Beverly Bird - Playing By The Rules

I stood and reached for her. I was thinking that I should guide her away from the table, maybe to the ladies’ room, where she could calm down. Then I spotted Frank Ethan over her shoulder.

The evening was going to hell in a handbasket, I thought. I should have just listened to Sylvie Casamento and gone straight home to my daughter after court. I hadn’t seen Frank since the night six weeks ago when I’d discovered that he kissed like a fish. He didn’t frequent McGlinchey’s—but he knew that I did. Which more or less equated to the certainty that he was here hoping to find me.

Sam recognized him. “Hey,” he said. “Isn’t that the corporate dude who used to stand outside our building and check his watch so he’d knock on your door at the exact time he said he’d pick you up?”

“Shut up.” I spat the words just as Frank started toward me, his arms spread wide and his mouth puckered up fish-style. I caught Sam’s sleeve and backpedaled. “Time to go.”

He was trying to dry his face with a bar napkin. He threw it back onto the table. “Sounds good to me.”

We turned together and headed for the door. Or rather, Sam headed for the door. I walked into a wall of blue chambray and a snarl of chest hair at its opened collar.

“Ms. Hillman?” chest-hair asked.

Sometimes you just know something and there’s no getting around it, even when you’d prefer ignorance. Blue chambray or not, this guy was a sheriff’s officer. I’d met enough of them in ten years of practicing law to recognize one when I ran into his chest.

I tried to step around him. I knew he wasn’t allowed to detain me, not for what he wanted to do. But he didn’t have to. He slid the papers he was holding into the open side flap of my purse.

Service acquired.

Sam tried. He’d only been in Philadelphia for six months, but he’d passed our Commonwealth’s bar exam with flying colors and he knew the ropes. He tried to knock the papers out of the guy’s hand before they landed. Sam was quick, but the deputy was quicker.

Sam swore once the damage was done and more or less dragged me out of the bar by my arm. I stopped on the sidewalk, pulling back against his grip, and I drew in a steadying breath.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m all right now.”

“How can you be after that?” he demanded.

“If it makes you feel any better, then I’m a puddle of Jell-O.”

“Jell-O is solid,” he pointed out. “It can’t be a puddle.”

“It’s not so solid that it doesn’t jiggle.”

He thought about that and finally gave me the point. “What did he serve on you, anyway? Are you getting disbarred?”

I choked at the mere thought. “No.”

“How do you know without looking at the damned papers?” He was more upset about this than I was, I realized.

“Because the bar association sends their axes by certified mail in this state,” I explained. At his startled look—one that asked how I knew that—I added, “It happened to a guy in my office once.”

Besides, I didn’t have to look at the papers because I already knew what they were. Now that they’d finally turned up, I realized that I had pretty much been expecting them ever since Millson Kramer III had tossed his hat into the political arena a while ago. I’d guessed then that Chloe and I would become his official campaign skeletons-in-the-closet.

To appreciate this, you’d have to know Mill. He’s the proving ground for the fact that too much IQ is not necessarily a good thing. He’s clinically a genius and my daughter is a shining testament to that. Chloe grasps it all—math, science, concrete concepts and those of an airier, more abstract variety. She’s dazzling. Mill, on the other hand, tends to be so captivated by his own calculating thoughts that he has the charm and disposition of a wet dishrag. He is, however, very exacting, orderly and methodical. So I’d known that Chloe and I were probably on his to-do list of things to clear up so he would become highly electable.

We’d been seeing each other on a comfortable basis for a little over a year when I got pregnant. I wasn’t appalled when I found out about Chloe. I’d always wanted a child, though this wasn’t exactly the way I’d envisioned it happening. I knew I would be swimming upstream by going ahead with parenthood on my own, but I was reasonably sure I was good for the challenge. And Mill provided an excellent gene pool, being intelligent, attractive, well-bred and, best of all, indifferent.

After I decided that I wanted the baby, I also realized that hooking up with Mill on a legal basis for the express purpose of her existence would be a mistake of monumental proportions. Regardless of the fact that I arrange divorces and negotiate custody disputes for a living, I strongly believe that marriage is supposed to be forever. And the comfortable pseudorelationship I had going with Mill was not the sort of thing forever is made of. In fact, when I realized that, I was a little ashamed of myself for letting it progress for as long as it had.

In the end, I trusted in the fact that Mill was so utterly self-absorbed, he wouldn’t try to take the idea of parenthood too seriously. He wouldn’t try to make our relationship more than it was because of the baby. I knew that if I declined his proposal of marriage and asked him to go away, he’d go away. I was right—he did, with a few snide comments for casual observers—until now.

Now he had decided to run for city council, and the whole business of Chloe would make him look less than stellar in the eyes of Philadelphia’s more conservative voters. I knew this was a custody suit even without taking the papers from my purse, and I was definitely not going to do that. Not yet. On top of Grace’s bizarre opinions about me having sex with Sam, and the Woodsen matter of schizophrenia, I was in no way planning to address the issue of my daughter’s parentage before morning.

