Cal Lowman was a name I recognized. He was a senior partner with one of the big-deal corporate law firms in town—Henderson, Lowman, Richards, and Potts.
I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, raised by a single mother who supported us by working as a seamstress. She made a meager living by sewing knock-off copies of designer dresses for Seattle’s social elite. All through grade school I had to endure endless teasing over showing up each day in one or another of my mother’s homemade shirts. Eventually I fought back, winning some and losing some and being sent to the principal’s office on an almost daily basis. The fights didn’t stop for good until I was in high school and was old enough to get an after-school job at the local theater. Only then did I achieve the pinnacle of sophistication by showing up at school in a store-bought shirt.
But America’s a great place. Here I was, decades later, having a tuxedo-clad male bonding conversation with one of Seattle’s prime movers and shakers.
“Your wife’s on the board?” Lowman asked.
This is one of the reasons I’m no good at chitchat. If I couldn’t explain Mel Soames’s position in my life to my children, how would I manage with this stranger? Mel most definitely was not my wife, but the more dispassionately accurate U.S. Census Bureau term, POSSLQ—a person of opposite sex sharing living quarters—just didn’t do it for me. And we were both far too long of tooth for the old standby terms of boyfriend/girlfriend to apply.
“Mel Soames is my partner,” I said finally. “And yes, she’s on the board.”
Just then the woman we had met days earlier at the California Pizza Kitchen arrived on the scene. She was dazzling in a strapless green silk gown topped by an amazing emerald necklace. “Hello, there,” she said to me. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” Then, reaching past me, she collected the glass of wine Cal Lowman had been holding.
“So you’ve already met my Anita?” Cal asked with a possessive smile.
As I said, Cal was about my age. Mel is fifteen years younger than I am, and this delectable piece of arm candy was far younger than that.
I brushed off my conversational skills as best I could and tried to measure up. “Briefly,” I said. “But I’m not up on exactly what you do.”
“I’m retired,” Anita told me, sipping her wine. “And trying to make the world a better place. That’s why I started the SASAC in the first place.” She turned to Cal. “Okay,” she said, “time to go to work. There’s someone I want you to meet.”
She dragged him away so unceremoniously that I was surprised Cal didn’t object. Their abrupt departure left me wearing the conversational equivalent of two left feet.
About that time Mel showed up and relieved me of her glass of wine. “So let me guess,” I said, nodding in Anita and Cal’s direction. “Now that Anita’s hooked up with a sugar daddy like Cal Lowman she can forgo working for a living and can afford to devote herself to charity.”
Mel gave me a bemused look. “There you go,” she said. “You’ve fallen back into that age-old trap of gender stereotyping. You’ve got this story upside down and backward. If anybody’s a sugar daddy, it would have to be Anita. She left Microsoft at age thirty-three with a pocketful of loot. That’s where she met Cal—at Microsoft. She plucked him off Microsoft’s team of corporate legal beagles and took him home to play house. A lot like you and me, babe; only, in our case, you’re the one with the moolah. Anita could probably buy and sell Cal Lowman a dozen times over.”
That’s when it came home to me. Times had changed; women had changed. My second wife, Anne Corley, had died and left me with an armload of money, but tux or not, I was still that unsophisticated hick from Ballard. No amount of money in the world was going to fix that.
“And plan on being nice,” Mel added. “I’m pretty sure we’re seated at the same table.”
Convinced I had somehow bungled that initial encounter, I was dreading sharing dinner with Cal and Anita, but then I got lucky. When we went down to the cavernous ballroom and made our way through to the table directly in front of the speaker’s podium, I caught sight of someone I actually knew—Destry Hennessey.
I had encountered Destry years earlier, when she had been a lowly criminalist working on a master’s at the U. Dub during the day and toiling away in Seattle PD’s crime lab by night. Once she earned her degree, she had taken a job somewhere else—I wasn’t sure where. Sometime in the course of the last several years, Destry had returned to the West Coast as the newly appointed head of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab.
I went up and shook her hand. “Des,” I said, “long time no see. What are you doing here?”
“I’m the speaker,” she said. “I hate doing public speaking. In terms of phobias, it’s supposed to be right up there with fear of dying. With a room this big I can tell you I’m scared to death.”
“You’ll do fine,” I said.