Thorns of Truth (8 page)

Marie, who as a teenager could eat anything and never gain an ounce, wasn’t so much skinny nowadays as downright scrawny. In her mid-fifties, she looked a good ten years older. Her face was hard and lined with too many disappointments, her once-brown hair dyed an unflattering shoe-polish black.

“In the cupboard to the right of the stove.” Watching her sister rummage among the boxes and jars. Rose had to avert her gaze from the sight of Marie’s spine running like a lumpy seam up the back of her cheap polyester blouse. She asked, “Would it have made a difference if I’d tried talking you out of it?” Marie had been nineteen and pregnant, but, still …

Marie shrugged, settling back into her chair. “You’re talking ancient history. Who the hell knows? For one thing, with Nonnie breathing down my neck twenty-four hours a day, I’d probably have run off with the Son of Sam if he’d asked. The only thing I regretted at the time was leaving you alone with that old bat.”

“I had Clare, remember?”

At the mention of her younger sister, Marie snorted. “For whatever it was worth. Saying all those rosaries might’ve put her one step closer to heaven, but let’s face it, living with Miss Goody Two-Shoes was hell.” Roughly, she shook a teaspoon of sugar into her mug straight from the box, then sat back and lit a cigarette. She was the only person Rose allowed to smoke in her home. “Anyway, Pete was okay when he wasn’t drinking.”

Rose idly stirred her coffee. What did you say to a woman who’d been beaten for years, until she finally got fed up enough to walk out? A woman who was hospitalized once with a ruptured kidney, and whose nose had been broken more times than a prizefighter’s? At the time, Rose had had plenty to say. But now …

If Marie had little sympathy for others, she had none for herself. And if her tiny apartment in Port Washington, which was all she could afford on her salary as a Macy’s clerk, wasn’t exactly what she’d wanted out of life, Marie was far too proud to show it.

“But if it was
your
son, Bobby or Gabe?” Rose persisted.

Marie set her mug down with a decisive clunk. In the stark morning light, with the smoke from her cigarette drifting in lazy wreaths about her head, her eyes were a queer shade of milky blue that Rose associated with burned-out lightbulbs.

“I’d do whatever I could to save him,” she said in a voice as hard and tight as the look on her face. “Get rid of the girl myself, if I had to.”

Monday morning, Rose sat at the desk in her office, feeling vaguely let down. She couldn’t put her finger on what was missing … until she remembered that this month was when she and Max had planned to take that trip to Nepal they’d always talked about—he’d wanted to go hiking in the Himalayas at least once before he died, he’d told her.

Two months after sending in the deposit, he was in a mahogany casket being lowered into the ground.

And now his widow sat with her back to a breathtaking view of Park Avenue and Fifty-second from the twenty-fourth floor that another executive would have forfeited several years’ worth of vacations to be gazing out on.

With a sigh, Rose leaned back in her swivel chair, staring at the accordion file in front of her, bulging with filings, briefs, affidavits, rulings—and that was only the last few months’ worth. There was a whole file drawer in the outer office dedicated to
Esposito
v.
St. Bartholomew’s Hospital
. And now, finally, it was going to trial. Max would have been pleased, she thought. Though it was technically her case—via Rachel, who was affiliated with St. Bart’s—from day one, Rose and Max had worked side by side on it, compiling and documenting. Hadn’t it initially been Max who’d argued in favor of their representing the hospital, and thus taking on what had all the markings of a lost cause? He’d pointed out that however sympathetic a jury might feel, the plaintiff—a seventy-five-year-old woman who’d suffered a stroke on the operating table while having her gallbladder removed—had been chronically ill to begin with, and that there had been no clear negligence on the part of her doctors.

Max. God, how she wished he were here. While she tended to sift doggedly through mountains of discovery material, piecing together a case bit by bit, Max usually spied the one piece of evidence so obvious that everyone else had missed it.

Like with
Ackerman
v.
Brushrite Industries
—Max pinpointing the source of his client’s lead poisoning by having not only the paint currently manufactured by Brushrite tested, but the layers of Brushrite paint on the factory’s walls, some of which dated back to the time of Ackerman’s claim.

