some giant sack of years I’ll be lugging around for the rest of my life.”
“That doesn’t sound like you,” she says.
“Maybe now that I’m fifty I’m not the same me anymore.”
“Wow,” Ellen says. “You definitely need a glass of wine, or two or three. Red or white?”
“Shouldn’t we wait for the others?” Every year Ellen assembles the same group of girlfriends to celebrate my birthday. We were all roommates in law school, but she’s the only one I’ve stayed close to. Ellen thinks she’s doing me a favor by getting us together, as if this annual reunion will magically transport me back to my twenties, but it depresses me. This year I postponed it a couple of times with lame excuses, until I couldn’t put it off any longer.
“Answer the question. Red or white?” Her voice has that prosecutorial determination she uses in the courtroom.
“Red, I guess.”
She scans the wine list, motions for the waiter. “We’d like a bottle of Chianti. The Banfi, please.” Ellen is one of those people who knows her wines. She’s also a great tennis player and gardener, not to mention lawyer, wife, and mother. I’d hate her except for the fact that she’s one of the very few people who knows me well and loves me anyway.
By the time the wine comes Valerie and Wendy have arrived. Valerie looks great, her thick red hair swept up and pinned loosely in one of those arrangements that looks artsy and casual but undoubtedly takes a lot of time. “Helen sends her regrets,” she says. “Last-minute babysitting for the grandchildren.”
“God,” says Wendy, “Can you believe we’re old enough to have grandchildren?” There’s a moment of discomfort, a pang of silence in which I wonder if they’re all thinking the same thing: Yes, we’re all old enough, but one of us won’t ever have grandchildren.
Ellen, bless her heart, recovers quickly, lifts her glass toward me: “To Sally, who gets better every year!” I lift mine, take a swallow big enough, I hope, to bring me back to myself, whoever that is.
“Yeah,” says Wendy, “I heard things are getting better for you in the love department!” She leans across the table and lowers her voice. It’s only then that I notice the little pucker-lines around her mouth; otherwise she could pass for thirty-five. “He’s a vet, right?”
“Just a good friend at this point,” I say.
“She’s being coy, if it’s possible for Sally to be coy!” Ellen says. She pours the rest of the bottle into my glass, orders another. “Maybe, since he’s a vet,” she says, “he could help you with the cat case.”
“Katz?” Valerie says, her eyes widening. “Don’t tell me the Katzes are divorcing!”
“‘Cat,’ as in feline,” I say. “But it’s not official yet.”
“She did such a good job on the dog case, the probate judge wants her to represent a cat,” explains Ellen, as if I’m not there. And then, because the chatter around us makes it hard to hear, she continues in her loud, lawyer-in-the-courtroom voice: “You know about her thing with the dog, right?” Of course it is at this very moment that the waiter reappears, and although he can’t miss hearing “her thing with the dog” he pretends, as he takes our orders, that he hasn’t. We smother our laughter until he leaves, then explode. Everyone in the room turns around to look.
“Okay,” says Valerie, after we’ve recovered our respectability, “I want the whole story.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Client confidentiality.”
“Bullshit,” says Ellen. “Your client was a dog. A dog doesn’t have any secrets.”
“So, tell all,” insists Valerie.
When I’m finished she says, “So, let me get this straight: Joe Baynard, judge of the Charleston Family Court, who happens to be your ex-husband, appoints you to represent a schnauzer in a divorce case, not because the dog really needs a lawyer but because he—Joe—is still in love with you?”
“Well, to be fair to him,” I said, “it was the case from hell, and poor Sherman—”
“Sherman?”
“The dog. Sherman was right in the middle of it. Like a kid in the middle of a custody case.”
“So,” says Wendy, “Joe couldn’t find someone else? He has to choose his ex-wife to represent the dog?”
“He’s appointed me in lots of custody cases—to represent the kids,” I say. “I think he was hoping I’d help him settle it.”
“Maybe,” says Ellen, “but he’s also obsessed with you.”
“Joe’s remarried, isn’t he?” asks Valerie.
“I heard they were separated,” says Wendy.
“They separated for a while, but they’re back together now,” I say.
“I always liked Joe,” says Wendy. “I never did really understand why you … Never mind, this is your birthday dinner!”
“So, what happened … with”—Valerie interrupts herself while the waiter serves our appetizers—“with the case, I mean?”
“The couple reconciled and Sherman’s back home with them.”
“She’s leaving out the best part,” says Ellen. “The dog’s vet wants to marry her.”
Valerie’s eyebrows rise. “You’re getting married?”
“Not anytime soon,” I say.
“I don’t know what you’re waiting for,” says Ellen. “He’s perfect for you.”
And there’s a voice in my head—a voice that sounds strangely like my own. This voice, this me, is agreeing with Ellen. This me is still Sally Baynard, lawyer extraordinaire, but she’s also a woman with a love life, one who doesn’t live with her demented mother. She trusts her own instincts, isn’t afraid of making another mistake.
This me might have another glass of wine, might even move in with the vet.
* * *
By the time I get back to the condo, after dinner and dessert and coffee, I’m my old self again, feeling the full load of being Sarah Bright Baynard for half a century. The short drive across town was oddly comforting—Charleston with its antebellum buildings glowing under streetlamps, cobblestone streets with their bumpy history, the city where I’m still, by contrast, young—but when I enter the renovated lobby of my building (faux marble floor, trendy red leather furniture) I’m struck by its gleaming newness. The members of the home owners’ board are all in their seventies and eighties. Maybe this expensive facelift is a defense against their own deterioration. This year there are fresh Christmas decorations—real pine garlands with white bows over the doors, a gigantic spruce tree in one corner, glittering with tiny white lights—to replace the fake wreaths and faded red ribbons of years past.
