Any Way Out - 12. Finale Foreplaywright

PART III

A year or so earlier

Lights switched off around Associate Counsel Josh Carter, He heard the air conditioner switch off, a harbinger that its overnight cycle would soon take effect. He knew the early June heat of El Paso would soon start soaking into the office, but he still had one task that demanded his personal attention. It lay in the two folders before him on the desk and kept him glued to his seat while the office emptied around him.

In a few months, Stetson Logistics was opening its Washington, DC branch. The new conglomerate of west Texas trucking, supply, and food-service firms was making a move on the lucrative contracts coming out of the Departments of the Interior and Homeland Security. He had been tipped for Deputy General Counsel of the branch by the CEO, and tasked with finding young, local talent for the growing firm.

He smiled at the memory of the recent two week junket back east. Where his marketing and administrative colleagues had rushed about the nation’s capital for their first two days inquiring after candidates, he had landed in the airport with a very short list from his old buddy Manford, who headed up a DC bar association internship program. His two networking days were spent taking in museums, concerts, and fine dining with some federal officials who were full of interesting ideas.

It wasn’t as if he wasn’t doing his job. He had actually interviewed the candidates, two law students in their 3L -- i.e. final -- year at school. The file on the left side of his desk bore the gleaming headshot of Nate Hill: square faced, blond-haired, blue eyed, the visage split by a brilliant toothy smile.

He had been a sociable guy. They met over an extended lunch in Richmond, Virginia's stylish Shockoe Bottom a couple of days before Nate's graduation. The man was bright and cheerful. He generally aligned with Manford’s assessment: knowledgeable, charming, and a good fit for the heavy networking required for government contracting. He was in every way Josh’s social equal, but was disappointingly basic in his tastes when the conversation went that way. There was also a lack of a certain drive and direction that Josh wasn’t in the mood to overcome. He was a little vague about his plans between graduation and the July bar exam, and what he would do with himself between that and the position opening up in November or December.

On the right side of the desk, a severe brunette girl glared up from her photo. Her pretty face was adorned only with a prim, almost reluctant grin. Josh had questioned Manford’s judgment on the way out to the obscure little law school in Virginia's extreme southwest, smack in the middle of serious hillbilly country. He was sure he was going to get captured and violated -- “Deliverance” style -- on his way from the parking lot to the law library where the interview took place. However, Manford was right again: Ashlee Vance was a determined, all-business lawyer, who was reputed to put any two or three interns to shame. She didn’t graduate until December -- a quirk of little Appalachian Law -- but she was also taking the Virginia bar in July, with plans for the DC bar in February. A freak of nature for sure.

Josh thought about Curtis Hahn, who had the nod for branch manager. He saw it as his duty to wipe out enjoyment from the workplace. “The Fun Sponge”, remarked the CEO once after about six drinks with the legal team. Hahn would appreciate the all-work-no-play attitude, and this girl could help keep him off Josh’s back. That sounded useful, but she seriously didn’t know when to stop; how soon would Josh get tired of her?

Josh heard the night janitors shuffle in. Decision time. Maybe he didn’t need a nosy white guy gamboling around his ankles. Maybe Vance wasn't a terribly original thinker or much to talk to over hors d'oeuvres, but she knew her stuff, and would attend to details while he dealt with important things. Besides, He knew that Blake in admin was looking at bringing on a couple of real hotties -- a blonde bombshell and a little Asian cutie -- and Josh could help pretty up the office even more. Besides, he didn’t need his candidate slipping away in the four-to-five-month gap between the bar and the position opening. Vance would be safely in college till he was ready for her.

Nate Hill was consigned to the shadows of Josh’s desk, while Ashlee Vance’s documents were fed into a scanner. A minute later, the email was on its way to the CEO, and Josh Carter was striding out across the baking parking lot to his car.

“Carter! Pendejo!”

