Such a Pretty Face (3 page)

Unfortunately, we were not defending Danny, his life reduced to mush, who was fed through a tube and couldn’t even
think
about playing baseball. We were not trying to get money for the Athertons to care for Danny, who had three other sons and a maxed-out insurance plan.

Nope. We were defending the hospital. Aggressively. Mercilessly. Without morals or ethics, as far as I was concerned.

“We must win the Atherton case, Steve. Win. Win. Win.” Crystal pounded a fist against her desk with each word. “The family wants ten million dollars.” She laughed. “For a kid. They say they need nurses around the clock. Hell, the mother’s at home. She’s a housewife. Broom, mop, laundry, that sort of thing. Eww. She doesn’t have time to take care of her own kid? She’s a hard-core
housewife
. Come on!”

Crystal spat that word out as if she was spitting out: Slimy vermin. Lazy loser. Bottom-dwelling infected crab.

I didn’t say anything.

“How much does it take to take care of a kid? They think they’re gonna win the lottery. I already met Mom. She’s fat. Frumpy. Dumb hairstyle, probably hasn’t changed it since high school. Dad’s a plumber. A plumber! They want money for life,
for life,
for this kid. Stupid.”

“But isn’t he going to need care for the rest of his life? He needs nurses, caregivers, he won’t be able to work, his mother won’t be able to go back to being a teacher, they have enormous medical expenses—”

She glowered at me, then slammed a pile of documents on her desk. “That’s not our problem. It’s not the hospital’s problem. They’re not responsible for every kid who was born with a problem with their heart. Don’t you get that, Steve?”

“Uhhh…”

“Uhhh.” Crystal mocked me.

I rolled my lips in. I was so uncomfortable around Crystal. I knew it was me, it was my lack of self-esteem, I got it. But she was awful. Zena called her a walking sexually transmitted disease, which I would never repeat aloud, because it’s rude to say that Crystal is an STD. Quite rude. So I won’t say, “Crystal reminds me, too, of an STD.”

“I need people on my team who are with me on this case. Are you with me, or not?”

I didn’t say anything. Didn’t matter. She was suddenly swearing at her cell phone, which had rung. She silenced it.

“Where is the deposition of Dr. Shintoleva?” she spat out, suddenly angry.

“I’ll get it for you and bring it in,” I said.

“Right away. I also need the deposition of that nurse. You know. The blonde who seems to hate me?”

Everyone hates Crystal. I nodded. “I’ll get that to you as soon as possible as well.”

“Sooner than possible, Steve, sooner than possible. We’re going to screw this greedy, plumber family with the housewife momma who was head of the PTA.”

She shook her head and put her skinny ankles back up on her desk so her soles were facing me. “Are you up to this, Steve?”

“Yes, I’m up to it but, Crystal…”

“What? What is it?”

I squared my shoulders. “Shouldn’t we settle this case? If it goes to trial—”

“If it goes to trial, and it won’t, but if it does, we’ll win. Sure, people are going to feel for the poor kid, but it’s not the hospital’s fault.”

Not the hospital’s fault? I had read what had happened in there, and I did not believe the hospital’s claim of a lack of culpability. I thought they were lying. The boy’s current condition was in line with an operation going haywire because of a lack of oxygen.

“You can go, Steve.”

I turned to leave, feeling sick. I did not want to be a part of this.

“One more thing,” she snapped, standing up, suddenly agitated. “Now remember what I told you a couple of months ago. Any piece of paperwork you see that you don’t understand, hand to me. There might be one letter, from a Dr. Dornshire to Charles Winston, who is, as you know, the president of the hospital. I want that e-mail.”

“Why don’t you ask Dr. Dornshire for it?”

“Dr. Dornshire no longer works for the hospital.”

“He doesn’t?” Dr. Dornshire was a doctor who apparently had entered the surgical room at the end part of Danny’s operation.

