Custody (14 page)

Dunlap and Reed was housed in an ugly aluminum-sided duplex on Cambridge Street. They kept it purposefully unpretentious: its humble appearance made it seem hospitable to people who might feel shy around lawyers, and provided their opposition with a false view of their strength.

“Good morning, Your Honor,” Jackie Cortez greeted her from her receptionist desk. “You’re looking mighty fine today.”

“Feeling mighty fine, Jackie,” Kelly said. “How did Emanuel’s game go?” Jackie’s thirteen-year-old son, the youngest of five children and the only boy, played on a Little League team.

“Lord, he hit a home run!”

After hearing a detailed description of Saturday’s game, Kelly headed to her office at the back, in the room that had once been the kitchen and still had its linoleum floor. Three walls were lined with inexpensive pine shelving stacked with Massachusetts Law Statutes, law reviews, ancient legal volumes, and piles of current advance sheets on changes in the law. Her desk, a valiant metal veteran, squatted beneath the weight of a computer, printer, phone, answering machine, and towers of files, papers, and folders.

Sinking into her chair, she checked her email and flipped through snail mail. Then she turned to the contents of her drawers. Behind her, on either side of a window, stood file cabinets
once so full she could scarcely close them. Since she’d been notified of her appointment, she’d begun the complicated effort of cleaning them out, and it was almost sad, how empty they looked.

Dragging a cardboard storage box from the pile in the corner, Kelly settled in to finish the job. Half the files at the back were so old they’d been there when she arrived.

She’d left her door open in case any of the other lawyers wanted to wander in for a chat. She was just hefting an armload of files into the box when she heard a knock on the door.

“Come in!” she called. “Oof!” She dropped the files, brushed her hands, and turned.

René Lambrousco stood there, grinning.

Kelly had seen him at her mother’s funeral, so she knew that by now, nearly sixty, René had lost much of his startling sexual appeal. However, René was not yet aware of this. He struck a pose in her doorway, absolutely
lounging
against the door, clad in black jeans, black motorcycle boots, and a black silk shirt open to reveal several gold chains. His style, Kelly thought, had definitely deteriorated over the years. He wore his hair pulled back in a ponytail and a thick salt-and-pepper beard camouflaged his sagging jowls. An unlit cigarette hung indolently from his full lips.

“Smoking’s not allowed in here,” Kelly said peevishly.

“And I’m delighted to see you, too, dear stepdaughter,” René retorted, his voice oily with false pleasure. He put the cigarette in the breast pocket of his shirt.

“You’re not my stepfather,” Kelly snapped. “What do you want?”

“I’m not allowed to stop by? To say hello? To offer my congratulations?”

“René,” Kelly said, very calmly, “go away.”

Instead the man advanced into the room, draped his body in the chair facing her desk, and swung one leg over the armrest. “Imagine my surprise when we read about you in the paper. A judge. Most impressive.”

Kelly stared at him.

“Please remember”—René pouted—“when your mother was dying, I went to the trouble to search you out.”

“Don’t tell me it was difficult. You had only to look in a Boston phone book.”

“Even so. I made the effort. Without me, you would not have seen your mother ever again.”

Kelly shut her office door. She didn’t need her personal life aired to everyone. Sinking into her desk chair, she said quietly, “Yes, René, what you say is true. I am grateful. And I know,
and you know, that Ingrid was grateful. But she’s gone now, and she was the only connection between us.”

René’s eyes narrowed. “You think you’re so much better than the rest of us because you’re a judge, don’t you?”

“No, René, I don’t. I only think I worked harder. I only think that when my birthright was taken away from me, I had to find a way to fend for myself, and I know that you have
no idea
what kind of sacrifices I made. And you never will know.”

“Whatever your sacrifices,” René countered smoothly, “here you are. You’re going to be a judge. You should be happy with yourself. Proud.”

“I am proud. I am happy.”

“Then why not be friends?”

“I have enough friends.

“Ah, what a pity. You’ve become
hard
.”

“Probably.”

“Don’t you ever think about Felicity?”

