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CHAPTER 1
The meeting had started without me. I sneaked a peek at my watch — I was still one minute early. I flashed Taylor Anderson — partner in charge, Armani Adonis, and the object of countless fantasies, including mine — a rueful smile, which he appeared not to notice. I took a seat. The client, Jason Krill, head of a tiny Internet startup company, looked at me expectantly. Members of the legal team, no matter how junior, are usually introduced.
Taylor went right on talking. Krill's company was trying to raise venture capital, the kind of shoestring deal that could explode profitably overnight given the right combination of luck and more luck. The venture capitalists wanted seats on the board of directors and a reasonable amount of stock. The CEO wanted to give up as little as possible. Taylor was explaining the Facts of Life.
"This isn't Silicon Valley," he said apologetically. "I'm afraid you have to give something to get something back."
The client had the geeky look of someone who had spent a lot of time in front of his terminal and not much outdoors. He probably wasn't a day older than twenty-five, with a hint of stubble on his chin that spoke of neglect rather than style, but in a year he might be driving a new Bentley Continental SC and squandering vast sums on a vintage pinball machine collection. Or not. That was the fun of start-up companies.
Melissa Peters, my senior in experience but not in years, crossed her admittedly awesome legs beneath a skirt that was definitely born the runt of the litter. "You might want to rework your business plan," she suggested.
The leg-crossing appeared to have short-circuited the client's brain. He stared at her, his mouth opened slightly. She obviously did something for his hard drive.
Melissa (called "Missy" by her friends, but not by me) and her ilk are the reason a lot of men in positions of authority treat their female colleagues with a wary formality inspired by fear of lawsuits. She gave off so many conflicting signals you were derailed before you knew what hit you. Her awesome self-confidence in her own ability was no less irritating for being justified, at least most of the time. On the other hand, instead of the you-touch-me-you'll-be-sorry professional demeanor of a female associate on the make, she had a kind of post-feminist exhibitionism about her body. She could stop a firm meeting dead (and had) by hitching up her skirt and massaging her calves. She was also taking classes in Tae Kwan Do and early Norse literature. For fun.
Taylor frowned momentarily. I knew what was the matter — the rule for associates at Roth, Tolbert & Anderson was that in meetings with a client, silence was not only golden but mandatory. Only one person at a time speaks for the firm, and it better not be you. My job, as the lowest in seniority, was to sit in the corner like Jane Eyre and take notes. Melissa's was to nod sagely at everything Taylor said. She wasn't supposed to make suggestions on her own.
"The firm feels that a review of your plan might be helpful," Taylor said, resuming command. He glanced in my direction. "Becky, could you get Mr. Krill's business plan for us?" He turned to the client. "Jason, can we get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Soda? Wine?"
Jason closed his mouth and swallowed. "Do you have Sprite?" he asked hopefully.
I stood up. Taylor caught my eye and then he stiffened. I knew, and he knew I knew, that he'd forgotten I was the lawyer and not the gofer.
Again.
If I'd come into the firm in the normal way, fresh out of law school at twenty-four and incandescent with ambition, I wouldn't have had these problems. Instead I'd spent the last six years becoming the oldest new associate in the law firm where I had, not incidentally, spent the same six years working as a receptionist while putting myself through law school at night. If I hadn't received a foundation grant for older graduate students returning to the workforce, it would have been more like eight and a half, or never. Not such a lofty pinnacle, I admit. But if this wasn't success, I didn't have a clue which way to turn.
The trouble was, for all those years I'd been a fixture at the front desk — a pleasant fixture, probably, but only slightly above the Italian- style furniture in rank. Receptionists come in two categories — twenty-year-olds who didn't go to college and can't get another job and forty-something divorcées who went to college years ago and can't get another job. Moreover, firms like the forty-somethings better because they don't chew gum into the phone, don't come to work wearing halter tops, and don't (usually) throw themselves at the partners. Anyway, when you're used to seeing — or, more accurately, not seeing — someone in a certain way, it's difficult to alter your perception.
It was bad enough that the attorneys sometimes forgot to take me seriously, but worse by far was the attitude of most of the staff. Putting yourself through law school at night — however grueling, grinding, or boring the process — is seen as a kind of rebuke, a suggestion that being a secretary or a receptionist isn't Enough. It isn't, financially, but that's beside the point. I mean, how much did the stepsisters like taking orders from Cinderella after the ball? I hadn't married the prince, but it was like pulling teeth to get anybody to do my work.
I might have done better seeking employment somewhere other than Roth, Tolbert & Anderson, which was an aspiring law firm but definitely second tier. Unfortunately, night law school is not the career path of choice for the upwardly mobile, and topflight legal jobs do not grow on trees (or even shrubs) for the chronologically challenged. Law firms, particularly top law firms, like to mold you into their own image, and grads with a few years under their belts are presumably less malleable and far less willing to devote their associate years to Nothing But Work. RTA, however, suffered from a geographical disadvantage — everybody would like to vacation in San Diego, but no one looking for big bucks wants to work there.
