She said, “I had an email from Curtis this morning.” She pulled a tea sachet from the tin on the counter. “I want to be in Atlanta next week for the Coca-Cola deposition.” Among other locales, Stehlik, Elton, Mallory and Sanders had satellite offices in Atlanta. Sam made monthly trips to the city, staying at the Four Seasons, walking the two blocks to the Peachtree Street offices, and ignoring the fact that Pikeville was a two-hour drive up the interstate.
“I’ll let travel know.” Eldrin retrieved a carton of milk from the refrigerator. “I can also ask if Grainger has—oh, no.” He was looking at the muted television in the corner. A graphic spun ominously onto the screen. SCHOOL SHOOTING.
As a victim of gun violence, Sam had always felt a particular horror when she learned of a mass shooting, but like most Americans, she had become somewhat acclimated to their almost monthly occurrence.
The screen showed a little girl’s photograph, obviously from a school yearbook. The name underneath read LUCY ALEXANDER.
Sam added milk to the tea. “I dated a boy in school named Peter Alexander.”
Eldrin raised his eyebrows as he followed her out of the kitchen. She wasn’t usually easy with details about her personal life.
Sam continued toward her office. Eldrin continued the rundown of the day’s itinerary, but she only listened with half an ear. She hadn’t thought about Peter Alexander in a long while. He had been a moody boy, given to long, tedious speeches about the torture inherent in being an artist. Sam had let him touch her breasts, but only because she had wanted to know what it felt like.
It felt sweaty, frankly, because Peter had no idea what he was doing.
Sam dropped her purse by her desk, a glass and steel chunk that anchored her sun-filled corner office. Her view, like most views in the Financial District, was the building directly across the way. There had been no rules regarding set-back when the Canyons of Wall Street had been erected. Twenty feet of sidewalk was all that separated most buildings from the street.
Eldrin finished his spiel as she placed her tea on a coaster beside her computer.
Sam waited for him to leave. She sat down in her chair. She found her reading glasses in her briefcase. She began the review of her notes for the ten thirty meeting.
Sam had understood when she decided on patent law as a career that the job was basically one of trying to sway the transfer of large sums of money: one incredibly wealthy corporation sued another incredibly wealthy corporation for using a similar set of stripes on their new athletic shoes, or co-opting a particular color from their brand, and very expensive lawyers had to argue in front of very bored judges about the percentages of cyan in a certain Pantone.
Long gone were the days of Newton and Leibniz battling for the right to be identified as the inventor of calculus. Most of Sam’s time was spent combing through the minutiae of design schematics and referencing patent applications that sometimes reached back to the early days of the industrial revolution.
She loved every single second of it.
She loved the melding of science and law, delighted in the fact that she had somehow managed to distill the single best parts of her mother and father into a rewarding life.
Eldrin knocked on her glass door. “I wanted to update you. Looks like that school shooting took place in North Georgia.”
Sam nodded. “North Georgia” was a nebulous catch-all for any area outside of Atlanta. “Do they know how many victims?”
“Only two.”
“Thanks.” Sam tried not to dwell on the “only,” because Eldrin was correct that two was a low body count. The story would probably roll off the news by tomorrow.
She turned to her computer. She pulled up a rough draft of a brief that she wanted to be conversant with for her ten thirty meeting. A second-year associate had taken a stab at a response to a summary motion made in the case of SaniLady, a division of UXH Financial Holdings, Ltd. v. LadyMate Corp, a division of Nippon Development Resources, Inc.
After six years of back and forth, two failed mediations and a screaming match that took place mostly in Japanese, the case was going to trial.
At issue was the design of a hinge that controlled the movement of the self-closing lid on a partition-mounted public restroom sanitary napkin and tampon disposal bin. The LadyMate Corporation produced several iterations of the ubiquitous container, from the FemyGeni to the original LadyMate to the strangely named Tough Guy.
Sam was the only person involved in the entire case who had actually used one of these bins. If she had been consulted during their design, she would’ve gone for truth in advertising and called them all the Motherfucker, because that was usually the first thing that came into a woman’s mind when she had to use one.
Sam also would have designed the spring-loaded piano hinge as two components for the extra .03 cent manufacturing cost rather than risk a single, integrated hinge that invited a patent infringement lawsuit that would result in millions of dollars in legal fees, not to mention the damages if Nippon lost the case.
If the brief on her computer had anything to do with it, UXH would not be seeing those damages. Patent law wasn’t the most baroque area of litigation, but the second-year associate who had drafted the brief wrote with the adroitness of a piece of sandpaper.
This was why Sam had taken a three-year detour into the Portland district attorney’s office. She had wanted to be able to speak the language of a courtroom.
Sam scrolled through the document, making notes, rewriting a long passage in an approximation of simple English, adding a modicum of flourish to the end because she knew that it would perturb her opposing counsel, a man who had, upon his first meeting with Sam, told her to fetch him a coffee, two sugars, and tell her boss that he did not like to wait.
Gamma had been right about so many things. Sam Quinn was given far more respect than Samantha Quinn could have ever hoped for.
At exactly ten thirty-four, Sam was the last person to enter the conference room. The tardiness was by design. She did not relish chastising stragglers.
She took her seat at the head of the table. She looked out at the sea of young, white men whose degrees from Michigan and Harvard and MIT gave them a bloated sense of their own self-importance. Or perhaps the bloat was warranted. They were sitting in the gleaming, glass-lined offices of one of the most important patent firms in the world. If they thought that they were captains of industry, it was likely because they soon would be.
But for now, they had to prove themselves to Sam. She listened to their updates, commented on their proposed strategies, and generally let them toss ideas back and forth until she felt that they were biting their own tails. Sam was notorious for running lean meetings. She asked for case law to be researched, a rewriting of briefs to be completed by tomorrow, the incorporation of a certain patent application from the 1960s to be integrated more deeply into their work product.