The voice was only a few paces behind him. Josh spun and staggered to face Adrian Zarate, whom Josh knew as a truck driver from Stetson’s payroll. Josh gulped and glanced regretfully at the smashed CCTV camera swinging pitifully from its mount. Zarate didn’t have much to say, but Josh could see where this was going. He feebly raised his arms, but they were swept away, clearing the path for a massive fist to smash across his left cheekbone. A second blow from beneath his jaw laid him out on the asphalt.

Zarate wound up his right boot and aimed for Josh’s kidney, but decided against delivering the kick. He contented himself with a final, “You fucking stay away from her, Carter!” and sped into the twilight. Unable to lie a moment longer on the sizzling pavement, Josh dizzily righted himself. Well, that could have been worse, I suppose, he mused, and continued to his car.

***

Present day

“Almighty God, we come before you this day in the finance committee to give thanks for your gifts. We just pray that you give us wisdom and ability to use the talents you have allotted us to magnify your name and serve your church. In Jesus’ name we pray.”

“Amen,” Cathy Vance responded to Pastor Mark’s invocation. She opened her eyes and watched the preacher take his seat across from her. Ten or twelve men and women shifted around in chairs at the long table in the church’s sterile fellowship hall. Cathy compared the agenda to the array of notebooks on the table in front of her. Everything was there, of course. She’d sat down the second she’d arrived at the church and gone straight to her work, Warding off attention with her sheer force of concentration.

The reason lay in the little parchment envelopes with their purple calligraphy addresses that had been flitting about the city and county of Roanoke all week. Within, inscribed in violet, was an offer to share the honor of one’s presence at the the union of Miss Ashlee Vance and -- Cathay checked a scream in her throat -- MISS Felicity Davis, under the auspices of the Reverend Jane O’Connor, ELCA, some kind of liberal Lutheran.

“A son’s a son till he finds a wife; a daughter’s a daughter the rest of her life.” The proverb rattled between Cathy’s ears, while she wondered what fresh sorrows she would have to endure with maternal grace from a supposed adult over two hundred miles away.

Even her long-accustomed rainbow ordering wasn’t safe. For twenty years she’d offered her accountant’s skills to the Lord, keeping the church’s finances shipshape in rainbow binders. Even when the gay ideology robbed God’s sign to Noah from His faithful ones, no one had dared say a thing Today, however, her clear, wheeled file box had drawn a few glances. Church gossip was bad enough without people looking for queer coding. She had seen more than a few moral dust ups in this church over the past two decades, but this was her first time playing the lead. Changing would only make it worse. She boldly arced them in her double-size spot at the elbow of chairman Jim Anderson and waited out the committee chattering.

The shuffle calmed down after half a minute, and one by one, the committee members focused expectantly on Jim.. He proceeded: “Okay, y’all, let’s go ahead and get started. JAck, can we have the minutes from the last meeting, please?” Cathy centered the red binder in front of her and opened it to a well-highlighted page. Jack Miller, in his role as secretary, rattled off the minutes, and Cathy checked off the marked bullets in her own copy as she moved for adjustments. Seated as they were nearly opposite each other, Cathy smiled on her administrative protege. Jack had retired from being a factory floor manager just five years before, and he had almost stopped making mistakes in the minutes.

The trustee report was next, so orange was called down front and center. A few minutes later, she was up. The yellow book was bristling with tabs and document protectors, and her treasurer’s report lay on the top. She recounted the month’s receipts and expenditures, each referenced in the margins to a tab in the binder, so questions were answered in seconds. It was now more important than ever to remind everyone how good she was.

After all the committee’s queries were dispatched, Jim opened his mouth to move on to the building report. As Cathy reached for green, Charlotte, the Sunday School director, cut in.

“Can we offer a prayer for Cathy’s girl, Ashlee?” Silence landed on the table with a dull thud. Faltering slightly from the reaction, but determined to press her cause, she continued: “Cathy, I know you’re so worried about her, and she’s fallen in with some bad folks in Washington. Can we pray that she comes back to her family and back to the Lord?”

