Jason Bullock, who had only recently taken on Mrs. Potts’s case, asked me to consider Dr. Potts’s own degrees as marital property.
“You think you can split up a medical license like a set of dining room chairs?” sneered the good doctor.
His attorney asked to speak to his client in private. When they came back to the bargaining table, the attorney announced that Dr. Potts was also willing to pay reasonable room and board while Felicia was in college, a term not to exceed three years.
Jason Bullock smiled, then produced pay stubs and cancelled checks to prove that Felicia had indeed financed most of Jeremy Potts’s medical education.
Although our State Supreme Court has ruled that professional licenses aren’t marital property, it has ruled that “any direct or indirect contribution made by one spouse to help educate or develop the career potential of the other spouse” could be taken into consideration when granting alimony. Bullock’s argument and those cancelled checks convinced me that Potts would still be slogging through medical school without his wife’s help and I granted Mrs. Potts so much alimony that my clerk’s jaw dropped. I even provided for an annual accounting of his income with an accountant of her choice if she decided later to come back for a bigger bite sometime in the future.
Potts’s attorney gave immediate notice of appeal.
“You’re free to take it to Raleigh,” I had told him, feeling pretty sure that my ruling was solidly grounded in the law. “In the meantime, her alimony payments start now.”
Most of this occurred in open court and the results were public record so it wasn’t a betrayal of anyone’s confidence to tell about the case over fish and cornbread.
“But why would Potts be angry at Lynn Bullock,” I asked, “when it was Jason Bullock that handled the wife’s divorce?”
Again, Amy knew the details. “Felicia Potts studied accounting before she quit school and when they came to Dobbs, she got a job in Ralph McGee’s office till he died.”
(The late Ralph McGee, father of Annie Sue’s friend Cindy, had been a CPA over in Dobbs.)
“That’s how she met Lynn. Ralph did the Bullocks’ taxes.”
“And that affected the Potts divorce?” asked Minnie.
“Absolutely! Felicia was going to accept the good doctor’s first offer,” said Amy, “and Lynn heard him bragging about it at the hospital. I told y’all Lynn Bullock was one smart cookie? When Jason was in law school, she used to read some of his casebooks and one of those cases covered a similar situation. Felicia didn’t have any money to hire a good lawyer and it’d never dawned on her that a degree could be like marital property, but once Lynn talked Jason into taking the case on a contingency basis, Felicia went back and pulled every tax record and every receipt from their whole marriage.”
Daddy nodded. “Sounds like something a granddaughter of Charlie Seymour’s would think of.”
“Lynn Bullock?” Will cocked his head at his wife. “Long blonde hair? Built like a brick outhouse? Wasn’t she the gal we saw Reid with at the North Raleigh Hilton last Christmas?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to speak ill of the dead,” Amy said, “but yes, she did play around on the side a little.”
Again Daddy nodded. “Just like her mama.”
CHAPTER | 6
Such a night of horror as the unfortunate inhabitants were compelled to pass has fallen to the lot of few since the records of history were first opened.
September 1—cont’d.
—Edouard 37.5°N by 70°W. Winds 85 knots & dropping fast as it heads to N. Atlantic. No longer a threat to anybody.
—Hurr. Dolly pounded Mexico. At least 2 people dead.
—Fran 23.9°N by ?? W. Winds steady at 75 kts.
—Gustave—
Stan threw down his pencil, unable to concentrate.
Upon returning from evening worship, he had come straight to his room and turned on his radio to the weather station, but he’d been too distracted to copy off all the numbers accurately, much less put them in coherent order. There were floods in Sudan, monsoons in Pakistan, earthquakes in Ecuador and maybe he’d use them in his report and maybe he wouldn’t, but right now, all he could think about was the storm raging behind the closed door of his parents’ bedroom.
A quiet storm. No flying shoes or hair irons crashing into lamps. No shrieked accusations or thundering counterblasts. Even with his own door cracked, he could barely hear his mother’s low voice, quick and tight and cold with a towering anger usually reserved for racist whites who threatened the dignity of her world.
Normally when she raged, his father’s voice would be heard rumbling beneath hers, soothing, reassuring, reasoning. Tonight, he seemed to speak only when she paused after a torrent of questions, and even then, his words were short and fell away to a silence quickly filled with more of her anger.
Bewildered, Stan remembered how the evening had started normally enough. After a heavy Sunday dinner, supper was always sandwiches and milk. Then Mama and Lashanda would neaten up the kitchen while he and Dad went on ahead in the van to get things set up.
Ever since Balm of Gilead burned to the ground back in July, services had been held in an old-fashioned canvas gospel tent with folding chairs. In just the few short months Dad’d been here, the congregation had grown to over a hundred and it looked as if they could begin breaking ground for a new sanctuary next month. Meantime, everybody was sort of enjoying the outdoor preaching. There were inconveniences, of course. No Sunday school rooms, no choir stalls, no screens, no air-conditioning, not even overhead fans, only the handheld, cardboard-and-stick fans with a picture of Jesus knocking at the door on one side and an ad for a funeral home on the other.
But tent revivals were a tradition that had almost fallen out of use and the older folks beamed when they sang,
Gimme that ol’ time religion, that ol’ time religion,
Gimme that ol’ time religion—It’s good enough for me.
That evening, he’d helped Dad set up the simple sound system, then he’d taken rubber gloves and a bucket of soapy water out to the two portable toilets that stood modestly on opposite sides of a large holly tree at the back of the lot and wiped down the seats and floors so everything would be neat and fresh.
When he came back to the tent, Sister Helen Garrett and her daughter Crystal were there, arranging a large bouquet of deep blue hydrangeas in front of the pulpit, the only piece of church furniture to survive the fire. At least Crystal was at work on the flowers, trying to keep the heavy flower heads from tipping over. Her mother was at the pulpit in deep talk with his father.
“Hey, Stan,” Crystal said shyly. They were in the same class, but different homerooms at school, and he’d only started to know her a little when Sister Garrett joined their church last month. “Could I borrow your bucket to get some water for these?”
“I’ll get that for you,” he said, glad for a chance to be alone with her a few minutes before his friends arrived and started clowning around, teasing them. He’d always had friends who were girls, but never a real girlfriend. Not that Crystal was, he thought confusedly as he fetched the water and poured it into the vase. But if he did have a girlfriend, Crystal Garrett sure would be fine. That smile. Those eyes. Smart, too. Her science project was on the life cycle of the black-and-yellow argiope.
Only thing wrong was her mother, who embarrassed both of them the way she put herself forward at calls for rededication, clinging to Dad as she sobbed out her sins in his ear. Now that his own body was so aware of girls—and not just Crystal—it had only recently dawned on him precisely why Sister Garrett and one or two other of the church women took any opportunity to convert Dad’s “right hand of fellowship” into a warm hug. He hated the way those women pulled at him and touched him and brushed up against him like they wanted more from him than what a pastor was supposed to give.