Unfit to Practice

“What do you mean?”

She shrugged. “I really don’t know. Just more at me than ever.”

“Family-law cases are the worst,” Paul said. “Give me a good old corporate dispute, partners gouging out eyes, stabbing each other in the back, but, hey, it’s just business. Next week they’ll be toasting the next great joint venture.” He turned left onto Lake Tahoe Boulevard.

“Anyway, it’s over until tomorrow and I’m going to put it out of my mind. And concentrate on you.”

“I like that,” Paul said. He ran a finger down her cheek. “Love me right and I’ll love you right back.”

She kissed him again. “It’s so great when you’re here. I wish you could stay forever.”

“Come live with me in Carmel. You know that’s what I want.”

He popped that out as casually as popping a beer. It was the ongoing struggle between them. How could they possibly create something strong and permanent living 250 miles apart?

“I know.”

“Luck was with me this morning,” Paul said. “I got the two witness declarations you wanted signed. Wish you had been able to drive Highway 89 with me up to Tahoe City. Whitecaps starting up, the sky that sensational transparent blue that you only see when it’s swept clean and a storm’s blowing in. Fall a

Nina disentangled herself and twisted back, retrieved the file, and set it on the floor in front of her. Otherwise she’d never remember it. Curling herself against Paul again, she said, “I hate it that you have to leave.”

“Job’s over,” Paul said. “I’ve got an office in Carmel crying for my attention. You could always come down again this weekend.”

This reminder that he led a life complete and separate from her gave her a pang. The nights without him were hard. She missed the rise and fall of his chest, the rhythm of his breath. “You know I want to, but I’ve got an office in Tahoe crying for my attention too, and Bob needs new shoes and the house is a wreck.” They drove along the lake under a lowering sky. Wind flattened the water way out and threw up ruffled whitewater closer in. One last sailboat tacked into the Keys harbor, the sail taut and the two people inside pulling hard at the ropes, their yellow life jackets bright in the half-light.

“We better get you on the road fast,” Nina said. “You should just drop me at the office.”

“No way will I miss lunch with you. It’s too early in the year for snow. What’s a little rain?”

“You’ve seen the mountain rainstorms,” Nina added. But she didn’t really want him to leave so she didn’t ask again. While they ate at Passaretti’s, the light rain turned into a downpour. By the time Paul kissed her good-bye in the parking lot of the Starlake Building, the skies were delivering a four-star one-for-the-books drenchfest.

Inside, she barely had time to fold up her umbrella and prop it in the corner of her office before the afternoon steamrolled her. Her assistant, Sandy Whitefeather, was in and out on errands, leaving Nina mostly on her own to answer the phone and handle emergencies. Two old personal-injury clients soaked up time without resolving anything. An interpreter slowed down a complicated phone call to the Vangs about a settlement offer in their insurance case.

Then, to cap off an already crowded afternoon, sisters named Brandy and Angel told her a harrowing story about witnessing something on a camping trip that had ended with a suspicious death the next site over.

She took notes, thought fast, kept her eyes on the tasks at hand, tried to keep track of everything. Between the phones and the thirteen other cases that needed attention in the interstices of the main appointments, she drank her bottled water and hung in there. She let the rough morning go and decided she had had a good day because Paul was in it.

Outside, dark came early and water flowed down the street. The lights flickered once or twice. Inside, Nina kept right on trying to fix people’s problems and bring order back into the chaos that afflicted them. She thought once or twice about the Cruz custody case. Paul was right. Custody disputes between two more or less competent parents who both loved their kids were the most painful cases for the lawyer as well as the parents, because no just solution existed. You couldn’t saw the kids in half. They had to spend most of their time somewhere.

She felt bad for Lisa Cruz, for what she had done to her.

When the last client had left and she was finally alone, she washed most of the hardened crud off the coffeepot, turned out the lights, packed her briefcase, and slung her purse onto her shoulder. Umbrella in hand, she headed down the hall not feeling anything at all except the desire to get home. She made it only a few steps at a normal pace from the office door before immense raindrops, ballooned into drunken saturation, reduced her hair to string and her boots to sodden. A gust of wind turned her umbrella inside out.

Abandoning all dignity, she ran for protection. She threw open the Bronco’s door with such force that it seemed for a second it might break off. Safely inside, she tossed her briefcase and broken umbrella to the floor of the backseat and waited. The sky could only dump so much water. For a few minutes, she watched heavy branches ripping and scattering like twigs in the force of the storm. Freshets of water cascaded down Highway 50. Cars pulled over to the side, wipers going like mad, as the street became a brook, a river, a lake.

She let the drumming on the roof occupy her consciousness. Bob had probably made it home from school by now, and Sandy should be safe at home. Paul would be over Echo Summit and down in the Sacramento Valley by now. The briefcase on the backseat floor held her most pressing client files, the ones she would take to bed with her to read and consider.

Sharp pellets struck the roof. Hail. People on the streets scurried for cover like mice escaping a marauding cat. “Just ducky,” she muttered as the streetlights blinked out all at once. Across the street, the neon flicked off on the Mexican restaurant’s sign.

The whole town went dark, and this time the lights didn’t come back.

A mountain town without power isn’t a town at all, but an animal hideout under the trees, like a deer nest or bear cave. They saw it all the time up here, the facade of civilization casually torn away by snow, wind, storms, not to mention the raw human emotions uncovered after losing everything at the all-too-civilized casinos on the Nevada side of town. Scylla and Charybdis, and humanity reduced to headlights in the din.

Now what? She gave it another minute, pulling for civilization, but nature had the town firmly in hand. No lights, rain lashing the windshield. She fumbled for her car keys, which were supposed to be clipped with a metal carabiner to her purse strap, but they weren’t there. She must have dropped them somewhere. She clicked on the overhead lights, which ran on the battery, and looked through her keys on the ring. House key and office key, check, mystery key, check, Bob’s spare bike-lock key, yep, but no car key.

She hadn’t seen the doggone key since she’d parked at the office at eight that morning. Sandy had dropped her off at the courthouse and Paul had picked her up.

She should go back into the building and look for the key, a very daunting thought right now, but she was already half out the door again when she remembered that she had an old plastic key in her wallet, which the auto association had sent her for use in an emergency.

The fan on the heater at home wouldn’t work without electricity. Bob would be making a fire and enjoying the process entirely too much. She should hurry before he burned the cabin down.

She would find the key tomorrow. Tonight she couldn’t go back in there. She fished out the plastic key and turned it in the ignition, hoping the flimsy white plastic wouldn’t break.