The committee took up a nervous mumble. Jack, the secretary personally drilled by Cathy to meet her meticulous demands, started clacking this new business into the minutes on his laptop, but slowed and then ceased under Jim’s glare and the deliberate shakes of Pastor Mark’s head. Jim muttered, “Jack, go ahead and strike that.”

Against the now-hushed table, quiet but for Jack tapping the backspace key, Cathy forgot herself for a moment. She clenched her jaw and lowered her brow at the sanctimonious woman. What was she even doing here? Cathy relaxed her face to neutral and tallied up the people who for sure already knew about Ashlee. By her estimation, three or four new sets of ears were hearing about her fallen daughter for the time. The owner of one of those sets, Liz Stelting, asked, “Oh, Cathy! What's going on with Ashlee?”

Cathy mentally gritted her teeth, but answered calmly. “Ashlee is just making some unusual choices these days, but otherwise she’s doing fine.” She dug her nails into the green binder and shot pleading eyes at Jim and Pastor Mark.

The preacher did the best he could. “Almighty God, we lift up Ashlee and all children of the Lord, that they might honor their father and mother on earth as their Father in Heaven. In Jesus’ name we pray …”

“Amen!” the committee responded, but none so loud as Jim, who rushed to say, “Thank you Pastor, thank you Charlotte, you’re in our prayers Cathy, Madge, do you have the building report?”

The meeting broke up half an hour later, and though all she wanted to do was leave in a huff, Cathy had seen this sort of thing play out too many times. Taking a breath and pasting a smile on her face, she circulated around the women making small talk. The cicadas in the trees were just beginning to bellow as Cathy sat down in the car to wind her way up to the hills overlooking Roanoke.

***

Fred Vance relaxed on the couch with a beer and early “Law and Order” on the TV. He’d been working from home today, taking advantage of the policies the bank had in place for the young guys, and had cleared his desk a bit early. Cathy’s return was imminent, but he’d done everything he knew how to please her, and predicted a list of fewer than ten things to do when she came through the door.

He’d mainly stayed out of her way since the invitation had shown up. It had brought out the worst in her. Cathy wasn't into psychology or therapy, but Fred had guessed for years that she had some OCD going on. Her first reaction to trouble was to become an over-controlling -- he stopped himself. Cathy was feeling betrayed and frightened; finding out that Ashlee was not only gay, but getting gay-married, too, was the horror of horrors that nothing had prepared her for. Fred did his best to keep her happy, ready so step in with a hug, a kiss, and a quickie when her grit ran out.

Fred wasn’t particularly thrilled either, but he knew he should have seen it coming a mile away. Cathy had thrown her the boyfriend/marriage question a hundred times, and every time she had, Ashlee had redoubled her career ambitions. Poor girl; just like her mother.

The front door banged open, and Cathy’s blurred figure raced directly to the home office. Fred paused the show and set his drink on the coffee table.

“Fred!” Cathy screamed. “You’ve got a plate and a cup in here! Come do something about it!”

Fred set his lips for a benign smile. In the office, Cathay was sorting the papers on his desk, muttering while she organized them into the system she had set up years before. Fred carried his dirty dishes to the kitchen, but stayed put by the sink. He was surprised to hear his wife slump onto the couch. Only one thing; a new record. He opened the fridge and extracted a canned cocktail, then returned to the couch.

Cathy accepted the drink, and Fred sat by her. “Which one is this?” she asked.

Fred rolled out the synopsis: “It’s the psychopath kid who shoots another kid in an abandoned building. Stone can’t convict, but tries to get him for a similar shooting when the kid was eleven.” They’d both seen it at least fifteen times.

“Oh, yeah,” said Cathy, who cracked the drink and took a very long sip before stopping for air.

“How are you feeling, honey pie?” said Fred.

“People need to recognize what’s appropriate for a meeting.”

“Who was it this time?”

“Charlotte. Why was she even there? She’ll get the money we give her, and she can take it or leave it.”

