Laura Lippman - Life Sentences

‘A calley—do you mean Calliope?’ Gloria could afford to keep her office in disarray and limit her exposure to computers because the entire history of her practice was always available to her. She had a prodigious memory. On those rare occasions when someone felt intimate enough to challenge her on her drinking, she maintained that it was the only way to level the playing field.

Not that she was likely to forget Callie Jenkins under any circumstances. She had tried.

‘Yes, that’s it. Calliope. Calliope Jenks.’

‘Jenkins.’

‘Right.’

‘What, specifically, does she want to know?’

‘She wouldn’t say?’

‘Did you ask?’

The girl’s downward gaze answered the question more emphatically than any statement-question she might have offered in return. Gloria leaned across the desk and tried to take the paper, but the girl was out of reach. She moved forward tentatively, as if Gloria might bite her, jumping back as soon as Gloria had the phone memo in her hand.

‘It’s an out-of-state number,’ Gloria said. ‘New York, I think, but not the city proper. Long Island, maybe Brooklyn. I can’t keep all the new ones straight.’ She had, in fact, once been able to recognize every area code at a glance. She knew state capitals, too, and was always the one person at a party who could complete any set of names—the seven dwarves, the nine Supreme Court justices, the thirteen original colonies.

‘But she’s in town,’ the girl said, thrilled that she had gleaned an actual fact. ‘For a while, she said. That’s her cell. She said she plans to be in town for a while.’

Gloria crumpled the pink sheet and tossed it in the overflowing trash can by the desk, where it bounced out.

‘But she’s famous!’ the girl said. ‘I mean, for a writer. She’s been on Oprah .’

‘I don’t talk to people unless they can help me. That case ended a long time ago, and it’s better forgotten. Callie’s a private citizen now, living her life. It’s the least she deserves.’

Was it? Gloria wondered after dismissing the girl. Did Calliope have the least she deserved or far more? What about Gloria? Had she gotten more than she deserved, less, or exactly her due? Had Gloria done the best she could for Callie, given the circumstances, or let her down?

But Gloria didn’t like the concept of guilt any more than she liked the word guilty coming from a jury foreman, not that she had a lot of experience hearing the latter. Guilt was a waste, misplaced energy. Guilt was a legal finding, a determination made by others. Gloria didn’t have time for guilt, and she was almost certain she didn’t deserve to feel it, not in the case of Callie Jenkins. Almost.

She called the temp agency and told them she wouldn’t be able to use the new girl past this week. ‘Send me someone new. More capable, but equally pretty.’

‘You’re not allowed to say that,’ the agency rep objected.

‘Sue me,’ Gloria said.

‘Why aren’t you staying with me?’ her mother asked, and not for the first time. ‘That was the original plan.’

‘Yes, when I was going to be in Baltimore a week. But for ten, twelve weeks? I would drive you crazy.’ And you me .

‘But a hotel room, for all that time—you won’t be able to cook for yourself—’

‘It’s an apartment, the kind set up for short-term corporate renters.’ Cassandra anticipated her mother’s next protest: ‘It’s not that expensive.’

‘Did you sublet your place back in New York?’

‘No.’

‘So you’re carrying two rents for three months. And you’ll need a car here.’

‘Mom, I have my own car. I drove down. I drove here, it’s parked in your driveway.’

‘I don’t know what the point is of having a car if you live in New York.’

‘I like to be able to get away—visit friends upstate or at the…beach.’ She used the generic, beach , instead of the specific, Hamptons , out of fear that the latter would provoke another spasm of worry.

The reviews of the last book had been hard on her mother. Her mother’s e-mails had been hard on Cassandra. Until this winter, she hadn’t even known that her mother could initiate e-mail. She seemed to use the laptop that Cassandra had given her for nothing more than playing hearts and solitaire while depending on the reply-to function to answer Cassandra’s sporadic notes. Even then, she was extremely terse. ‘Thank you.’ Or ‘That’s nice, dear.’ Lennie Fallows seemed to think e-mail was the equivalent of a telegram or a long-distance call back in the seventies. It was a mode of communication to be limited to dire emergencies or special occasions, and even then brevity was required.

Then, back in January, the e-mails had started, with no ‘RE:’ in the subject headers, with no subject headers at all, which made them all the more terrifying, as Cassandra had no idea what conversation her mother was about to start.

‘I wouldn’t worry about the Kirkus.’ ‘The PW is good, if you omit the dependent clause.’ ‘Sorry about the New York Times.’

Except she hadn’t written ‘the New York Times ’ or even ‘NYT’, come to think of it, but the critic’s surname, as if the woman were a neighbor, an intimate. This detail saddened Cassandra most of all. All she had ever wanted was to give her mother a sense of ownership in Cassandra’s success. She had felt that way even as a teenager, back when Lennie was, in fact, a profound embarrassment, running around town in—oh, God, the memory still grated—painter’s pants or overalls, that horrible cap on her head, tools sticking out of her pockets. Yet Lennie insisted on crediting Cassandra’s achievements to her ex-husband’s side of the DNA ledger. Even the book that had forged Cassandra’s reputation had been problematic for her mother, arriving with that title that slanted everything toward him .

But the life that book brought Cassandra—ah, that her mother had loved and gloried in, and not because of the small material benefits that came her way. She adored turning on the radio and hearing Cassandra’s voice, basked in being in a store and having a neighbor comment on one of Cassandra’s television appearances. Once, in the Giant, Cassandra had seen how it worked: Her mother furrowed her brow at the mention of Cassandra’s most recent interview, as if it were impossible to keep track of her daughter’s media profile. Was it Today ? Charlie Rose ? That weird show on cable where everyone shouted?

You must be very proud of her , the neighbor persisted.

And Lennie Fallows—it had never occurred to her to drop the surname of the man she detested—said with steely joy, ‘I was always proud of her.’ In her mother’s coded lexicon, this was the rough equivalent of Go fuck yourself .

Cassandra opened the refrigerator to browse its contents, a daughter’s prerogative. It was huge, the kind of double-wide Sub-Zero one might find in a small restaurant. The kitchen had been Lennie’s latest project, and superficially, it looked great. But Cassandra knew where to find the corners her mother never stopped cutting, a legacy of the lean years that had left her so fearful. The refrigerator and the stove would be scratch-and-dent specials, with tiny flaws that prevented them from being sold at full list. The new porcelain sink would have been purchased at Lennie’s ‘professional’ discount—and, most likely, installed by her, along with the faucet and garbage disposal. She had kept the palette relatively plain. ‘Better for resale,’ she said, as if she had any intention of putting the house on the market. Like Penelope stalling her suitors, Lennie continually undid her own work. By Cassandra’s reckoning, this was the kitchen’s third renovation. Lennie was desperate not to leave the house, which had been big for a family of three, almost ruinous for a single mother and daughter, simply ridiculous for a woman now in her seventies.