Scott Turow - The Laws of our Fathers

Nikki loves costumes. She imagines herself with stylish dos and beaded gowns. I took to heart my mother's distaste for glamour and am always alarmed. Where does Nikki get these ideas? I wonder. Is this the penalty for working, for not being at her side twenty-four hours a day? When I pick her up from day care tonight, she is wearing plastic high heels on the wrong feet and a crown.

'I'm getting married!' she squeals.

Married! my heart shrieks, but I take her in with kisses, knowing that this instant when we're reconnected for the weekend is, in ways, the point toward which I've been journeying all week.

'We have stew for dinner. Just the way you like it.'

'No peas?' she asks.

'Not one.'

When Nikki was born, I decided I would become organized. I would cook meals in advance and freeze them, like my friend Grace Tomazek. I would keep extensive grocery lists so that I would no longer have to go to the store three times each day. I would start shopping from catalogues for clothes, and buy a season ahead so I was not desperate when the weather changed. I would sign up for Moms and Tots on Saturdays. Finally an adult, I would have a life reflecting forethought rather than waning moods and windblown caprice. I wanted this with desperate, almost unbearable longing, as the sign of some gathering of myself, as an affirmation of the capacity of any person to make her life a bit more bearable.

And I succeeded, after a fashion. Oh, of course, I become preoccupied – with the cases before me, with one feud or another with Charlie, with the madness in Bosnia or a memory of my mother that has not visited me in years, anything that catches me on the spike of passion and ends up making me seem, especially to myself, unfocused, even scatterbrained. But for the most part, I have made my life less a momentary adventure. Nikki and I have a routine. There are meals in the freezer, which I, generally speaking, remember to defrost. The lunch bag is packed. Amid the whirl of single-mom responsibilities, I often feel like one of those little old ladies, Old World ethnics dressed all in black, wobbling around like a top about to fall. On occasion, I'm undermined by uncertainty about myself. A few months back, as I was listening to the discordant screech of Avi, Gwendolyn's son, sawing away at his Suzuki violin, I was jarred by panic. What was I going to do about music lessons? I'd never even thought of it. I called piano teachers all night. Lately, I've felt pangs because Nikki knows nothing of religion. But it happens, all of it. My life has what planning always seemed to imply: a center, weight, substance. Love.

Love. I've been so lucky! I think all the time. Not in the ordinary outward sense that people have in mind with that phrase. Because, after all, I've had my pratfalls and distractions, my own tough patches, sickness and divorce, the ordinary major miseries of an ordinary existence. But I'm so lucky to have Nikki, to have someone to love, unambiguously and durably, someone for whom my love will never falter. Love, whatever it means, has otherwise been an unreliable thing in my life. With my mother. With men. In my younger years, it made no sense to me that one word referred to sexual relations and your family. You have to get older for all of that to cohere, to understand it comes down to the same thing, intensity, connection, commitment, some Mecca toward which your soul can always pray.

After dinner, a bath. Nikki frolics, inventing games with Barbie dolls who, except for the moments of their evening drowning, dwell on the tub side in consummate nudity, despairing, no doubt, over the sad fate of their plastic hair, which Nikki's repeated stylings have left a mass of ratted knots.

'I like Jenna better than Marie,' says Nikki, 'but they're both black.'

Once again, panic is forestalled. Teach. Always teach.

'You know, Nikki, whether someone is nice has nothing to do with the color of their skin. You're nice from the inside, not the outside.'

She pouts, she bugs her eyes. 'Mommy, I know that.' Some propositions are obvious, even to a six-year-old.

Eventually, I extract her from the tub. Already, I find myself longing for the baby who has only recently disappeared, the three-and four-year-old with her winsome malapropisms. 'It's gark outside.' 'Hum on' for 'come on.' Now she sometimes seems a being of unknown origins, with tastes and even physical attributes I've never encountered in myself or even Charlie. Where does she get these fingers, I wonder as I'm toweling her dry, which look tallowy as melting party candles?

'Have I told you how wonderful you are?' I ask, kneeling beside Nikki's bed.

'No,' Nikki answers at once, as she does each evening. 'Well, you're wonderful. You're the most wonderful person I know. Have I told you how much I love you?'

'No,' she answers, squirming shamefaced against my chest.

'I love you more than anything in the world.'

I cuddle her until she sleeps, an indulgence I should not permit, but it's a precious moment, again the simplest atom, nucleus, and particle. Asleep, Nikki is soft and smells sweetly of her shampoo.

Afterwards, in the quiet house, I lounge in the living room. A glass of white wine is spun experimentally by the stem between my fingertips. At long last, I reach the glorious moment when I remove my pantyhose. Now, after the parade of the day is over, I find out what has stuck, before it grows into something new in the hothouse of dreams. Night sounds rise up from the city: wind against the gutters, passing cars, teens a block away exuberant with their mischief. Above the painted brick fireplace a Modigliani hangs, a narrow-faced girl in whose inscrutable pose I have always recognized something of myself. While Charlie lived here, I spent hours staring at that painting, since I was loath to move around while the poet was in the throes of creation. From Charlie's study in the extra bedroom, the strong blue smoke of his hand-rolled cigarettes would penetrate the room. He used tobacco brands you saw in Westerns – Bugler and Flag – and could dip his thick fingers into the pouches and line a paper without ever looking up from the page. His concentration as he wrote was fabulous. He wouldn't have heard The Bomb. But he demanded that the house be still, and so until he finished – and God knew when that would be -1 would work out here with a cup of tea, cringing if the cup even rang on the saucer, love's zombie, an unhappy refugee in my own home.

And with this memory, as the fretting of the work week recedes, as the courtroom with its tentacles of repulsion and fear falls behind me, I am arrowed by the terrible humbling poignance of the simplest truth. I'm busy, fly-about, overburdened. True enough. But I know this secret, too: In the marrow of the bone, where blood is made and beliefs are gathered, I'm hungry for the intimate company of other humans. I am lonely. And it is not merely a symptom of divorce. There were years, years married to Charlie, when I felt like this, wondering, as I still do, how long it will go on.

And then unpredictably – stealthy as a thief – the line that went by in passing days ago returns, haloed with all the urgent sincerity with which it was spoken.

'How many people,' Seth asked, 'how many people do you get close to in a life?'

MAY 2, 197o Seth

I did not sleep further after June's visit. It was 3:30 by then and I lay awake, telling myself no, then yes, telling myself it was crazy and wrong, and then that it was right for just that reason. Near 5:00, when I was going to leave, I called Hobie's. Lucy's voice was slurred with sleep. 'He's not here,' she whispered.

Hobie kept luxurious hours. He read all night and had not attended a morning class throughout college. I was sure that Lucy, pliant as ever, was under instructions to tell me he wasn't there, but when I challenged her, a tide of distress rose through her voice.