“Dr. Dornshire is now in his own medical clinic in Africa attending to starving or beat-up or depressed kids or something like that. Yuck. I could not stand being around all those poor people and the snakes and bugs and lions. Too hot, too. Anyhow, we can’t reach him. We tried. Can’t find him. He’s in the jungles, gone.”

There was something not right here.

“If you see the letter, hand it over pronto. You don’t even need to read it. Got that, Steve?”

“Got it.”

The vast majority of our cases are legitimate cases. Who we are defending needs defending for valid reasons. Or, you can at least make an argument that they should not be forced to pay the amount they’re being sued for. However, not this time.

“Good. Not too complicated, is it? You fully understand?”

“Yes.” I wished I didn’t sound so meek. I turned to leave.

“You can go now. I have important people to talk to right this second.” She waved her hand in front of her. Off you go, shoo fly, shoo.

Zena saw my face when I returned to our shared cubicle, and called down toward Crystal’s office, “Have you found the stick, Crystal? Keep searching! You might have to bend over!”

Crystal slammed her door.

Zena laughed.

Zena has a job at Poitras and Associates for life. Lawyers are always stopping by our cubicle and asking her for help, sometimes with white, pasty, panicked expressions on their faces.

“Zena, I forgot to file those papers on the Hubernach case….” Inhale, exhale. Pant, pant. “Any chance you did?”

Zena would nod and say, “It’s gonna cost you, you brainless wonder. Fifty-dollar coffee card.”

Or, “Zena, the federal case, the water thing, I didn’t call, oh, my God!” Hands to head, sweat dripping off nose. “I’m dead. Any chance that you—”

Zena would nod and say, “I did it, you lame-duck loser. Fifty-dollar coffee card.”

Zena bought us coffee every day. She had piles of cards.

But her photographic memory was what stunned everyone. “Zena, remember the Thompson case in eastern Oregon four years ago? What was the name of the neighbor we deposed after the lady with the fluffy red hair?”

Zena would know who it was, first and last name.

Or, “Zena, remember that pollution case? What was the name of the attorney who was handling the small claim with that business in Grants Pass and who was his client?”

She knew the name of the attorney, she knew the firm he worked for and the location, she remembered the claim and client.

She is one wild gal, mouthy and opinionated, and Cherie thinks she’s great. Secretly, outside of the office, those two are fast friends. That’s why Zena doesn’t usually work for Cherie directly.

“I’m going to get a huge pile of sticks and dump them on Crystal’s desk,” Zena said. “Then I’ll use the copy machine to take a picture of my butt and put that picture on top of the sticks. I think she’ll get it, don’t you, Stevie?”

I nodded. She’d get it.

Zena’s so darn funny.

Ashville, Oregon

H
elen’s face ended up in my birthday cake.

As incidences with her went, it was rather mild.

The lights were off, candles were lit and, singing as the ex-Broadway star she had been, Helen brought the cake in from the kitchen. Sunshine, next to me, held my hand. She had given me a charm bracelet with a clover, cross, flower, dog, cat, house, and heart, “because I wuv you.”

I heard the girls around me catch their breaths because Helen was so beautiful. She was wearing a red, silky dress over her slim figure, her golden hair swept up in a chignon, and her pearls. The only thing out of place was her boots.

“Happy birthday to you…”

Her black rubber gardening boots, which she always wore, were wrapped with chicken wire to “catch the voices” that spoke to her. “They’re so damn loud,” she’d told me. “I have to turn them down. They’re screaming at me on microphones. And they’re spying on me. Do you see them spying?”

Grandma and Grandpa watched Helen like hawks. She had insisted that she be the one who brought me my cake, in a treasure chest shape and filled with gumdrops. The day before the party she had a meltdown and told them she knew they were part of the “plot” to keep her from the cake.

“You’re spies. I know you are. Cake spies. Turn that Lerblomerbing off,” she’d commanded, pointing at the TV. “That’s how they get to me.”

