Young Wives (34 page)

Thinking of her first job in the teller’s cage, Michelle tried to estimate what she was holding in her hands, but then the dizziness came back and she had to put the money down, get up, and almost stagger to her daughter’s bed. She pushed Jenna’s clothes to the floor in piles and laid down, drawing her knees up close to her chest. Slowly the dizziness passed, but the fear took its place. Not fear—terror. She’d seen four packages in the floor, and she estimated there were at least five or six hundred bills in the first one. Over half a million dollars wrapped in newspaper under floorboards and carpet, hidden in her eleven-year-old daughter’s closet beneath pairs of old Doc Martens and new platform shoes?

Michelle felt suddenly so exposed, so endangered, that when Pookie jumped on the bed, she nearly screamed. The poor dog started and was about to bolt until she reached out to him and nestled him on her lap. She needed him and his body warmth right now more than he needed her. She patted his head and automatically pulled gently on his silky ears the way he liked. Everything else stopped. Everything except the dog’s breathing and her own.

Then, almost like a video running behind her eyelids, she saw what her life with Frank and the children had been. Comfortable. Easy. They’d never worried about downsizing, about recessions, about turn-downs in the economy the way everyone else had for the last ten years. Unlike Clinton’s, Frank’s business had thrived. Michelle, who had never been greedy before, had spent whatever she wanted to and Frank had encouraged her. He’d bought her jewelry. They took vacations. He deposited cash in her checking account and she paid the bills without problems every month, month after month, for…for years and years. When she’d taken the bank job, Frank had mildly disapproved, and reminded her they didn’t need the money. All the other couples in their neighborhood both worked, but…

Then the scene of the bust, fragmented, came to her, and the meetings with Bruzeman, and the promise from Frank that it was all a mistake. The women at the bake sale. Getting fired at the bank, Jenna’s tears, Frankie’s wet beds. All of it kept flashing faster and faster at Michelle. Frank’s face, and his promises, his protestations, her belief, her support, her loyalty. Her stupidity.

“Stupid,” she said out loud, and it sounded like her mother’s voice. Pookie jumped a little. “Stupid,” Michelle repeated.
My mother was right. I am stupid. And Frank must think I’m stupid, too
.

But stupid as I am
, Michelle thought,
even I know where all this money had to come from
.

In which Angela comes to her senses—mostly smells

Angie woke up and rushed across the bare floor to the bathroom sink. She was living in a state of siege. She was having all she could do to go on her walk with the girls each weekday morning, since she was sick almost every morning now. Then for the rest of the day, the smell of anything—even an apple sitting on the kitchen counter across the room—seemed to waft a strong odor that sent waves of nausea through her. In fact, her sense of smell had advanced along with her pregnancy, so that she could now detect soup or anything else being prepared in the immediate area. All meats had an odor of dead flesh; when Bill, the paralegal at work, had cheerfully offered her half of his turkey sandwich yesterday, she’d actually had to step quickly back, away from the innocent-looking white slabs of flesh he held out between two slices of bread.

Bread was about the only thing Angie
could
eat now. As she washed out her mouth, for some reason she thought of the biblical quote that “man doth not live by bread alone.” But some pregnant women, even back then, surely did. Angie, in modern days, was foremost among them. Just another difference between men and women, Angie thought bitterly, as she took tiny bites out of a slice of Wonder Bread. She knew that the advertisements for the stuff from her youth weren’t true—the spongy bread didn’t build strong bodies in twelve ways. Too bad, since it was all she could choke down.

She thought of the tiny body growing within her and knew she should go to a doctor and probably be eating differently, but what was the point? She couldn’t decide if she should continue the pregnancy for even one day more. But she also couldn’t bear the thought of aborting the tiny life within her, of making the decision to do that all alone. She’d loved Reid so much, wanted him and a life with him, that thinking about ending this life, killing this dream was unbearable.

Keeping the secret was unbearable, too. She’d never let her father see or hear her vomiting, and Anthony, who was in and out on business all the time, hadn’t said anything about her weight gain. Mostly she tried to avoid him. His protective love and anger wouldn’t be helpful right now. He’d offer to beat up Reid and pay for the OB-GYN, but Angie had to make her decision first.

