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It's hard being Lillian Belle Rosemary Cleary.
And if I didn't know that already, Bonita, my legal secretary supreme and secondary therapist, kept reminding me.
"Carita," she said, shaking her head and handing me the pink highlighter at my hyperventilated request so that I could mark another obscure legal point I needed to memorize for my upcoming appellate argument. "You make this so much more difficult than it needs to be."
So spank me, I'm a lawyer, and complicating things at a high hourly rate is my specialty.
I ignored Bonita's implied protest and recited a choice quote I had just underlined in pink, and Bonita typed it into my laptop for future reference. We were both sitting on my shiny terrazzo floor on pure-cotton yoga mats. I was only on the seventh legal opinion of questionable value for my argument, busily color-coding impressive language from jurists I hoped to twist to the benefit of my client, a charlatan to be sure, but not without his charm and definitely with the liability policy that would pay me.
Thinking of how much work I still had to do made me gulp air and jump up to wash my hands and face.
"I wouldn't be you," Bonita said, sighing as I plopped down again beside her. This from a widow with five accident-prone children.
While I reached for the yellow highlighter, Benicio, Bonita's teenage son who insisted that we call him Benny, pounded his size-twelve boots into the kitchen, where in one gulp he consumed about three dollars' worth of my GMO-free, hormone-free, fat-free organic milk -- slogan: "Our Cows Aren't on Drugs." He was cutting my grass, apparently at about a square foot per quart of milk, and relentlessly bitching that I didn't have any real peanut butter.
"This soy peanut butter sucks," he said, eating a spoonful straight from the jar. "Positively sucks," Benny reiterated, as if somehow I had managed to miss his point.
"Please don't talk like that to Lilly," Bonita said, her voice low and sweet.
"But this soy stuff is so gross."
Before we finessed the soy peanut butter debate further, Bearess, my one-hundred-pound rottweiler that I inherited from a dingbat mass-murderer wanna-be, lifted her head and growled at the front door.
"Doorbell," I said, stifling the urge to jump up and scream that everybody had to get out and leave me alone with my hearing transcripts, my depositions, my photocopied legal opinions, and my multicolored highlighters.
"I didn't hear a doorbell," Benny said.
Bearess growled again and rose from her organic cedar-chip dog bed, which she drags around the house to follow the rotating patches of sunlight through the windows and which cost me not much less than tuition at my first community college on my seven-year quest for a law degree. The dog advanced on the front door, even as the bell rang.
"Told you," I said, pulling myself away from the thousands of sheets of paper that I would boil down into a convincing appellate argument to save my client, a pet psychic/alien-abductee counselor.
Edgy with visions of having a judge in a black robe smite me from behind the appellate bench, I opened the door without peeking, as it was the middle of a bright afternoon and having a large celebrity rottweiler vastly reduced the fear of home invasions. Besides, this was Southgate, a Sarasota neighborhood with safe, middle-class streets. I lived on Tulip Street and one didn't have home invasions on Tulip Street.
"Lilly Belle, my old sweetheart," bellowed a longhaired man in cutoffs, standing barefoot in my doorway. He was built like a middleweight boxer with big, big hands and a face that looked like he had spent about a hundred years in the bright subtropical sunshine. His T-shirt was a crudely painted white dove flitting among red opium poppies -- my brother Delvon's handiwork.
"Farmer Dave," I said, and Bearess stopped growling and stuck her big black-and-tan mug in between us until Dave petted her. Then I let him hug me, biting back my twenty questions and sniffing him, primeval and patchouli.
"Why aren't you at my apple orchard?" I gave in to the primary question. Dave was the caretaker of my 180-acre heavily mortgaged apple orchard in north Georgia, as well as my mad-hatter brother Delvon's best friend.
" 'On the road again,' " he sang out in a decent mimic of Willie Nelson's theme song. Willie is Farmer Dave's secondary god, next to illegalities of the nonviolent persuasion. Willie worship marginally explained the two pigtails Farmer Dave's head sprouted and the long, wayward gray beard.
"You left my orchard for a road trip?" I snapped, imagining rats burrowing through my house and barn and the trees withering from neglect, never to bear fruit again, while Dave went on a frolic.
"Ah, Delvon's up there, now that he's done saving your life and the GBI put him out of business. He's taking care of things. Gave me a chance to get out of Georgia for a while."
Dave grabbed me again, kissed me on the cheek, and was heading for my mouth when the phone rang. As I moved toward it, I pointed to Bonita and said, "Bonita, meet Dave Baggwell. Dave, meet Bonita Hernández de Vasquez. And this is Benicio, her son, my alleged yardman."
"Benny," Benicio corrected, glowering at me as I grabbed up the phone.
"You can't leave that mile-long truck out there," screeched my neighbor, the hall monitor of the universe. "I'll call the police. It's a violation of clause two of the neighborhood covenants."
"Move to a condo, you blue-haired Nazi," I screeched back. I hung up the phone with a clunk.
While Bonita and Dave eyed each other cautiously, I looked out the front window. It was a pretty big truck for a U-Haul. The phone started ringing again, no doubt Mrs. Covenant Nazi next door. "What's in the truck?"
Wildcat Wine. Copyright © by Claire Matturro. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Excerpted from Wildcat Wine by Claire Hamner Matturro
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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