Not that I wasn't grateful. The firm paid for me to take the bar exam and gave me time off to study. I didn't have to uproot my children from their schools or my mother from her security. I could stay in La Jolla, home of the improbably fortunate, even if only on a shoestring. Jamison Roth, the only partner over sixty, took me to lunch. In a burst of optimism, I even allowed my college roommate, the alumni class secretary, to publish news of my promotion in the Class Notes. So what if all the other first-year associates called me "ma'am"?
All of which goes to explain why I gave Taylor Anderson another smile — this time a reassuring one — in the face of his little faux pas. "I'll get it," I said, noticing when I stood up that my slip had worked its way up around my hips like a life preserver. Great.
Melissa gave me a you'll-never-make-partner-at-this-rate smirk. I didn't care; it was exactly what I hoped for her, though probably only one of us would get her wish. "I'll be right back," I added. And I would have been too, except that the career god chose that moment to deal me another low blow.
Wendy Richards, legal secretary and office administrator, stuck her well-coiffed head around the door. "Excuse me," she said, looking directly at Taylor, "but there's a phone call for Ms. Weston." Taylor made an impatient little gesture, and Wendy turned to me. "Your mother," she mouthed.
"Could you tell her I'm in a meeting and I'll call her back?" I asked desperately. I knew what was coming next.
"She says it's urgent," Wendy said sympathetically. My mother always said it was urgent. Since she was eighty years old, there was always the chance that this time, after a lifetime total of 956 false alarms, there might actually be a real emergency.
I was already standing, so there was no way to make an inconspicuous exit. "I'd better take it," I said to all and sundry, carefully avoiding looking at Melissa. Her mother was probably my age, fit and tanned and playing a round of tennis every day before she went off to be chairman of General Motors or whatever.
Taylor's quick grimace passed for permission to leave. Or maybe I just imagined his exasperation, because a second later he said pleasantly, "Sure; go ahead. Wendy, would you get us the rest of the papers from Mr. Krill's file? It's on my desk. And if you wouldn't mind, Mr. Krill would like a Sprite."
"Ice?" Wendy was asking as I left the room.
"We're out of ice cream," my mother told me when I picked up the phone.
I closed my eyes and made a conscious effort not to hold the phone with my neck. I could feel the tension spreading through my shoulders. "Is that what you called to tell me?" I asked her. I thought I sounded wonderfully patient, but my mother apparently thought otherwise.
"You said to remind you," she said in an aggrieved tone.
"Yes, but, Mother, you said it was urgent. I was in a meeting with a client."
"They always say you're in a meeting," she protested, unruffled. "That's how they put you off. If I didn't say it was important, they wouldn't have called you to the phone, would they?" she asked reasonably.
I had to swallow hard to stifle an audible sigh. "Mother, I'll pick up the ice cream on the way home, but please don't say it's urgent when you call if it's not." I paused. "We've had this conversation before."
"Don't use that tone with me, Rebecca. I'm not a child."
But sometimes she was, of course, in the ways that counted. Not a child who was growing outward and more independent but one who was dwindling and becoming needier. The relationship was constantly being renegotiated.
Before I could say anything more, she added, "I can't find my blood- pressure medicine."
"What time did you last take it?"
There was an edge of panic beginning in her voice. "I'm not sure. I don't remember." Pause. "Maybe this morning."
I went through the litany of all the places her pills might be.
"I checked there. I checked everywhere."
"Okay, try to relax. I'll help you find them when I get home. You know it doesn't matter that much if you miss one dose."
Her voice fluttered a little. "I think I need them now."
Whether she did or not, it was pointless to argue. She wanted me to come home and find them for her, and I couldn't. We reached this impasse a couple of times a month. I looked at my watch. "Did you ask Allie to help you?"
"Alicia is not home," she said triumphantly.
I wondered if that was the hidden agenda behind the conversation. My mother adored her granddaughter, but she couldn't resist pointing out the flaws in the elaborate domestic construct I had made to try to keep everyone happy.
I felt a flicker of annoyance. I paid Alicia to come straight home from high school every day she didn't have a scheduled activity so she could check on her grandmother. Not that my mother needed constant surveillance, but it was supposed to head off problems before they got serious. Not incidentally, it made sure that my fifteen-year-old daughter was not wandering around unsupervised while I was working.
I thought it was a brilliant solution. When it worked.
"I'm sure she'll be home soon," I told her. "What flavor ice cream do you want?"
"Whatever you like," said my mother, infuriatingly. "Becky?"
"What?" I asked, more curtly than I intended.
