Drown #13: the story we tell, part 3

August 2086. Angelo Shaw is 24. Jeremiah Day is 29.


She told him what her name was, but Angelo had already forgotten it. She was wearing the brightest top in the whole room. It was like a beacon. "I can't help it," he said. "It's just like you're a tulip and I'm a honeybee."

She laughed. He couldn't quite tell if she was laughing for him or at him.

"But don't worry, I don't sting. I'm just after the sweetness."

"Are you trying to hit on me? I bet you don't even have a job."

"Nah, baby, I got a job," Angelo said. "I’m a lawyer."

"You’re too young to be a lawyer."

"Alright, I’m a junior, but exam passed and licensed! I’m a lawyer. Wanna see my card?"

He handed her a card with his name in gold plating. His firm would only print him twenty cards, being a junior, but she could have every one of them.

"Huh," she said. "So why’d you want to be a lawyer."


"Let me tell you a story. See, my dad, he was the greatest guy I ever knew. Sadly, he’s not with us anymore..."

"Oh, I am so sorry to hear that."

Angelo’s father was not dead—he was sentenced to twenty years in prison for money laundering—but a little bit of sympathetic misunderstanding never hurt anybody.

"My father taught me three things," Angelo said. "First, that people aren't perfect. Second, that people get in trouble sometimes and they need help. Third, never let anybody take you for a fool. I guess I like to think that, no matter what kind of trouble a person gets into, people are generally good on the inside. Like he tried to be. Like I try to be. Because that's where it counts."

Her smile softened and she tilted her head just ever so slightly.

"Okay," she said. "How about you buy me dinner, then, hot shot."

"Yeah. I got forty-six dollars. We can get some hamburgers."


The hamburgers were a hit, as were the wine spritzers and his ravishing humor. She was into him. He'd get her number, at least. He would have to remember her name before she realized that he forgot it.

—

When Angelo's father left them, he wanted to make sure that his family was taken care of. Angelo's law degree was paid for in full, even though he'd never gotten better than mediocre grades in school. But now Angelo was man of the family, and it was his duty to look after his mom and little sister. So he'd make the best of it. Although, his first case as a lawyer kind of felt like a sinking stone.

"Did you get me that deposit yet?"

Jeremiah slid a check for $100 onto the table.

"$100? What is this? I said the deposit was $500."


"Yeah, so this is your first job out of law school. Look, you're working out of the living room of your apartment and I don't know if you're going to deliver."

"I’m gonna do a good job," Angelo said. "See, I have a different kind of experience. It’s hard to explain."

"Well, we'll see," Jeremiah said. "I’ll get you the rest when you get me shared custody."

A man has to have honor, Angelo's father used to say. You do what you say you're going to do, you pay when you said you were going to pay.

Angelo had recently read an article that said a person could actually die of shock from pain, and that the kneecap was able to produce some of the most excruciating pain on the entire human body. Of course, he finally realized, that was why his dad used to have people kneecapped when they didn't pay their bills. It made so much sense now. Angelo wondered if his dad still had access to some of his old thugs from back in the day.

He'd keep that idea in his back pocket. 

"The unstable home environment was disproved," Angelo told him. "They found no reason to think the relationship was fickle or a detriment to Willow's home life. They found the opposite, actually."

"What did they find?"

"They wouldn’t say any more in the report. Shared custody is going to be a stretch. Willow is too young and she doesn’t know you. You moved yourself halfway across the country and that doesn't help. Now you have to prove why you think you're entitled to take a kid who barely knows you to South Carolina. They won't go for it. If you were local, I could get you half the week easy peasy. But this? It's a crapshoot man, you've made some bad choices."

"What bad choices?"


"First, you lied to me," Angelo scolded. "This was not a first offense. You have assault charges from college. Dude, if I can find these things, so can they. You have five counts of behavioral misconduct resulting in probation while you were stationed on Europa. That looks bad. You dumped two therapists before you stuck with the third. That looks bad. And there was a questionable incident registered from Three Lakes, Canada in 2082, while your wife was pregnant. The paramedics were called, but she didn’t press charges. What happened in Three Lakes?"

"It was nothing," Jeremiah said. "She just had a panic attack. That’s all. I never beat my wife!"

"What is she going to say?"


