I HAVE NEVER been more grateful for my mother’s dramatics in my whole life.
The bailiff raced over to her, even Vincent started to go to her, though Jack held him back.
“Your Honor…” I started, but didn’t need to.
“This court will reconvene first thing tomorrow morning.” Judge Melton crooked his finger at me to come forward.
When I stood before his bench, Jack scrambling to come up next to me, the judge said, “I will not tolerate a trial filled with your mother’s shenanigans.”
Then he stood and was gone just as Jack arrived at my side.
“What was that about?”
“Oh, nothing,” I managed.
Who better than I to know that my mother’s “shenanigans” couldn’t be controlled. At least by me. “You know how men are regarding my mother. He was concerned about her health, is all.”
Jack cursed, his brow lined with worry. And why shouldn’t he worry? Jack knew as well as I did that he had been given more rope that day than he should have been given. And this judge was known to be fickle. Whatever Jack’s reasons were for going after my mother, if he wasn’t careful, he very easily could have reeled off enough rope to hang himself.
I smiled to myself, then went to my mother’s side as she was helped out of the courtroom.
ONCE IN THE CAR, my mother smoothed her skirt. “I was good, wasn’t I?”
“Not so much since the judge is on to you. If you pull a stunt like that again he’s going to throw you in jail on contempt.”
“He can’t do that!”
“He can, and he will.”
We pulled into the driveway and my mother shooed me out of the car, and told Ernesto to hand over the keys.
“I have someone I need to see.”
“Mother, don’t you dare go talk to anyone about this case!”
“Someone’s got to do something.”
Short of lying down in front of the Mercedes, I didn’t know how to stop her. And quite frankly, I wasn’t sure my blocking the way would have done more than leave me with tire tracks across my back.
She returned an hour later looking quite pleased with herself. She even had Lupe pour her a glass of sherry.
“Mother, we need to discuss Martin Pender. Without the alcohol.”
She waved me away. “There is nothing to discuss.”
“What do you mean?”
“Martin Pender will not be back in court tomorrow.”
I gasped. “Mother, what did you do?”
She smiled her particular brand of satisfied smile and took another sip.
“You killed him!”
She sighed in exasperation. “Good Lord, Carlisle. Don’t be ridiculous.” The smile returned. “I just convinced him it was worth his while to leave town.”
I slapped my hands over my ears. “I don’t want to hear it.” And quite frankly, what were my choices? Turn my mother over for tampering with a witness? Or pretend I hadn’t heard her? I opted for the latter, and why not. It wasn’t like I was the only person in this hearing who had lost sight of how to be a lawyer.
I left the room, wondering how I had ever gotten tangled up in this mess with a lunatic mother, crazy judge, and an opposing counsel who played fast and loose with the rules.
I HAD TO SHIFT my regular dance school for debutantes to the evenings given my court schedule. During the deb sessions I stopped messing around. The girls were going to become proper young ladies who could carry themselves with grace if it killed me.
I drilled them like a marine sergeant, running them through their paces like they were in a debutante boot camp. We walked, talked, practiced pleasantries. And we did more Dips than royal courtiers in front of a queen. Unfortunately, the girls weren’t getting any better. Tiki and Abby didn’t even try to do much more than bob their heads. Sasha spent most of her time talking on her cell phone to her boyfriend. And I was really nervous that Ruth still had money worries.
The Smiths had only taken one table instead of the unwritten rule of at least two, and they were paying for it on the installment plan—which I suspected was a first for Willow Creek debutantes. When I had asked Ruth about her dress, she had been evasive, simply exclaiming it was going to be great. It was her cheer again that gave me pause.
In court, if possible, the gallery grew even more crowded. Savannah had warned me it was coming, mentioning at breakfast that everyone who was anyone in town was talking about my disastrous debs and the titillating divorce proceeding. Wainwrights had become the best source of entertainment in town.
At the news, my mother had gone all out by dressing in a stunning royal-blue suit that highlighted her eyes, her blond hair, and supple skin luminous even under the harsh court lighting. She wore pearls at her ears and neck, and greeted people as we arrived as if we were entering a gala in her honor, not a hearing that could take her down.
“Don’t ever let them see you sweat,” she whispered to me under the flash of newspaper photographers.
“Your Honor, I call Martin Pender,” Jack announced.
My mother smiled confidently.
But Jack looked at me with a raised eyebrow as if he knew what my mother had done. Then he nodded toward the inner door, which opened spitting out one Martin Pender led by two court officers.
My mother’s confident smile faltered, and I could tell she was on the verge of fainting, this time for real. “Don’t you dare,” I hissed.
Martin Pender was a tall, handsome man, with deep brown eyes, his light milk-and-coffee skin speaking to a Spanish heritage.
My brow knitted. Something was off.
Pender stood in front of the bailiff, his hand placed reluctantly on the Bible.
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
He shrugged. “What is truth, anyway?”
Judge Melton glared and started to say something, no doubt something unkind and of the punishable-by-another-night-in-jail variety.
“Fine, I’ll tell the truth. And the truth is I am here against my will,” he stated more to my mother than anyone else.
“Your Honor,” Jack said, “I would like the court to recognize that Mr. Pender is a hostile witness.”
“So noted.”
Jack cleared his throat. “Mr. Pender, for the record, please state your name.”
His name came out reluctantly, hesitantly. But the sordid details of his and my mother’s “alleged” affair did not.
“I met her at a café on the Riverwalk in San Antonio.”
I knew my mother loved the Riverwalk, and went often.
“She flirted with me.”
No surprise there. She flirted with every man.
“Then I saw her again the next week, at the same café. We started to talk.”
