Free A Good Divorce by John E. Keegan

flattened handle. “Just don’t turn out prickly like your mother. You can be such a beauty. And don’t be afraid to be wrong sometimes, huh?”
    The empty can I threw at the column missed. Through the booziness and cigar nausea, I couldn’t help thinking I was a failure. The kid who’d left Quincy to become a big-city lawyer and live in a larger house than his parents had flopped. My parents had hosted my college graduation party at the Grange. Mom’s church friends put out trays of wrapped cold cuts, a variety of crackers, and warm miniature meatballs. The mayor and most of the City Council were there as well as some of my high school teachers. The police chief, whose house I’d painted one summer and whose kids were named Jake, Jack, and Jake Jr., made a toast with cheap champagne. “This young man’ll graduate from law school and replace Scoop Jackson in the United States Senate,” he said. What a joke. I couldn’t even keep my marriage together. And worse, I’d turn out to be an absentee father.
    It was still dark when I woke up the next morning, and I felt like a boneless chicken breast that had been splatted on a piece of wax paper and left on the drainboard. I was dehydrated and my head throbbed. As I folded a piece of toast around fried Spam with mayonnaise and grape jam to cut the grease, I realized that cooking was one of the reasons the kids had chosen Jude.
    I welcomed the distraction of work that morning. The law didn’t fuss over my desirability as a father or a husband. One of the senior partners at the firm had been hospitalized with a fluttering heart and I had to help out on his embezzlement case. They thought he might have had a mild stroke. Bob was my assigned mentor when I was an associate, the person who was supposed to mold and inspire me. We went to his house for dinner once and Jude thought he was a howling bore. He was so frugal that he’d shut his car off at red lights and only make long distance calls to his kids after ten p.m. When he got home, he’d shut off the engine, open the garage door, and push his car in the rest of the way by hand. After our dinner, I saw him take his empty milk glass to the kitchen tap, swish a mouthful of water around to get the residue off the sides, and drink it. Bob was the kind of citizen that gave Jude the shivers—Eagle Scout, Symphony Board of Trustees, and Treasurer of the King County Republicans. On the way home, she said, “He probably rinses out and reuses his condoms.” We got the giggles.
    The day Nixon resigned, Jude called me at the office to play a tape of his goodbye speech to the White House staff. She was giddy. Nixon’s troubles had been better than a marriage counselor. After he fired Archibald Cox, even I got suspicious. Nixon had briefly made us allies. After the resignation, I traded my marble-brown plastic frames for gold wire rims and stopped parting my hair. One of my partners joked that I looked like Dagwood but Jude thought it was an encouraging sign.
    Our office devoted an entire conference room and two paralegals to the embezzlement documents. One of my jobs was to distill the contents of the stacks of file cartons that circled the table into a persuasive legal brief. At breakfast and lunch meetings, I’d go over testimony with nervous witnesses. Worrying about the embezzlement trial and the kids, my own heart was beginning to flutter.
    On the way to work, I’d drive by the house to see what time Jude left in the morning, see if she was taking the kids to school, count the heads in the kitchen nook, see what kind of choice the kids had made. I’d call at odd times during the day and hang up if Jude answered. I was desperate for a scintilla of evidence to prove that they missed me as much as I missed them.
    At night, I’d wait until dark and park several houses away, trying to find out if she’d gone out and left the kids alone or invited a