Chapter 10 #2
She got the dog down the stairs and back up and called Brynn and said come over.
"So he's building a case," Kristin said.
Brynn was on the one chair. Kristin was on the floor against the wall with the dog and a beer she was not drinking.
"That's what you think."
"That's what I know. Lena's filing in March.
The staffing thing is the single best exhibit anybody has ever handed a defense lawyer — look how seriously we take it, look what we've done, look at the eight hundred people.
You do that before the complaint, not after.
You do it in January so that in June a jury hears about it as something you did on your own. "
Brynn said nothing.
"And the letter's the same thing," Kristin said. "No screening. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful sentence to have in an affidavit. The day I understood, I dismantled the thing that caused it. Lena would kill for that on the other side."
Brynn said nothing.
"He's not a bad man. I've never said he was a bad man. He's a man who has been managed since he was six and now he's got a lawyer and a communications firm managing him toward a filing date, and this is what that looks like from the outside, and I would be an idiot—"
"Kristin."
"—I would be an actual idiot to sit on this floor and let myself—"
"Kristin. Stop."
Kristin stopped.
Brynn leaned forward on the chair with her elbows on her knees, and she did not look sharp or profane or protective. She looked tired, and about fifty, and like a woman who had been holding something for a while.
"Say the last one again," she said.
"Say what again?"
"The letter to Rosemary. Say the note out loud."
Kristin opened her mouth.
I'm sorry it took me until now to work out what you've been carrying.
She got about four words into it and heard it.
She heard it the way you hear your own voice on a recording — the whole of it at once, from the outside, the shape and the pitch and every wrong thing about it — and she stopped in the middle of the sentence with her mouth open and a beer in her right hand.
There is no lawyer on this earth who tells a client to put that in a note to his mother's housekeeper.
There is no communications firm that makes eight hundred people appear on a night shift in three dozen buildings in four states in a week in January, when the same effect could be had, for a tenth of the money and ten times the coverage, by announcing a review.
There is no version of building a case in which you tell every professional who works for you that you have terminated their judgment, permanently, in writing, including your mother, in a paragraph they will all remember for the rest of their lives.
And there is no defense lawyer alive who would let a man take a write-down against his own holding rather than the company, quietly, where nobody would ever see it.
"Oh," Kristin said.
Brynn did not say anything.
Kristin sat on the floor of two rooms above a shut bakery with her back against the wall and a thirteen-year-old dog asleep on her leg and heard herself, an hour earlier, saying the word exhibit about a man who had sent a one-page letter to his mother telling her she no longer got to protect him.
"I need it to be a tactic," she said.
"I know."
"Brynn, I need it to be a tactic."
"I know you do, honey."
"Because if it isn't—" Kristin stopped. She had to actually stop and get her breath, which had gone somewhere.
"If it isn't a tactic, then he did the thing.
He did the actual thing. Not a gesture, not a building, not a car — he found the machine and he took it apart with his hands, in January, in the dark, where I was never supposed to see it, and he'd have been perfectly happy for me never to see it, and the only reason I know is that his mother got angry enough to drive out to a cattle shed in the wrong shoes. "
"Yeah," Brynn said.
"And then what am I supposed to do."
Brynn got up off the chair.
She came over and sat down on the floor, which she had not done in fifteen years, and she put her shoulder against Kristin's shoulder and looked at the same wall.
"Nothing," she said. "Not tonight."
"Brynn—"
"You don't have to do one single thing about it tonight, and you don't have to do anything about it in February either, and if it's real it'll still be real in the spring." Brynn bumped her once. "That's the whole advantage of a man doing something quietly. It keeps."
Kristin wiped her face with the back of her wrist.
"I hated him this morning," she said. "I want that on the record. I got up at four-thirty and I hated him the entire way to Watertown."
"You're allowed to still."
"That's the part nobody tells you." She looked at the ceiling.
"I thought it was going to be one or the other.
I thought at some point a door shuts and you're either a woman who hates her husband or a woman who doesn't." She let her head go back against the wall.
"It's both, Brynn. It's both, at the same time, in the same hour, and there's no arrangement of the facts that makes it stop being both. "
Brynn thought about that.
"Ya," she said. "Welcome to being married."
"I'm not married."
"Honey," said Brynn, "you are extremely married."
Kristin laughed. It came out cracked.
Outside, the cold went on doing what it does in January, and the two of them sat on the floor for a while without saying anything, and at some point Tilly got up and turned around twice and lay down against both of them at once.