Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“Well, listen, let’s have a drink to celebrate the end of your sentence. That is, if there’s a bottle of anything around — well, what do you know?” he said, producing a bottle of Jameson from the top drawer of his desk. “What are the chances of that?”

It was about four-thirty, and an hour later — during which time Ben didn’t hear the office phone ring once — the lawyer invited his client over to his house for dinner. There was a real edge to Bonifacio’s aggressive friendliness, an edge Ben thought Joe himself was mostly unaware of. He seemed proud of how small and cluttered and poorly insulated his house was, proud that someone like Ben — just the kind of privileged guy he’d always hated — was brought so low as to have to be grateful even for the tepid, perfunctory dinner put before him by Bonifacio’s resigned and surly wife.

“So how long are you back in town for?” she asked him. “Just picking up some things?”

He struggled to finish chewing a rubbery piece of beef. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really have any plans, to tell the truth. I guess I just came back here to regroup.”

“Regroup for what?” she said skeptically.

“Not sure. I’m thinking.”

“Thinking about what?”

“Ginny, let’s not be rude to company,” Bonifacio said. “My client has paid his debt to society. Also his bill, which puts him in rare air around here. So as far as we are concerned, he is washed in the blood of the Lamb.”

Ginny shrugged and began clearing the table. “You’ll have to go back to work,” she said to Ben without looking at him. “Everybody has to work.”

“Demonstrably untrue,” Bonifacio said.

“All I really know how to do is practice law,” Ben said, “but with a prison record, that might be difficult for me.”

“Anyway,” Ginny said, pointedly on her way to the kitchen, “one lawyer is already plenty for a little town like this.”

Ben and Joe looked at each other, eyebrows up, realizing together what Ginny had been talking about all along: she was worried that Ben was planning to open up his own law office in town and drive her husband out of business. In her mind this was how well-off people behaved, and Ben had to hand it to her — as stereotypes went, it wasn’t a bad one.

“I wouldn’t worry, honey,” Joe said, struggling not to smile. He had been drinking Jameson, however leisurely, for at least three straight hours now. “Ben’s a smart enough guy to know that he’d be better off hanging his shingle in some town where he has less of a preexisting reputation as a scumbag.”

Ben smiled; then, to get off the subject, he said, “Joe, can I ask you something? I drove by my old house earlier today, before I saw you, and it looks very much like no one’s living there. You handled the sale for Helen, right? Is it some kind of absentee owner or something?”

“No. Well, yes, in the sense that the absentee owner is your ex-wife. The sale fell through, although it took months to declare it dead because Helen kept giving these deadbeats extra time. It’s still technically on the market. Not a great moment for real estate around here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Are you kidding me?” Ben said loudly. “What the hell is she living on?”

Joe shrugged, as the ice from the bottom of his glass hit his teeth again.

Ben returned to the house on Meadow Close the next morning. First he looked through the intact porch screen while standing on the back lawn; then, on a whim, he tried his key in the front door lock. It still worked. All the furniture was gone, and the rooms smelled of moisture and what was probably mice. He stood in the center of each empty room. He opened all the windows and then, before leaving, shut and locked them again.

It felt strange, after that, to go sit on his bed in the motel room. He held his phone in his hand and reflected that it — a cellphone — was probably the closest thing in his life to a home right now, the object most linked to his sense of identity and with the longest association to his past. Whats a good time to call u ? he texted Sara, and she did not reply. Then it occurred to him that she might have thought he was still in jail upstate, but when he texted to let her know he was out now, she wrote back yes I know I can count . She did not ask him where he was.

Two nights later Bonifacio called him when he was watching TV in the motel room and said, “Listen, I have a proposition for you. You’re a trusts and estates guy, right? Or were. Anyway, I just caught a probate case that is a real bear.”

“Who died?” Ben asked.

“You know the Feldmans, who live on Colonial Ave.? Husband was a commodities trader?” Ben did know them, a little; he saw Jay Feldman ten times a week back in the early years, when he used to take the train. “Well, he died of a heart attack while jogging, if you please, and the weird thing is the Feldmans were like two days from finalizing their divorce when it happened. Anyway, it’s a mess, and I was wondering how you’d feel about coming in for a week or two to help me sort it out. If you’re not doing anything.”

Bonifacio was loving this a little too much, Ben thought; but he agreed to it anyway. For a week, he sat in a folding chair with his feet on Joe’s windowsill and helped him craft a brief on the angry widow’s behalf that was bound to blow the mind of whatever hack rural circuit-court judge caught the case. The bottle of Jameson usually came out of the drawer around four o’clock. Ben understood that it was tied in some way to the difficulty Bonifacio had not with his work but with going home. At the tail end of the Friday before his court appearance on behalf of Mrs. Feldman, Bonifacio brought up with Ben the question of money.

“It’ll have to be under the table,” Bonifacio said. “I hope that’s not going to cause you any problems. I can offer you two grand. I know you’re worth much more, but I mean, look around you.” He waved with the glass in his hand to indicate the tiny lamplit office, the sun already descending behind the muddy train station across the road. “It’s all I’ve got.”

The proper thing for Bonifacio to do, Ben knew, was to offer him instead a cut of the eventual settlement; but he didn’t care to pursue it. He had something else on his mind.

“Keep it,” Ben said. “I was happy to help out. You did plenty for me, so it’s good to give back.”

“I did do good for you, didn’t I?” Bonifacio said. “I mean, I couldn’t keep you out of jail, I am sorry about that, but you were able to hold on to a fair amount of money in the end, considering you were getting prosecuted and sued and divorced at the same time.”

Ben raised his glass in salute. “Very true,” he said. “Which is why I don’t need your lousy two grand.”

Bonifacio laughed. “Have it your way,” he said. “Regardless, you were the best little assistant I’ve ever had around here.”

Really, it was like he kept digging around until he stumbled on the remark that would make you want to slap him in the face. That seemed to be what he wanted. No wonder he didn’t appear to have other friends in town. Ben drained his glass and held it out cheerfully for a refill.

“You make a better lawyer than a boss,” he said. “And you’re still the only advocate I’ve got. Which brings us to new business. I have a job for you.”

ANEW KOREAN-MADE ECONOMY CAR got a “Satisfactory” rating from Consumer Reports, whereupon the Crisis Management team assembled as immediately and instinctively as a team of superheroes; but then most of their subsequent time and ingenuity was spent moving ninja-like through the immense trivialities of the various social networks, countering complaints, planting favorable remarks. The question of whether the client might instead address the crisis by building safer cars was a nonstarter. Helen understood that once you got out of the realm in which your clients were individuals with whom you sat down face to face, your power diminished, and your thinking had to change; still, though, even their most detailed and intense strategies often seemed to her like confoundingly small potatoes.