A vision of Felicity flashed through Kelly’s mind: a teenager, too thin, sullen, astoundingly gorgeous with her pale skin and cascading black hair, standing at the graveyard while their mother’s coffin was lowered into the ground. Felicity had exhibited no interest in Kelly. Hiding her eyes the entire time behind dark glasses, she’d seemed foreign and forbidding. “So that’s it. What do you need? Money for her?”

“She’s fifteen. She’s your half sister. She’ll be wanting to go to college soon.”

“René, I have seen your daughter exactly twice in my life, once in the hospital when mother was dying, and again at the funeral. I feel no connection to her whatsoever.”

“You should.”

“I
should
? How can you, of all people, tell me what I should feel?” Kelly felt her face flush with anger.

“My dear Kelly, I’ve never made excuses for what I am, for how I live my life. I’m not here now to ask for anything for myself. I’m here, quite humbly, to congratulate you, and to ask you to consider thinking of your half sister.”

“Very well,” Kelly said. “You’ve come. You’ve spoken. Now go.”

René’s face darkened. “How can you be a family court judge when you don’t even communicate with your own family?”

“You’re not my family. You never have been.”

René sighed and shrugged. “Ah, well,” he said. “What a pity. Felicity is a marvelous girl. But quite bowled over by her mother’s death. She needs someone feminine in her life. I was hoping that you—”

Kelly kept her face blank.

René rose. “Then I’ll leave you.”

“Please do,” Kelly said.

“It is your loss, you know,” René told her.

She didn’t respond. René would try to trump any comment she made, and besides, in her heart she thought that very probably he was right. It was undoubtedly a loss that she did not know the young woman who shared her blood, but it was a loss that Kelly chose, and that made it tolerable.

Sarah Franklin picked up the ringing telephone, heard her daughter’s voice, and immediately overcome with weariness, collapsed into a chair.

“How are you, Mother?” Anne asked.

“Ugh!” Sarah gasped. “Sorry, dear, Brownie jumped right up on my stomach. Knocked the air out of me. Fine, darling. How are you?”

“Good.”

“Busy?” Keeping her arm around Brownie, their newest pet, an abandoned husky—pit bull mix MSPCA adoptee, Sarah reached under her to pull out the object poking her thigh. It was a shoe. A man’s shoe. Stroking Brownie’s head as she settled deeply into her lap, she observed how much her head was shaped like the shoe, wide between the ears, narrowing steadily toward the nose.

“Very. Eleanor Marks gave me a PR brunch last Sunday, but Rebecca, the imbecile, had scheduled me for two different events at the same time and I had to have a videotape made, because the videographer offered to make a campaign tape for nothing, but it had to be done then.”

Thomas came, slumping, into the room. “There is something I am missing.”

“Actually, it looks as if it will be a great tape. Mick Aitkins—he’s the videographer—helped me come up with a rather clever slogan. ‘Vote for Anne Madison, for the health of it!’ ”

Sarah made an encouraging, ambiguous
mmmm
sound, indicating, she hoped, to both Thomas and her daughter her utter, fascinated attention.

Smiling, she waved the shoe at the willowy man in his green Stop & Shop shirt. Thomas, from Russia, lived rent-free in their attic with three of his friends, the newest members of the New World program Sarah and her husband and like-minded families throughout New England had started thirty years ago. Project New World found jobs with local businesses for the immigrants, an easy enough task when Nantucket’s tourism was booming and the merchants desperate. In addition, the Franklins provided free lodging for the men. This way the immigrants could save most of their salaries for the pursuit of education or investment in a business or airfare to bring their families to the States. Over the years Sarah and Herbert had personally helped perhaps a hundred people in this way. At Christmas their mail carrier came staggering to the door, weighted down with cards and photos and expressions of continual gratitude from a complete United Nations of recipients of their generosity.

Sarah had enjoyed them all—some, of course, more than others—but she couldn’t recall anyone quite as handsome, in a gloomy way, as Thomas. Of course, he
would
be melancholy, with his wife and little boy left behind with his parents and brother and sister in a crowded cottage without electricity in an impoverished rural village. Heartbreaking, and truly shocking, the way some people were forced to live. All their lives Sarah and Herbert, children of rather disgustingly wealthy families, had tried their best to balance, in their own small ways, the scales.

