Free Whirl Away by Russell Wangersky

fall, even though I always wonder who the hell really knows what’s going to do the most damage to kids.
    In Barrett versus Barrett, Ontario Court of Appeal, the husband wanted a cut in support payments even though he hadn’t ever bothered to pay anything. Ever. And the wife wanted every missing payment back to the dawn of time. The total her lawyer had worked up at the bottom of his submission looked like the kind of number you usually associatewith a lottery win. That’s a case where you can tell that someone—probably everyone—is bound to end up dissatisfied.
    There was a French case I once saw where everyone was accusing everyone else of spousal violence, and the kids told the judge they didn’t want to live full-time with either parent. The husband said the wife tried to run him over with the car, and the wife said she had her right hand slammed in a door. I can imagine the daughters, three little girls, lined up prim and proper and serious in pressed dresses in front of the judge. Their names in the court documents were a simple triptych— A , B and C —and in his ruling, the judge made each one of the girls out to be more mature than anyone else in the courtroom. And he was probably right.
    Mary had left before the sleet started, when it was still fat drops of rain weeping down on the outside of the big streetside windows. I could tell that it was getting colder outside. The chemistry of weather was changing right in front of my eyes, so when the drips started to form into a lacy skein of wet ice at the bottom of the glass, I wasn’t really surprised.
    I watched her go, watched her heading down to the underground car park half a block away where the firm leases a handful of spaces. I never have to scrape the car windows when I leave work, but the route to almost anywhere is an uphill right-hand turn that’s slippery whenever there’s a snowstorm or ice.
    Mary had the collar of her long coat pulled up around her neck and ears, and when she pushed her way into the rain, she pulled her head down into her coat so that it lookedas if her neck had completely disappeared. I found myself hoping that she was warm enough, that she wasn’t going to get soaking wet before she got down the short hill to her car.
    I always think of Mary the way I know her best, eight buttons down on a smooth blue blouse, her arms always open.
    While she’d been here, we’d left the blinds open the whole time, even though there’s a hotel across the street with at least twenty rooms where anyone could just walk to the window and peer across into my office. You get to a point where there’s a grim kind of fatalism to it all, where you know the end result is that you’re going to get caught, and the only real questions are when and where and how. Because nothing except being caught will ever be able to break the spell.
    Mary would be known as the adulteress if she cropped up in Smith versus Smith-Coté—Smith-Coté’s lawyer obviously favours the classic language, and I expected a “heretofore” to pop up at any moment—and Mary, some version of Mary, appeared in her supporting role as mistress in Harris versus Pender, and Tobin versus Tobin, and Henry versus Barber-Henry too.
    I used to get in trouble with clients sometimes, because they would say I had barely included the other woman when I was drawing up the nuts and bolts of their case, dismissing her in too few words, because she mattered, often passionately, to everyone involved. My problem was that, before Mary, I wanted to point out the far from surprising fact that a third party wasn’t that original, that a sudden extra was always the protagonist in someone else’s two-act play, entering right before the climax and staying onstage all the way throughthe short sharp slide to the denouement. But that, as much as she mattered to everyone involved, she didn’t matter a bit to the law