Fred read the situation. He didn’t have to ask if Ashlee came up. Cathy’s red eyes said everything. He wrapped an arm around her and stroked her breast, but an authoritative hand guided it down to her waist. He paused the TV and focused on his wife.

“It was the damned invitations. I’m sure her sister got one. That presumptuous cow stopped the meeting to ask Mark to pray for us. As if we need her prayers. The way they looked at me; as if I were the one getting married to that girl.

‘A son’s a son …” Fred began the incantation.

“Yes I know!”

“You still don’t think we should have seen it coming?”

Cathy considered the question for the thousandth time, but again shook her gray bobbed hair.

Frank said, “I guess we never really asked. Not a lot of boyfriends.”

“I didn’t have a lot of boyfriends, either” countered Cathy. “I had too much to do. Waiting for you was the best thing I ever did.”

Fred knew she meant it every time. Feeling lucky, he went for the breast again, and it was a full three seconds before she slapped him away.

“Not now!”

Frd’s grasp retreated to her hip. “I feel a little bad about missing it,” he said.

“I can’t do it. I can’t walk into a place where everything I believe in will be made a mockery of. And the way she talked to me when she showed up with that woman! Like I was some kind of -- ignorant beast!”

“You didn’t much care for ‘If you loved me you would be happy about it’?”

“No, I did not.Questioning my love for my own child, daring me to love her? That behavior is for teenagers. Now she can’t even call to say anything? Just mailed instructions to be in Alexandria on a random Thursday, or else? No thank you.”

Fred could see her point. Ashlee had dropped a bomb on her parents and expected them to be happy about it, then gotten indignant when it wasn’t instantly perfect. Cathy wasn’t the type to be scolded. He’d been impressed at Ashlee’s new-found gumption, but Cathy’s iron will was old and strong.

Cathay continued, “Don’t tell me I’m missing my daughter’s wedding. You can go if you want, but I’ll wait for when she has a real wedding: to a man, not this farce.”

Fred wondered if he should tell her. He’d taken one look at “Felicity” and seen it right away. Still, he/she/it/they seemed nice enough, Ashlee looked happy for once -- before the shouting had started, at least -- and Cathy didn’t need anything added to her burdens.

***

“She wouldn’t even listen to me then, and she hasn’t called me since. I feel like the ball’s in her court,” said Ashlee. “I hope they come, but If they don’t, I’m not going to wait.”

“It just makes me sad that they’re not going to meet my mom and dad.” Felicity said. "I don’t like you guys not getting along.”

“Well, we can’t all have perfect parents like yours, Felicity," riposted Ashlee, with a bit more edge than she’d intended.

“Well, your parents seem like very different people.” This came from Chelsea, a licensed clinical social worker, the woman whose head was talking to them out of Ashlee’s laptop screen. The fifty-ish lady with close cropped gray hair and glasses was seeing them for the third time now.

Ashlee considered this, “I wouldn’t be where I am now, I guess, without them, the good or the bad stuff.”

“That could be something you can reconnect to her with when the time is right,” suggested Chelsea. "I think she takes pride in you and would be happy to hear how she succeeded.”

“Ooh! A kitty!” squealed Felicity.

Ashlee sat back on the couch and counted down from 10. A striped orange and black cat had just filled the laptop screen on the coffee table in front of her and Felicity, obscuring the therapist’s face. This was going to take at least another five minutes to resolve.

“Her name is Tantomile! Sorry about that. I keep telling her she needs a license to be on screen, but she never listens.”

Chelsea scooped up the mottled moggie and tossed it into the oblivion off-camera. Ashlee had never been in therapy before, but expected that every session would be rigidly scheduled with precise goals. Felicity had been in the hands of headshrinkers for years, but she bounced around like a little girl at a fair.

“I love cats!” Felicity began.”We never really had one, but we left the doors open a lot in the summer, and we always had cat food on the porch and they always hung out with us. We had Mittens, there was Socks and Tuxy, Tummyboy, Stevie, Blanquita, … and … after we get married, do you think we could have a kitty-cat?”

