Page 5 of Pro Bono

“Thanks,” Charlie said. “I owe you a big favor.” He handed Kyle the keys to the Toyota.

Charlie got into the driver’s seat and pulled away very smoothly, not going too fast so Kyle wouldn’t worry. He thought about heading for the 101 freeway to Santa Barbara, but then he decided that there was no reason now to be in such a hurry. If Mack was gone already, he could return Kyle’s car and go back to the plan. He was driving a car that Mack wouldn’t recognize, so he could just drive past and look for the BMW.

As he reached his street, he saw that the BMW was still in the driveway, but immediately saw Mack stepping out of the front door. He slowed down and watched. Mack slammed the front door, hurried to his car, got in, and pulled away fast.

As soon as Mack turned the corner, Charlie parked Kyle’s car, ran to the house, and went inside the back door to the kitchen. Everything looked the same. Charlie was about to go back outside, but then he sensed something was off. The air was wrong. It smelled different. Had Mack left the oven on, or something? He checked the dials and burners, then touched the oven door, checked the air fryer and microwave, and walked toward the front of the house. Suddenly there was the screech of the fire alarm. It was coming from upstairs. He ran back to the kitchen, grabbed the fire extinguisher off its rack on the wall, and sprinted to the stairway and up to the second floor. His mother’s bedroom was fillingwith smoke. Charlie saw that the flames were just taking hold, flickering up the curtains. Mack must have lit sone papers in the trash can and pushed it under them.

Charlie sprayed the curtains and the trash can, and the fire went out in seconds. He turned on the air conditioning fan and threw open the French doors onto the balcony, and in a moment the terrible noise of the alarm died out. He closed and locked the French doors, pivoted, and ran down the stairs. His eyes seemed to be seeing things through a red film in front of him. Mack had tried to burn the house down on his way out. As soon as Charlie had seen the fire, the rage had gripped his chest. He dashed out the front door to the street, already reaching into his pocket for the keys to Kyle’s car. He was not going to Santa Barbara anymore.

He threw himself into the driver’s seat, started the engine, and had the car in motion before his seat belt buckle clicked. He knew the intersection where Mack Stone would be stopped. It always took sitting through the long traffic signal, sometimes twice, before a car could get through onto Sunset in the late afternoon. Mack’s car wasn’t stuck at the signal so Charlie didn’t wait for the light to change. He just veered left, shot straight through, and kept adding more speed. In another second or two he was weaving in and out of traffic, knowing that he would be able to see the BMW before long. He was not used to driving this car, but he was quickly building a feel for its controls. The car was small, but it had a powerful engine and was the right weapon for what he was determined to do.

It was three days before he spoke to his mother again. When he reached her hotel, she demanded to know where he had been and what he’d been doing. He told her he’d needed to be alone to think. She never asked him again, maybe because within another day or two, the authorities had notified her about her husband’s death, and she knew a reason not to.

3

MAY 2021

Vesper Ellis climbed up on the step stool to reach the deep blue glasses in the cupboard. They had been nested inside one another on the top shelf since the last time she’d used them, which had been over a year ago, and she needed to wash them all again before she could add them to the tray.

She inspected them as she took them down, two in each hand, set them on the counter, and reached up for the next four. The color was gorgeous, a perfect sapphire, the eyes of the angels in Renaissance paintings she’d seen, a pigment which she’d read had been made by grinding up lapis lazuli.

It almost made Vesper feel guilty for hating the glasses. It did not seem to her to be wise to serve anybody anything outdoors in a vessel that wasn’t fully transparent. As a child she had been given lemonade in a deep green glass, and when she took a sip, the hornet that had flown into it for some of the sugary drink had stung her lip to make its escape.

One of the adults present that day made the predictable remark that pretty girls’ lips were sometimes described as “bee-stung.” She wishedhim dead for over an hour, and then determined to forget he existed, which was as close to obliteration as she could achieve.

Vesper arranged the blue glasses on paper doilies on a tray of their own, but kept them all upside down. It would have been unthinkable not to have enough glasses for the garden party, and all the clear tumblers and stemware and highball glasses had been placed on the dining tables and the bar according to their natural purposes.

Vesper felt slightly dizzy for a second as she stepped off the stool. This was George’s fault, and she mentally placed it on his side of the balance sheet. He always seemed to have his most desperate desire for her at inconvenient times—often so late at night that she didn’t get back to sleep before the alarm went off. This time it had been at dawn, when he was fully aware that she was preparing to entertain three dozen people at midday and had to get started.

All her emotions about the day were strong—first rage at his selfishness and uncaring attitude about the effort she’d been expending for days and the importance, not just to his business standing, but to her reputation too, damn it, for getting social events right. And then there was the warm feeling of being adored and desired by her husband, a sensation that started out faint and not at all fair compensation for her annoyance, but grew as the closeness and touch continued, until it made the negative feelings start to seem foolish and distant and then overwhelmed them completely. The feelings were vivid, but then once again they ended with her having to rouse herself from a state of profound relaxation to start performing tiresome chores in rapid succession to make this day happen.

