The Lies that Bind by Judith Van Gieson Page B

old lady that nobody notices.”
    â€œThere’s got to be more to it than your body.”
    â€œMen are easy; you like them, they like you. My mother always liked men; maybe it’s genetic.”
    Cindy probably remembered that my mother was a lonesome highway that I didn’t often travel on, but she took a tentative step. “They say the best thing you can do for your daughter is give her a happy mother. Was your mother happy, Neil?”
    â€œWhy not?” I asked. “She always did exactly what she wanted to do.” That was about as far as I was willing to go. “What about yours? “
    â€œAre you kidding? She knows duty, she knows doing the right thing, she knows survival, but happy? That’s one word she’ll never know the meaning of.”
    The phone rang again. Cindy picked it up on the third ring. She listened for a while, said okay and hung up. “Whit broke his glasses,” she told me. “He’s downtown at the Small Business Association. He works there as a volunteer, helping minority businesses get started, and he wants me to bring him his extra pair.”
    Working as a volunteer for anything sounded out of character for the self-centered Whit. I let that one go by, but I had my say about the rest of it. “Whit wants you to go all the way downtown to bring him another pair of glasses?”
    â€œIt’s not that far, and I can drop you off at Mighty on the way.”
    â€œThe Mighty van will pick me up here. Whit’s a grown man. Why can’t he just tape his glasses back together?”
    â€œThat’s the way grown men are, Neil. Spoiled. The ones who grew up rich anyway. They’re told from childhood that they’re wonderful, and they believe every word of it.” She stood up and grabbed her purse. “I think we should get going. He’ll complain if I’m late.”
    â€œLet him.”
    â€œIt’s not worth the aggravation. Believe me.”
    It was her house and her husband, and she was determined, so I followed her out to her car, a beat-up blue station wagon with Arizona plates and a country club sticker on the rear window.
    On our way to Mighty we passed the Arroyo del Oso soccer field, where a girls’ game was in progress. The girls wore short plaid uniforms and knee socks. One of them scored a goal, and while her teammates cheered, she ran down the field strong and graceful as an antelope. When she reached the end, she did a cartwheel and a flip that were victory in motion. Some progress had been made in the last twenty years, I thought. Girls had learned how to run.

8
    W HEN C INDY DROPPED me off at Mighty, Ramón Ortiz was standing at the counter, surrounded by admirers, two miniskirted young women with big blond hair and one older woman with tight blue curls.
    â€œIs my car ready?” I asked, pushing through to the counter.
    â€œNeil Hamel, right?” He studied me with eyes that seemed considerably less cavalier than they had in the morning.
    â€œRight.”
    He pulled out my bill, and I paid with plastic. He searched through the keyboard and found my keys among a bunch that had probably been sitting on their hooks as long as or longer than mine. There were only two keys on my ring—one to the Nissan’s door, one to its trunk—but some people kept all their keys on one ring, I noticed: keys to their cars, their houses, their mailboxes, maybe even their hearts. They left them here all day on Ramón Ortiz’s keyboard, disobeying one of nature’s more important laws: never trust a man who knows he’s good-looking. A guy wearing a grease-monkey suit came in from the shop and took a set of keys from the rack.
    â€œYou guys aren’t very careful with your keys,” I said to Ramón.
    He handed me mine with a look that said: So? His words, however, were “What is it you do?”
    â€œI’m a lawyer,” I replied, expecting to be either asked for