"If you got one of those phones ... you know ..."
I knew. "Cell phones?"
"That's right. A cell phone. If you had one, I wouldn't have to call the office."
I felt a measure of panic at the thought of being available in the car, the market, even the ladies' room. "I don't think so," I said sharply.
"Oh," she said forlornly.
Then I felt a wave of guilt, the kind you feel when you think you've been really, truly selfish.
The Older Parent Game is a game you can't win. It's not their fault, but it isn't yours either. Ambivalence, guilt, responsibility, tenderness — they're all part of a complicated package. My mother had moved in with Allie, David (my son), and me after my divorce, and her presence made it possible for me to go back to work and to school. Her Social Security tided us over when the support payments were late and in the awful period after my ex-husband died.
On the other hand, her needs were becoming a large, powerful drain that threatened to draw everything close into the maelstrom, and I was the only one around to meet them. As she reminded me rather frequently, she'd given up her friends, her life, and her house to help me out, and she wasn't about to start over. I loved my mother, but love wasn't enough anymore. A sense of jeopardy hung over my life like mist — letting up occasionally but never entirely evaporating.
"Well, I'll look into it," I told her. "They're very expensive, but ... I'll look into it."
"Becky?"
"Yes, Mother?"
"Chocolate," she said. "Bring home chocolate."
Wendy stepped into my office as I was replacing the receiver. "Everything okay?" she asked.
Wendy was about fifty-five, a decade my senior, and had been my ally ever since I discovered her sneaking into the office one morning very early to call her mother at firm expense. "She lives in a nursing home in Toronto," she'd said then. "I don't do this very often, but it's so expensive ..." She seemed to expect me to turn her in to the partners. I didn't.
"We were out of ice cream," I told her.
She laughed sympathetically. "Sorry. I guess I shouldn't have called you out of the meeting, but your mother insisted."
"I know," I told her. "She wants me to get a cell phone so I can be more available."
"Don't do it," she warned. She rolled her eyes. "I can't say who, of course, but someone in this firm has a mother who calls with daily soap opera updates. Four calls an afternoon. Well, three, now that they've canceled Another World."
I shuddered. "I'll keep it in mind. Is Jason Krill still here?"
She shook her head. "He's catching the Nerd Bird to San Jose tomorrow and wanted to go home and pack." The Nerd Bird was the early flight to Silicon Valley, awash in laptops and pocket protectors. "Sheesh. I hope he remembers to put in his deodorant."
"He'll probably be a billionaire by Christmas," I told her.
"Then he ought to be able to afford soap," she said with asperity. "Not that that stopped our Miss Peters from throwing herself at him."
I didn't say anything, although I was dying to.
Wendy gave me her best attempt at a leer. Since she resembled no one so much as Pat Nixon in her heyday, the effect was almost macabre. "And he's not the only one she's dangling her ... wares in front of," she said. Her eyes shone a little, as if she was excited by the idea of RTA as a hotbed of illicit lust.
"I don't think ..." I started.
"Yes you do," she said. "But you're too nice to say so."
I couldn't think what to say to that.
"Don't mind me," she said. "I'm just your generic sex-starved middle- aged divorcée."
That makes two of us, I thought. But of course I didn't say that either.
CHAPTER 2
Taylor Anderson was sitting at his desk staring out the window. Despite his polished demeanor, his office looked as if he hadn't put anything away since approximately 1982. Even the chairs were stacked with papers. I thought it took a certain confidence to entertain clients in those surroundings, because it looked impossibly chaotic. What if your will was at the bottom of one of those piles? By the time its whereabouts were discovered, your hated nephew could have absconded to Brazil with your estate.
I tapped on the door and went in. Law firms are more informal than big corporations, where nobody dares disturb the person above him in the chain of command.
Taylor looked startled, as if I'd caught him in a fantasy of his own. Maybe I had. "What's up?" he asked distractedly.
"Not much," I told him. "I just wanted to apologize."
He raised his eyebrows. His sleeves were rolled up at the cuffs. It made him look adorably boyish. "What for?" he asked.
"For having to leave the client meeting," I told him.
He looked blank.
"Jason Krill. The phone call," I prompted him.
"Oh, right."
This was worse than I thought. He hadn't even remembered I was supposed to be there. He watched me patiently, the way people do when you interrupt them at a cocktail party and they're just waiting to get back to their conversations. I couldn't think what to say next. The seconds ticked by.
"Was there something else?" Taylor asked finally. His fingers toyed longingly with the edges of the papers in front of him. He softened the dismissal with a smile.
"My mother," I blurted out. The words were hanging there before I knew what I was saying. Damn, damn. Why did I say something like that? "I'm sorry," I said hopelessly.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Exit Strategies"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Catherine Todd.
Excerpted by permission of Diversion Publishing Corp..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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