Chapter 3
brODY
I ’ve been standing in the breakroom, listening to the partners laugh and exchange stories about their most ridiculous and wild requests throughout the week for the past ten minutes. Scrolling through my phone, I finally hit the jackpot for my own story.
“I believe that I can do you one better,” I tell them. “I wouldn’t take this man’s case, so he emailed me this today. ‘Your behavior is not only unacceptable, but downright discriminatory. You call yourself an attorney who represents all families, but you won’t help me?
“Who do you think you are? My marriage certificate was printed by a professional-’ he’d typed it up himself and had it printed at a kiosk,” I clarify before continuing. “‘I will be reporting you to the American Bar Association for this disgusting behavior. Good luck keeping your license, fuckface.’ He finished with…thirteen exclamation points.”
“Fuckface will get you every time,” one of them cackles.
“His ‘wife’ is his parakeet,” I tell them as I lift my coffee to my lips. “And I wasn’t rude when I told him no. I simply told him that in no state is a human-avian marriage legal, so he doesn’t need my help in leaving her.”
“How does someone even divorce their bird?” Another partner asks.
“With butter and garlic,” Ezra answers with a shrug, and I chuckle into the lid of my drink.
“That’s horrible,” I tell him.
I’ve known Ezra since our first day of college, and somehow the guy’s managed to follow me all the way here.
They say that if a friendship lasts longer than seven years, it will last a lifetime. Ezra’s been with me for longer than that and he’s seen me through my share of hardships, so it looks like I may well be stuck with him.
After emptying my tea, I toss the paper cup into the nearest garbage can and reach for my attaché case.
“Brody’s off to cause mayhem in the streets,” Ezra announces.
“If by ‘mayhem,’ you mean sorting through discovery and reading Dostoevsky, and by ‘the streets,’ you mean my home office, sure,” I chuckle. “Goodnight, gentlemen.”
I leave them with a wave of my hand and I head for the parking structure behind the office to climb into my beige Volvo SUV, settling into my seat as I drop my attaché case onto the passenger seat.
Pulling my phone from my pocket, I skim through the group chat that I (occasionally) participate in with my sister and our youngest brother.
My brother is the perfect, cookie-cutout son that our parents want him to be. He lives and breathes their rules and he never strays from their expectation, unlike the rest of us. I would both kill and die for him, but it grates on my nerves sometimes. And Tripp…
Well, he’s Tripp.
Graham and our parents hate what I do for a living. They think that I’m laughing at God by using my second – and third – chances at life to ‘tear apart the lives of others and help them break their vows to Him,’ which inherently means that they believe I’ve torn my own life apart twice, now.
I don’t need their approval for my life choices, but I could certainly do without their judgment.
As I pull into my garage, I’m met with the piles of moving boxes that I still have yet to fill. I have yet to even put them together, in fact. There are very few things I dread more than the thought of having to go through my entire house and pick apart every corner of it to pack it away.
My eyes move to my attaché case, to the boxes, and back again before I let out a sigh and tuck a stack of the cardboard flats beneath my arm as I enter the house.
I find myself sitting on the floor of my office in front of my bookcases, flipping through discovery while I tape the ends of a box together and work to carefully stuff my books inside of it, leaving out my copy of The Idiot .
I’m nearly halfway through both the first bookcase and my work when my phone pings beside me with an alert from The Haven’s app.
I stare at the message for a few seconds too long before clicking the included link to RSVP. I haven’t actually participated in an event since shortly after I joined the club, but I try to attend as many of them as I can, if only to show Isla my support and to help keep an eye on the crowd.
Almost as soon as I click on the green button to indicate that I’ll be attending, the phone rings.
“Yello?” I chuckle as I answer.
“Can I save a room for you, darling?” Isla croons through the receiver.
“You know the answer to that question,” I tell her. “I’ll be there to support the club, but that’s it.”
“I’m saving you a room.”
“Isla—”
The line goes dead before I can even get out my statement of protest. I sigh as I push my glasses onto my head and rub the heels of my palms against my eyes.
“There’s my boy,” my mother says as she wraps her arms around me.
“How are you?” I ask with a kiss to her cheek.
“Happy that all of my babies are here,” she answers, and I try to hide the crease that forms in my brow.
I follow her through the house and into the sitting room, where my older sister and youngest brother sit with my father, niece, and nephew, laughing and carrying on in conversation. I greet each of the men with a handshake and press a kiss to the cheeks of my sister and niece before taking my seat in an armchair near them.
“Clare was just telling us all how well she’s been doing in her classes,” my father tells me.
“A’s across the board,” she boasts, to the visible frustration of my father.
Prideful.
“Except for theology,” her stepbrother laughs.
Graham reaches forward to pat Clare gently on the knee, wearing a sympathetic look on his face. “It’s okay,” he tells her earnestly, “I can help you with it.”
I stand with an apologetic glance to my niece as Graham launches into one of his lessons on theology, heading for the kitchen instead. It’s warmer in here than it is in the rest of the house, thanks to the hard-working oven, and it smells incredible.
My mother has always been skilled in the kitchen, even down to the macaroni and cheese that every single one of us had a phase of eating as children. It was the one thing she’d always insisted that she make for us; not the staff, not anyone else. Only my mother.
The boxed stuff has never cut it for me, since.
As I reach into a cabinet for a glass and move to the sink to fill it with water, my mother’s hand comes down on my shoulder with a squeeze. “How are you, sweetheart?”
