The Shyster's Daughter, page 21
One weekend not long before the wedding, Jim rents a U-Haul truck and takes his oldest son, Alan, with him to remove everything from the unit. Lucia borrows her father’s Ford Ranger pick-up. Her hair is pulled back in that old snood she used to wear. She means business as do I with mine held up off my neck with a rubber band. I’m in a black T-shirt and cut-off shorts to hide the dirt. The two of us are in charge of another kind of heavy lifting—disposing of all of my father’s legal files—over two decades worth of failed marriages, new business partnerships, individuals exonerated of crimes as well as current inmates of the California state prison system. Because the metal file cabinets are stored all the way in the back of the unit I haven’t been able to get to them and count just how many there are.
Piece by piece Jim and his son take away the remnants of my father’s life, like the wall painting of a trail leading from a thatched roof cottage into the forest that used to hang in the foyer of the Chino house. It was one of the rare items my mother had flagged with a Post-It and the movers had missed.
“Hold on,” I call out to Alan. I’m halfway to the filing cabinets as I reverse my way back, banging up my knees and calves along the way. He slides up the back door and I pull out that ugly Hansel and Gretel painting. Carefully I lean the gold-flecked frame against the wall of the unit designated for the items I’m keeping, like my father’s old Rolodex with his clients’ contact information.
Of the phone numbers I’ll gather I will decide on only two of his former clients to call—one a killer, the other a crook who, if I’m to believe my father, cheated him out of a fortune in grove profits. I’m not sure why I want to talk to them except that I’m hopeful I’ll hear real sorrow or remorse in their voices upon breaking the news that the lawyer who spared them from life behind bars is now dead.
With what seems like no time and no real dent made in the unit, a first load in the U-Haul is ready to go. Fortunately, Jim finds a Goodwill store just down the street. He starts up the engine, then hops out from behind the wheel.
“We’ll be back in a few minutes.” He kisses my forehead, patting my back with a thick leather glove. “This will all be over soon, Baby.”
His freckle-faced fifteen-year-old son, on the other hand, doesn’t look so optimistic. He strains his neck at what’s left in the unit as if it’s a sky scraper he’s expected to scale.
Lucia gives me a leg up and I cross atop the geography of my father’s and my life—the refrigerator and freezer where my father used to keep the bottles of ouzo from Lesvos, the professional portraits of Pride’s Contract and Midnight’s Secret Wish, the show horses he lost to either old age or Rhea’s former lover Dumbo, and the tan leather love seat worn at the arms from where my father rested his while he channel surfed and where I used to sprawl out across the length of it and watch TV as he pored drunkenly through family slides. Even with the door to the unit open, the air inside is dusty and hot, and I have to wipe my forehead with the tail of my tank to clear the perspiration from my eyes.
Lucia shines a beam from a flashlight in my eyes.
“Well?” she says expectantly. “How many?”
It takes me twice to count them all.
“Eighteen.”
“Eighteen?”
“Yeah,” I say again, “eighteen.”
“Mother of God.”
Lucia is trying to curb her cursing. At nearly thirty she’s dashed all hopes of ever making it as an actress and now teaches Kindergarten at a private Catholic school.
The protocol for what to do with a deceased, disbarred lawyer’s files is lost on me. His former clients should’ve asked for their files back once they learned his license had been revoked. All the necessary documents, I figure, are on file with the court anyway.
I begin with the business partnerships, pulling out by the arm load bulging manila files, the papers punctured with a two-hole punch, held down between the covers with metal brackets. The Fly Bye owners hired my father for a partnership with a Japanese businessman when they decided to open up a second restaurant in Chino Hills. They now own close to ten nearby airports all across the Pacific Northwest. In one of the drawers I come across Rex’s file and inside is a copy of the check for a measly few grand that hog-riding, schizo thief gave my father for the San Joaquin Valley groves that were worth close to a million—tangible evidence my father was telling the truth. Even if the groves were mortgaged to the hilt his cut should’ve been six figures. The date on the check is around the time my father had his law license suspended. He must’ve been desperate enough to cash it, maybe to pay his own lawyer. Disgusted, I toss the check and the rest of Rex’s files in the gap between the fridge and the big, hand carved dining room chairs. Later, when the business of dealing with my father’s things is over I will call that man out for being low enough to steal from my father whom he knew was already down and out.
From the heap of papers I make outside of the unit, Lucia tosses them into the flatbed of the pick-up. This process continues for hours until I see Jim’s son shoving one of those oversized wooden dining room chairs into the back of the U-Haul. After a couple trips to Goodwill, there is now space to move around inside the unit and I’m able to get out in no time.
“Where are you taking the chairs?” I call out to Jim who has one in his arms. “They’re coming home with us.”
“But Baby . . .”
The chair is even wider than Jim’s muscular shoulders and he needs both hands to carry it. His face is partly obscured by the back of it as if he’s behind wooden bars.
My demands are wearing him out quicker than all this moving and he sets down the chair, collapsing in it.