Ten shades of red alert blazed through Ashlee. A live animal shitting in a box, dependent on them, distracting Felicity just when she was getting her life together; Ashlee couldn’t believe she had ever thought about having a baby. Don’t be negative Nancy, remembered Ashlee.

“It could be something down the road, Felicity. I think we’ll find a bigger place soon and I wouldn’t want to move it.” Ashlee threw out a date, remembering the time-bound goals Felicity was trying out. “What about a Christmas present?”

Felicity frowned. “Christmas cats never last. It’s bad luck. But you’re right, let’s move first. Oh, Chelsea! We think there might be a two-bedroom opening up in our building. We could be going really soon after the wedding!”

“Oh, how exciting!” chirped Chelsea. "That would be an easy move.”

Ashlee couldn’t hold back Nancy any longer. She’d been saving this for therapy just so Chelsea could referee. “We looked at one. They only have the, like, roommate style places; you know, two bedrooms, each with a bathroom, around the living room. I’m really worried that we’re going to separate into our own spaces. Felicity’s going to have her bathroom, I’ll have mine, and we’re going to fight about keeping it clean.” Ashlee didn’t look at Felicity, but went on, her voice shaking, “I want to be able to live together with her, and learn not to be such a bitch about things.” Ashlee closed her eyes and slumped on the couch, then felt Felicity’s arms around her, followed by the touch of a kiss and hot tears on her cheek.

Ashlee heard Chelsea over the speakers: “That’s so sweet, Felicity! And, Ashlee, that’s a really big insight. Isn’t it important, though, for you two to have some space?”

Ashlee didn’t look up yet. “I just know I would walk in and lose my shit.”

“Babe,” sang Felicity, “I didn’t even think about that. We can do it! I even dried the shower every day this week except Wednesday!”

The goal had been to miss only two days. “Yeah, that’s pretty good,” agreed Ashlee with a smile and a chuckle.

“You two are so cute together!” exclaimed Chelsea. “I want to hear how this goes. The wedding is next week, isn’t it? Thursday night, right? Are you guys going crazy yet?”

“Yes,” confirmed Ashlee. “I mean, yes it’s on Thursday. We couldn’t get anything else on short notice. But I don’t think we’re going crazy. My friend Sarah is the maid of honor and she’s taking the lead, and one of our co-workers, Uyen --” Ashlee saw Chelsea writing and interjected, “It’s spelled U-Y-E-N, but you say it ‘when’.”

Chelsea nodded and motioned as if scratching her error out. “That’s interesting. Is she Vietnamese?”

Felicity took over. “Her family is. I think her dad is actually from Vietnam. She’s taking me to the salon on Thursday before the wedding. We found a place that works with transgender women. Ashlee’s lucky; she can go anywhere, and Sarah’s taking her. Uyen’s got my dress at her place so Ashlee doesn’t see it. It’s from the same shop that’s doing my hair and makeup. Ashlee’s got a gray tux with a purple tie. She looks delicious in it with this short hair! My dress is white with purple, but that’s all Ashlee gets to know.”

Chelsea asked, “Purple? Is that lesbian purple? My wife and I thought about that, but we went with red. And I was definitely the groom. You wouldn't catch me in a dress.” She added with a laugh.

Ashlee smiled. “Felicity here is totally the bride. And we didn’t even know about the purple thing. Felicity’s birthstone is blue, but it’s overdone, and mine’s purple; amethyst, actually.

Chelsea made a note and continued: “I am really excited to hear about this. Tell me all about it after it happens. We only have a few minutes left, so Felicity, do you want to set any goals for this week, or is getting married enough?”

“I want to make Ashlee’s life easier, so I’m going to make sure the place is clean before I go off to school every day, so we can have our evenings. SHe’s helping me keep track of homework, so I don't want to add to her stress.” chirped Felicity brightly.

Ashlee almost cried. This might work out after all.