"You have to understand," Jeremiah pleaded. "My wife, she’s a little paranoid to say the least. She somehow got it into her head that I was trying to hold her captive there. As if I had her chained up to the bed or something. Like she couldn’t just walk out the door. Well, she said that I hated her family, I hated her friends, and I just wanted to keep her there all to myself. I let her talk to her family. She talked to her brother a couple of times. And after I’d gone through all that hassle to get my post changed and moved up there, she wanted to go home? So I was mad, but who wouldn’t be? She wanted to call Justin all the fucking time, and now I know why. Do you think it’s unreasonable that I didn’t want my wife to talk to this 'friend' she was obsessed with? She had people to talk to. She had me. She was fine. But then I got the draft letter and I just suggested that instead of moving back home, we could go to South Carolina. That night, she flipped out and started having a panic attack. She said that I would never let her go home. She thought she was losing the baby. I don’t know what she said to the paramedics, but they checked her out and she was fine. Not a mark on her. But she ended up calling her mom from the hospital. Before I knew it, we were moving back to dear old Lakeside Heights and I never said a damn thing about it, even though we went to stay with her parents who hated me. I’m not a bad person."

But Angelo knew that Jeremiah wasn't a good person, either. Angelo had met truly good people and truly bad people, and more often than not, he had met all kinds of people in between. He hadn't quite worked out where on that spectrum Jeremiah fell, but Jeremiah sure could tell a story. That might work to their advantage.


"We’re going to have to try to prove that," Angelo said. "You can’t lie to me. If you lie to me, I can’t help you and this won’t work. What do we have to work with? Friends? Family? Co-workers? Any ex-girlfriends who would speak highly of you? What about this girl from college, would she vouch for you?"

Jeremiah shook his head. "That’s probably not a good idea."

"We need to prove that her leaving was a shock to you. That’s why you had South Carolina worked out. That's why you lost your temper. What else can you give me to work with?"

"What am I paying you for if I have to come up with the ideas?"

"You haven’t paid me yet," Angelo said.


"Fine," Jeremiah said. "She sent me pictures while I was on Europa. You know, dirty ones."

"And that means what?"

"That means she was still acting like my wife. That means she was screwing around behind my back while sending me nudes like we were still married. That's why I was so blindsided by it. That's why I was so mad. So maybe she cheated, but I never thought she would leave me."

"Okay," Angelo said. "What’s the date stamp on those? When was the most recent?"

"Probably 2084. Spring or summer."

"That’s a year after you left. We might be able to work with that. We can say that was evidence she intended to participate in the marriage. I mean, if the marriage was toast, why would she send you nudes? A more recent date would be better, though. Because yeah, it's after you left, but she stopped sending them at some point, didn't she? See if you can find something more recent."

"I’ll see what I have," Jeremiah said.

"Listen, if you don't fuck this up, you actually have a case. I mean, what do they really have on you? So you banged on a fucking door? So what? So you got angry and sent some texts? What dickhead doesn’t spout off texts he doesn’t mean? Sure, it makes you a fucking asshole, but assholes have rights to their kids, too. She can't take that from you, but Jesus, you have to play by the rules."

Jeremiah grunted.

"And get me the rest of my fucking money," Angelo said.

—

notes: her name was Aliyah, by the way. Neither I nor Angelo ever remembered that until I had to go and look in game, lol! Maybe we'll remember if she calls him back for a second date. 

—

a quickie note on Angelo Shaw and the timelines: If you happen to remember Angelo from the old old LH blog and if you do the math, there is no way that Angelo could be 24 years old in 2086. He'd actually be about 17. Which, of course, is also far too young to be a lawyer. Even if a young one.

But when I envisioned this character for the book draft of this story, the character who would be Jeremiah's lawyer, it absolutely HAD to be Angelo Shaw and nobody else. From the trajectory he was on and the events that happened in his family's life, this is exactly the man I imagine he would grow up to be. He was the smarmy little kid who wasn't sure if he'd grow up to be a sports star or a movie star or a rock star, but in the end, his revered father was sent off to jail when he was at an impressionable yet helpless age, so he decided to pursue criminal defense instead. So I time-warped his age to make him 24 in 2086.

The years he missed just would have been law school anyway, so probably pretty uneventful. Just imagine there were lots of women and textbooks. ;)