9

It was daytime—late into the morning, judging by the level of light in the room. I sat up and brushed matted layers of hair out of my face. Donald was asleep next to me. The clock said it was almost ten, which meant that he slept an unprecedented four hours in a row. Normally, I would have stood in awe at the profundity of that event, but something had woken me up. A noise outside the bedroom door.

I unwrapped myself from a tangle of covers and headed for the living room. When I opened our bedroom door, I jumped to see Joe in front of me.

He stopped and smiled. “Oh, hey, you’re awake!”

I checked the clock over my shoulder. “Why aren’t you at the office?”

“I was. I tried to call. I guess you didn’t hear the phone ring?”

I shuffled past him into the living room, squinting in the daylight. “I was tired,” I said, not mentioning the part about staying up until four o’clock in the morning to fundamentally re-evaluate everything I believed about human existence. At some point I’d tell him about that, but preferably not when I was exhausted to the point of feeling like I had the mental capacity of a bowl of oatmeal. “Why are you home?” I asked.

“I got some news,” he said, pausing to grin. In a more coherent state I might have been able to guess what it was, but I was surprised when he announced, “I passed the Texas Bar Exam!”

The news jolted me out of my haze. I actually bounced on my heels as I told him congratulations and gave him a hug. Tears stung my eyes, and only partially because I was still frazzled from the night before. Hearing that Joe passed was one of those moments of not realizing how stressed you are until the stress has been removed. If Joe had failed the exam, it would have been six months until he could retake it, and we didn’t have the funds to last that long. It may have set us back seriously enough to stop the entire law firm dream in its tracks.

Joe radiated happiness. “Want to come down and check out the office? I’ve got it almost all set up—I think we can start hiring next week.”

I looked down and noticed a crusty stain from where I’d dropped a meatball on my shirt four days ago. “Let me, umm. . .” I motioned to my outfit.

I didn’t need to finish my sentence. “Yeah. Go ahead and get yourself ready—take your time.”

After I showered and changed clothes, we put Donald in his car seat and made the short drive to Joe’s office, which was so close that we could’ve walked. He had rented out a bank of rooms in a two-story building off Enfield Road, which housed other small law and accounting practices. It was nestled in the downtown neighborhood that used to be a residential area, but whose historic early-twentieth-century houses had now been taken over by businesses.

With the baby nestled in a wrap sling, I followed Joe past the receptionist and into the hallway that led to his office space. When people walked by he greeted them by name, and we stopped so that he could introduce me to another attorney whose office was on the first floor. It occurred to me that while I had been shuttered in my bedroom at the Westgate, stuck in my twenty-first-floor, self-imposed prison like a frumpy Rapunzel, Joe had been living a real life, making new friends, and getting a lot of work done. I was suddenly conscious of the feel of pants that were not pajama bottoms—even if they were ill-fitting maternity jeans—and the structure that these strange “shoe” apparati imposed on my normally bare feet. I wondered if I should maybe start to make an effort to get back into the real world again.

At the end of the hall, on the right side was an open office area. Currently, it functioned as a graveyard for cardboard boxes and broken desk chairs, but Joe was planning to transform it into a workspace for two or three paralegals to share. On the left were two office doors, one of which would eventually house another attorney. Joe opened the door to the other, his own office.

The last time I had seen it, it was an empty room with a few stacks of books resting in the corner. Now it was a real workspace: An oak desk filled the center of the room, and behind it were two floor-to-ceiling windows that looked down upon the grounds of a historic mansion across the street. A panel of bookshelves lined the left side of the room, the wood stained a few shades darker than the desk, two of its shelves already filled with legal tomes leftover from Joe’s days practicing law in New York. On the wall across from the desk were Joe’s framed degrees.

Joe sat down behind his desk, as if to make sure I got the full picture of the office in action. “What do you think?”

“I love it!” I slid into a leather chair on the other side of the desk, imagining being a client of the Fulwiler Law firm.

