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It’s been a day, all right, but he and Kim managed to meet at the big Uptown mall just as the Cinnabon employees pulled a fresh tray of buns out of the oven; they nestle in their flimsy paper boxes as he carries them out of the shop, gently hot in his hands. This and a coffee and he could almost forget everything he’s done today and everything he’ll have to do tomorrow— Ask Mrs. Nguyen for extra time re: rent is at the top of his to-do list, God help him— and the first messy bite goes some way to filling the void left by a skipped lunch. Melted butter and cinnamon syrup run down the back of his hand.
“Jeez,” he mutters, holding the bun at arm’s length so its heaped frosting doesn’t spill over onto his crisp new shirt, the papers already spread out on the table, the briefcase by his foot.
“Use a fork,” Kim says, tossing him a paper napkin into the bargain.
“A fork? I’m eating this thing the way God intended,” Jimmy says, around another mouthful of dough. Besides, it’s fun to watch Kim attack her own pastry with a standard-issue disposable plastic fork, jabbing around in its paper case as she tries to section off a reasonably sized bite. “You’re fighting a losing battle there, counsellor.”
“I am trying to avoid another dry-cleaning bill this month,” Kim counters. She reaches over to the empty table behind them and grabs a plastic knife from the caddy. “I make no apologies for this.” Holding eye contact with him, she cuts and spears a bite of cinnamon roll and pops it in her mouth.
“So how’d it go?”
Jimmy scoffs, shakes his head.
“Sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“I know. Still sucks, though.”
“Yeah. Shouldn’t have wasted my time.”
“That’s not true,” Kim says. “Hey, someone’s gotta— if you keep sending out resumés—”
“I know.”
“Eventually, someone’s gonna bite.”
“Yeah, well, that and a dollar’ll buy me a bus ticket,” Jimmy says, then regrets it. “Sorry. Not you I’m mad at.”
Kim nods.
“You can do better,” she says, after a swig of coffee.
“Better how? What, am I supposed to lie about my—?”
“I mean, better than that job.”
“Better than a cushy associate’s job at a white-shoe firm in Santa Fe?”
“Yes,” Kim says. At Jimmy’s stare, she elaborates. “You know why they’re changing all the signs at that place? To Andersen, Reyes, Muller & Shepherd? One of the senior partners’ twenty-five-year-old nephew just passed the bar.”
“Seriously? Yikes. Howard Hamlin 2.0.”
“Well, with Howard it was—” she starts, as if that trusty defend-the-boss instinct has kicked in, and then stops herself.
“Different? How was it different? I know we’re not supposed to talk about this, but c’mon, Kim.”
“Howard was— well, for one thing, he was older than twenty-five.”
“Yeah, I bet he was three, four months older at least.” Jimmy shoves another bite in his mouth. “Besides, the guy’s Peter Pan. He doesn’t age. Twenty years from now when we’re all zipping around in our flying electric cars, he’ll look exactly the same.”
“I’m just saying, it is different. It wasn’t just George Hamlin gunning for Howard; didn’t Chuck take him under his wing when he was studying for the bar?” she asks, and then almost visibly cringes at what she’s said, so much so that Jimmy almost feels sorry for her. “The people at Andersen, they were never gonna—” Give you a fair shake, Jimmy guesses in her silence, and wonders if she might be right. “You can do better,” she says instead.
“Andersen, Reyes, Muller & Shepherd is a dumb name for a law firm,” Jimmy says, after further chewing.
“Why’s that?”
“Spells ‘arms’. Like, the long arms of the law,” he says, while Kim snorts. “How’s that gonna look on a letterhead? Kid should’ve had the foresight to be named something else.”
“Yeah, he should’ve thought about that before he was born.”
On the other side of the food court, just beneath the escalators, a gleaming latest-model SUV sits near a bored-looking man at a booth. Financing Available! No Down Payment! One thing Jimmy can say for himself, he never got suckered into one of those deals. His car may rattle and groan but at least he won’t be stuck paying it off into the 2010s.
“How’s Chuck?”
Jimmy shrugs. “Last I heard, he’d gone up to one of those little mountain towns for a couple of weeks. Near Taos? A retreat, he called it. No phones, no internet, just sort of unplug and relax.” Putting it like that makes it sound nice, harmless. The kind of thing healthy people do. “I think he’s just overtired,” he adds, as if saying it will make it true. Suddenly all that vitamin-enriched flour and high-fructose corn syrup sits like a brick in his stomach.
“Well, he’s had a lot on his plate,” says Kim, playing along. “Especially with the Raeburn case wrapping up.”
“The what case?”
“Raeburn v. High Desert Realty? Huge class-action suit?”
“Nope.”
“Our clients contended that they’d been sold worthless plots of land as an ‘investment opportunity’, starting way back in the seventies, and since the company had been dealing in Colorado as well as New Mexico they were able to move assets around to shield their liability… at least at first. Then Chuck dove in and made them account for every last penny. It was…” She glows at this recounting, which makes Jimmy feel some type of way. “You seriously didn’t hear about it? Chuck and Howard were up to their necks in discovery for, like, months.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve had my own clients to worry about? Somebody needs to defend Albuquerque’s dumbest criminals for seven hundred dollars a pop.”
“They can’t all be that bad.”
“Trust me, Kim. The smart ones can afford better lawyers.”
Kim rests her hand on top of his and gives him an enigmatic look.
“Don’t tell me I should be grateful for it. It’s grunt work, Kim. It’s— it’s…”
“I wasn’t gonna say that.”
“The crap I have to deal with, day in, day out…”
“I know.”
“I feel like a goddamn babysitter. Like I’m trying to keep a bunch of two-year-olds from throwing their toys at each other. ‘Don’t talk to the guy you just got six months’ probation for hitting with a weed-whacker! I don’t care if he is your brother-in-law!’ Or— or, ‘Don’t throw gang signs in the courtroom in front of the judge! We’ve all got eyes!’”
He expects Kim to laugh, and the corners of her mouth turn up, but mostly she just looks thoughtful.
“If you could do any kind of legal work you wanted… anything at all… what would it be?”
For a disorienting second, Jimmy feels like he’s facing another interview question he has no idea how to answer.
“What’s the point? It’s not like I get to pick and choose.”
“Well, someday you will. And… thinking about it might help.”
“Yeah?”
“It does for me.”
Jimmy looks past Kim and tries to imagine his ideal client, his ideal case— heck, his ideal office — but all he can see are the tired corridors of the municipal courthouse, the strung-out jitters of defendants left to dry out in jail, an endless series of stooped shoulders in ill-fitting suits.
“Something that pays the bills,” he says. “Three square meals a day, a proper apartment, no more calls from the phone company. Is that too prosaic?”
“It’s a start.”