“I’m not looking to make this a battle.”
“Jack, you’ve made your decision. It’s a little late for this now.”
His face curled -into disbelief “Excuse me? My decision? I made a
decision to marry you over four years ago. That was my decision. Ii was
your decision to end it.”
She pushed wet hair out of her eyes. “Okay, it was my decision. Now
what?”
He turned to face her, gripped both her shoulders.
“Look, it suddenly occurred to me last night. Oh what the hell! It’s
been every night since you left. I knew it was a mistake, goddarnmid I’m
not at PD anymore. You’re right, I don’t defend criminals anymore. I
make a good, respectable living. I, we. . .” As he looked at her
astonished face, his entire mind went blank. His hands were shaking. He
let go of her, slumped back in the ‘seat.
He stripped off his drenched tie, stuffed it in his pocket, and stared
at the little clock on the dashboard. She checked out the motionless
speedometer, then glanced at him. There was kindness in her tone,
although the pain was evident in her eyes.
“Jack, lunch was very nice. It was good to see you. But that’s as far as
we can go. I’m sorry.” She bit her lip, a movement he didn’t see because
he was getting out of the car.
He poked his head back in. “Have a good life, Kate. You ever need
anything, call me.”
She watched his thick shoulders as he walked through the steady rain,
got in his car and drove off. She sat for several minutes. A tear traced
its way down her cheek. She angrily flicked it away, put the car in gear
and drove off in the opposite direction.
THE NEXT MORNING, JACK PICKED UP THE PHONE AND THEN slowly put it back
down. What was the point really? He had been in the office since six,
wiped out his backlog of highpriority work and moved on to projects that
had been on the back burner for weeks. He looked out the window. The sun
ricocheted off the concrete and brick edifices. He rubbed the glare out
of his eyes and pulled the blinds down.
Kate was not going to suddenly plunge back into his life and he had to
adjust to that. He had spent the night turning every possible scenario
over in his head, most wildly unrealistic. He shrugged. Things like this
happened to men and women every day in every country in the world.
Things sometimes did not work out. Even if you wanted them to more than
anything else. You couldn’t will someone to love you back. You ‘ had to
move on. He had plenty to move on to.
Maybe, it was time for him to enjoy the future he knew he did have.
He sat down at his desk and methodically moved through two more
projects, a joint venture for which he was doing low-level, no-brain
grunt work, and a project for the only client he had other than Baldwin,
Tarr Crimson.
Crimson owned a small audiovisual company, was a genius with
computer-generated graphics and images, and made a very good living
running AV conferences for companies at area hotels. He also rode a
motorcycle, dressed in cutoff jeans, smoked everything including an
occasional cigarette, and looked like the biggest burnt-out druggie in
the world.
Jack and he had met when a friend of Jack’s had prosecuted Taff for
drunk and disorderly, and lost. Tarr had come in dressed in a
three-piece suit, briefcase and neatly trimmed hair and beard, and
argued persuasively that the officer’s testimony was biased because the
bust was outside a Grateful Dead concert, that the field test was
inadmissible because the cop had not given the proper verbal warnings
and lastly because an improperly functioning piece of equipment had been
used to administer the test.
The judge, burdened with over a hundred D&Ds from the concert, had
dismissed the case after admonishing the officer to adhere strictly to
the rules in the future. Jack had watched the entire affair In
amazement. Impressed, Jack walked out of the courtroom with Tarr, had a