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Authors: Judith Tarr

BOOK: Household Gods
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I can't worry about it now, she told herself over and over. I'll worry about it after I get to the office. I'll worry about it tonight.
First she had to get to the office. When she came out onto Victory, she shook her head violently. She knew too well how long tooling back across the western half of the Valley would take. Instead, she swung south onto the San Diego Freeway: only a mile or two there to the interchange with the 101. Yes, the eastbound 101 would be a zoo, but so what? Westbound, going against rush-hour traffic, she'd make good time. She didn't usually try it, but she wasn't usually so far behind, either.
Thinking about that, plotting out the rest of her battle plan, helped her focus; got her away from the gnawing worry
about Josefina's desertion. It was good for that much, at least.
As she crawled down toward the interchange, she checked the KFWB traffic report and then, two minutes later, the one on KNX. They were both going on about a jackknifed big rig on the Long Beach Freeway, miles from where she was. Nobody said anything about the 101. She swung through the curve from the San Diego to the 101 and pushed the car up to sixty-five.
For a couple of miles, she zoomed along—she even dared to congratulate herself. She'd rolled the dice and won: she would save ten, fifteen minutes, easy. She'd still be late, but not enough for it to be a problem. She didn't have any appointments scheduled till eleven-thirty. The rest she could cover for.
She should have known it wouldn't be that easy. Not today. Not with her luck.
Just past Hayvenhurst, everything stopped. “You lying son of a bitch!” Nicole snarled at the car radio. It was too much. Everything was going wrong. It was almost as bad as the day she woke up to a note on her pillow, and no Frank.
Dear Nicole
, the note had said, on departmental stationery yet,
Dawn and I have gone to Reno. We'll talk about the divorce when I get back. Love, Frank.
And scribbled across the bottom:
P.S. The milk in the fridge is sour. Remember to check the Sell-By date next time you buy a gallon.
Remembering how bad that day was didn't make this one feel any better. “Love, Frank,” she muttered. “Love, the whole goddamn world.”
Her eye caught the flash of her watch as she drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. Almost time for the KNX traffic report. She stabbed the button, wishing she could stab the reporter. His cheery voice blared out of the speakers: “—and Cell-Phone Force member Big Charlie reports a three-car injury accident on the westbound 101 between White Oak and Reseda. One of those cars flipped over; it's blocking the number-two and number-three lanes. Big Charlie says only the slow lane is open. That's gonna put a hitch in your get-along,
folks. Now Louise is over that jackknifed truck on the Long Beach in Helicop—”
Nicole switched stations again. Suddenly, she was very, very tired. Too tired to keep her mad on, too tired almost to hold her head up. Her fingers drummed on the wheel, drummed and drummed. The natives, she thought dizzily, were long past getting restless. Her stomach tied itself in a knot. What to do, what to do? Get off the freeway at White Oak and go back to surface streets? Or crawl past the wreck and hope she'd make up a little time when she could floor it again?
All alone in the passenger compartment, she let out a long sigh. “What difference does it make?” she said wearily. “I'm screwed either way.”
 
She pulled into the parking lot half an hour late—twenty-eight minutes to be exact, if you felt like being exact, which she didn't. Grabbing her attaché case, she ran for the entrance to the eight-story steel-and-glass rectangle in which Rosenthal, Gallagher, Kaplan, Jeter, Gonzalez & Feng occupied the sixth and most of the seventh floors.
When she'd first seen it, she'd harbored faint dreams of
L.A. Law
and spectacular cases, fame and fortune and all the rest of it. Now she just wanted to get through the day without falling on her face. The real hotshots were in Beverly Hills or Century City or someplace else on the Westside. This was just … a job, and not the world's best.
Gary Ogarkov, one of the other lawyers with the firm, stood outside the doorway puffing one of the big, smelly cigars he made such a production of. He had to come outside to do that; the building, thank God, was smoke-free. “Nicole!” he called out in what he probably thought was a fine courtroom basso. To Nicole, it sounded like a schoolboy imitation—Perry Mason on helium. “Mr. Rosenthal's been looking for you since nine o'clock.”
