Playing By The Rules

“That’s the compliance part?”

“Yes. So you see, if you hook up with someone once you get past thirty-five, I think you do it for the purest of reasons. Compatibility. Comfort. Conversation. Then throw in a little lust for fun and games. The whole situation becomes easy and noncombative. You don’t fall into a relationship for what the guy can give you, because you’ve probably already gotten it for yourself. You don’t have the need to demand anymore. You can just accept.”

Grace swallowed wine. “Oh, joy. I can hardly wait. Does this come hand in hand with crow’s feet?”

I ignored that. “It’s why I don’t date…much,” I explained. “And why I don’t have an overriding need to claw.”

“Because you’ve already got a child, you don’t want a mortgage and you don’t care what people think anymore?”

“In a nutshell, yes. I can afford to be selective now, so I am.”

Grace put her wineglass on the table and leaned forward. “Mandy. You haven’t dated lately because you spend all your free time with Sam. Let’s not lie to each other here.”

My spine jerked straight, hard enough and suddenly enough to hurt a little. “That’s not true.”

“What’s not?” Jenny Tower asked, flopping into one of the chairs. By the way she shifted her weight in her seat, I knew she was toeing her shoes off under the table. She looked tired.

“Mandy doesn’t date because she’s too busy hanging out with Sam,” Grace said.

“It’s my choice!” I was going to get that through to her if it killed me. “I can afford to wait for compatibility, comfort and conversation because I’m thirty-five!”

Jenny took her apron off and laid it on her lap, pulling a wad of tips from the pocket. She started sorting the ones from the fives. “I don’t ever want to be that old.”

“It’s better than dying young,” Grace said, “but barely.” Then she grabbed the money from Jenny’s hand. “Honey, you’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Jenny looked around the bar and blinked as though coming out of a dream. If there’s anyone in the world more trusting than Jenny is, then it would have to be Toto himself—and even Toto had the good sense to bark at that goofy wizard. “You think someone’s going to snatch it right out of my hand?” she asked disbelievingly.

Grace took the hand in question and pressed the money back into it, folding Jenny’s fingers over it. “Call me mercenary, but our rent is due in two weeks.”

Jenny sighed and pushed the money into her jeans pocket. “Okay. I’ll count it later. Let’s get back to why Mandy doesn’t date.”

I launched into my theory again. “I haven’t met anyone recently who particularly inspires me, and I don’t need all those other things I was mentioning—the mortgage and whatnot—so I won’t tolerate someone who doesn’t inspire me.”

“Which brings us back to Sam,” Grace said. She cut a look at Jenny. “We were talking about clawing his clothes off, at which point Mandy went off into this business about relationships at a certain age. Compatibility. Comfort. Conversation. Wait, what was the other thing you mentioned?” She glanced at me again and tapped a finger against her cheek exaggeratedly. “Ah. Now I remember. Lust.”

“Lust is good,” Jenny contributed. “But I agree, the other things matter a whole lot, too.”

“You and Sam are compatible,” Grace continued, still aiming her words at me. “You’re comfortable with each other. The conversation between you is great—just ask any of us who’ve ever tried to horn in on it. Therefore, according to everything you just told me, the progression is obvious. You two ought to be having sex.”

I opened my mouth to argue and realized that I had just been boxed in by my own theory. Grace was going to make one hell of a lawyer when she finished clerking for the criminal court judge.

Then she sat up a little straighter and looked over my shoulder. I turned in my chair and followed her gaze and my pulse hiccuped.

Sam had just arrived. He was standing at the bar.

Chapter Two

“Who’s that with him?” Jenny asked, leaning forward at our table to check out the situation.

My gaze hitched to Sam’s left. It was the woman he’d taken out Monday night. Surprise—she had a lot of hair and all of it was blond. “I think he said she works for Fox, Murray and Myers,” I said. “She’s a receptionist.”

“She looks like a bimbo,” Grace observed.

My gaze dropped to her not insignificant bosom. “I don’t think he wants her for her mind.”

Then, as though my attention had drawn his, Sam looked around and saw us. He grinned at me and picked up his scotch-and-water from the bar. I knew it was scotch because that was pretty much all he ever drank—Glenlivet specifically. With his glass in one hand and the blonde’s elbow in his other, he began steering her toward our table.

