Chapter 49: Everyone Leaves Eventually
Vera told him about the box.
She told me herself, two days later, in a voice that had decided to stop apologizing for existing.
He called about the rent, she said.
He wanted to know if you had invented it to punish him.
I told him the rent was mine, and the apartment was mine to pay for, and then, God forgive me, I told him about Victor's box.
Why? I asked.
Because for one second I wanted him to know that his father-in-law trusted me with something, she said.
That somebody in that family once thought I was worth trusting.
It was petty. It was also true.
What did he say?
Nothing, for a long time, she said.
Then he asked what was in it. I said I never opened it.
He said, You gave her my family. Then he stopped himself. Even he could hear it.
He said, Everyone leaves eventually, she told me. And he hung up.
She did not call back, she said. For the first time in his life, she did not call back.
Owen received the next update through the court docket.
Grant missed a filing deadline.
Not a small one. The response to our financial motion, the one Paula had already asked the court to extend once.
The docket showed the deadline in a red status field.
When one side stops answering, Owen said, the case posture changes before the judge rules.
Could it be strategy? I asked. Letting deadlines die?
No, Owen said. No competent strategy surrenders a response deadline. If Grant does not file, the court can take our numbers as given.
This is a man coming apart, in the order these things happen. First the job. Then the office. Then the family. Then the calendar.
Vera called again that weekend, her voice stripped flat.
He is drinking, she said.
Not the way he used to drink, at dinners, for show. Alone. Mornings.
I found the bottles when I cleaned after he left.
He called me at two in the morning last week, she said. He was crying about the firm. Then he was shouting about you. Then he was crying about the firm again.
I sat in my kitchen and took notes, she said. Like a woman in your foundation class.
There was nothing to say to that, so I said nothing.
He does not answer his phone, she said. His friend Dale came by the building looking for him. Dale looked frightened.
Dale, who once told Grant to settle, who once asked what on earth he had married.
Even Dale could not get him to the door.
Dale left a note under it, Vera said. It said, Call someone. Anyone.
And then, on a Wednesday, it became official, in the flat language of the court.
A motion to withdraw as counsel, filed by Paula, copied to Owen's office.
Owen read it standing in my kitchen, and his eyebrows did the thing they do when a document confirms a story.
Irreconcilable differences with the client, he read. Non-payment of fees. Failure to communicate with counsel.
Translation, he said, setting it down.
She has not heard from him in weeks, and he stopped paying her.
Grant Wexler, who once hired the sharpest divorce lawyer in the county to take everything I had, was about to stand in front of a judge alone.
I should have felt triumph. My stomach tightened instead.
There is no hearing for this, Owen said. No ceremony.
A lawyer simply withdraws in a filing, and that filing is the last thing in the case that still works.
The filing ended with the standard professional line.
Counsel wishes the petitioner well in his future endeavors, Owen read.
Nobody, he said, has ever meant that less.