I opened my mouth to tell Sam this, then McGlinchey’s door opened behind us. Sam tugged my keys from my hand. I tried to hold on to them as we started jogging toward the parking lot, but he twisted them free of my fingers, anyway.

I yanked on the passenger door once he had unlocked it. I dropped inside and looked over my shoulder. Whoever had come through the door after us—if it had been either Tammy or Frank—they weren’t following us. And the deputy didn’t have to. He’d already accomplished his dirty work.

Sam found the little button on the side of the driver’s seat, and he moved the seat backward with ruthless intent. I could never get it into the right position again when he did that. He shot the key into the ignition, revved the engine and looped around onto Pine Street. We headed toward the outskirts of Society Hill. Mill lived in the district. Sam and I could only afford to come close.

“You’re not very good at this, you know,” I told him.

He angled a glance my way. “At driving?”

This is something else I’ve learned from thirty-five years of living: never ever criticize a man’s driving, no matter how bad it is. It’s a testosterone thing. “Actually, I meant dating. Keep your eyes on the road.” I closed my own so I wouldn’t have to note how fast we were going.

“I’m a great dater.” This came out with predictable evidence of that same testosterone.

“No, Sam, you’re not. Practice does not always make perfect.”

“It strikes me that this is a little like the pot calling the kettle black.”

I opened my eyes again. “I hardly ever date!” I protested.

“That is my point.” He swerved around a cab and we veered north onto Third Street.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I straightened in my seat. Damned if the man couldn’t get my ire up. Plus, he’d managed to hit on a topic that I’d already been under fire for through half the evening from Grace and Jenny.

“It means that maybe if you did more of it, you might be in a position to judge my tactics,” Sam said. “It means that you might figure out that a guy who has an obsession about time is probably going to be a little anal retentive. And he just might be the type to come at you in a bar with his arms open wide, puckering up his mouth like some kind of overblown fish.”

I was just outraged enough that I didn’t know which comment to respond to first, but I’d be damned if I’d admit that Frank Ethan really did kiss like a fish. “I happen to appreciate a sense of punctuality and responsibility,” I said.

“Yeah? What about that day you canceled all your appointments and played hooky so you could show me the Liberty Bell?”

“That was you.” As soon as it was out, I considered biting my tongue off. Grace’s voice whispered nasty little observations in my head again.

“Which means…what?” Sam asked.

I wasn’t going to answer that. “I fail to see what this has to do with Frank,” I said stiffly. “Besides, there’s no such thing as an overblown fish.”

“Yes, there is. There are those ones that puff up occasionally for some scientific reason I can’t remember right now.”

“Like Tammy’s chest?”

“Leave her chest out of this.”

“That’s tough to do, Sam. It’s so…out there.”

He took his eyes off the road again to glare at me. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”

“I’m fine.” Grace was wrong with me, I thought, her and her absurd opinions about me and Sam.

“You’re not fine,” Sam said. “You’re being caustic.”

“At least I don’t tell people I love them on the first date. Or did you do it on the second?” We’d reached the parking lot that I used and he drove my car into a space. The Mitsubishi rocked on its shock absorbers when he hit the breaks too hard. I tried not to wince.

“I did not tell her that I loved her,” he said.

“Well, you must have done something to put the idea in her head.” I got out and slammed the door. “In the throes of passion, maybe?”

“I never even got around to passion with her!”

My heart shifted a little. Damned if I cared. I grabbed my keys from his hand and started up the street toward our apartment building.

“So what about that scampi?” Sam asked, following me. “Since we’re both home now and we’ve semi-resolved the Woodsen thing, we might as well eat together.”

“Bribe me and I’ll consider it.”

“You want me to pucker up like a fish?”

I turned and walked backward to face him. “For the record, Frank kissed like a…like a…”

“Words fail you?” he said when I couldn’t quite continue.

“I’m trying to reach for the perfect superlative.”

“I hope you come up with it before my hearing starts to go.”

“There are just so many to choose from.”

He reached around me and opened the outside door of our building. I pivoted back to face forward and we crossed the black-and-white marble vestibule to step into a fern-filled hallway. My apartment was on the first floor, his was one floor above mine.

“Come on, Mandy. Feed me,” he said. “I’ve got some wine I could contribute. I bought it because I was going to try to lure Tammy back here tonight.”

“Ah, leftovers. Sam, I am so flattered.”

“I’d rather share it with you.”

Everything inside me rolled over. Slowly, sweetly. It was purely Grace’s doing, of course. I had been absolutely fine when I’d been hating Sam in Judge Larson’s courtroom two hours ago.

“Go get the wine, Sam,” I said, a little tired of fighting off images of how he would claw. But I watched him move up the stairs with that slow, prowling way he had of moving, and I found myself thinking that on so many levels he seemed absurdly unaware of his own appeal. Either that or he took it for granted. I had never quite figured out which it was.