Mark Gimenez - The Color of Law

Bobby stared down at the child in amazement. “That’s pretty good. Okay, Pajamae, your turn. What about her, the blonde over there with the, uh…”

“Store-bought boobs?”

“Uh, yeah, that one. What’s her story?”

“She’s way dumb, but she doesn’t know it. She’ll marry a rich lawyer and live happily ever after.”

Bobby found himself nodding in agreement.

“You girls are good. Okay, Boo, what about this guy?”

Boo moved her eyes about, scanning the pool crowd.

“Which guy?”

Bobby was now pointing the pork rib at himself.

“Me.”

Boo considered him for a moment, then dropped her eyes to the water and shook her head.

“Hey, come on, tell me.”

Boo looked back up; her eyes seemed sad.

“No, Bobby.”

Bobby laughed and said, “What? I’m a big boy, I can handle it,” figuring she was going to say he was a pathetic loser and always would be. Hell, no surprise there. He told himself the same thing every morning in the mirror.

But Boo was quiet. Then, without looking at him, she said: “You secretly loved my mother, but she married A. Scott. You’ve never gotten over it. You’ve always wondered what your life would’ve been like if she had married you instead.”

Bobby hadn’t figured on that. He had to take a deep breath. He pushed himself up but looked down at her.

“How?”

“I saw how you looked at her when you got here. Your eyes went all over the crowd, kind of frantic like, until you saw her. Then you just looked at her for a long time. Like, forever.”

Bobby walked directly to the beer cooler.

From the windows of the master suite on the second floor Rebecca Fenney was looking down on the backyard scene at two of the three men who loved her: Scott, surrounded by law students and cheerleaders and one buxom blonde in a black string bikini giving him the come-on; and Bobby, alone by the beer cooler. Poor Bobby. She had known he loved her back when he and Scott were in law school, but he had kept it to himself, never one to challenge for any of Scott’s possessions. Not that he could have won her; everyone knew Bobby Herrin wasn’t going places, just as everyone knew Scott Fenney was. So Rebecca Garrett had signed on for the Scott Fenney ride. And it had been quite a ride: eleven years ago she had been living in a sorority house, driving a used Toyota, and leading cheers for the SMU Mustangs; today she was living in a mansion, driving a Mercedes, and vying to be chairwoman of the Cattle Barons’ Ball. But now she found herself feeling anxious and afraid and wondering: Is the ride coming to an end?

Rebecca Garrett had grown up in a working-class suburb of Dallas. She hated having less; she wanted more. So for her college education she looked no further than SMU. For poor Dallas kids, SMU was their entree to a better life. It was a way in to Highland Park.

Rebecca was a smart student, in and out of class. In fact, when she drove her old car up and down the streets of Highland Park and fancied herself the woman of the house at one of the fabulous mansions, she was smart enough to acknowledge a fact of life: she would never have a Highland Park home on her own, by using her brain, by pursuing a career. No woman would.

Her future lay in her looks, as it always had. From the time she was ten, other children’s mothers would stop and say, “My, what a remarkably beautiful child”; and when she was sixteen and her body had become a woman’s, her friends’ fathers would stare; and when she was twenty-one and the most beautiful girl at SMU and she interviewed for jobs, men’s eyes lit up when they saw her beauty-they wanted it and they would pay for it.

But she would not sell her beauty by the hour or by the night or even by the job. Rebecca Garrett would sell her beauty for community property, for half of everything her husband would acquire over the course of their marriage. As every Texas girl knows by the time she graduates high school, in Texas wives don’t have to beg for alimony; in Texas wives are entitled to half of everything-by law.

So she needed a husband. As she saw it, her beauty afforded her three matrimonial options: an older man who had already made his fortune (but such a man always comes with baggage, usually a couple of ex-wives and twice as many kids on the dole); the son of such an older rich man (but an inherited fortune is not community property); or a man with the ambition to make his own fortune, a fortune made during marriage, a fortune of community property. Scott Fenney, a Highland Park and SMU football legend, was just that kind of man. There is no better place in the world to be a football legend than Dallas, Texas. It’s as close to an ironclad guarantee of success as life offers.

So Rebecca Garrett bet her beauty on Scott Fenney.

She loved him back then, but she would not have married him if he had wanted to coach high school football and live in a small house in the suburbs. She could not separate her love from his ambition. She loved him because he wanted what she wanted, because his desire to have all this equaled her own. They were two of a kind. So they married and settled in a small $500,000 home in Highland Park; Scott became Tom Dibrell’s lawyer and she became the most beautiful woman in Highland Park.

The early years of the Scott Fenney ride were exactly what she had expected: they bought, they acquired, they went out, they moved up. Scott fought for the family fortune at Ford Stevens; she joined the society clubs and paid her social dues. Success followed success, his and hers. They soon made the Highland Park A-list, the up-and-coming couple, young and beautiful, smart and successful, the SMU legend and Miss SMU. They were the envy of all: men wanted her and women wanted him. But they expended their sexual energies only with each other-success excited her and she excited him. Her husband wanted her with a passion that always burned hot; he needed her more than life itself, a need that never waned or wandered. Success and sex: Rebecca Fenney’s life was perfect and getting better by the day.

Until the day she became pregnant.

Which came as a complete shock-motherhood had never been part of her plans-and a recurring one as she watched helplessly as her belly expanded and her body bloated up until she looked like a beached whale. She had always loved to look at herself when she passed a mirror; now she averted her eyes. Rebecca Fenney was not a squat soccer mom in a minivan! She was a sleek white woman in a black Mercedes coupe! Which she drove over to Harry Hines on more than one occasion trying to work up the courage to enter one of the clinics and have an abortion. Of course, she would have blamed the loss of the child on a miscarriage; there are no abortions in politically conservative Highland Park.

But Scott wanted the child.

He alerted all the world that a Fenney child was on the way. Men looked ahead fifteen years to when Scotty Junior would make his football debut at Highland Park High; women showered Rebecca with baby gifts to ease her descent into motherhood. With such attention focused on her pregnancy, a “miscarriage” would have been viewed as a personal failure on the part of Rebecca Fenney, and failure is not socially acceptable in Highland Park. So she resigned herself to the inevitable and became the perfect mother-to-be, eating only organic, no caffeine, no alcohol, exercising daily in the pool, acting oh so happy to be oh so fat.

But Scotty Junior was a girl named Boo. A collective sigh of disappointment went up in Highland Park, from everyone except Scott. He didn’t care. When he gazed on his new daughter in the hospital nursery, it was love at first sight. And Rebecca saw that her place in his heart had been stolen.

Sex was never the same.