But if there was a magic bullet buried somewhere in
Esposito
v.
St. Bartholomew’s
, she had yet to find it. Against the team of ambulance chasers representing Mrs. Esposito, a half-paralyzed old lady in a wheelchair, Rose would have to come up with an argument so compelling it would make a multi-million-dollar institution look like the underdog.…

She was going over the anesthesiologist’s deposition—fifty pages of truly numbing transcript, no pun intended—when her intercom beeped. “Rose? I have that file you wanted Xeroxed. You asked me to give it to Mandy … but she’s not in her office yet.” She sounded apologetic, but it wasn’t her fault Mandy wasn’t in. Hell, she probably felt guilty for failing to cover for her.

Rose tapped her pencil against the desktop in annoyance. Her stepdaughter had promised to go over next year’s proposed budget before their partners’ meeting at eleven. Rose needed the figures on Mandy’s department. It would have been helpful, too, to get some overall feedback on the firm. Like her father, Mandy had always been good at spotting places where they could trim back a bit; and since she was generally the first to show up in the morning, and the last to leave at night, she had a pretty good perspective on things.

Except, lately, Mandy hadn’t been quite as available as usual.

Come to think of it, Rose wondered, when had she last seen her stepdaughter? Whenever she buzzed Mandy at her desk, or stopped by her office. Rose was informed that Mandy was either in a meeting, or in court, or having lunch with a client. Was family law such a booming enterprise these days? Or was Mandy simply avoiding her?

Rose made a mental note to invite her stepdaughter over for dinner one night next week. For hadn’t she been avoiding Mandy, too? When was the last time she’d suggested even a cup of coffee? Mandy was also grieving, she reminded herself. Maybe that was why they’d been subconsciously keeping one another at arm’s length: each was for the other too painful a reminder of the husband and father they’d lost.

It wasn’t that Rose didn’t care; she just didn’t feel she could handle more than what was on her own plate. When the simple act of weeding out a closet seems like the excavation of Troy, you don’t have a lot left over for your family, she acknowledged ruefully.

“Ask her to stop by my office when she gets in,” Rose directed her secretary—a bright-eyed Sarah Lawrence graduate whose anal doggedness secretly drove her a little nuts. “And— Mallory?—what is this on my calendar about a speech I’m supposed to give tomorrow afternoon?”

“The Chelsea Tenants Association,” Mallory reminded her. “Something to do with legal rights in landlord disputes, I think.” She added nervously, “You spoke to the woman in charge, remember?”

“Of course. It’s coming back to me now,” Rose lied.

“Do you want me to see if I can reschedule it?”

“No … I’m sure it’s in their bulletin already. I’ll squeeze it in somehow.” Running around like a chicken with its head cut off was better than having too much time to think, she’d found.

“Oh, and one other thing,” Mallory remembered to tell her. “Before, when you were on the phone with Judge Henry’s office, there was a call. Some man—he said he was a friend.”

Rose felt herself grow warm. Eric? Like an uninvited guest, he’d been on her mind since Saturday night. When he didn’t call on Sunday, she’d figured that was the end of it. She should have been relieved … but, instead, she’d been secretly disappointed. Now, perversely, what she felt was pure panic.

“Did he leave a number?” Unconsciously, she’d brought a hand to her throat, where a pulse leaped. Rose quickly dropped her hand into her lap.

“He said he’d call back.”

“Next time, be sure and get his name.” Better not to arouse her secretary’s suspicion, Rose thought.

The intercom clicked off.

Rose returned to the paperwork on her desk, but found she couldn’t concentrate. Even the simple task of flipping through her Rolodex—looking for a name she couldn’t find at first, because she couldn’t remember if the “P”s came before the “R”s—left her feeling muddled and irritable.

She stared at the framed portrait on the wall above the ecru sofa, a charcoal sketch of Max done by a sidewalk artist. Not particularly skillful, but somehow it captured his essence. That hint of irony in his crinkled eyes, and the angle of his head—chin tucked low, as if he were a boxer squaring off for a punch.

She thought of Max in bed; his hands, which had known her body so well, all the places she liked to be touched. The rhythms of their lovemaking like a familiar song she never got tired of hearing. How, even after they’d both come, he’d stay inside her another minute or so, not moving … as if withdrawing would shatter something precious.

