It had only rarely been an issue. The postmodern cowboys I went for weren’t big on vows. When one of them got slung up, I didn’t hear from him, and if I did, I was done with him, anyway. I had a strict No Assholes policy, and I’d never met a cheater of either sex who wasn’t some stripe of asshole underneath the He doesn’t understand mes and the We drifted aparts and the She won’t do that thing I need in beds.
It narrowed my pool—the world had never once been short on assholes—but not too much. Physically, I didn’t have a type. I’d dated short guys and tall guys; scrawny, thick, and ripped; red and yellow, black and white. I liked any charming fuckup who was passing through, promising good conversation, good sex, and zero complications. The world also had no shortage of fellas with commitment phobias who genuinely enjoyed the company of women—I just couldn’t find one this afternoon. Not unless I wanted to go out and pick a fresh one.
I didn’t. I’d given up on one-night stands in college. Too risky, and the sex was generally subpar. It could take weeks or even months to find and cultivate the kind of relationship I liked. I dropped my phone back on the table, frustrated.
With no work to keep me busy, the afternoon stretched ahead of me, unbearably long. And yet I had zero drive to go back to the office. Maybe I should have taken on that new pro bono, after all.
Henry rolled onto his back and air-paddled his paws at me, being charming but making a mess of my stacks. I picked him up and baby-cradled him, burying my face in his neck, smelling that good warm cat smell for as long as he would let me. After a minute, his affection plate got full, and he pushed at me until I let him down. I stared at the table full of papers. They stared back.
I’m not sure what I would have done had my iPhone not mercifully started ringing. I answered without even checking the screen. “Hello?”
“You call him yet?” Birdwine said, forgoing greetings.
“No,” I said, defensive.
“Bullshit,” he said. “Unless you emailed him instead?” I kept silent. Facebook wasn’t technically email. He was already laughing at me. “Busted. Damn, woman, I dug as fast as I could. Here’s the thing. I’ve been looking in the kid’s financials. I’ve got some concerns.”
Big ones, I thought, for him to call me back this fast. “About the adoptive family, or about him, personally?”
“Him. The parents were typical American middle class.”
“You mean they had a lot of debt,” I said, and then I picked up on the verb tense. Were. It made my body restless, set me pacing from the table to the sofa. “His adopted folks are dead?”
“Oh, yeah. The mom was a type-one diabetic. She developed complications when Julian was a teen. Celiac, then intestinal cancer. The dad dropped dead of a heart attack near the end of her illness. Stress got him.” Birdwine said this like it was fact, but I knew what he was doing. He was telling me the story he had read between the lines of documents and spreadsheets. I knew if I were in the room with him, his hands would be rolling in that way he had, laying out the hypothetical. “So the kid just started his senior year at Berry College when his dad bites it. He drops out. Moves home. From that point on, he’s taking care of his mother. By October, she’s dead, too. You want to hear the obit?”
I was lagging a few sentences behind him, trying to process as I paced back and forth across the space between the dining table and my great room sofa. Birdwine was distilling it down to something too dense for me to chew. “I don’t know. Do I?”
“Nah. It’s long—a full column in the Marietta Daily Journal. Active in her church, community, blah blah. Dies ‘after a long illness.’ At the end, all it says is, ‘She is survived by her beloved son, Julian.’ ”
My heart sank. “That’s it? No other kids? No spare sister or some cousins?”
“Full stop. His parents were both only children, and they’re gone. Meanwhile, his old friends are off at college, his new friends are back at Berry. Kid’s got nobody. He hires Tim Worth to find Kai in November.”
I sighed. Julian and I were orphans, which gave us a full three awful things in common. If he took my offered meeting, I hoped he liked the Braves or David Cronenberg movies so we’d have something innocuous to talk about. Otherwise a simple lunch with him might be enough to put me back in therapy.
“I hear you oiling up your pity gland,” Birdwine said. “Stand down. He’s also dead broke, Paula. Worse than. Medical and hospice ate the Bouchards’ retirement. Kid has three quarters of a liberal arts degree and a job at Mellow Mushroom. Whatever cash he did have went to Worth. No way can he go back to Berry. Not without a payday. He shows up at your swanky midtown office, sees your rich-people carpet, your crazy-ass shoes. I gotta wonder, what’s he thinking?”