Free Whirl Away by Russell Wangersky Page B

mortgages and different rates of interest, all being spun together into a knot while the judge hunted for fairness like an Italian hog hunting for truffles it can’t see but still scents.
    Every single case reduced me to almost complete, thudding despair, wave after wave of hopelessness passing over me and leaving me behind in the trough, followed by the next case that picked me up and flung me farther ashore. I couldn’t stop reading, scrolling down through the legal websites and picking off every single case where two people with the same name were battling each other. Sometimes I got lucky and it was a probate case instead, a brother and sister fighting about some obscure or unclear clause in a will, and it was a relief to be able to follow the skeleton of the argument without havingto invest anything in it except professional legal curiosity.
    There was nothing pleasant or tidy about where I was, no legal shorthand that was going to make it all right. There was no excuse or even a clear explanation—and I wasn’t offering or expecting one. It just was, and it had been from the very moment I realized something was wrong.
    Mary had a familiar, sad half smile when she left my office, and she trailed a finger along the line of my jaw from my ear to my chin, cool, smooth skin, and she adjusted her clothes briefly before she left, like she was shaking herself into them, a motion that, to me, has a curious formality—and a curious finality—about it every single time I see it.
    You’re supposed to step back every now and then in my job. I kept trying to remind myself of that: step back to cut through the emotion and the fury and find the analytical lines that I used to use to make rational decisions—the sharp lines that clear points are based on.
    Clients always want to explain what happened, and I always have to keep myself from stepping right in and stopping them. Why stop? Because like any lawyer anywhere, I bill by the hour, whether the discussion is useful to the case or not. It’s like clients feel they have to regale me with the reasons first; that it’s essential we spend a bunch of time on “she didn’t care about me anymore” or “he picked up some tramp” before we do anything else. The whys don’t matter to me, I’ve always wanted to say, and the hows matter even less. So let’s cut to the chase and get the one thing done that almost everyone can agree on.
    There was a time in divorce law when everything was essential, when blame was paramount and critical, when scarlet letters actually left a mark, but that’s an archaic concept now.
    People always want to put an explanation out there for why it all failed, for why they won’t get to be the couple putting the fiftieth wedding anniversary advertisement in the newspaper, both of them staring out of the photograph like slightly amused survivors of a long infantry campaign. You always see the ones who made fifty; there’s no newspaper ad for “crashed and burned two years in.”
    People don’t want to hear that the successes are as arbitrary and chance-ridden as the failures, and that the reasons are only justifications for much more deeply hidden flaws. Even if reasons mattered in law, I’d have to tell them that I won’t ever believe it was that simple anyway. I would never accept it was all one person’s fault, no matter how egregious or horrible his or her behaviour. I’d like to tell clients we should spend the time in my office concentrating on what comes next, on where they’re going, and not waste any more time worrying about how they got here.
    There was a time when Beth and I spent every moment together. Joined at the hip, her friends used to say. It’s trite, but every couple has to have those moments tucked somewhere into their joint past; otherwise, they wouldn’t end up being couples, would they? No matter how hard things get later,