Now, in her head, she could hear him, as if he were whispering in her ear.
I know you loved me, Rosie. Don’t you realize that nothing could ever cancel that out?

Mentally, yes. But her heart … ah, that was a different matter. It was made of more resistant stuff. Probably she was capable of sleeping with another man, but Rose couldn’t imagine sharing a bathroom sink with anyone other than Max. Or a closet. Or in airports, on long layovers between flights, falling asleep with her head nestled in a lap that wasn’t his …

She was halfway through the pile on her desk when the intercom buzzed once more. “It’s
him
again, and this time I got his name,” a conspiratorial voice announced. Another thing that annoyed Rose about her secretary—Mallory’s assumption that, like herself, every single woman over the age of thirty was at all times actively seeking a husband. “Eric Sandstrom. Line two.”

Rose, suddenly furious that she’d been placed in this position, punched the blinking button. “Rose Griffin,” she announced crisply.

“Am I catching you at a bad time?”

Eric’s voice, like no other—faintly husky and at the same time resonant—caused her face and scalp to prickle, and the skin on the back of her neck to grow tight. Well, of course, she thought, feeling impatient with herself. Didn’t he make a living as a host on the radio?

“I have a meeting in half an hour, so I
am
a little rushed,” she told him.

“This will only take a minute.”

“What can I help you with?”

There was a pause, and she heard the bemusement in Eric’s voice when he said, “You sounded so businesslike just then.”

“This
is
my office,” she reminded him.

“Well, I won’t keep you then.” He became suddenly businesslike himself, leaving her feeling the tiniest bit guilty. “I need a legal expert for a show I’m doing next week. You interested?”

Rose immediately felt foolish. What could she have been thinking? That any guy over forty would succumb to the charms of a middle-aged woman with two grown boys, and more gray hairs than there were papers on her desk?

“Depends. What’s the topic?” she asked, more brusquely than she might have had her heart not been pounding.

“Domestic violence. My main guest is a former battered wife, who just published a book about her experience. I’ve lined up the director of a local shelter, too, along with one of the residents.”

“Sounds interesting, but I’m afraid it’s not up my alley,” she told him. “Why don’t I have my stepdaughter give you a call? She specializes in family law.”

“I don’t need an expert witness—nobody is on trial here.” He chuckled. “You ever done any radio or TV? I have a feeling you’d be good at it. Frankly, that’s why I thought of you.”

Rose hesitated, uncertain how to respond. She’d been so busy putting up barriers against a romantic interest Eric didn’t appear to have, his simple directness threw her off guard. It might be fun, being a guest on his show. Certainly it would be a change of pace.

“What the heck, why not?” she relented with a laugh.

“How about Tuesday? One-thirty, you’re out by two-fifteen.”

“You got it.” Grabbing an envelope, she scribbled the address. In SoHo, West Broadway. That would be cutting it close, but unless she got stuck in traffic she’d make it back in time for her three o’clock.

She was on the verge of saying goodbye when Eric remarked, “By the way, I spoke to Brian this morning. He told me Iris and Drew had gotten engaged.”

He had the good sense, at least, not to congratulate her. On the other hand, he didn’t sound troubled, either. Why should he? It wasn’t Eric’s son about to ruin his life.

She said cautiously, “Drew seems to think they can work it out. In any case, there’s not much I can do about it. He didn’t exactly consult me ahead of time.”

“And if he had?”

“I’d have told him to wait until he was absolutely sure. Like the song says, only fools rush in.”

“ ‘… but I can’t help falling in love with you,’ ” he finished the refrain.

In the beat of silence that followed, Rose felt suddenly, frighteningly vulnerable—as if he’d somehow stripped away her executive veneer and could see how desperately lonely she was. But she sensed Eric wasn’t mocking her.

“Something like that.” Rose closed her eyes, pressing the heel of one hand to her aching chest.

“You’ve never felt that way yourself—like you’d die if you had to wait a single more minute for something you wanted?” Eric’s voice, low and soothing, seemed to tug at her like a gentle tide.

“If I ever did, it’s been so long I can’t remember,” she lied.

“Or would just as soon forget,” he countered, with the wry lightness of someone who must tread cautiously himself, or risk opening old wounds.