Not very often.
So didn’t she deserve to celebrate a little? The rest of the lawyers who’d worked the case had gone off to the Embers for steak and a big birthday-style cake. She’d begged off. After getting back from the courthouse, and after running into Sam, she found a pink message slip on her desk.
She recognized the name instantly.
She also recognized why he had called her.
She spent five minutes on the phone with him, then hung up slowly, numbly.
Richie was back at it again.
He’d been sliding on the AA meetings — and, she’d suspected, starting to drink again, too.
Now she learned that the drinking wasn’t the only thing he was sliding on...
So given all this, didn’t she deserve one teensy-tiny extra potato chip?
She thought about it all the time, all the existential aspects of the potato chip matter, all the metaphysical considerations, too, and then what she did was break the potato chip crisply in two.
She ate only half of the fourth potato chip and felt pretty darned good about herself.
2
It seemed that each decade produced its own very memorable scandal out at the Crystal Falls Country Club. Back in the fifties, a drunken man pulled out a .45 and shot his best friend in the groin. His best friend had been sleeping with the man’s wife. In the sixties, the first Jewish member of the club found a swastika painted on the trunk of his shiny black Chrysler. In the seventies, one of the club’s board of directors had embezzled more than ten thousand dollars from the club’s coffers. And in the eighties, a maid claimed that three drunken members, using their own drunken members, had raped her. The maid, now a much wealthier woman, soon left Crystal Falls.
The Crystal Falls Country Club was a sprawling, vaguely Moorish-style building tucked into some radiantly beautiful timberland out on the west edge of town. There were tennis courts, two swimming pools (one outdoor, one indoor), and a handsome golf course that big-city visitors invariably dubbed “a real surprise.” What had they been expecting? Potholes on the greens? Cows wandering around? Caddies in bib overalls?
As she approached the club, Amy thought back to her own days as a member. Her father had been locally prominent, so that of course meant that the family spent an undue amount of time at the club. Amy had always resented this because it meant hanging around with the girls whose fathers were also members of the club. And Amy just happened to prefer the company of the lesser social stars — and for a very selfish reason. Going to movies and hanging around Orange Julius and giggling over Playboy — in other words, spending your long summer afternoons out at the mall — was a hell of a lot more fun than spending them at the club, where the same boring girls said the same boring stuff over and over again.
The club was always sending her invitations to join. Amy was, after all, the district attorney. And her father had been a prominent member. So why wouldn’t she join? She was always putting them on hold, saying she “probably” would if she ever got time. Probably.
She drove her nice, sensible two-year-old blue Buick — which she had actually bought from a very nice old lady at church — up the winding asphalt that led to the entrance of the country club. She left her car in the parking lot and then walked over to the retaining wall, where you could get a look at most of the club’s outdoor activities.
Below, in an almost eye-shocking valley of green, lay the tennis courts and the swimming pool and the first six holes of the golf course.
There was the thwock of tennis balls, the bright jagged screams of young swimmers, and the muffled voices of golfers yelling things to the group ahead.
It was a pleasant scene, one that almost made her wish she was a member here.
But this wasn’t the real country club. No, for that you needed to go inside to the dark, mahogany-and-leather bar or the airy, bright restaurant that sat on a shelf above the same scene Amy was now seeing.
That’s where the gossip went on, where reputations were made and lost, where people were branded this or branded that on the flimsiest of evidence. The very wealthiest always sat at the same six tables in the north corner, and it was sickening to watch the trek made by the less powerful people. A religious pilgrimage was what it had always looked like to Amy. Visiting the Vatican, and bowing and scraping and humbling oneself before the pope.
No, the country club might be fine in theory, but in practice...
No sign of Richie.
She decided to try down by the lockers.
Richie, who was her younger brother by four years, was called the tennis pro here. Actually, he did a little bit of everything, including bartending when the place was especially busy. This was his sixth job since getting out of the detox clinic Amy had paid for. Six jobs in nine months. She just prayed he could hang on to this one. All his life, Richie had been a star, and had been treated as such. In junior high, he set track records that were still unbeaten. In high school, he’d been the only sophomore ever to start as the varsity quarterback. His football luck continued on through college, where he’d been All-Big Ten three years running. His fortune appeared to carry right on into the pros, the Chicago Bears offering him a contract during his junior year. That’s about when the drinking got out of hand. And shortly after — after having been a serious drinker since age fifteen — Richie did the inevitable. He piled up his car. Wrapped his yellow convertible around an oak tree out on the old river road by the dam. Richie smashed both legs. The girl with him was told that she would never walk again. And she wouldn’t. Richie’s athletic career was over. That was six years ago. He’d drifted back to town here — who the hell wanted a tapped-out former college football star? — and continued his downward spiral. Last year, Amy’d insisted that he check himself into St. Mary’s Clinic, which was an aged convent that had been converted into a substance-abuse clinic that sat amid the bluffs on a beautiful hill overlooking the Dubuque section of the Mississippi.
At this time of day, the club was pretty quiet. The lunch hour was over and most of the members were back at work, or home overseeing their estates. Most of the golfers were retired; most of the screaming kids in the pool were preschoolers out here with their mothers. The tennis players at this time of day were almost all women.
That had been another one of her fears about Richie working out here. He was a great-looking kid, lots of curly, dark hair, a trim, hard body, and a killer smile.
Ever since he’d come back to town, he’d been seeing some of his old high school girlfriends. The trouble was, most of them were married to prominent local men. Richie had accumulated a rather formidable list of enemies. He had also accumulated a rather formidable list of traffic violations, including one charge of operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated. That was one of the two or three times that he’d fallen off the wagon since coming back from detox.
That she knew of.
She was sure he was drinking again, two, three nights a week. Maybe more.
But so far he’d been careful.
She hadn’t been able to catch him. And he wasn’t making it easy for her, either. She rarely saw him these days except for when he needed money. Once or twice a month, wearing his one and only suit and looking like a successful young executive, Richie would show up at her house.
When she saw him out there on the porch all duded up this way, she knew exactly why he was here.
Something’s come up, and I just really need some money, Amy. I’m sorry to always he hitting on you like this.
It was never much — never more than a few hundred dollars — but it didn’t need to be much to break her. She wasn’t exactly getting rich as district attorney — her peers in law firms were making about twice as much as she was — and she had no savings to speak of. Keeping Richie in detox had taken everything she had. But she’d been desperately hopeful that it would be worth the money. Richie would never take a drink again. Ever. She’d been so sure of it. Now, in retrospect, she seemed so self-deluded and silly.