Angie got dressed and drove into work early. She’d left a note for her dad. She had chickened out at telling him about her apartment. Her mother had been bad enough, with offers of furniture, worries about the neighborhood, and requests for the floor plan. Anthony would be worse when he found out.

She got to work, poured herself a cup of hot water—coffee was out of the question—and sat at her quiet desk. She tried to work as much as she could—work took concentration, and when she focused on it she couldn’t think about anything else, her own problems included. But she knew, deep inside her, that every moment that ticked by was one moment closer to the time when a decision would be made for her, even if she did nothing.

She was alone—yet not alone. She slept more deeply and with more exhaustion than she ever had in her life. The workload and the pressure to help her clients was enormous, but coupled with it was the energy drained from her body by this secret growing inside her.

Angie also got tired every afternoon—so tired that she twice had put her head down on her desk waking up with a stiff neck to find she had drooled out of the side of her mouth and onto several of the files while she napped. Now she picked up the Jackson folder, marked with a blot from a previous nap, and began looking through it again. George Creskin had gotten an incredibly early date for the custody hearing and Angie wasn’t sure she could be prepared in time. Could she get a continuance? She’d have to ask Laura or Michael. For some reason—not just because she was spending her mornings walking with Jada Jackson, but because of the outrageous situation that the woman had found herself in—Angie felt this case was central to her. She got up and put the stained folder under her arm to go consult with Michael. Although his caseload was enormous, he’d already been kind about helping her—and she needed a lot of help.

He was working in his equally small but meticulously organized office at the very end of the hall. He looked up from his desk, capped his meaty pen, and swung his legs out from around the side of the modesty panel. “So,” he said, “you’re both mobile
and
awake.” Angie felt her shoulders dip guiltily.

Michael raised his hand in a dismissive gesture and lowered his voice. “I stepped into Karen’s—I mean,
your
office yesterday and you were asleep,” he said and smiled. He had a nice-looking smile for a suburban father type. Angie had to grin back. “I warned you, this stuff can be really overwhelming,” he continued. “I’m not good at sleeping, but I’ve been known to sneak out and go sit in a movie on an afternoon when it just gets to me.” He put his hands behind his head in a sort of cradle and stretched back. Angie sat down in the seat clients usually used. She couldn’t help but notice how Michael’s belly pooched out when he stretched like that, as if
he
were in the earliest stage of pregnancy. She pushed the thought from her mind.

“I want you to look at this,” she said, and handed him a copy of the social worker’s report she had just received. “Is this report really pretty ghastly, or am I overreacting? Jada will be devastated.”

Michael raised his brows again. “
Jada
?” he asked. “So, you’re on a first-name basis?” Angie shrugged.

He picked up the document she offered him and began to read it. She had hoped the news wasn’t as bad as she feared, but he raised his brows almost immediately. She took that as a bad sign. “Wow,” he said after he’d skimmed through it. “Let’s get in our own expert witness to counteract this.”

“Good. You know one?”

“The best. Dr. Pollasky from Yale. A pal of mine. But…” He looked uncomfortable. “Look,” he finally continued, thumbing through the report, “before we go through the expense of an outside expert, is there any chance that this woman is”—he looked down at the page—“unstable, a possible drug user, or any of the other crap listed here? I know she’s your client, but there
are
children at stake.”

Before Angie could reply, he went on. “Hmmm. No witnesses to any of that except her and him. He said, she said. The judge will usually rule for the mother, not that that’s necessarily fair, but that’s the way it is. Here, however, we have a very negative report from the social worker. Okay, she spoke with the father first and obviously was prejudiced but…Creskin has asked for and received an early date, claiming the kids are at risk. He points out the children are already in custody with the father, and a new caregiver is employed.”

“The caregiver is his girlfriend!” Angela told Michael. “And she’s being paid out of Jada’s support money!”

Michael sighed and shook his head. “So she’s giving testimony that the children were not cared for. And so will his mother. Where are her parents?”

