Free Whirl Away by Russell Wangersky Page A

anymore.
    It wasn’t that simple in my own life, where the other woman was Mary. Suddenly it wasn’t the way I’d always told my clients it would be—especially the women—the way I’d told them the other woman was just a transition, that she was only a bit player, and not to focus on her because the root causes of a marital collapse were sunk far deeper than whoever had recently arrived, the real roots were deep in the wreckage of a marriage they had already lost.
    But with Mary, it was right and natural, the way things are supposed to be. And believe me, I know exactly how stupid that sounds. I’ve probably heard the same thing a hundred times myself from clients.
    Sometimes, when everyone else is winding up for the day, Mary comes in to help me finish up the paperwork. I’ve spent the tattered edge of a hundred days watching my partners leave the office purposefully looking straight ahead and away, waving their good-night waves without even looking at us. Williams and Wright are perfectly happy convincing themselves they haven’t seen anything if it’s something they don’t want to see.
    Mary has been working with me for six years and she knows just about everything there is to know about me: my shirt size, my shoe size, the way I love to touch the wispy hair on the back of her neck. Yes, Mary knows way too much. She knows when my wife’s birthday is, and twice she’s bought Beth’s birthday present because I was tied up late in court.
    Mary knows both my kids, Will and Liz, and sometimes they’ve sat at her desk for hours while I finished up with a client, Liz with her tongue stuck out and a pen looking oversized in her small hand. Mary’s got some of her drawings up on the side of a filing cabinet, stuck there with tape because Liz gave them to her. William always wants to talk to Mary—always wants to talk to anyone, actually—his words the pure little ringing bell that is a young boy’s voice. I wonder about the jumble of emotions she must feel every time she looks at those kids.
    â€œChrist, Michael,” Mary has said to me more than once. “I can’t go on like this. It’s ripping me apart.”
    She’s right. And I can’t either.
    This is plain exquisite and unstoppable hell.
    I know there are people who can go cold turkey, can decide to go back and try to rebuild the house that has crashed down all around them. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how they surrender what they’ve got, or how they could possibly go back, knowing that the marriage they’re going back to will be even worse than the despair they were already in. That it will be every bad thing it was, along with extra servings of guilt and blame. You look at the ceiling in a house with a leaking roof and you always see the patches where the plaster is shot from water coming in, never noticing the parts where there’s no mark at all.
    In Matheson versus Matheson, there were no children, but there was twenty-eight years of combined property—including the matrimonial home and a cottage and an RV—and still,with all those years of water under the bridge, one of the two had made a list of every single wedding present, and whose side of the family each one came from. The judge bravely marched through the list, step by step, in his decision—red wineglasses to this party, white wine to the other—until he got to an entire set of copper-bottomed pots that he suggested should stay together, even if the marriage couldn’t.
    So, who gets the good memories, and the memories of the meals cooked in those damned pots? Who gets the inside jokes, now hollow because no one’s left who understands them anyway?
    In Royal versus Moore, they were fighting over the fact that they each brought condos and prior lives into the merged equation, and unravelling the tangle was as complicated as calculus—percentages and