Free Dearly Departed by David Housewright

tabletop and bellowed, “Woman, where’s my dinner?!”

    C ynthia made a dish of braised chicken and sweet peppers. Or rather she reheated it in the microwave. A personal chef had created it, a woman Cynthia hired to come to her home once a month and whip up about a dozen different menus for two and put them in the freezer. She’s a helluva cook. The personal chef, I mean. And the price, about three hundred bucks and expenses, isn’t so much when you compare it to a decent restaurant. But the idea of someone coming to your home and making your meals left a sour taste in my mouth. I told Cynthia so, and she very calmly explained that, unlike me, she was too busy to cook for herself much less for both of us. Besides, she didn’t know how to cook.
    Her mother hadn’t been around to teach her; an alcoholic, she had run off when Cynthia was just six, leaving her daughter in the care of elderly—and brutal—grandparents who died within months of each other when she was twelve, leaving her a ward of the state. Cynthia drifted between foster homes, halfway houses, and the streets, unloved and unloving, with drugs and alcohol her only friends. After attempting to take her own life on her seventeenth birthday, Cynthia was mandated by a court-ordered detention into a local snake pit with some major-league crazies. It might have been the best thing that ever happened to her. The experience shocked her into a kind of sanity and ignited in her a passion for survival that still burns red hot. Upon her release, she embraced the straight life with both hands. She earned her GED, put herself through a three-and-three program—three years of undergraduate studies and three years of law school at the University of Minnesota—on strength of will alone and finishing tenth in her class. Along the way she taught herself how to view life critically, becoming what my father calls “a woman of substance” as well as a lawyer. Believe me, if Cynthia could hang ATTORNEY in neon above her town house, she would.
    As for the rough edges, she pays a woman to teach her manners, how to walk and talk and present herself in nearly any social situation. She pays a woman to select her clothes, making sure she’s always fashionable. She pays another woman to buy her furniture. And she pays a woman to cook gourmet meals. These women obviously care about their work, creating for Cynthia a look of quiet elegance, and only someone who knows her well could sense that it doesn’t quite fit. I know because I’ve spent a lot of time with Cynthia over the past eight months. I had met her while working a case. Re-met her I should say. She had defended the man who had killed my family with his car years earlier. At first that fact bothered me a lot. Then, not so much. Now when I’m not with her, I’m alone.
    After we ate, I helped Cynthia with the dishes—partly because I’m a warm, sensitive, caring man for the millennium and partly because she gives me that look when I don’t.
    Later, stretched out on Cynthia’s expensive Ethan Allen sofa, I sipped the red wine the sales clerk at the liquor warehouse recommended to her while Cynthia drank Catawba juice. She hasn’t had an alcoholic beverage in—what?—nearly eight years now. We were listening to a Nicholas Payton CD. The CD belonged to me. Mostly Cynthia listens to heavy-metal junk played by bands I’ve never heard of—a direct contradiction to the image she so carefully cultivates. I once offered my opinion of her taste in music. But only once. She responded with language that would make the most obnoxious rap artist blush. You can take the woman out of the street, but you can’t take the street out of the woman.
    The phone rang, and Cynthia got up to answer it. My eyes followed her as she removed the cellular phone from its cradle, extending the antenna with one quick motion. I listened to her side of the conversation, watching her as she paced the dining and living rooms, absentmindedly