Grandma turned the TV off, flicked her long white curls over her shoulder, and continued baking my cake in her cowboy boots, pausing only to help Helen readjust the tin foil crown she’d made herself.

“Happy birthday to you…” Helen’s voice soared and dipped.

Helen had sung so beautifully in high school that people from all over the state came to see our town’s musicals. She single-handedly funded the drama program, basketball, band, choir, track, volleyball, cross-country, cheerleading, soccer, and various clubs at school.

She had gone to an Ivy League college on full scholarship, then had spent four years on the stage in New York City, singing to packed houses in musicals that always had to extend their runs. As Grandma told it to me, Helen came back home when she walked onstage wearing her blue fuzzy pajamas. She had refused to get into her Egyptian costume. Her singing was incredible until Momma took her pajamas off onstage and sang naked.

Some would say the performance became better after that, but the newspaper reporters spoke of a “total nervous breakdown” and “the loss of one of America’s most promising singers,” and, less articulately, “She is outrageously crazy.”

The promising singer, who was pregnant at the time with me, ended up in a straitjacket that night. Weeks later, Grandma and Grandpa were able to take her home from the hospital with a nasty label attached to her: schizophrenia.

“Happy birthday, dear girl….”

Helen put the chocolate treasure chest right in front of me, the candles flickering. She sang full throttle, raucous, clear, with a long trill at the end, then burst into a Broadway song that had all my girlfriends giggling, but my smile froze on my face. Helen was on new medications but they sure weren’t helping, as usual, and now I was worried.

She did a little tap dance and finished with great fanfare, and my girlfriends clapped. Grandma and Grandpa came right in close to us. It was the prelude to disaster, and they knew it.

I took a breath to blow out my candles and make a wish. My wish was that Helen would leave the room and go to bed and not embarrass me.

I was unable to blow out my candles because Helen’s head was suddenly in my treasure chest cake and I was staring down at her chignon. I heard the gasps of the girls, half of them related to me, and the groan from my grandparents as they moved in to save the situation.

I should have been surprised. I mean, really, how often is your mother’s head in your birthday cake? She was, by the way, singing another Broadway song through the cake and ice cream. I believe it was from
My Fair Lady.

But I was used to using humor to excuse Helen. It was my only coping mechanism—all I had left. I blew out the two remaining flaming candles, licked my fingers, then tapped her on the shoulder. “Momma, how does the cake taste?”

“Shhh,” she said, her voice muffled by icing. “They’re listening to us. I can hear them. They’re by the gumdrops.”

“Who wants ice cream?” I asked the girls, their mouths hanging open in shock, their eyes wide.

My best friend, and also a distant cousin, Lornie Rose, burst into tears and reached for my hand.

“It’s your favorite flavor, Lornie Rose,” I reassured her. “Chocolate chocolate mint!”

I didn’t burst into tears until I was in bed that night, Sunshine’s body curled up to mine, the light of the moon glinting on my charm bracelet.

I hated myself for hating Helen.

Portland, Oregon

T
hat night I dreamed I was inside a cake with Helen. She shoved icing down my throat until I couldn’t breathe. The river came and washed me away. From the top of the cake she stood with Sunshine, then threw her up to the moon, which was reddish gold. Sunshine got stuck on the moon for a minute, teetered off, headfirst, into the river, then down the jaws of a fish shaped like a cornstalk.

I couldn’t find the fish, couldn’t find her.

Helen whispered to me while I choked on the icing, “It’s all your fault, Stevie. That’s why she died. You killed her.”

I get up at six o’clock every morning and walk for an hour and a half. I rarely sleep past six anyhow, might as well get something done. Plus, I find that walking helps calm my nerves after another night full of horrendous nightmares involving gingerbread men, a left hand held out at a weird angle, a rushing river with claws, and catatonic behavior.

I used to be a window person.

I saw almost everything through glass.

Dusty, dirty, sometimes clean, but always through that pane of glass. The outdoors and me avoided one another, simply because I couldn’t walk very far, or long, without panting or worrying my heart would explode.