He has no idea how important these chairs and table are to me. He doesn’t know that my family used the chairs to protect ourselves against an escaped murderer on the loose. He doesn’t know the story about the one night when we returned from a local horse show and encountered two burglars robbing our house, using the table to carry out the goods. One was a white guy with a bandana and the other looked Mexican with a tie-dyed t-shirt. Each had one end of the dining room table that was loaded down with stacks of thinly crafted china from my mother’s hutch. The Mexican was backing out first through the front doors.
“What are you doing?” my father asked, just standing there.
“It’s okay,” the white guy said. “My friend, he lives here.”
I will always remember the way my father cocked his head to the side like a dog hearing a high frequency.
“The hell he does. I’m gonna kick your ass, you boutso gliftie.”
It happened just that fast. My father dropped the keys and lunged right for the white one, clipping the guy at the side of the head with his fist. The table thudded to the sidewalk, my mother’s prized gravy boat with the blurry pink flowers being the only casualty, tipping off the table and breaking into pieces on the concrete. My father chased both of the burglars down the street only to lose them in the bushes at the Norbenger’s residence where they also run a dirt and fertilizer company, on the corner.
Running so hard tore the muscles in his belly and required surgery, steel webbing to mesh his flesh back together.
This is a good memory of my father, one of many I want to keep, when he wasn’t as strong as he was in the linebacker years of his youth. Still, he was as fearless before the loss of my mother, my brother, and sister as well as his license had aged him and weakened his will to fight.
I sit on Jim’s lap. The weight of both of us makes a strange stretching sound coming from the woven seat. I get up quickly.
“I’ll nail down some plywood,” he says, giving in. “We can’t have any of our guests falling through the seats during dinner.”
Paper swirls like a tiny tornado in the flatbed as Lucia drives us to the recycling center on Mission Boulevard, past the closed down drive-in theater with a parking lot teeming with tumble weeds and Robin Hood’s Sex Shop, a green and white building that’s the size of a shoe box with a red bow and arrow painted across the door.
The attendant working the booth at the recycling center has Lucia park on the scale and he weighs us, taking down the number. When we are finished dumping, then we’ll drive back on the scale and he’ll record what pittance of change we’ve earned. We have our choice of three different mountains of paper in which to unload.
Lucia backs it up and I jump into the flatbed, and I crouch down and begin. I shove and push and sometimes even kick out the manila folders, depositions bound with brackets and other court transcripts that are the size and heft of fat textbooks. Lucia helps but I do most of the work because I’m faster and because as my father’s daughter disposing of what’s left of his legal career is my job. Load after load, my hands chafe, nicked with deep paper cuts that sting but never bleed. Sometimes the papers come apart from the folders. Other times the papers fly back at me with the breeze.
I lose count how many trips to the center Lucia and I make. At some point after having dumped a load, I scoot back in the flatbed and rap at the glass with my knuckles. It no longer makes sense to spend what energy I have left crawling out and getting in the front seat.
“Go ahead,” I say. “I’ll stay back here.”
When we’re finally all through, the attendant tallies our trips. Ninety-two dollars. The guy who isn’t much older than us lets out a shocking whistle.
“That’s some paper trail, ladies.”
Neither one of us laughs. Not that it isn’t funny. We’re simply bone tired. Even my rib cage aches from breathing.
In an act of good will I’ll send my mother that painting I spared at the last minute. Crying over the phone, she’ll insist I stay on the line while she unwraps it.
Lake Tahoe, with a shoreline twelve miles wide and a span of twenty-two miles, provides enough room for her and me to get along, long enough for her to watch me marry. As I’ve secretly hoped it provides far more—at a recently built casino on the North Shore, seated side by side at the quarter slots, my mother and I share a bucket of coins, trying our luck in a new place. Tahoe is my desired spot to be married because it’s where my parents honeymooned, where I imagine they were the most in love. Pitching a tent and laying out sleeping bags at a camp site on the South Side of the lake, they poured red wine into Styrofoam cups. They toasted to their future, their big plans of building my father’s law practice from scratch, one client at a time. But then came my sister and then a couple years later me, and the standard fees of divorces and petty criminals weren’t enough to keep up with what my parents wanted for us, for our new baby brother and for themselves.
My marriage is weeks away and I’ve learned from my father not to act like an ilithios and worry about what’s coming, only what’s here in front of me right now. And right now there is nothing before me but a cold and empty concrete space. The material details of the past have been taken away. The files—the private histories, that old refrigerator where my father once kept his ouzo, where I once lost a fake fingernail in the ice tray. It will mean nothing to its next owner and maybe that’s a good thing. To let go so as to move on.
No matter how my father may have died or who I suspect, who I know, played a part in it, he is gone. But there is no real proof, there are no real answers and for me, I am a work-in-progress when it comes to accepting what I may never fully understand. In my determination to start I focus on the task at hand. I sweep every corner of the entire unit clean of all the dirt that’s collected over the years.
With the cash from my father’s old case files I cover the gas for the Ranger. In honor of my father whose name I vow to carry even through marriage, I will meet up with my fiancé and my soon-to-be stepson and blow the rest on salty gyros and some flaming feta at Yanni’s.