Jesus. The founding partner. How couldn't he be looking for Nicole? That was the kind of day this was. Even knowing she'd had it coming, she still wanted to sink through the
sidewalk. “God,” she said. “Of all the days for traffic to be god-awful—Gary, do you know what it's about?” She pressed- him, hoping to hell he'd give her a straight answer.
Naturally, he didn't. “I shouldn't tell you.” He tried to look sly. With his bland, boyish face, it didn't come off well. He was within a year of Nicole's age but, in spite of a blond mustache, still got asked for ID whenever he ordered a drink.
Nicole was no more afraid of him than the local bartenders. “Gary,” she said dangerously.
He backed down in a hurry, flinging up his hands as if he thought she might bite. “Okay, okay. You look like you could use some good news. You know the Butler Ranch report we turned in a couple of weeks ago?”
“I'd better,” Nicole said, still with an edge in her voice. Antidevelopment forces were fighting the Butler Ranch project tooth and nail because it would extend tract housing into the scrubby hill country north of the 118 Freeway. The fight would send the children of attorneys on both sides to Ivy League schools for years, likely decades, to come.
“Well, because of that report—” Gary paused to draw on his cigar, tilted his head back, and blew a ragged smoke ring. “Because of that report, Mr. Rosenthal named me a partner in the firm.” He pointed at Nicole. “And he's looking for you.”
For a moment, she just stood there. Then she felt the wide, crazy grin spread across her face. Payoff—finally. Restitution for the whole lousy morning, for a whole year of lousy mornings. “My God,” she whispered. She'd done three-quarters of the work on that report. She knew it, Gary knew it, the whole firm had to know it. He was a smoother writer than she, which was the main reason he'd been involved at all, but he thought environmental impact was what caused roadkill.
“Shall I congratulate you now?” he asked. His grin was as broad as Nicole's.
She shook her head. She felt dizzy, bubbly. Was this what champagne did to people? She didn't know. She didn't drink. Just as well—she had to be calm, she had to be mature. She
couldn't go fizzing off into the upper atmosphere. She had a reputation to uphold. “Better not,” she said. “Wait till it's official. But since you are official—congratulations, Gary.” She thrust out her hand. He pumped it. When he started to give her a hug, she stiffened just enough to let him know she didn't want it. Since Frank walked out the door, she hadn't wanted much to do with the male half of the human race. To cover the awkward moment, she said, “Congratulations again.” And hastily, before he could say anything to prolong the moment: “I'd better get upstairs.”
“Okay. And back at you,” Ogarkov added, even though she'd told him not to. She made a face at him over her shoulder as she hurried toward the elevators. She almost didn't need them, she was flying so high.
When she'd floated up to the sixth floor, her secretary greeted her with a wide-eyed stare and careful refusal to point out that she was—by the clock—thirty-three minutes late. Instead, she said in her breathy Southern California starlet's voice, “Oh, Ms. Gunther-Perrin, Mr. Rosenthal's been looking for you.”
Nicole nodded and bit back the silly grin. “I know,” she said. “I saw Gary downstairs, smoking a victory cigar.” That came out with less scorn than Nicole would have liked. She had as little use for tobacco as she did for alcohol, but when you made partner, she supposed you were entitled to celebrate. “Can he see me now, Cyndi?”
“Let me check.” The secretary punched in Mr. Rosenthal's extension on the seventh floor, where all the senior partners held their dizzy eminence above the common herd, and spoke for a moment, then hung up. “He's with a client. Ten-thirty, Lucinda says.”
Cyndi down here, Lucinda up above. Even the secretaries' names were more elevated in the upper reaches.
Nicole brought herself back to earth with an effort. “Oh,” she said. “All right. If Lucinda says it, it must be so.”
Nicole and Cyndi shared a smile. Sheldon Rosenthal's secretary reckoned herself at least as important to the firm as
the boss. She was close enough to being right that nobody ever quite dared disagree with her in public.