“I have something for you,” Joe said. He produced a brown cardboard box from a drawer and reached across the desk to hand it to me. He flipped the lid open like it was a jewelry box and revealed a rectangular row of neatly stacked business cards. I pulled one out to see the FULWILER LAW, P.C. logo against the rustic tan and burgundy background colors, made more vivid by the card’s glossy sheen. In the center of the card were the words:

JENNIFER FULWILER
Business Manager

I was conscious of the fact that we would one day look back on this moment as the beginning of our success. A decade from now, we’d gather our many employees at the Fulwiler Law Christmas party and tell them about the time that Joe handed me the first company business card. Everyone would shake their heads wistfully and note that they could hardly imagine this firm having only two employees.

“There’s something we need to talk about,” Joe said. His tone had changed. He didn’t sound upset; rather, he seemed more concerned that I would be upset by what he had to say.

Trying not to wake a sleeping Donald, I leaned down and slid the business card into the pocket of my purse. “Sure. What?”

“I’ve been looking at our finances over the past few weeks. I’ve run the numbers a bunch of times, and I don’t see how we can make everything work.” He had an expectant look in his eyes, as if he had more to say, but he was waiting to let that sink in first.

“What do you mean ‘make everything work’?”

“It’s going to take the firm longer to make money than I thought. We’re also burning through savings. I don’t know if you’ve taken a look at our budget lately, but our spending is insane. We can’t start a business with those kinds of expenses—not unless we got investors, and you can’t have investors with a law firm.”

I didn’t understand what he was saying.

“If we’re serious about starting this firm, then we have to slash expenses,” he explained.

“Okay. I think I could shave some money off the groceries—”

“I said slash.”

I patted Donald through the taut canvas of the sling while I thought about it. “You mean, like we’d try to get by with one car?”

Joe stood and came to sit in the other client’s chair, next to me. I turned to face him. He leaned forward and said with gentle urgency, “I mean get rid of it all. Sell the condo. Get rid of the Jag. No more trips to that salon you go to. No more travel.”

A whirl of concerns hit me at once. I wasn’t sure where to start. “Wait. You said get rid of the condo. Where would we live?”

“Well. That’s the main thing I wanted to talk to you about.” Uh-oh. I forgot about everything else and stared at him, waiting for whatever he was going to suggest.

“Your mom has her house all to herself. She once said that we could always move in with her, and I don’t think she was kidding.”

“My mom? You want us to move in with my mom?”

He paused, searching my face for something, probably any sign of agreement. “Yes. I do. I think it’s the only chance we have of making this thing work.”

Donald stirred slightly, and I stood to walk him around. Everything I loved about living downtown flashed before my eyes: the walks to Whole Foods and bookstores and my favorite sushi restaurant on Congress Avenue. The Texas Book Festival took place literally at the front door of our building each year. And then there was the Westgate itself: The building had a full gym, a doorman, and 24/7 staff. The lieutenant governor lived a couple of floors down from us, and I sometimes chatted with him when we were on the treadmills at the same time. And of course there was the rooftop pool and patio, where we had had more than a few memorable parties. Joe was suggesting that we leave all of this? For the remote suburbs where my mom lived? “Are you open to it?”

I turned around to face Joe, who was still sitting in the chair. I found within me a surprising willingness to make this sacrifice. Joe still exuded excitement despite the tension in this conversation, and it made me understand for the first time just what this meant to him. When he was a kid, sometimes his mom couldn’t afford to run the heat in the winter. She’d wrap him up in a blanket and cuddle him in a rocking chair, turning her head so that he wouldn’t see her tears. When he was older he’d have to hurry through homework each night so that he could help her clean office buildings until midnight, and then he’d wake up at four-thirty in the morning for swim team practice, in hopes that it would help him get a scholarship to a good school. What kept him going through each of those moments was the vision of this moment, right now: sitting in his own office, the founder of what was sure to be a successful business. It was no exaggeration to say that this was everything he’d ever wanted.

“It won’t be easy,” I said under my breath. As soon as I spoke, I regretted it. Of course he knew it would be hard; Joe was the one who had been working sixty hours a week trying to get a law firm going. “But we can do it,” I added. “I know my mom would be fine with it. We can make it work.”

Joe let out a long breath, then rose to his feet. “I really think this is the right decision.”

“So do I.” Joe may have been dreaming about owning a business longer than I had, but I wanted it as much as he did. And I was willing to make it work, even if that meant letting go of our lifestyle for a few months.