Jenny ogled them. “He’s bringing her here? He’s bringing his date to sit with Mandy?”

“He probably wants my stamp of approval,” I murmured.

“You two are strange,” Jenny said.

“We’re friends. Just friends. Why is that so hard for you people to wrap your minds around?”

Grace watched them approach as well. “His bimbo isn’t happy,” she decided.

I agreed. The blonde’s jaw seemed a little too set, her eyes too narrow.

Sam finished propelling her toward our table. He pulled out the last chair for her and snagged a seat from the next table for himself, then he placed it on the opposite side of the table from the bombshell.

“This is Tammy,” he said. He deposited his glass on the table and shifted his chair to face mine. “I had a thought on our Woodsen stalemate. What we need to do is get them back together. They’re shaky parents individually, but as a team they might be almost solid. Especially if we can convince Larson to appoint some kind of supervisor to look in on them from time to time. I think Lyle has a sister who lives something like two doors down.”

I opened my mouth, shut it, then tried again. On the second effort, I found words. “Where do you get these ideas? We’re divorce lawyers, Sam. We’re supposed to break people up. It’s what we get paid for.”

“I’ll kick in my fee if you do.”

“I can’t kick mine in. I have partners to report to.” I was being cranky. I was still stinging from what he’d sprung on me in court.

“Just give it some thought,” he urged. “We should try to save them for the kids’ sake. Besides, I believe strongly in the sanctity of marriage.”

I snorted. “Unless it’s your own.”

I realized too late that his ex-marital status wasn’t common knowledge. The look Jenny gave him was amazed. I could only imagine that having traipsed down the aisle once in his life lent Sam a little more potential in her eyes.

“You were married?” she asked quickly. “I never knew that.”

Sam cast me a wounded look. “I left McAllen, Texas, after my divorce and came here. It was too painful to stay.”

Jenny’s gaze went kind and misty. In a moment, I thought, she would begin stroking his hair and cooing things like poor baby.

“Mandy decided that I was the one who ended the marriage, and I’ve never disabused her of the notion,” he went on.

It stung a little because I had assumed that.

“Why?” Jenny asked, looking between us. “Why wouldn’t you tell her the truth?”

“Because there’s something emasculating about being tossed over for another man and—worse—being slow to recover from it.”

“You told me that,” Tammy said suddenly. “You told me you were divorced.” The rest of us looked at her. I think we’d forgotten she was there.

“Which just goes to show,” Grace murmured, “that Sam doesn’t mind appearing emasculated in your eyes.”

Ouch, I thought. Like I said, Grace can be brutally honest.

I pulled the subject back to what I figured was safe territory. “About the Woodsens,” I said quickly. “I don’t think Lisa has hooked up with anyone new yet.”

“Lyle hasn’t, either,” Sam replied.

I thought about his suggestion. “He’d be the hardest to convince. He was the one who filed for divorce in the first place.”

“She’s a paranoid schizophrenic. She woke up one morning and decided he was an extraterrestrial. It was making his life hell.”

“She didn’t mention that.” There was a lot Lisa hadn’t bothered to tell me. Then it hit me. “An extraterrestrial?”

“From Pluto. No mundane Martians for our girl.”

“Excuse me,” Tammy tried to interrupt.

I laughed aloud. “She told me that when he got drunk he would chase her around the house. Maybe that was what tipped her over into planetary delusions.”

Sam perked up. “Were they wearing clothes, do you think?”

I had just sipped more wine and it backfired up my nasal passages. I coughed and he clapped me on the back.

“If Lisa stays on her medication and Lyle forgoes a six-pack now and again, it could work,” he insisted.

“Between the two of them, one might be sane and sober for the kids at any given time,” I agreed when I could finally talk again. “The supervisor idea has some merit, but we’d need to have random blood tests for the children’s sake, too. You know, test him for blood-alcohol content, and her to make sure she’s still on her medication.”

“I’ll sound him out on it in the morning,” Sam said.

“I’ll do the same with Lisa. But I’m not going to my partners about kicking in my fee.”

“Excuse me,” Tammy said again.

“We’ve got trouble,” Grace murmured and eased her chair back from the table a little. I barely glanced at her.

“Are you going to be in court tomorrow?” Sam asked me.

“In the afternoon. I’m arguing a motion at one-thirty.”

“So am I. Get there early and I’ll buy you a hot dog from our favorite vendor.”

