Starter House(15)
“Thanks, Uncle Floyd.”
“Heard from your parents lately?”
“No.” After the Foothills pyramid collapsed, Eric’s mother had gone to Indiana to stay with her sister, and his father was still in jail. Eric wondered if Floyd had given him the job to find out if there was money hidden somewhere. If only. “Mom wrote once, but not Dad. I guess he’s ashamed.”
“He should be.” Floyd reached across Eric’s desk to finger the files. “Loaded you up with judies, huh?” Those were the clients who picked Moranis Miszlak because they saw the ads on afternoon television, airing during Judge Judy: cheap cases, hardly worth the cost of his time. People suing each other over undocumented loans, minor car accidents, and of course the low-income divorces. These cases belonged in small claims court, except for the clients’ inflated value of their own pain and suffering. The divorces were people who had seen trouble coming and married it anyway. “Poor people need lawyers too,” Floyd said. “You’ll get better cases soon.”
Eric straightened the picture of Lacey in its clear plastic frame. She stood beside the bumper cars at Myrtle Beach, with a snowcone in her hand, her hair blowing across her face in wavy strands of brown and gold. When Foothills went down, two weeks after Lacey and Eric got engaged, she kissed him and comforted him and promised to get him through law school. And she did it. Now she lay in bed with her feet elevated, wearing an adult diaper to catch the trickling blood.
“I’ve got enough to keep me busy,” Eric said.
Floyd took the picture from his hands. “It ain’t good enough to be busy. You got to be smart.” He laid the picture on the desk, facedown, and took the orange slice off Eric’s ribs and ate it, peel and all. “You know why they call this a doggy bag?”
Eric nodded. This sounded like the beginning of an Uncle Floyd life-skills seminar, and the quickest way through it was to nod and smile.
“Because you are that little girl’s bitch is why,” Floyd said. “Women all over God’s earth have babies and they don’t whine and carry on.”
Eric couldn’t let this pass unchallenged. “She put me through law school.”
“Good for her. Now she’s putting you through hell.”
Eric pushed his keyboard away and tore a rib off the rack. It was still hot. These weren’t leftovers. Floyd must have ordered for him just before leaving the restaurant. He was such a terrible old man, and then he had moments of disarming generosity.
“You got to be ready,” Floyd said. “You were smart about the house, not spending much; she’ll get half, but in a few years you’ll hardly notice.”
“She’s my wife. I love her.”
“There’s never another wife like the first. My Marian, I still dream of her. Doc gives me Xanax for it. That girl of yours, her mother’s some kind of witch.”
Eric and Lacey had a courtroom wedding; Floyd Miszlak and Ella Dane Kendall, their witnesses, had made a bad impression on each other. Ella Dane interrupted the ceremony to invoke the four elements and the four directions to bless the young couple, bringing them fertility, abundance, harmony, and joy. Floyd followed her incantation by declaring it the deepest pile of crap he’d ever stepped into, including the summer he’d worked cleaning the elephant habitat in the Greeneburg Zoo when he was sixteen. “It prepared me for the law,” he concluded, “but it didn’t prepare me for this.” He never missed a chance to remind Eric that all women turned into their mothers.
“Thanks for the ribs,” Eric said.
“Best barbecue in town. I’ll swear it on my deathbed.” Floyd left the room.
Eric wiped his hands. On the surface, Floyd was all chicken-fried grammar and happy fat charm, like a rustic chair with bark on the wood, but under that were layers of cunning; the man could write a contract that would make Satan weep. But he was wrong about Lacey.
When Eric told her there was no money, that his parents had drained his trust fund to string their clients along, she took off her engagement ring, a one-carat marquis barricaded by ramparts of smaller diamonds, three carats total. She put it in his hand.
“You don’t want to get married?” he said. It had been his first thought when he heard the news on morning television. Upstate investment firm closes its doors. He turned toward the television, toaster waffle steaming in his fingers, to see the Foothills storefront with its doors chained, and a crowd of clients—people whose accounts he’d handled during his internship last summer, when everything was fine—milling in the parking lot, funneling their hands and peering in the windows as if they might see boxes of money on the desks. Lacey’s gone, he thought. The ring flashed in his hand.