Just then came a timid knock on the door, and Bennie didn’t have to guess who it was. The secretary was out, Carrier knocked like a freight train, and Murphy never knocked at all. Bennie shoved the photo in the drawer and closed it quickly, so as not to reveal that she had Normal Human Emotions and/or Chinks in the Armor. She called out, “You’re fired, DiNunzio!”
No laughter came from outside the door.
“I’m only kidding! Come in, silly!”
The door opened slowly, and a stricken Mary DiNunzio peeked inside. “I’m not coming in if you’re going to fire me.”
“I’m not going to fire you.” Bennie waved her inside. “Come in and sit down.”
“Thank you, thank you so much, Bennie, I can explain everything. First off, I’m really sorry and my mother is not crazy.” DiNunzio hurried to the club chair across from the desk, perching on the edge of the seat cushion. Her words tumbled over each other and she gestured as rapidly as sign language. “She’s really great, and I love her a lot, but I never would have let her come to the meeting if I had known she was going to act that way. She said she’d behave, but I guess she couldn’t control herself, because she’s very old school, you heard her accent, she wasn’t even born here, and she gets a little upset and emotional because she loves me and she worries about me, and I’m really sorry. I can’t believe she did that and I’m so embarrassed and so sorry. Really sorry. Did I say that already?”
“Yes. You-”
“I feel just awful. I’m so embarrassed, I know you must be so embarrassed. It was just so embarrassing.”
“No, I’m an adult, and a lawyer. I can deal-”
“I mean, to have someone yelling at you, right in front of everybody, right in the office, and the whole thing was like a nightmare, I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was awful! My mother says she’s sorry and my father says he’s sorry and we’re all so upset that it happened.” Mary teared up, but all Bennie had was a cup of cold coffee, so she handed it across her desk. The associate drank some and made a face. “Ugh! This tastes terrible.”
“I know. I’m trying to shut you up.”
“It worked.” She set down the mug. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. Now can we get over it? You know I’m not good at the comforting thing. I-”
“But I should be comforting you.” Mary’s eyes welled up again. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were just trying to help me and-”
“Please shut up!” Bennie shouted, startling the associate into a tearstained silence. “Thank you. Now, settle down and listen. Your mother has good cause to be angry at me. I gather it’s because of the trouble I’ve gotten you into on some of our cases.”
“But that’s not your fault, and I tried to explain it to her. Working on those cases was my decision, and things happened. She just worries because I work here. She wants me to quit.”
“You can do whatever you like.” Bennie couldn’t imagine the place without DiNunzio, but she wasn’t about to guilt-trip the kid. “Do you want to work somewhere where your mom wouldn’t worry?”
“That’s impossible. She’d worry no matter what I did. She worried about my sister Angie, and she was a nun in a cloistered convent.”
Bennie said nothing. She was thinking about her mother, who had been so ill and had passed two years ago. Bennie still missed her every day.
“Besides, I like the work we do, even if sometimes I get into trouble. I mean, we’re doing justice. We actually do justice.” The associate’s mouth set with determination. “I think I’m getting better at being a lawyer, over time. I know I’m trying, and I don’t want to stop. And today I brought in a new client, all by myself.”
Bennie smiled. She’d never heard DiNunzio speak with such pride. It seemed like a cue for Bennie to say something she’d never said, even at the associate’s performance reviews, when maybe she’d been too bogged down in the details of brief writing. “DiNunzio, I think you’re a far better lawyer than you know. You have the mind, and the heart, to be one of the best of your generation.”
Mary almost started crying again.
“Also your hair doesn’t glow in the dark.”
Mary smiled, but tears threatened still.
“Don’t give a second thought to what just happened with your mom. I’m sure we can work it out. I’ll take her to lunch and have a little chat.”
“No!” Mary’s eyes flared with new alarm. “I mean, thanks, but I don’t think so. My mother doesn’t go out to lunch.”
“Why not?”
“It’s outside.”
“Outside what?”
“Her kitchen.”
“Of course it is.” Bennie thought again of her own mother. Depression had kept her confined to bed, often for months, in the era before Prozac and Paxil, when nothing seemed to work. “Why doesn’t she go out? Is she ill?”
“No way. You saw her.”
“Is she agoraphobic?”
“No, she’s Italian.”
Bennie let it go. “Okay. Then I’ll take her to an Italian restaurant. Get her a nice plate of pasta.”
“No, she would never eat someone else’s gravy. Unless it was a blood relative.”
“Okay, we won’t go out. I’ll go over to see her. That’s in.”
“No.” Mary shuddered. “No talking, no seeing.”
“Why not?” To Bennie, the whole thing seemed unusually complicated. “I want to make peace. We can reason together. I have great faith in the power of words.”
“Take it from me, you two don’t speak the same language. Bennie, you may not realize this, but my mother has lots of superstitions. Beliefs she brought over from the old country.”
“Like that I’m the devil incarnate? Because of our cases?”
Mary swallowed hard. “It’s not what you do, it’s more who you are. It’s what you stand for, the way you wear your hair, that you’re tall, that you’re so unlike her, what she thinks a woman should be, that you’re not married, that you’re not really ladylike-”
Don’t hold back now.
“-and also it’s not completely rational. Like, she’s mad at you because I grew up, because I work, because I don’t live at home, because my sister is a nun and I’m a lawyer and all and-”
Bennie stopped the word flow like a traffic cop. Funny thing was, she sort of understood. “Okay, so what do I do about it?”
“Letting it go will be the best course.”
“That’s not like me.”
“Sometimes it’s good to step back.”
From the mouths of babes. Bennie straightened up. “Okay, fine. Now then, about the Brandolini case-”
“Can we keep it? If I promise to walk it and feed it and work it on my own time?” Mary jumped off the chair, fell to her knees on the dhurrie rug, and clasped her hands together in prayer. “Please, please, please?”
“You nut! Get up!” Bennie burst into laughter.
“I’m not a nut, I’m a Catholic, and we do this all the time. Please, please, please can we take the case? It so important. It would be righting a terrible wrong. I’ll work it on my own, I swear, and the Circolo will help with the bill. They can sell a lot of cannoli. The ricotta with the chocolate chip is beyond belief.”
The associate’s dark eyes pleaded with such deep and undisguised emotion that Bennie realized there was more than just a case at stake. Mary had brought in her first real client and was growing up before her eyes, as a lawyer and as an adult. Bennie felt herself respond, caught by surprise as something wrenched within her chest. Between Murphy’s pantyhose and Carrier’s hair and Mary’s new case, she had lost any and all authority with these girls. The inmates were taking over the asylum, and for some reason, Bennie found herself smiling.
“So this is what it’s like to have kids,” she muttered.
And Mary exploded with joy.
Bennie had given up on the Filofax and was just about to call about her driver’s license when the phone rang and she picked up reflexively. “Bennie Rosato,” she answered, and the voice on the other end of the line laughed.