“The one with the spider monkey?” His name was Julio, and he was the only one who had fried onions on his cart.

“It’s a chimpanzee,” Sam corrected me.

“No, it’s not—” Then I broke off because it happened.

I caught a quick movement out of the corner of my eye, a flick of Tammy’s wrist. Then something pale and pink floated over the table in a pretty arc. I reared back in my seat just in time to avoid it. Then her drink was in Sam’s face, dripping from his chin. He didn’t look good in pink.

He came to his feet, sputtering. “What the hell was that for?”

“You don’t love me!” Tammy’s voice went to screech volume. “You can’t even remember that I’m sitting here at the same table with you!”

Grace rose to her feet. “Okay, that’s my cue. I’m going somewhere else.”

Jenny just looked stupefied.

“Who said I loved you?” Sam looked at me a little wildly. For help, I knew.

Tammy’s face contorted until she managed to squeeze tears from her eyes. She was so young—I really hadn’t caught that before. I actually felt a little sorry for her. She’d need a lot more seasoning before she was ready for the Sam Cases of the world.

I stood and reached for her. I was thinking that I should guide her away from the table, maybe to the ladies’ room, where she could calm down. Then I spotted Frank Ethan over her shoulder.

The evening was going to hell in a handbasket, I thought. I should have just listened to Sylvie Casamento and gone straight home to my daughter after court. I hadn’t seen Frank since the night six weeks ago when I’d discovered that he kissed like a fish. He didn’t frequent McGlinchey’s—but he knew that I did. Which more or less equated to the certainty that he was here hoping to find me.

Sam recognized him. “Hey,” he said. “Isn’t that the corporate dude who used to stand outside our building and check his watch so he’d knock on your door at the exact time he said he’d pick you up?”

“Shut up.” I spat the words just as Frank started toward me, his arms spread wide and his mouth puckered up fish-style. I caught Sam’s sleeve and backpedaled. “Time to go.”

He was trying to dry his face with a bar napkin. He threw it back onto the table. “Sounds good to me.”

We turned together and headed for the door. Or rather, Sam headed for the door. I walked into a wall of blue chambray and a snarl of chest hair at its opened collar.

“Ms. Hillman?” chest-hair asked.

Sometimes you just know something and there’s no getting around it, even when you’d prefer ignorance. Blue chambray or not, this guy was a sheriff’s officer. I’d met enough of them in ten years of practicing law to recognize one when I ran into his chest.

I tried to step around him. I knew he wasn’t allowed to detain me, not for what he wanted to do. But he didn’t have to. He slid the papers he was holding into the open side flap of my purse.

Service acquired.

Sam tried. He’d only been in Philadelphia for six months, but he’d passed our Commonwealth’s bar exam with flying colors and he knew the ropes. He tried to knock the papers out of the guy’s hand before they landed. Sam was quick, but the deputy was quicker.

Sam swore once the damage was done and more or less dragged me out of the bar by my arm. I stopped on the sidewalk, pulling back against his grip, and I drew in a steadying breath.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m all right now.”

“How can you be after that?” he demanded.

“If it makes you feel any better, then I’m a puddle of Jell-O.”

“Jell-O is solid,” he pointed out. “It can’t be a puddle.”

“It’s not so solid that it doesn’t jiggle.”

He thought about that and finally gave me the point. “What did he serve on you, anyway? Are you getting disbarred?”

I choked at the mere thought. “No.”

“How do you know without looking at the damned papers?” He was more upset about this than I was, I realized.

“Because the bar association sends their axes by certified mail in this state,” I explained. At his startled look—one that asked how I knew that—I added, “It happened to a guy in my office once.”

Besides, I didn’t have to look at the papers because I already knew what they were. Now that they’d finally turned up, I realized that I had pretty much been expecting them ever since Millson Kramer III had tossed his hat into the political arena a while ago. I’d guessed then that Chloe and I would become his official campaign skeletons-in-the-closet.

To appreciate this, you’d have to know Mill. He’s the proving ground for the fact that too much IQ is not necessarily a good thing. He’s clinically a genius and my daughter is a shining testament to that. Chloe grasps it all—math, science, concrete concepts and those of an airier, more abstract variety. She’s dazzling. Mill, on the other hand, tends to be so captivated by his own calculating thoughts that he has the charm and disposition of a wet dishrag. He is, however, very exacting, orderly and methodical. So I’d known that Chloe and I were probably on his to-do list of things to clear up so he would become highly electable.