“Mother? Are you there?”

“Yes, darling, hanging on your every word. Just a second … Is this what you’re looking for, Thomas?”

He came toward her, smelling of Zest, Brylcreem, and Listerine—he kept himself flawlessly clean. “I do not know how this shoe came to be in this room.”

“Brownie, I think. She seems to think shoes are her children. It’s rather sweet, isn’t it?”

Thomas held his shoe up, inspecting it carefully. “Here it is moist.”

“Yes, the leather is a bit soggy, but it will dry. Brownie was very gentle. No bite marks anywhere.”

“Mother!”

“Sorry, Anne, but Brownie seems to have adopted poor Thomas’s shoe. She brought it all the way down here from the attic.” Laughing, Sarah fondly stroked Brownie’s pointed head.

Silence.

“Darling, I
was
listening to you. I am. Go on. Video thingy, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, never mind!”

“Thank you,” Thomas said, taking the shoe. “I go to work now.”

“Remember to smile, Thomas!” Sarah instructed. “They like you better if you smile. Come on. You can do it.”

Slowly Thomas widened his mouth, exposing horrible teeth. Maybe it would be best not to encourage him to smile.

“Mother?”

“All right, Anne, so sorry. Thomas just left. You have my entire attention.”

“I don’t want to bore you.”

“Come on, you never bore me,” Sarah lied, silently asking the fates how she and Herbert had ever managed to raise a child as deadly serious as Anne. Anne’s intentions were without fault, but the grim resolution with which she pursued them, exhausting.

“I’ve come up with a great idea for a local access television show. Something like a sitcom that would be fun for children to watch but would teach them,
subtly
, about issues like not drinking alcohol during pregnancy and the necessity of proper diets for mothers—”

Oh, this was going to be a long conversation. Sarah lifted Brownie onto the floor, hefted herself out of the armchair, lumbered into the kitchen, and cut herself a large slice of chocolate cake. Opening the cupboard, she discovered there were no clean plates. She’d forgotten to run the dishwasher, which was overflowing. Clamping the phone to her ear with her shoulder, she filled the detergent tray and switched the machine on; then she sat down at the table to eat the cake right off its plate. Sarah’s mother would have had apoplexy. For that matter, so would Anne. That was it, of course: Sarah’s mother’s anal compulsions had skipped Sarah and landed in Anne, like one of those genetic diseases she’d read about. Appropriate, then, that the majority of Sarah’s mother’s estate had gone to Anne.

Sarah hadn’t minded. Sarah’s mother had had maids, lots of them, scurrying around their huge Chestnut Hill mansion with brooms, dustpans, cloths, vacuum cleaners, like something absolutely out of Dickens. Her mother had snipped and snapped at those women, who in response nodded meekly, nearly prostrating themselves with expressions of servility. As a child, Sarah had cringed at the injustice of it and vowed she would never cause another person to be her servant.

She’d kept that vow. Unfortunately, no one had ever taught her how to attack in orderly fashion the running of a house. It had taken her a very long time to learn the simplest things, like the good sense of the dustpan living with the broom. To this day, when she and Herbert were in
their sixties, their home—they had now, only the one, this summer home on Nantucket they’d had insulated and renovated for year-round use—displayed not so much messiness and dirt as a simple lack of organization and systematic routine care.

When she turned fifty, Sarah had finally hired a girl to come in twice a week to see to the basic things like scrubbing the kitchen floor and the bathrooms, but Sarah had never learned to bond with furnishings. Because she always found the lives of the cleaning girls much more interesting than whether or not the freezer was defrosted or the bathtubs scrubbed, Sarah continually invited them to sit down with a cup of coffee and a muffin for a good long talk about their gloriously dramatic lives. She paid the cleaning girls for eight hours, knew they barely worked three hours, and didn’t care. What, after all, was money for?