forty-five-year-old Roger Walsh.”
The newscaster is speaking earnestly into a video camera, trying her best to look dignified as she stands in the middle of Laura’s front lawn, strewn with roller skates, Roller Blades, a bicycle, and half a dozen other artifacts of an eight-year-old boy’s life.
Laura takes a moment to wish she’d gotten on Evan’s case about picking up after himself as she’s led out the back door by a police officer. The video cameras are still whirring. She tries, unsuccessfully, to shield her face with the collar of her raincoat, the one she’s been meaning to bring to the dry cleaner for weeks. Photographers from all the Long Island and New York papers are there. The New York Times. Newsday. Even the local edition of The Pennysaver. Flashbulbs explode in her face.
“She’s an animal!” cries one of the dozens of onlookers, a man in an undershirt and drooping jeans who’s brandishing his beer can.
“She’s not an animal,” counters a woman clutching a bag of groceries. “She’s a woman who needs a good lawyer! “
“She was merciless!” someone else cries.
“All she wanted was her just revenge,” claims the woman.
Laura can remain silent no longer. “I didn’t mean to kill him!” she cries. “It just happened! One minute I was arranging the steak knives in the drawer, and the next thing I knew —
* * * *
“Mo-o-o-om!” Evan’s whiny voice pulled her out of her nightmarish reverie. ‘Today’s gym, and I can’t find any clean sweatpants.”
For once, Laura was actually glad for the excuse to drag herself out of bed. Not that the fantasy she’d been spinning as she lay in bed was entirely rooted in fiction. Today she was making her initial foray into the world of the legal jungle. The day before, she’d made an appointment with a lawyer. A divorce lawyer. She’d dialed three times before she was able to keep herself from hanging up. It was such a monumental step. Such a definitive step. Above all, such a final step.
The fact that Irwin Hart had been Claire’s lawyer bothered her, too. Laura’s instincts told her that following Claire’s recommendation for anything would be like borrowing one of her Lycra miniskirts: it would turn out to be much too much for Laura. Still, with no other ideas about whom to try, she’d decided to check him out.
She felt as if she were about to sneak off on a secret mission as she slapped peanut butter and jelly on white bread for Evan’s school lunch and tried to carry on a meaningful discussion about why the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles no longer held the same cachet they once had. Through it all, Roger remained silent. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and looking sullen. Laura tried to quell her irritation—with him, of course, and with the fact that despite her decision to get out of her marriage, she was still living with the same husband in the same house, with the same anger gnawing away at the half-chewed bagel sitting in her stomach—by reminding herself that things weren’t that different from what they’d been all along. On the upside, she realized that her days of breakfasting with a hostile, brooding husband were numbered.
She was standing in front of the mirror in Irwin Hart’s reception area, looking with dismay at the sad, tired face staring back at her, when she remembered that this wasn’t just any day. Today was her fifteenth wedding anniversary.
She was supposed to be buying champagne. Wrapping either a cappuccino maker or a bathrobe in colorful gift paper. Maybe even plotting a few surprises for the bedroom: reintroducing candles, perhaps, or even throwing caution to the wind and removing her socks. Instead, she was taking a mental inventory of their possessions, struggling to remember who’d originally owned the collection of Byrds albums, agonizing over who was entitled to the margarita glasses.
Looking at her reflection in the mirror, Laura watched her face crumple. “Oh, my
The newscaster is speaking earnestly into a video camera, trying her best to look dignified as she stands in the middle of Laura’s front lawn, strewn with roller skates, Roller Blades, a bicycle, and half a dozen other artifacts of an eight-year-old boy’s life.
Laura takes a moment to wish she’d gotten on Evan’s case about picking up after himself as she’s led out the back door by a police officer. The video cameras are still whirring. She tries, unsuccessfully, to shield her face with the collar of her raincoat, the one she’s been meaning to bring to the dry cleaner for weeks. Photographers from all the Long Island and New York papers are there. The New York Times. Newsday. Even the local edition of The Pennysaver. Flashbulbs explode in her face.
“She’s an animal!” cries one of the dozens of onlookers, a man in an undershirt and drooping jeans who’s brandishing his beer can.
“She’s not an animal,” counters a woman clutching a bag of groceries. “She’s a woman who needs a good lawyer! “
“She was merciless!” someone else cries.
“All she wanted was her just revenge,” claims the woman.
Laura can remain silent no longer. “I didn’t mean to kill him!” she cries. “It just happened! One minute I was arranging the steak knives in the drawer, and the next thing I knew —
* * * *
“Mo-o-o-om!” Evan’s whiny voice pulled her out of her nightmarish reverie. ‘Today’s gym, and I can’t find any clean sweatpants.”
For once, Laura was actually glad for the excuse to drag herself out of bed. Not that the fantasy she’d been spinning as she lay in bed was entirely rooted in fiction. Today she was making her initial foray into the world of the legal jungle. The day before, she’d made an appointment with a lawyer. A divorce lawyer. She’d dialed three times before she was able to keep herself from hanging up. It was such a monumental step. Such a definitive step. Above all, such a final step.
The fact that Irwin Hart had been Claire’s lawyer bothered her, too. Laura’s instincts told her that following Claire’s recommendation for anything would be like borrowing one of her Lycra miniskirts: it would turn out to be much too much for Laura. Still, with no other ideas about whom to try, she’d decided to check him out.
She felt as if she were about to sneak off on a secret mission as she slapped peanut butter and jelly on white bread for Evan’s school lunch and tried to carry on a meaningful discussion about why the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles no longer held the same cachet they once had. Through it all, Roger remained silent. He sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and looking sullen. Laura tried to quell her irritation—with him, of course, and with the fact that despite her decision to get out of her marriage, she was still living with the same husband in the same house, with the same anger gnawing away at the half-chewed bagel sitting in her stomach—by reminding herself that things weren’t that different from what they’d been all along. On the upside, she realized that her days of breakfasting with a hostile, brooding husband were numbered.
She was standing in front of the mirror in Irwin Hart’s reception area, looking with dismay at the sad, tired face staring back at her, when she remembered that this wasn’t just any day. Today was her fifteenth wedding anniversary.
She was supposed to be buying champagne. Wrapping either a cappuccino maker or a bathrobe in colorful gift paper. Maybe even plotting a few surprises for the bedroom: reintroducing candles, perhaps, or even throwing caution to the wind and removing her socks. Instead, she was taking a mental inventory of their possessions, struggling to remember who’d originally owned the collection of Byrds albums, agonizing over who was entitled to the margarita glasses.
Looking at her reflection in the mirror, Laura watched her face crumple. “Oh, my
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