EPILOGUE
I come alone on that hazy white afternoon, carting a bouquet of white roses that have been spray painted a sunny yellow, thanks to the florist at the shop on the corner who insists nobody will ever be able to tell the difference. They do look freshly cut, center table ready. My father would appreciate the deception. His marker is white with black lettering—Beloved Father, Grandfather, Son, Brother. A decorative black rose winds its way up the side. I imagine if any of his spurned clients, the ones whose fortunes he helped create as well as squander, came by they’d want to add—Shyster and Thief.
The last time I’ve been to his grave site was when I gave the eulogy and talked in specifics about my father’s love for me and my siblings. Toward the end I found a way to slip in his neverending affection for my mother because it was not right that she was singled out from collectively mourning for him too. Before I spoke Uncle Dimitri approached me. “I know you don’t want to hear this but Gil wants to say a few words too.” Uncle Dimitri shrugged, his eyes squinted up in Yia Yia’s way. “What the hell can I do, Paula? They’re brothers. I told him he could, but you will get the last word.”
Apparently Uncle Dimitri had temporarily forgotten that day how in many ways he helped rear me too. Because I was somewhat surprised he didn’t catch on after I reassured him that I was fine with Gil speaking, even offering to go first, that I had no plans providing a pedophile with a captive audience. In an orchestrated protest, Lucia, my sister and brother, followed by my fiancé, headed for the car just as Psycho Gil positioned himself before my father’s coffin.
The memory, while still conjuring up old anger, no longer holds as much power. Time may have played a part, but it’s my stepson Kyle who ultimately brought me out of my selfish and all consuming grief. He was only in the first grade when Holly died. Everybody had been at the hospital saying their last goodbyes. It was where Kyle and I were headed when I got the call from Jim, telling me to turn around. He didn’t want Kyle to remember his mother that way. It was left up to me to forever break a seven-year-old boy’s heart by telling him his mommy wouldn’t be coming home. “She’s gone to another home,” I told him, talking as reassuringly as I could over my own sobs, “one with a better view so she can watch out for you. My father and grandfather live up there, too.” As he listened Kyle’s tears were dollops in his eyes, trapped, with no chance of ever coming down his cheeks. I watched helplessly as my little stepson turned more reserved than most grownups. “I’m too young for this,” he’d said to me, throwing his head back against the car seat. Afterward I drove with him to his mother’s house and brought some of his clothes along with his aquarium and his pet goldfish, Barracuda, back to the home Jim and I recently bought in Lake Arrowhead. Together Kyle and I stayed busy all afternoon cleaning out the tank, first netting the fish in a salad bowl filled from the tap, then together we dumped out the murky tank water, and with two sponges and real elbow grease we scrubbed clear the algae off the sides. We became closer that day, not because of what I said, but because of how we got through it. Kyle and I let our relationship grow naturally over morning cereal, car rides to and from school and afternoons walking our dogs Maggie and Leo to the park where we’ve trained Leo since he was a puppy to scramble paws first down the kiddie slide.
Across the lawn a woman stands in front of a fresh mound of earth framed with fly wheels, balloons, and color 8 × 10” photographs of a smiling teenage girl. I am one of many who have suffered loss in a cruel and unexplainable way. As a professor I regularly hear about the sudden tragedies in the families of my students. One student’s mother died in a car crash while he was on his honeymoon. Another young female student’s boyfriend was murdered, one bullet in the back of his skull, in the alley behind the apartment the two of them shared. The answers why these unthinkable acts happen are only allotted to a lucky few. The rest of us learn to live with only fragments of the truth, as much for the sake of the dead as for ourselves.
Sitting before my father’s marker, I search the grass until I find the metal holder hidden beneath and place the roses inside. Then I run my hand across the lettering on his marker. The words, they feel like a stark line of brail, identifying my father to the strangers who pass by on their way to grieve for others. Sadly the words don’t say near enough. My father, in his prime, was an enviably good defense lawyer. He could out argue anybody. He taught me how to hold a position and never waiver. He taught me how to stand strong. Later, when he was spent from a profession that forced him to constantly work around the truth, he himself became a cheat as well as having been stolen from himself. But he was also the funniest person I’ve ever known, cursing everyone and everything out in Greek, from a disgruntled driver who cut him off to the smoking engine of his diesel Mercedes that he failed to fill with oil. At times he rescued me with his frank words of wisdom and sometimes he wrongfully let me down too. But he loved me. He loved me so much he never knew how to say it. Maybe it was the distance between him and my sister and brother that forced him to find the proper words for them.
On some days like this one I am convinced he took his own life. I am convinced he drove away from Sugar Brown’s house that night stricken by her dangerous act of disloyalty. It must’ve hit him that he was just another old fool who had allowed himself to be tricked by a much younger woman. No woman would ever truly love him. My mother had already proven that by walking out on him. By the time he called me from the Kat Nip he had already made up his mind. That was why he had sounded so cryptic, why he had me make that promise. The pills would be easy to find. He could’ve finished off his own blood pressure prescription or rummaged through Yia Yia’s medicine cabinet and taken all of hers. My great grandfather died of suicide, which like other dark secrets in the Priamos family, got buried. I didn’t learn of it until well after I’d begun writing this story.