Now I’m not a window person.

Every time I walk, I can’t get over that I can walk in the first place.

Sounds strange?

It isn’t.

Walking, when you’re morbidly obese and can’t even see your shoes, hurts. It hurts your bones, your joints, and your lungs feel as if they’re being blown out. Plus, you can’t breathe. The fear of a heart attack is quite real. You might be pushing your body right over the edge into Coronary Land. You could die in the middle of the sidewalk, teetering on your stomach. You could die on a neighbor’s front lawn by a gnome.

I had had to start out slow. I could walk for only five minutes the first few times out after my bariatric surgery, when I could get out of bed in the first place. I tried to increase my minutes each week. At first I walked three days a week, then four. After a few months, I walked six days a week, thinking one day off to rest would be good, but that didn’t work. I never felt alive on that seventh day. My body learned to exercise, and it would not wake up until I did it.

So I walk every day, an hour and a half, and on my walks I study other people’s gardens. Some people’s yards are flat and boring. One well-trimmed tree, perfect grass, a couple of bushes, done. Others are messy, or half done, skateboards and scooters in front. Some houses have potted and hanging flowers, which are so pretty.

Then there are the gardens that make you stop and stare and gawk and feel gobs of envy. The ones where the flowers are piled up, happy bursts of color, with a decorative walk, maybe some outdoor art, the borders in layers, short plants and flowers first, then the medium sized, finally the flowering trees. Maybe there’s a fountain or a pond, a gazebo in the backyard.

That’s what I want to create. That kind of garden.

A Garden of Eden sort of garden, lush and ripe and blooming, the type that Adam and Eve could be found gallivanting around naked in.

I want Adam, but only if he’s hot, funny, and doesn’t blame me for everything bad that happens in the world when, in fact, he could have and should have protected Eve from that apple in the first place, and he certainly shouldn’t have told God that Eve had messed things up big-time, that she was to blame, she started all the evil, bad woman, not him. What a wimp.

Come to think of it, I don’t want Adam in my garden at all. I’ll take Eve if she promises to help me build my raised beds and never walks around naked.

Or Noah, the ark builder. I could take him. He could build a mini-ark and I could fill it with flowers and vegetables.

But not corn. No corn in the ark.

At the end of my walk I had to leap over a three-foot-high, pokey green hedge owned by my neighbor, Nancy Bull, and hide myself facedown in the dirt like a bug.

I do not want him to see me
.

Ducking was instinctive. Immature. And almost, but not quite, funny.

My neighbor, Jake Stockton—what a romantic name, doesn’t it set a beat in your breast?—was leaving for work. He lives six houses down from me and moved in about seven months ago. I know he travels, sometimes for weeks at a time—not that I am stalking him at all. That would be weird. Not that I am spying on his house, either. That would be creepy. Nor am I keeping an eye out for gorgeous Jake at all times. That would be obsessive.

I don’t know where he travels to. Whenever he sees me, and I cannot make a leap into an escape, he waves. Now and then he stops to chat, but I scuttle off, quick as I can, as a paralytically shy mouse would, because I can feel my vocal chords stiffening in fear. Plus, when he first moved in, I hadn’t had my second operation, so loose skin was hanging off me like uninflated parachutes.

If there is a more gorgeous man on the planet, I have not seen him. Jake’s almost as tall as my grandpa and built in the same oxen form. He has blondish hair; is probably a little older than forty; and has huge, kind, green, mushy, yummy eyes and a jaw that could break a board in half. He is not pretty. In fact, I think he’s spent a lot of time out in the sun, because he has that tanned, weathered cragginess. He has a smile that reaches into my heart, wraps itself around me, and makes me hope.

I avoid him
at all costs
.

I stuck my head up when I knew he and his truck had zoomed off to work. I spit dirt and, I think, a small spider from my mouth and leveraged myself up, flicking dirt off my front.

