Starter House(25)
Floyd mused on Eric’s victory. “You’ll lose on the next hearing. You get a judge with an IQ higher than room temperature, which is at least half of them, and he’ll slap your guy with child support. Back child support. With interest.”
Eric had already warned his client. “Maybe the biological father will pay.”
“Maybe pigs will fly out my ass. How many clients you got?”
“Hundreds,” Eric said glumly. “They’re all judies. It gets me down.”
“They’re the peanut butter in your sandwich, boy.”
Eric’s mind slid to his new client, Lex Hall, whose bill was being paid by Harry Rakoczy. He’d depose the pediatrician. Maybe he could get together with the wife’s lawyer. “What do you know about some guy called Cambrick MacAvoy?” he asked.
The lawyers and paralegals laughed, and Sammie the receptionist’s Bambi eyes got even bigger and darker. “Here’s a joke,” someone said from across the table. “How many lawyers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Depends on how many Cambrick MacAvoy can drag in there.”
“Who is he?”
“She,” four voices said from various points across the table.
“Ex-wife,” Floyd said. “Mine. You’re up against her?”
Eric was surprised. His family hadn’t been close with Floyd, seeing him only at Thanksgiving. When Foothills Financial collapsed and Eric’s father went to prison, it was Lacey who called Uncle Floyd and asked him to hire Eric. Eric didn’t remember the name Cambrick. Could he have missed an entire marriage and divorce in his uncle’s life? It was too bad. He should have sent a card. Maybe two. “It’s a divorce. A judy.”
“Not with Cambrick on the other side. Trust me, that woman will hang your kidneys on her Christmas tree. Don’t tell me there’s custody.”
“There’s custody. I was hoping to work something out.”
“Could be, could be,” Floyd allowed. “If you give her your kidneys right off the bat, she might could let you keep half a lung and a pound of liver.”
The food arrived. Floyd had ordered a variety of wings with names ranging from Sweet Caroline to Inferno. “I’m serious,” Eric said, as the lawyers passed the plates. “I need to talk with her.”
Floyd raised his voice and yelled across the bar, “Cambrick MacAvoy!”
Eric dropped the wing on his plate and hastily wiped his hands. “She’s here?”
“You’ve got a little something,” Sammie murmured, leaning across the table to dab at the corner of his mouth with her napkin. Sometime in the last few minutes, her blouse had mysteriously slipped lower on her breasts.
“Thanks, I’m good,” Eric said. He reached for his beer. If she kept lunging at him, he’d have to spill it on her. An image of Sammie with her pink blouse soaked in beer crossed his mind, and he quickly amended the thought: he’d have to spill it on himself.
Floyd chimed his beer glass with his knife. “Cam-brick!”
A tall white-haired woman in a blue dress slid over to the table. “I see you’ve gained weight,” she said to Floyd.
“Looks like you overdid the Botox, darling.”
“That’s my natural expression when I see you. Rigid horror.”
“You go to court in that rag?”
“Only if I’m meeting the judge in chambers afterward.” Her white hair was wound into a Sunday-grandma pouf of a chignon, and the blue dress showed a body that made Sammie look like a middle schooler playing dress-up. Her gaze wandered around the table. This might be the perfect moment to spill beer on himself. Then she said, “I’m looking for some larval Miszlak thing.”
“That would be me.” He looked directly into her face, ignoring all distractions; and then he recognized her. “Aunty Marian?”
“He remembers. Do you know, once I divorced your uncle, I never heard from any one of you Miszlaks again? It was like I fell off the earth.”
“I was only eight.” He stood up to kiss her cheek, as he had been trained since infancy—kiss your aunty, kiss your grandma—though she felt not at all like the usual sort of aunt. Something dreadful had happened to her. “You’re looking great.”
“I dropped three hundred pounds of ugly fat; that’ll do wonders for a person. You’re representing some nut, I hear.”
“Lex Hall, Aunty Marian.”
“I’m not your aunty anymore, and I’m not Marian either,” she said. “It’s Cambrick, as in, what the hell just hit me upside the head, some kind of brick? Lexington Hall! He’s got dirt in his past, and his dirt will bury him. Remember.”