Jack hammered away, asking questions, ruthlessly grilling the witness, going from their encounters of harmless flirting to furtive dating, to their first physical encounter, all in San Antonio until they made a regular date at the Lazy 6 Motel.
As Pender warmed to his subject, he regaled the audience with a tale of inventive sex that had everyone on the edge of their seats even if their faces were flushed with embarrassment. He threw around words like “naked” and “hot,” “sweaty skin” and “sliding together” as easily as if we were in an X-rated porn shop.
Only Jack stood through it all with the implacability of a warrior used to seeing blood. And by the time he finished his line of questioning, the courtroom felt much too hot and not a little dirty, though based on the detailed description given, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that my mother had indeed had an affair with Martin Pender. Even I couldn’t see how he could make up the sordid tale.
“This court will reconvene tomorrow at ten,” the judge announced, pushing up so abruptly that his high leather chair banged back against the wall, and the bailiff had to scramble to do his job.
In the car on the way home my mother and I were silent. I didn’t have a clue where to begin. I also didn’t know how to look her in the eye given all I had heard in the courtroom.
As if reading my mind, she huffed and looked out the window. Willow Creek passed by as I studied her profile. “Why would Jack Blair have it in for you?”
She jerked her head back to look at me. “What are you talking about?”
“Truthfully? I don’t know. At first I thought it was about me. But now I’m not so sure. If I were a betting woman, I’d say he was going after you.” I flinched involuntarily. “God, Mother! Did you have sex with him too?”
“Carlisle! Heavens no.”
Right or wrong, I believed her. “Then why?” I persisted.
She sighed. “Who knows. Though whether it’s those Bennetts or those Blairs, they’ve never been particularly friendly.”
Actually, she had never been particularly friendly to them.
“Whatever the case,” she continued, “he’s being as rude as I have ever seen a man be.”
“Mother, lawyers aren’t supposed to be minding their manners.”
“Carlisle, everyone should mind their manners no matter where they are.”
My mother—Emily Post.
We were silent, tension riding between us like another unwelcome passenger in the car.
“This isn’t going well,” she finally said.
“First clue?”
“Stop acting like a child.”
“I am not a child.”
I might have stamped my foot.
Note to self: you are a successful adult and an accomplished attorney.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “You’ve done nothing but criticize everything about me since I got home. Why did you want me to deal with your divorce when you don’t have any confidence in my abilities, and you won’t do anything to help!”
“Good Lord, Carlisle. What is wrong with you?”
I sat up straight with a start. “What is wrong with me? Why don’t you take a look in the mirror for a change, and not simply to notice how beautiful you are.”
She went very still, a bad sign, but I was too caught up in the moment to take notice. “You have spent my whole life getting into trouble and expecting me to fix it somehow, which is bad enough,” I said. “But you’re never, ever satisfied with how I get it done. Why don’t you stop getting in trouble? Why don’t you stop demanding everyone’s attention? Why can’t you be like every other normal mother out there?”
I expected at least a bit of contrition. I was mistaken.
“Because sweet, shy doormats don’t get anywhere in life,” she said with a cold voice. She looked me up and down. “Besides, what’s so wrong with wanting to be noticed?”
“Nothing, I suppose, if you’re an actor, or an opera singer, or a politician, or a… whatever. But not a mother at the Willow Creek Elementary PTA meetings, or at my birthday parties, or when I was in the final round of the Central Texas Debate Competition. You weren’t the one who was supposed to be noticed. You were an adult, a mother, not one of the kids. But no, you could never be a regular mom. No apron, no cookies, no simple questions like ‘How was school today, dear?’”
My heels jammed against the floor board in surprise at all I had spilled.
Ernesto shot us a nervous glance in the rearview mirror, and why not given the unwritten Wainwright rule of avoiding confrontation at all costs.
My mother and I both drew a breath and cut ourselves off. We drove in silence the rest of the way. When we pulled up the long brick drive, I was frustrated and confused. I started to get out but she caught my arm and told Ernesto to go on without us.
While I was frustrated, my mother had a strange, almost melancholy expression on her face. She sat for an eternity, not letting me go, but not speaking either. Finally she said, “Do you want to know a secret?”
I wasn’t sure. This could easily go in any number of directions, most of which I had no interest in going.
“I’ve never thought I was beautiful.”
I narrowed my eyes. My mother, the great boaster of her beauty, never thought she was beautiful?
“I wasn’t when I was young, you know,” she continued, smoothing the perfect lines of her skirt. “As I got older, I guess I grew into myself, and it was quite a surprise when people started calling me beautiful. And you know how one thing leads to the next; soon I started working to be more beautiful. I can’t tell you how differently people treated me once they saw me as the perfect beauty. It was unnerving, especially since I never thought I was perfect. In fact, more than anything I was sure that I wasn’t. But I learned that if I showed the perfect front, didn’t let anyone know that I had any weaknesses, then that front was what people believed.”
Was this what had caused the cracks?
“Is it so wrong that I need to feel beautiful?” she asked.
How to answer that? Or, realistically, was there an answer? And was the trouble she constantly found herself in a trade-off she was willing to make in order to feel noticed?
“Do you remember when you were a little girl,” she continued, and I could hear the fond smile in her voice, “how you used to pull the red beach towel out of the linen closet, tie it around your neck like a cape? You would sit for hours seriously tackling whatever you were doing. It was cute, but I always thought it a shame that you didn’t run up and down the yard in that cape, have fun. You know, let loose. But you only put it on to work. Even at four.”
I felt heat in my cheeks, and didn’t dare tell her that while the red towel was long gone, I still thought of the cape, almost as an anchor against the storm.
“Just one more time, pull out your cape and find a way to fix this, Carlisle.” High dramatics even for my mother. “Then I promise not to bother you with another deb ball or divorce ever again.”