“In Barbados,” Angie admitted. “She didn’t want them involved if she could help it. They’re old, and they couldn’t have witnessed much on a day-to-day basis. But I can get her friends to testify. A past PTA president. Her neighbor, Michelle Russo. Though there is a problem there…”

Michael was silent for a while as he looked through the file. “This thing about the drug dealer isn’t good,” he said. “Jesus, they’ve got news clippings and part of the testimony on this Russo guy and his wife. And she’s a friend? The kids were in the Russo household? And then they were—”

“Look, don’t jump to conclusions. The woman may be our next client. She hasn’t been indicted. There was no extraordinary traffic in and out of the house. And the husband has only been indicted, not convicted, Michael. This is America.”

“Tell it to the judge,” Michael said. “In Dom Rel cases, if it looks like a rat, smells like a rat, and tastes like a rat, it’s a rat.”

Angie stood up. “I can’t believe the injustice of it,” she said. “This is a woman who did everything,
everything
, to keep her family together while her husband loafed and slept around. It’s outrageous.”

Michael nodded calmly in agreement. Then he smiled.

Suddenly Angie was furious. “Are you laughing at me?” Angie asked. “Do you think this is funny? Do you think
I’m
funny? Because I came to you for some help to win this case. With or without it, I’m
going
to win this case.”

“I’m smiling at you because I like you,” Michael said. “I used to be as fired up as you. As passionate.” For some reason, Angie blushed. “I meant that in the professional sense, Angie,” Michael said. “But you’re what my kids call phat.”

“What?” Angie said. Was she showing already? And who was he to call her names? He had a belly.

“P-H-A-T. Pretty, hot, and tempting,” he said.

Angela could hardly believe it; she almost laughed out loud. This middle-aged, white-bread guy had used outdated rapper slang on her? But somehow she liked the compliment.

“Now sit down,” he told her. He sounded so reasonable, so pleasant, that her anger evaporated and she did as she was told. “Look, domestic law is not about fair. It’s about law. And sometimes it’s not even about law—it’s about manipulation and presentation and strategy. George Creskin has gotten a drop on us here, and he’s obviously got a pretty good strategy. We need one as good or better, and it certainly can’t be you explaining your view of fairness and expecting the judge to accept that.” He paused and smiled again. “With me so far?” he asked, but not in an offensive way. Angie nodded.

“So the point here is that we have to come back in with our own witnesses, our own home assessment. We could also try to work through the kids.”

“Jada insisted that was out of the question,” Angie said.

“It’s dirty pool,” he said, “but the court will probably ask the two older children questions, and you can be sure that George Creskin is doing his best to prepare their views.”

“They love their mother. They want to be home. That’s what they’ll say.”

“Children with cigarette burns all over their bodies still report that they love the mother who did it to them, Angie,” Michael said patiently. “Children love their mothers—at least, until their hormones kick in. And if I see Creskin’s strategy, they will get to be home, if your client is forced to vacate.”

Angie suddenly felt overwhelmed. She turned away from Michael, swept with another wave of fatigue so powerful she actually let her head hang for a moment while she resisted it. There was so much to do, so much to learn, and so little time. And she was so, so tired. Maybe she couldn’t win this case. The thought frightened her and she raised her head with a snap. Michael was looking more closely at her.

“Look,” he said, “this one is going to take some special resources. Maybe we send out an investigator. Look into this Tonya Green’s background. How about the grandmother? Is she clean? And the husband, has anyone ever seen
him
smoke a joint? Has anyone ever seen him drunk? Has he ever hit her? If you really want to use everything you’ve got, and maybe even some stuff you might not have, you could dig in to make a case despite the lead George has on this. But it will take resources. Has she got any money?”

Angie rolled her eyes in answer. Michael made an I-knew-the-answer-to-that-one face and flipped through the rest of the brief. “Well, I think we ought to take it before the committee this afternoon. It’s a real lulu, but I see your point about it being an extreme. If you’re sure she’s being railroaded, I’ll stand behind you and we can see if we can squeeze some funding from the special kitty Laura guards.”