Something else caught Nicole's eye and mind, which went to show how scattered she still was after her morning from hell. She pointed to the photographs on her secretary's desk. “Cyndi, who takes care of Benjamin and Joseph while you're here?”
“My husband's sister,” Cyndi answered. She didn't sound confused, or wary either. “She's got two-year-old twins of her own, and she stays home with them and my kids and her other sister-in-law's little girl. She'd rather do that than go back to work, so it's pretty good for all of us.”
“Do you think she'd want to take on two more?” Nicole tried to make it sound light, but couldn't hide how hard Josefina's desertion had hit.
Cyndi heard the story with sympathy that looked and sounded genuine. “That's terrible of her, to spring it on you like that,” she said. “Still, if it's family, what can you do? You can't very well tell your mother not to be sick, you have to stay in the States and take care of other people's kids.” She hesitated. Probably she could feel Nicole staring at her, thinking at her—wanting, needing her to solve the problem. “Look,” she said uncomfortably. “I understand, I really do. You know? But I don't think Marie would want to sit any kids who aren't family, you know what I mean?”
Nicole knew what she meant. Nicole would have felt the same way. But they were
her
kids. She was left in the lurch, on a bare day's notice. “Oh, yes,” she said. She hoped she didn't sound as disappointed as she felt. “Yes. Of course. I just thought … well. If my family were here, and not back in Indiana …Oh well. It was worth a try.” She did her best to make her shrug nonchalant, to change the subject without giving them both whiplash. “Ten-thirty, you said? I'll see what I can catch up on till then. Lord, you wouldn't believe how long it took me to get here this morning.”
“Traffic.” Cyndi managed to make it both a four-letter word and a sigh of relief.
Off the hook,
she had to be thinking.
Lucky Cyndi, with her sister in town and not in Bloomington, and no chance of her disappearing into the wilds of Ciudad Obregón. Nicole mumbled something she hoped was suitably casual, and retreated to her desk. She was still riding the high of Ogarkov's news, though the bright edge had worn off it.
The first thing she did when she got there was check her voice mail. Sure enough, one of the messages was from Sheldon Rosenthal, dry and precise as usual: “Please arrange to meet with me at your earliest convenience.” She'd taken care of that. Another one was from Mort Albers, with whom she had the eleven-thirty appointment. “Can we move it up to half-past ten?” he asked.
“No, Mort,” Nicole said with a measure of satisfaction, “you can't, not today.” It was just as satisfying to have Cyndi make the call and change the schedule—the pleasure of power. Nicole could get used to that, oh yes she could. Even the little things felt good today.
Tomorrow,
she thought. Tomorrow she'd be doing them as a partner. Today—her last day as a plain associate—had a bittersweet clarity, a kind of farewell brightness. She answered a couple of voice-mail messages from other lawyers at the firm. She wrote a memo, fired it off by e-mail, and printed out a hard copy for her files. Frank would have gone on for an hour about how primitive that was, but the law ran on paper and ink, not electrons and phosphors—
and to hell with Frank anyhow
, she thought.
It was going to feel wonderful to tell him she was a partner now. Even if—
She quelled the little stab of anxiety. He had to keep paying child support, as much as he ever did. That was in the divorce decree. She was a lawyer—a partner in a moderately major firm. She could make it stick.
The clock on the wall ticked the minutes away. At ten twenty-five she started a letter, hesitated, counted up the minutes remaining, saved the letter on the hard drive and stood up, smoothing wrinkles out of her skirt. She checked her pantyhose. On straight, no runs—thanks to whichever god oversaw the art of dressing for success. She took a deep
breath and squared her shoulders, and forayed out past Cyndi's desk. “I'm going to see Mr. Rosenthal,” she said—nice and steady, she was pleased to note. Cyndi grinned and gave her a thumbs-up.
Nicole took the stairs to the seventh floor. Some people walked all the way up every day; others exercised on the stairs during breaks and at lunch. Nicole never had understood that, not in a climate that made you happy to go outside the whole year round—even on days when the smog was thick enough to asphyxiate a non-smog-adapted organism. People who'd been born in L.A. didn't know when they were well off.

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