“Good,” I smile. “Work has been fantastic lately and I only have a few more trips to make before I’m finally moved into the new house. I’ll have to have you over for dinner when I’m finished.”
“Will you be happy in that house, all by yourself? I just worry you’ll be so lonely,” she tells me. “I’d like to see you settle down, for real this time.”
“It was for real the last time.”
“Your wife has children with another man,” she says with a shake of her head.
“He’s her husband,” I remind her. “And they’re happy. She didn’t wrong me. She has the life that she needs and I’m—”
“Alone.”
“ Completely fine ,” I correct her.
As if God Himself can hear me begging for freedom from this conversation, the timer above the oven dings to indicate that our dinner is ready.
Taking my glass of water and the large bowl of salad out to the dining room, I meet my family around the table as my mother announces that it’s time to eat.
“I wish Tripp were here,” Graham comments as we each take our seats around the table.
“You know the deal, Ham. Only Christmas and Mom’s—” I catch my father firing a glare in my direction and I clear my throat. “ Mother’s birthday.”
My mother circles us, setting plates onto our place mats and loading them up with eggplant parmesan and heaping piles of pasta. There are teams of people at this house almost every day, cooking and cleaning for them, but on family night, they’re not welcome, now that we’re all adults.
It’s the one night each month that the staff are sent away, my mother makes every part of the meal, and all of us work together to clean up afterward.
She serves each of us before finally taking her own seat next my father, who sits at the head of the table, just like he always has.
“Graham, sweetheart,” she says, “why don’t you say grace for us tonight?”
A proud smile spreads across my brother’s face as he smooths his napkin onto his lap. My gaze falls onto my sister’s stepson, forcing uncomfortable eye contact as I offer him a tight smile while each of us make the sign of the cross and Graham begins his prayer.
“Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts which we are about to receive through thy bounty,” he says. “Bless the hands that made us this food, and bless our bodies so that they may be nourished by it. Amen.”
“Amen,” we all echo, following once again with the sign of the cross to end our joined prayer.
As the rest of us pull our napkins onto our laps and the bottle of red wine is passed between my parents and siblings, my father smiles at my sister before asking her about her work.
He loves to talk to Edie about her students and to Graham about his studies, but he doesn’t like to hear about my job. My mother tries to listen to me when I talk about it, but as much as she loves me and as much as it shows, I can tell that it makes her uncomfortable.
Which is why it surprises me when I insert myself into their conversation tonight.
“I finalized a challenging case this week,” I announce. “I thought that it would be a simple in and out, but the wife contested it at practically the last minute. It was ultimately just a big show of—”
“Do you really think that this is appropriate dinner conversation?” My father asks. “We just asked God to bless us and now you’d like to mock Him?”
“I serve God with my work,” I argue.
“Brody,” my mother warns.
“I do . Would God want someone to stay in a marriage that didn’t fulfill them or a home in which they were being hurt?” I move my gaze around the table to find that my sister is the only one who will make eye contact with me. She offers a pinched smile in support. “‘Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to act.’”
“Do not quote scripture to me as if I don’t know it,” my father barks, wearing a scowl on his face. Everyone at the table tenses. “And don’t you dare try to present what you do to those people as good .”
An uncomfortable silence slams itself between all of us, taking up the rest of the space at the table.
I don’t argue with my father – ever. Never once have I so much as taken a tone with him that was anything less than respectful, even when I’ve wanted to. Even when he’s been flat-out wrong. Even when I’ve been furious with him. I never show it.
But tonight, I’ve had enough of it.
“You’re right, Ham,” I say with a look to my brother. “I wish Tripp were here tonight, too. Not just him.”
My mother looks as if she might cry, but my father looks as if he might explode.
His grip tightens around his utensils and the muscle of his jaw rolls as he grinds his molars against one another. My own body tenses as I pull my napkin from my lap and ball it into itself, throwing it onto the table next to my hardly-touched plate, and I stand.
“Where are you going?” Edie asks.
“I’ve lost my appetite.”
“Brody—”
“Let him go, Edith,” my father orders as I march out of the dining room.
I swipe my keys from the hook near the front door and move out to my car, climbing into the driver’s seat before taking off my glasses and toss them onto the dashboard in front of me. My hands rest at the top of the steering wheel and I knock my forehead against my knuckles a few times in frustration.
With a sigh, I put my glasses back in place and slip my key into the ignition. I have half the mind to go back inside and tell the old man to fuck himself, but I know where that would get me; the same place it’s gotten my little brother.
My sister could get away with murder, as far as our father is concerned. She’s the only one of us with children, and she’s stayed devoted to her husband not only until the day that he died, but even now.
She grieved like the perfect wife would, she’s continued to raise his son like the perfect wife would, she still wears her wedding band years later like the perfect wife would.
Even Graham isn’t offered the same grace that Edie is, and he follows everything our parents ask of him. He’s practically their favorite child.
At the rate that he’s going, he’ll be married by the time he’s thirty, and he’ll have his perfect little picket-fence wife cranking out perfect little picket-fence babies for him one right after the other the moment they say ‘I do.’
And then there’s me.
The sterile son with two divorces under his belt and a job that they can’t stand, giving them nothing to be proud of.
Sometimes, I really can’t blame Tripp for packing up his life and moving away from all of us. Sometimes, I think about doing the same thing.
I pull off of the drive, swallowing the bitter taste of guilt left on my tongue at leaving a dinner that I know my mother worked hard on, and one that we don’t get to do as often as we should.
I’ll send flowers and an apology when I get home and I’m not so angry anymore.