The Wishbones. Tom Perrotta

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      Stan knew he was going to be late for the fucking wake, but there was nothing he could do about it. He had to give Susie her goddam birthday present. That was the important thing. If Artie didn't like it, Artie could take his shiny saxophone and ram it up his managerial ass.

      He uncapped the bottle of Jack Daniels between his legs and took a long pull, keeping his eyes trained all the while on the door of the handsome white clapboard house with the wraparound porch that doubled as the law offices of Joel Silverblatt, attorney-at-law.

      “I'm Joel Shysterblatt,” Stan mumbled, “and if you suffer from hemorrhoids or tooth decay related to an automobile accident, I've got important information that you need to know.”

      When she first started working for the guy, Susie had loved it when he did his Joel Shysterblatt imitation.

      “That's him,” she'd say, covering her mouth to hold in the laughter. “That's Joel to a T.”

      Then, all of the sudden, she didn't find it so funny anymore.

      “Joel's a sweet guy,” she'd tell him. “He's not like you think.”

      “Come on,” Stan would say. “The guy's a shyster. He gets rich off other people's misery.”

      “You know what?” she'd tell him. “You don't know the first thing about the contingency fee system. It works to protect the little guy.”

      “The guy's a shyster, Susie.”

      “And stop using that word. It's anti-Semitic.”

      She was probably already fucking Shysterblatt by the time she started talking like that, but Stan was living in a dreamworld. Susie was his wife. They'd been happily married (at least in Stan's opinion) for eighteen months. It never occurred to him that she might be even the least bit attracted to her boss until he came home from a wedding one Saturday night and found an envelope on the kitchen table with his name on it.

      He lifted Susie's unwrapped gift off the passenger seat and studied it in the failing light. It was a framed enlargement of a picture taken on their honeymoon in Cancun. Stan couldn't remember who'd taken the picture, but he knew it couldn't have been him or Susie, since both of them were in it.

      The subject is Susie, standing on the beach in a pink bikini, squeezing water out of her hair with both hands. She's smiling, and her evenly tanned skin glistens with tiny droplets of water. Behind her, the ocean glows a rich shade of turquoise. At the left edge of the image, a man's arm reaches into the frame, offering the woman a towel. The arm belongs to Stan.

      He thought the picture captured something important about their relationship, something she needed to think about. If it hadn't been for the restraining order, he would've just walked into the office and laid it on her desk.

      “Happy Birthday,” he would've said. Nothing else. And then he would've walked out.

      He still couldn't believe she'd slapped him with that court order. He hadn't been violent with her except that one time, and even then, he'd only put her in the headlock to try to get her to listen. At the hearing, she'd accused him of stalking her and making death threats. On Joel's advice she'd taped his phone calls and kept a log of the time he spent spying on her from his car. Stan was surprised to learn that he'd called her on fourteen separate occasions on Valentine's Day, each time saying the exact same thing before hanging up: “Till death do us part, Susie. Till death do us part.” (He'd been drinking that day, and could only remember calling her five, maybe six times at the most.)

      Stan explained that he'd only been reminding her of her wedding vows, but the judge—probably an old law school chum of Shysterblatt's—had ruled in Susie's favor. So now Stan wasn't allowed within a hundred feet of the woman he'd married and still loved with all his heart. That was the fucking legal system for you.

      At five after seven, Joel Silverblatt emerged from his office and walked across the street. He tapped on the driver's-side window of Stan's LeBaron. Stan rolled it down.

      “Go home,” Silverblatt told him. “We just called the police.”

      “The police can't do anything. I'm more than a hundred feet away.”

      “You're drunk. You're sitting in your car with a bottle of whiskey. You want to lose your license on top of everything else?”

      “Everything else?” Stan repeated incredulously. “You mean like my wife?”

      The evening was breezy; Silverblatt reached up with both hands to protect his hairdo from the elements. He was a rubber-faced guy with a fleshy nose and dark circles under his eyes from trying to keep up with a woman half his age.

      “Go home, Stan. Go anywhere. Don't you have someplace else to be?”

      Stan thought of the wake. He thought of Artie, and of the cops on their way. He thought of Susie in Mexico, ocean water streaming from her hair. Suddenly he felt tired, too tired for any more trouble.

      “I'll go,” he said. “On one condition.”

      “What's that?”

      Stan poked the picture into Silverblatt's tummy. “Give her this. It's her birthday present.”

      With obvious reluctance, Silverblatt accepted the photograph. Stan started his car.

      “It's our honeymoon,” he explained. “That's me holding the towel.”