Yes, I avoid Jake at all costs because I envision him naked and smiling and cannot speak in his manly presence and therefore come off as imbecilic and fluffy in the intelligence department.

But, my, he makes my heart flutter.

“One day you’re going to have to talk to him, you know, like a real woman.”

I about jumped out of my skin, then relaxed when I saw Nancy and her rake. She has blond hair, is on her third husband (“Upgrade your husband now and then,” she’d told me. “Look for improved models.”), and is a gardening maniac.

“I know, I know,” I panted. “But not today.”

“Gee whiz. How about tomorrow?” She rolled her eyes. “How about the next day?”

“No, can’t do it. No, no, no.”

“I’ve seen him talking to you. He looks at you like he likes you, and there you go leaping over hedges, landing on your face in the dirt.”

“He doesn’t like me.” That was infinitely silly.

She thumped her rake. “Yes, he does. Get some guts, you flying wonder woman, and go talk to him.”

“No, no, no.” Whew. “No guts.”

“Wuss.”

“Manaical gardener,” I shot back, spitting out more dirt.

She thumped her rake at me. Twice.

He brought his full-sized female blow-up dolls to my little green house with the white picket fence. Lance, my cousin, had to make two trips back and forth to his car to bring in, with much pomp and circumstance, “the ladies.”

“This one is Tiger Momma,” he announced proudly, pointing at the bikini-clad blow-up woman that he propped up right beside me on my red couch. He took two steps back and grinned, chest puffed out with pride. “And this one—” he turned and grabbed another doll. “This one is
my woman,
Veronica! I’m going to get ten thousand of these made up.”

Veronica was wearing…nothing. Veronica was naked. Poofed out in all the right places.

I swallowed hard. I am not a prude. This, however, was a tiny bit too much.

I glanced across my living room at Lance’s sister—my cousin, Polly—who was perched on the church pew I’d decorated with red tasseled pillows.

Polly is tall and leggy and rangy, very thin, excessively high strung, and has super curly auburn hair hanging halfway down her back. She was rocking back and forth in nervous agitation, fluffing her hands in front of her face, as if to cool herself, her expression pained.

“Please tell me you won’t advertise these in the newspaper.” She rocked and fanned, rocked and fanned. “Don’t go on TV again. We have the same last name, Lance. Everyone will know. Oh, ohhh!” She fanned. “Ohhh.” She groaned. “Ohhh!” She inhaled in and out of her cupped hands.

I was so worried about Polly, and not because she was having trouble breathing.

Lance pushed Veronica onto the couch, too. She started to slip off and I grabbed her, accidentally, by the boob.

“Advertising is the name of the game, Polly Wants a Cracker, name of the game,” Lance said, bumping his fists together. “Advertising and marketing.”

“But I don’t appreciate your advertising,” she protested. What Polly was wearing could best be described as “ethnic.” A cotton shirt from Mexico with embroidered animals across the bodice. A wraparound, orange and red cotton, Texan-style skirt with fringe and a golden East Indian scarf with tiny mirrors around her shoulders. Cowboy boots, dangling earrings. This was in direct contrast to what she wore on the air as Portland’s most popular news anchor. “I feel sorry for the dolls. Can you imagine what these poor girls are going to have to go through? It’s embarrassing. I can hardly breathe when I think of it.”

“I think Veronica’s having a hot flash,” I drawled.

Lance turned on me. Lance is an interesting man and I love him dearly. He’s a former professional football player, two years older than Polly and me. He’s six foot six inches tall, has piercing gray eyes, broad shoulders, and slim hips. Women go crazy for him, and yet he can barely speak around them, barely utter a consonant. He is pathologically shy around them. Plus, he’s
very
emotional. “She is not having a hot flash. She’s flushed. She’s healthy, rosy cheeked.”

“She’s a plastic doll, Lance,” I said. “She’s not healthy or unhealthy. She is…there. She is an ‘it,’ not a person.”

