CHAPTER 11
“The hearing is set for August fifteenth,” Buzz Dobson told Lily and Ben as they sat in his dingy law office, the decor of which consisted of half a dozen dusty football trophies and one bedraggled plastic plant. “Let’s just pray that the air-conditioning in the courthouse is working.”
Lily sighed and looked down at Mimi, who was getting positively filthy playing on the law office’s unmopped floor. “I’m afraid the temperature in the courtroom is the least of our worries.”
Buzz shot Ben a conspiratorial grin. “She’s the nervous type, ain’t she?”
“Well,” Ben said, attempting a macho attitude, “you know how women get about babies.”
Lily sat quietly with her hands in her lap, but her fists were clenched so tightly she doubted anyone would be able to pry them apart.
Buzz pasted a condescending smile across his face. “Now, Mrs. McGilly, I don’t think you have a thing to worry about. We just need to establish that you and Benny Jack love each other and that you love Mimi and take good care of her. And if Benny Jack here is Mimi’s real father like he says he is, you’ve got no worries.”
“Right,” Lily said, clenching her fists even tighter. “No worries.”
“Now if you wanna do something that’ll turn the odds even more in your favor, I have a couple of suggestions for you, Mrs. McGilly.”
“Yeah?”
“Well...” Buzz shuffled some papers uncomfortably. “When you’re up there on the stand, you could try to look like a nice girl.”
“A nice girl?” Lily looked down at her cutoff Levi’s and Doc Martens, which were separated by pasty white legs whose unshaven state was due to apathy rather than feminist politics. “Well, I was planning on wearing a dress, if that’s what you mean.”
Buzz smiled self-consciously and reshuffled his papers. “Um, well, yes, that’s part of it. But I was also thinking you could take that ... that thing out of your nose and maybe do something with your hair.”
“My hair?” Lily was proud of her hair. Very few white girls had such soulful braids.
“Yeah, I mean ... somethin’ respectable.” He was still staring at his desk. “Look, Mrs. McGilly, I’m not a fashion expert, and the last thing I wanna do is tell a lady how she should fix herself up. I’m just saying that in these parts, a judge might look more sympathetically on a lady with a more ... conservative appearance.”
Lily flinched at the sound of the word conservative but muttered, “I’ll see what I can do.” As long as she was the same person on the inside, it didn’t matter what clothes she wore or how she styled her hair. Or so she tried to convince herself. If the only way she could keep her daughter was by deceiving people with misleading appearances, then deceive them she would.
At first Lily had been reluctant when Ben had wanted to invite Ken over for dinner. The facade of propriety they had created was so delicate that the slightest provocation could cause it to shatter.
“Don’t be so paranoid, O wife of mine,” Ben had said. “Married couples have bachelor friends over for dinner all the time —just to make sure the poor single guys get a decent meal every once in a while. No one will think a thing of it. And besides,” he added, “Ken knows the truth. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to let your guard down for an evening — to spend a few hours not pretending to be my little woman?”
Lily had to admit that it would.
Despite the fact that she was not slated to play the role of little woman for the evening, Lily still got saddled with the cooking. She didn’t mind it, actually.
Ben’s culinary abilities were limited to picking up the phone and ordering Chinese takeout, and there was no Chinese takeout to be had in Versailles.
So now, they—Lily, Ben, Ken, and Mimi—were sitting around the oak dining room table, eating Lily’s vegetarian chili with cheese, sour cream, and flour tortillas. Mimi, in her high chair, was wearing a flour tortilla on her head.
Ken, who was quite attractive in a just-stepped-out-of-a-Ralph-Lauren-ad kind of way, took an appreciative bite of chili. “Quite a little cook you got here, Ben,” he teased, winking at Lily. “You know what they say: The best way to a man’s heart is his stomach.”
Lily swigged the Corona and lime that Ken had brought to complement their meal. “Actually, I think the most direct route to a man’s heart lies farther south.”
Ben and Ken burst out laughing.
Finally, Ben said, “You sounded like Dez there for a second.”
Lily smiled. “I did, didn’t I?”
Ken turned to Ben. “Dez was your ex, right?”
“Yep.” Ben pushed his empty bowl away. “We were lovers for eighteen months, then friends for a decade. Dez could be maddening, but he was funny as hell. Lily, do you remember when he went to that faculty Halloween party dressed as Mae West?”
“How could I forget it?. I helped lace up his corset beforehand, which was no mean feat, let me tell you.”
Ben laughed. “Three mai tais, and Dez was sprawled on top of the piano singing Frankie and Johnny,’ to the utter mystification of the better part of Atlanta State’s liberal arts faculty”
Ken laughed. “I take it that when he did this, he already had tenure?”
Lily smiled. “You take it correctly. Dez was always flamboyant, but never foolish.” She looked over at Mimi, who had poked two eye-size holes in her flour tortilla and was wearing it as a mask. “And it was Dez’s kind sperm donation that helped create little tortilla face over there.”