Free Lily White by Susan Isaacs Page A

cracked her forehead against the edge of my desk. “Aaah!” she cried, a yelp of pain.
    A shudder chattered my teeth and shivered my shoulders, that frisson that comes when you empathize too intensely. For that second, my forehead throbbed in the same spot where she’d hit her head. I buzzed Sandi, requesting a cup of ice, fast. I must have sounded a little desperate because Sandi rushed in with it seconds later. Already a huge red rectangle, like a ledge, was protruding from Mary’s brow. I wrapped the ice in a few tissues and pressed it against the bump. Sandi stood by. “How are you feeling?” I asked Mary after a minute.
    “A little …” Her lovely eyes, floating upward, looked slightly dopey. Tiny black pearls of mascara dotted her lashes.
    “You’ll be fine in a minute,” Sandi assured her, too briskly. Sandi’s only other job had been with a malpractice firm. She lived in constant terror of lawsuits. Over the years, I tried to reassure her: No one’s going to sue me, but if they do, I can handle it. Nothing I could say could bring her peace. Besides the usual secretarial chores, she stood eternally vigilant, protecting the two oversophisticated rubes—me and Chuckie—from certain ruin at the hands of the shyster lawyers our scum-bucket clients would hire to sue us.
    “I can manage now,” I told Sandi, who clearly did not believe she should leave me alone with a con man’s sweetie who had probably arranged her own subdural hematoma just so she could haul me into court and bring me to utter ruin. “I’m okay, Sandi. Thanks for the ice.” Reluctantly, casting a knowing and hostileglance at Mary (whose eyes, fortunately, were still swimming in her head), Sandi left.
    After a moment, Mary whispered: “Sorry.”
    I took off the ice. “Are you all right?”
    “I’m fine.” Except “fine” came out shakily, in two syllables.
    “Are you nauseous?” I asked. “Does your head hurt?”
    “No, really, I’m fine,” Mary reassured me, offering me a lovely smile. “Just, you know, getting bonked like that. Wowie!” She laughed at her own clumsiness. An instant later, she burst into sobs.
    “Does it hurt?” I asked.
    “It’s not … my head,” she explained, taking a giant hiccup of air. “It’s … Norman.”
    “It must be—” I was going to say something objective and mealy-mouthed, like “difficult,” but instead I said: “—awful for you.”
    “He’s in jail for
murder.
And it’s all my fault.” Her fault? I waited, putting on my Totally Neutral face, an expression of absolute indifference I’ve cultivated so as to do nothing to either encourage or discourage the person sitting across from me. It’s important that I hear it all: the craziness, the bizarre confessions, the monstrous lies that pour forth from that armchair by my desk. Mary took a large, loud gulp of air and went on. “If I hadn’t been premenstrual … I mean, I get food on the brain. All I was thinking about was stuffing myself. How I was going to stop at BK and shove in a Double Whopper with cheese. And onion rings—they’re so salty, I love ’em. I was thinking that I had to remember to buy those teeny Breath Asure things so Norman wouldn’t know I’d been to BK, because he gets super PO’d when I eat junk food. And I was thinking about a vanilla shake too. Even french fries. I’ve never been a big potato person, so you can imagine how bad off I was. So when I left for Motor Vehicle I grabbed the Bob ID instead of the Dan ID. All the names heuses, I get mixed up, even though the last time he tested me I only got one wrong. If I’d’ve used Dan, they wouldn’t have traced the car back to the apartment.”
    “They would have found him, though. His fingerprints were all over Bobette’s place.”
    “But we could’ve gotten away once we knew the old lady was dead. The cops would’ve had to search every house on Long Island. They wouldn’t have found us in time. Instead—” She started to cry