Lance’s face became flushed, like his doll. “I know she’s not a person, Stevie. I know it. I get it.” He spread his arms wide and reminded me of a giant eagle. “Is it too much to ask that my sister and my cousin support my new business?”

I cleared my throat as he victoriously grabbed another doll and started pumping her up with a small red machine. Feet filled first, then the shapely, slender, impossibly long legs. I did not need to see the upper half inflate.

“So. Another business?” I asked.

“Yep. Make fun of me all you want, but this one’s gonna go flying. I can feel it.
Feel it.
My left ankle is twitching.
Twitching!
”

I would not doubt that he would make millions, especially if his left ankle was twitching. Lance uses his left ankle for answers to everything in his life. He has never formed a company without the blessing and twitching of his left ankle and has made millions. It started with some computer software he developed when he was in college. He sold it for a gazillion dollars. He was twenty. He morphed into a real estate mogul, which made him a fortune, as he bought at the exact right time during his pro career (“My ankle was almost thumping during those deals, almost thumping!”). He provided venture capital to two new start-up, online socializing sites, and they both took off like rockets toward Uranus.

He’s a modern-day Midas.

“I think your dolls are gonna be felt by a lot of weirdo, middle-aged freaks who can’t get a date to save their flabby butts,” Polly whimpered. Rock, rock, rock. She brought a brown sack up to her mouth and breathed. “And everyone will know that my brother is a blow-up-doll dealer.”

I muffled my laugh, shook my head.

“Those men should be arrested,” Polly went on, her mouth still forming O’s as she tried to capture oxygen. “They should be arrested and tried in court and sent to jail. If they want a freaky relationship, they should find it with their cellmate.”

Polly might end up having a “mate” in her life soon. I shivered. I was going to have to force her to deal with her problem.

“Treat my dolls with respect.” Lance kept blowing up his doll. She had blond hair and huge eyes. “This is going to go national. International. I’m going to sell to the Russians and Alabamians and the French peoples and the Africans and the Delawarians. I’m selling to everybody.”

“Fine. I respect Miss Bongo Boobs. My respect is sky high! Sky high!” Polly waved her hands high in the air.

I propped Tiger Momma up and told her, “You need to sue this man. Make him pay. He’s not your pimp.”

Tiger Momma kept that weird grin on her face. She freaked me out.

“This is a business opportunity. An investment in the future internationally.” You would never know Lance is a multimillionaire by looking at him. He’s got the weathered face of a mountain man, a head of brown hair, and a short, scruffy beard. He wears flip-flops, jeans, and sweatshirts. He does have a modern, woodsy, Oregon sort of home with incredible views of the coast range, and a boat, and a Porsche, but nothing else showy.

He stopped pumping and asked, “Do you think they have conventions and stuff for this kind of business?”

“Lemme see.” I pretended to stare into space. For someone who had made so much money already, sometimes Lance came off as shockingly naive. “Maybe the United Blow-Up Dolls Convention. I think that was on Jupiter last year. The Squish Me Conference is in Vegas in July. I think there’s even a Puffy Girls Union. You should know that the Blow-Up Dolls Girls have filed a union grievance against heavy men. They don’t want their boobs smashed. It makes them feel deflated.”

“That’s not funny, Stevie,” Lance said. “Why are you girls making fun of my new business? You’ve both hurt me. Right here.” He thumped his heart. “You’ve hurt my beater.”

Polly eyed one of the dolls on the ground, then grabbed her and hissed, right in her face, “Run! Run for your freedom, your dignity, your very soul. Run!” She threw the doll up in the air, and Lance protested in outrage, catching the doll with one hand.

He pushed the doll onto the couch by me. I was now surrounded by a bunch of blow-up dolls, as if they were people.

“This isn’t funny, Polly. My feelings are hurt again!”

Anyone else and I would have discarded that. With Lance, by golly, he’s telling the truth. I saw a sheen glistening over those gray, deep-set eyes.