Jennifer Greene - Man From Tennessee

“No,” Trisha said wearily. “Nothing is really amusing this morning. Please, darling…”

She slipped on dark glasses as she backed up and turned the car down the drive. A few more minutes and Trisha would be off his land, and she was suddenly desperate to be gone. Distance would give her a better perspective. Had it really only been three weeks? Three weeks ago she had no more illusions of getting back with Kern than she would have had hope of growing wings…

Hikers trailed the side of the road; she could not drive quickly. And then there was Jack, his blond head shining in the sun, his arm motioning her over to stop when he caught sight of the car. And she stopped, her features masked in a polite smile as Jack approached.

“Have you seen Kern?”

She shook her head. “I think he’s out with Matt.”

“Well, if you run into him, Trisha, would you tell him to hightail it down to the camp?”

Her lips opened, parting to ask what was wrong, if there was anything she could help with. And closed, not liking at all the concerned frown on Jack’s normally smooth forehead, but not having any choice except to ignore it. “I’ll be gone,” she said carefully. “If you need to get ahold of him, you might leave a message up with his mother.”

“Oh, well…have a good day!”

It wasn’t. It was a perfectly wretched day. It was $5.57 of fast-food hamburgers and searching out Gulf stations. It was a day of blinding sunshine that glared like a headache and congested cities where the heat seemed to mushroom down in the traffic. A poor excuse for a sunset brought a measure of relief from the heat as she crossed the state border into Ohio, but if there were any flatter states, she didn’t know them. Ohio was one long straight black ribbon of road on a night that held no stars. No one else seemed to be driving in the wee hours. Just black sky, black road, black mood…and despite exhaustion, her nerves were still stretched fragile and taut.

Five o’clock in the morning brought Trisha to the outskirts of Detroit-and the company. Motor City would have taken personal offense if its highways were empty. The rush hour never ended in the center of town. She merged into the flow as she had thousands of times in the past five years, familiar with Detroit’s dusty skyline at dawn. The heartbeat of the city-the cloverleafs of highway piled one on top of the other, the noise and rush, action and excitement, thousands of faces with no names-it was all familiar, and a last shot of adrenalin speeded obediently in her veins. All she had to do was convince herself that she belonged here again… And you do, she told herself. Everything you’ve built on your own is here. You have friends and a good job you worked hard for… But the inner pep talk had too much of a hollow ring to it. She stopped trying. In an hour she had passed by the four-by-one-mile elitist concentration of power and money that was Grosse Pointe; five minutes from there the car was parked and she was striding up the walk to her town house, dragging her suitcase in one hand with her key in the other.

The apartment was small and attractive from the outside, with dark olive siding and a sloping lawn that looked manicured. The promise of privacy was what had led her to sign the lease in the first place; the complex was shielded by a tall brick wall. For the first time it struck her how ironic it was, that in the city one measured privacy in fences…in the mountains it was simply there, free, something one found inside, and outside as well.

She slipped her key in the lock and turned it, nearly tripping over the pile of mail that had accumulated by the door in her absence. The pink and gold of her living room accented the feminine furniture. Her choices, so carefully and slowly accumulated over the years, always gave her pleasure when she walked in. But at the moment the air was stifling, dusty and stale, and the silence only spelled out a terrible kind of loneliness. Trisha set down her suitcase, almost dizzy from exhaustion, slipped off her shoes in the middle of the room and weaved to the bedroom.

She threw open the windows for air, heard the blare of a dozen traffic horns, and closed them again. Not yet-she really couldn’t cope with the city yet. The heat didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. She drew down the leaf-green spread, trying again to take just a moment of pleasure in what was familiar. The bedroom held white wicker furniture with fabrics in leaf-green and white; cool and fresh, it had always pleased. The indifference that she felt inside jarred, as if she had been betrayed by something she had counted on to sustain her. You’re just tired, she told herself as she stripped off the pantsuit and crashed on the mattress.

Her eyes fluttered open once to set the alarm. Three things had to be done before night. She had to go to the bank and retrieve money from her savings. And food. There wasn’t any, of course, in the apartment. And last…a lawyer. It was five years past time, but suddenly even hours seemed too long to wait.

The alarm was set for one-thirty in the afternoon. Her hand fell limp on the mattress seconds after she set it.

“No, I don’t have an appointment,” Trisha admitted to the sleekly groomed redhead with efficient eyes. She’d never met anyone before who could be said to have efficient eyes. “I’ve met Mr. Whitaker before; he’ll know who I am. I would appreciate it if you would at least give him my name.”

Cal Whitaker emerged from his office moments later, oblivious to his secretary’s sniff of disapproval at the obvious break from appointment protocol. “Patricia Lowery! What brings you to lawyer’s row? Nice to see you, sweetheart!”

Pin-striped, with a brown tie, Cal was a long lanky man who had little claim to good looks and a lot to distinguished ones-mustache, pipe, silver sideburns, Savile Row suits…and a come-on in the brown eyes that Trisha had had the occasion to turn down a long time ago.

She stood up, receiving his hand and second-thought kiss on the cheek with a cool smile. Cal’s appraisal certainly reaffirmed that the lemon linen dress could distract from the heavy circles beneath her eyes.

“A social call, I certainly hope?”

Trisha shook her head, being led into the dark paneled office ahead of him. “I need your professional services.”

“Well, we can take care of anything, gorgeous.”

She winced a little when he winked. The chair she settled in was living-room comfortable, and a glass of wine was served-part of the office decor was his bar. A dozen buttons were on his desk. He had turned three shelves of the bookcase into the bar. She felt no curiosity about the others. He was a country-club sort of lawyer who did that sort of job very well.

“I need a divorce, Cal. From your reputation, perhaps your schedule is full, but since I know you, I thought I’d ask-”

“I’d have been offended if you hadn’t.” He smiled warmly, received no answering warm smile in return, and set down his glass. From his pocket he drew out a pair of wire-rims, dropped the banter and unearthed a clean legal pad from his desk. “I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble,” he said more formally. “Why don’t you just start by telling me how things stand at the moment.”

She stared at him woodenly. “There isn’t anything to tell. I just want a divorce.”

He smiled gently. “So you said. A very rough time for everyone involved, but we do have to start somewhere. Grounds, Patricia? Obviously you’re the one who wants to file.”

“Yes.” Cal had the practice of a mother who hands out Band-Aids to her toddler. He didn’t really want to hear the same old story of how the hurt came to be any more than she had any intention of telling him, but somehow-ridiculously-it never occurred to her that she would actually have to talk to him. She didn’t want to talk. She just wanted it done.