Free The Muffia by Ann Royal Nicholas Page A

Homeland Security and any number of other savvy data-miners would know what I was doing alone at night. Worse, I might find myself on all sorts of lists, receiving more than the usual amount of unwanted ads for sexual performance-enhancing drugs and paraphernalia. The truth was, since the Griswold case was still the law of the land, I had a legal right to keep my dildo private—which is not to say the authorities respect this privilege one hundred percent of the time. But I would do everything in my power to ensure the information didn't leak out to where it might hurt me, which would begin with shopping for a dildo at a brick & mortar store and paying cash.
     
    Even though I’m no longer practicing law, clearly I still think like a lawyer most of the time. It’s just that when I decided to go back to law after my divorce, I chose to be an “alternative” dispute resolver, rather than spending my days slugging out one side of a battle in court. Only it turns out, most people in our society would rather fight—or at least start fighting—until they finally get the message that litigation is an expensive zero-sum game and that it makes more sense to avoid court entirely and come to a mediated settlement that saves everyone time and money.
    The trouble was, having been out of the work force for so long, it was hard getting people to trust me enough to hire me. I was on a list of mediators—kind of like those lists HMOs send out with all the doctors “in your plan.” I had to be pretty close to the bottom because I rarely got called and when I did, it was often neighbors with fights over fence height, or to be the arbiter between a dating service and a guy who hadn’t found his soul mate after paying his sign-up fee. To me, “can’t buy me love” is a rule just like “love hurts” is a rule. But once again, what do I know? It seems that “hope springs eternal” and that hope ensures the continued survival of the dating industry and a mediation job for me from time to time.
    I’d been trying to network with everyone I knew, searching for an ombudsman job with a corporation—an international corporation, so I could travel the world. Better yet, though a long shot, was a position with a group—a panel, as mediation jargon would have it—that dealt with international issues like the U.N. or the World Anti-Doping Organization or even the International Criminal Court. The idea was that in four years, when Lila turned eighteen and I lost her child support, I’d have a job that took me to far-off, fascinating places. Travel had been on my “to do” list for the past fourteen years, during which time the farthest I’d ventured from California was Miami for the death of my Grandma Evie.
    Around this time, long after I finished reading Deliciously Disturbed and Distracted and started in on Ten Days in the Hills (which I found sexy but not as ravishing as advertised), it seemed like my networking was about to get me somewhere. After three years of being a sporadic mediator of all manner of disputes, I’d managed to land an interview with the U.S. Olympic Committee. See, things were gearing up for the London games, and at one time, I’d been a short-listed Olympic swimmer. I never got to compete—repetitive-motion shoulder problems can really mess up a girl’s butterfly—but I’d been a cause celebre to some extent with my disavowal of steroid shots and drugs to get me to the starting block. At any rate, the Olympic Committee thought my background as a female athlete, lawyer and steroid-shunner might serve their needs, and they called me to come in for a meeting.
     
    On the day I was scheduled to drive downtown for my interview, Quinn and I made a plan to hook up afterward for a little sex-aid shopping, no matter the outcome of my meeting.
    “I can meet you at about five-thirty for about half an hour. Then I’m meeting a guy for drinks,” she whispered into the phone, barely audible.
    “Who’s the guy?”