I share the elevator with a woman who lives on my floor, whose name I don’t remember, and her poodle, whose name I do remember. “Hello, Curly,” I say, and the dog wags her tail.
“I hope you’ll bring your mother to the holiday party,” says the woman. “She could meet some of our neighbors! There’s a very nice older man who’s just moved into the penthouse.”
“I’m sure it will be a lovely event.” I remember last year’s party. I showed up in slacks and a sweater, my mother in a black wool dress and pearls. Most of the other women were in sequins and chiffons. Mom took one look and insisted on going back up to our apartment to change clothes. By the time we got back, the crab dip and the ham biscuits had been devoured.
“Where’s your little friend—that adorable schnauzer?” asks the woman.
“Sherman’s gone back to his family. I was just taking care of him for a few days.”
“Oh, that’s a shame. It must have been hard to let him go!”
“Yes.” Now I remember: It’s Mrs. Furley, rhymes with Curly. Josephine Furley. She has a head of black ringlets, dyed to match her dog’s.
“Well, then, you must get one of your own!” she says as we walk down the hall. “Your mother would like that, wouldn’t she? And then when she’s gone—I know you don’t want to think about that, dear … but when she’s gone, you won’t be all alone.”
Of course I won’t tell Mrs. Furley the truth: that it’s actually not at all hard for me to think about life without my mother. Maybe I’m a terrible person, but I often imagine this apartment to myself, these rooms that feel so cramped with her furniture, the equipment left over from the last hospitalization (the walker, the bedside potty), not to mention the bottles of pills and the giant-sized bottles of Metamucil that crowd the kitchen counter. It’s not scary at all to imagine coming home to silence, to my own space, without Mom and her sitters: Delores on weekdays and Shenille on nights and weekends if I need her. I would miss Delores, with her great laugh and good sense, but sometimes I sit out on my little balcony overlooking the harbor and imagine how it will be when I’m free of them all.
“You don’t have to do this,” my friend Ellen said, the last time I complained. “Your mother wouldn’t want this for you.”
“I can’t put her in a nursing home. I thought I could, but—”
“You deserve a life.”
“I have a life.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “Like maybe a life with Tony.” Tony is the vet. “I’m beginning to think you’re using your mother as an excuse not to make a commitment.”
“Mom has nothing to do with it. We’re just taking our time.”
“Bullshit. He’s crazy about you. And you know what I think about you and your damn ‘time’? I think you’re running out of it.”
Maybe Ellen’s right, and undoubtedly Shenille, who’s sitting in the living room watching a sappy romantic movie, would agree. She looks up at me, scans my outfit (white silk blouse, black pants, silver earrings), opines, “You’re still kind of pretty for your age. Seems like there’d be some nice man out there for you.” Shenille is overly generous with such observations, but she’s also very patient with my mother (who once referred to her as “the sweet little white one,” to distinguish her from Delores) so I ignore the comment.
She gives me a brief report on Mom’s evening—she ate all her dinner except the broccoli, spilled some juice on her bathrobe (in the dryer now), went to sleep after America’s Got Talent—and hands me a piece of paper on which she’s written a name and a number. “He called right after you left. Said something about a cat case. I told him I didn’t expect you back till late, but he kept on talking, about how his mama was crazy. Sounded kinda crazy himself, but I guess you’re used to crazy people, with all those divorces you do.” She says ‘divorces’ as if it’s a nasty word. She’s twenty, recently married, and has told me (another unsolicited observation) that she would never, ever get a divorce, because “no judge can divide what God has bound together.” She gathers her purse, her jacket. “Oh, and he said he’s a friend of your husband. That’s what made me think maybe he had the wrong—”
“He probably meant my ex.”
“He was talking so fast I got confused.” She gathers her purse, her sweater. “See you tomorrow night, Ms. Baynard.”
“I wish you’d call me Sally.”
“But your checks, they say Sarah.”
“Sally’s my nickname.”
“Sarah’s prettier. Like, more fancy or something.”
* * *
I check on my mother, who’s sleeping soundly, then settle into bed myself, read until the book falls on my chest, turn off the light, then can’t go back to sleep. I miss the vet. I miss the smell of him.
We could have this all the time, he said last weekend. We were lying in the hammock on his screened porch overlooking the creek, under a blanket because it was chilly. The three dogs—Susie and Sheba, his two golden retrievers, and Carmen, the beagle abandoned by her owner—stayed close, Carmen’s tail thwacking the floor contentedly, in rhythm with the hammock.
I have my practice, I said. And my mother. This place is too small for the three of us. And what about when your son visits?
Then we’ll get a bigger place.
And I’ll commute every day?
Or I will. I told you I’d be willing to do that.
That doesn’t make any sense. Your clinic’s right down the road. It’s a perfect setup for you.
He rolled halfway out of the hammock, stuck his foot out to make it stop swinging. If you don’t want it to work, Sally, you can find a hundred reasons why it won’t.
I’m just trying to point out—
Spare me the lawyerly logic!
I followed him into the kitchen. The dogs followed, too. I just want us to take our time, I said. I don’t want to screw it up.
That’s what you say about Carmen. He poured himself some juice, didn’t offer me any. Here’s this wonderful animal—he reached down, scratched the beagle under the chin—who needs somebody to love her. You say you want her, but somehow you can never bring yourself to take her home. Do I see a pattern here?
Okay, I said. I’ll do it.
Which, take the dog, or marry me?
Let’s start with the dog, I said.
He laughed. Thank God he laughed. One thing at a time, I guess, he said. You want to take her tonight?
Not tonight. Soon. I promise.
He pulled me close. Just don’t break this poor animal’s heart, okay?
Copyright © 2016 by Lee Robinson