We’d been seeing each other on a comfortable basis for a little over a year when I got pregnant. I wasn’t appalled when I found out about Chloe. I’d always wanted a child, though this wasn’t exactly the way I’d envisioned it happening. I knew I would be swimming upstream by going ahead with parenthood on my own, but I was reasonably sure I was good for the challenge. And Mill provided an excellent gene pool, being intelligent, attractive, well-bred and, best of all, indifferent.

After I decided that I wanted the baby, I also realized that hooking up with Mill on a legal basis for the express purpose of her existence would be a mistake of monumental proportions. Regardless of the fact that I arrange divorces and negotiate custody disputes for a living, I strongly believe that marriage is supposed to be forever. And the comfortable pseudorelationship I had going with Mill was not the sort of thing forever is made of. In fact, when I realized that, I was a little ashamed of myself for letting it progress for as long as it had.

In the end, I trusted in the fact that Mill was so utterly self-absorbed, he wouldn’t try to take the idea of parenthood too seriously. He wouldn’t try to make our relationship more than it was because of the baby. I knew that if I declined his proposal of marriage and asked him to go away, he’d go away. I was right—he did, with a few snide comments for casual observers—until now.

Now he had decided to run for city council, and the whole business of Chloe would make him look less than stellar in the eyes of Philadelphia’s more conservative voters. I knew this was a custody suit even without taking the papers from my purse, and I was definitely not going to do that. Not yet. On top of Grace’s bizarre opinions about me having sex with Sam, and the Woodsen matter of schizophrenia, I was in no way planning to address the issue of my daughter’s parentage before morning.

I opened my mouth to tell Sam this, then McGlinchey’s door opened behind us. Sam tugged my keys from my hand. I tried to hold on to them as we started jogging toward the parking lot, but he twisted them free of my fingers, anyway.

I yanked on the passenger door once he had unlocked it. I dropped inside and looked over my shoulder. Whoever had come through the door after us—if it had been either Tammy or Frank—they weren’t following us. And the deputy didn’t have to. He’d already accomplished his dirty work.

Sam found the little button on the side of the driver’s seat, and he moved the seat backward with ruthless intent. I could never get it into the right position again when he did that. He shot the key into the ignition, revved the engine and looped around onto Pine Street. We headed toward the outskirts of Society Hill. Mill lived in the district. Sam and I could only afford to come close.

“You’re not very good at this, you know,” I told him.

He angled a glance my way. “At driving?”

This is something else I’ve learned from thirty-five years of living: never ever criticize a man’s driving, no matter how bad it is. It’s a testosterone thing. “Actually, I meant dating. Keep your eyes on the road.” I closed my own so I wouldn’t have to note how fast we were going.

“I’m a great dater.” This came out with predictable evidence of that same testosterone.

“No, Sam, you’re not. Practice does not always make perfect.”

“It strikes me that this is a little like the pot calling the kettle black.”

I opened my eyes again. “I hardly ever date!” I protested.

“That is my point.” He swerved around a cab and we veered north onto Third Street.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I straightened in my seat. Damned if the man couldn’t get my ire up. Plus, he’d managed to hit on a topic that I’d already been under fire for through half the evening from Grace and Jenny.

“It means that maybe if you did more of it, you might be in a position to judge my tactics,” Sam said. “It means that you might figure out that a guy who has an obsession about time is probably going to be a little anal retentive. And he just might be the type to come at you in a bar with his arms open wide, puckering up his mouth like some kind of overblown fish.”

I was just outraged enough that I didn’t know which comment to respond to first, but I’d be damned if I’d admit that Frank Ethan really did kiss like a fish. “I happen to appreciate a sense of punctuality and responsibility,” I said.

“Yeah? What about that day you canceled all your appointments and played hooky so you could show me the Liberty Bell?”

“That was you.” As soon as it was out, I considered biting my tongue off. Grace’s voice whispered nasty little observations in my head again.

“Which means…what?” Sam asked.

I wasn’t going to answer that. “I fail to see what this has to do with Frank,” I said stiffly. “Besides, there’s no such thing as an overblown fish.”

“Yes, there is. There are those ones that puff up occasionally for some scientific reason I can’t remember right now.”