She had once very tentatively and obliquely asked her mother about George’s timing, or really, alluded to it, just putting it in front of her in case she knew something that Vesper should know. Her mother, whosename was Iolanthe, a crime of a name perpetrated on her at birth that she had also visited upon her daughter when she called her Vesper, said, “He’s going to feel that way about somebody. If he’s worth keeping, you should do your best to make sure it’s you. You’re lucky you’re so beautiful that what happens is up to you. You’re both in your twenties, young enough to find ways to make both of you happy.”

This morning Vesper had just given George a final kiss before she climbed into the bath, and now she was fresh, subtly perfumed, powdered, and made-up. She was all efficiency and motion.

There was pride too. Vesper could have spent a lot of money putting on these events for their friends and George’s colleagues. There were caterers in the Valley who were very good, even excellent. They brought their own dishes and linens and tables and chairs and five or ten staff to deploy them and to park the guests’ cars. She still believed there were advantages to doing things the way her mother and grandmother had done them. People didn’t pay magicians because they wanted rabbits removed from hats. They wanted the pleasure of seeing rabbits appear from the hats so smoothly that it seemed natural and inevitable. She stepped onto the back porch and looked at her preparations. Yes, she had done it again—rabbits.

Everything was right, tastefully chosen and arranged. The tables were set, the food was cooking, the bar was overstocked with liquor bottles with famous labels, wine of four kinds to pair with the entrees beside the correct glasses ready to be filled.

In a moment the first guests were arriving. Vesper greeted five or six couples with hugs and then swooped away to the kitchen to pick up a platter the timer at the back of her brain told her was ready and return with it. When she was back, there were enough other women who were looking for a chance to help, and a couple men too. The next trays andplatters were brought out behind her and she simply had to say, “That goes over there,” and point.

Couples were coming into the backyard steadily now—people didn’t want to be fashionably late at noon. George appeared at the bar making sure everybody was coaxed into having a glass of liquid to hold, and when the stream of people produced its own pourers to relieve him, he went around greeting guests he had missed and chatting with each of them. Vesper had assumed he would become the social George, and here he was, as expected, another part of the magic she was performing. When he wanted to, he could be magnificent—the warm friend who looked you right in the eye and asked about you as though he had been looking forward to seeing you all week. He remembered your kids’ names and wanted to introduce you to this other friend who had the same interest you did.

She walked toward the kitchen because she had to keep things moving. She had not forgotten any of the timers she had set—the oven, the sense of how long things should simmer on the stove, how long other things should cool in the refrigerator. On the way toward the house, she glanced at the levels of people’s drinks and how many of the hors d’oeuvres were gone and adjusted her sense of when the next trays should materialize.

Because the number of guests at this afternoon party was near the limit of the house’s capacity, Vesper allowed four of her friends to deputize themselves to help in the kitchen and in the serving. This time when Vesper went out the kitchen door, she was bringing main dishes, and she was one of five carrying large trays. As soon as the trays were placed at the ends of the long tables, the five were on their way back into the kitchen for the next load, an array of side dishes.

This was the part where coordination and timing were at their most crucial, and Vesper kept the machine moving steadily. At one point, asshe was coming out to the kitchen steps with two large bowls, George held the door for her and said quietly in her ear, “This is great, Ves. Everybody loves everything,” then kissed her cheek as she passed.

Her hands were full, so she couldn’t brush off the damp spot from his kiss, and she felt it for a few seconds before the sensation faded and was replaced by impressions about how her arrangements were working and decisions about what she would do next.

After the two-and-a-half-hour lunch, alcoholic drinks reappeared. The afternoon was hot and the drinking seemed to gain popularity more strongly than Vesper considered ideal, so she and her friend Tiffany Shaw deployed the tray of fresh iced tea and lemonade pitchers and glasses and called them to the attention of the guests at each table. Soft drinks had been in bowls of ice in visible places all afternoon, but an hour later she gauged that she needed to do some more adjusting. Alcohol had the advantage that it impaired judgement enough to make more alcohol seem like a good idea.

Vesper was aware that bringing out coffee was like playing the Last Dance music, but she judged that the coffee hour had been reached. She filled and plugged in the big coffee maker and Tiffany came out carrying the tray of cups and saucers. Others delivered plates of cookies and light dessert items. Soon the competition between liquid refreshments turned, the sun had sunk west of the rooftop, and the air was cooling.

Almost an hour later, people began bringing plates, glasses, and silverware into the kitchen, and many of them took this opportunity to thank their hostess and then follow the driveway out toward their cars parked along the street.

Vesper had begun a phased clean-up hours earlier, as soon as the entrees had been served, and the trays that had carried out food and drinks had returned with plates and glasses. By now most of the itemsfrom the early parts of the party had been through the dishwasher and put back in the cupboards.

---