“Like Tammy’s chest?”

“Leave her chest out of this.”

“That’s tough to do, Sam. It’s so…out there.”

He took his eyes off the road again to glare at me. “What’s wrong with you tonight?”

“I’m fine.” Grace was wrong with me, I thought, her and her absurd opinions about me and Sam.

“You’re not fine,” Sam said. “You’re being caustic.”

“At least I don’t tell people I love them on the first date. Or did you do it on the second?” We’d reached the parking lot that I used and he drove my car into a space. The Mitsubishi rocked on its shock absorbers when he hit the breaks too hard. I tried not to wince.

“I did not tell her that I loved her,” he said.

“Well, you must have done something to put the idea in her head.” I got out and slammed the door. “In the throes of passion, maybe?”

“I never even got around to passion with her!”

My heart shifted a little. Damned if I cared. I grabbed my keys from his hand and started up the street toward our apartment building.

“So what about that scampi?” Sam asked, following me. “Since we’re both home now and we’ve semi-resolved the Woodsen thing, we might as well eat together.”

“Bribe me and I’ll consider it.”

“You want me to pucker up like a fish?”

I turned and walked backward to face him. “For the record, Frank kissed like a…like a…”

“Words fail you?” he said when I couldn’t quite continue.

“I’m trying to reach for the perfect superlative.”

“I hope you come up with it before my hearing starts to go.”

“There are just so many to choose from.”

He reached around me and opened the outside door of our building. I pivoted back to face forward and we crossed the black-and-white marble vestibule to step into a fern-filled hallway. My apartment was on the first floor, his was one floor above mine.

“Come on, Mandy. Feed me,” he said. “I’ve got some wine I could contribute. I bought it because I was going to try to lure Tammy back here tonight.”

“Ah, leftovers. Sam, I am so flattered.”

“I’d rather share it with you.”

Everything inside me rolled over. Slowly, sweetly. It was purely Grace’s doing, of course. I had been absolutely fine when I’d been hating Sam in Judge Larson’s courtroom two hours ago.

“Go get the wine, Sam,” I said, a little tired of fighting off images of how he would claw. But I watched him move up the stairs with that slow, prowling way he had of moving, and I found myself thinking that on so many levels he seemed absurdly unaware of his own appeal. Either that or he took it for granted. I had never quite figured out which it was.

I went into my own apartment and closed the door behind me. The telephone was ringing. I jogged across the living room into the kitchen and grabbed it. It was Sylvie Casamento.

“It’s after six o’clock,” she said immediately. “You said you’d be home by six o’clock.”

I looked at the clock on the wall in the kitchen. It was two minutes past the hour. “I had a wonderful time,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

“Did that man find you?”

“Which one? The blue shirt, or the one with the fishy mouth?” What difference did it make? They’d both nailed me, but I wanted to know which one of them had come here looking for me first.

“He was wearing blue,” Mrs. Casamento said.

“Then, yes. Thank you so much for your help. You can send Chloe down now.”

Mrs. Casamento lived in my building on the second floor across from Sam. I went back to my apartment door and into the hall, and I collected my daughter.

I sent Chloe off to take a bath. Back in the kitchen I stared at my purse, at the papers stuffed into the side flap.

Over the years, from conversations at preschool, playgrounds, and PTA, I have come to the conclusion that single mothers share a near-psychotic obsession with being a good parent. Maybe this is because statistically we are expected to fail, to produce serial killers and assorted other prison inmates. Our children cannot possibly thrive in a broken home. To prove those statistics wrong, we obsess. And obsession can be exhausting. This is why, when your seven-year-old stares at you with guileless eyes and swears up-and-down on the life of her Barbie that she did her homework at the babysitter’s, sometimes you believe her. You do it because you want the hard part of your day to be over and done with. You’ve earned your wage, you’ve paid the gas bill. If there’s not food on the table, then at the very least it’s in the refrigerator waiting to be warmed up, or it’s in a takeout bag on the counter. So you take your child’s word at face value until you begin to shoo her out the door the next morning and you realize that she fibbed…just a little. The homework is half-done. You’re late for court and she’s late for school and there’s no way to backtrack and fix this. Now her teacher is going to know the truth. You are actually a bad parent in sheep’s clothing. Your child is doomed for the penitentiary.