Swan Dive

experienced in her legs. She nearly didn’t mention them to her doctor, ”they was such a small thing.” After the tests and the retests came the confirmation. There was no relationship between the unsteadiness and the infertility, but the tremors were just the first signals of MS.
    I left the Fiat curbside, even though the driveway had been widened to simulate a parking area for the converted garage. The new office appeared makeshift from the outside, not exactly the kind of facade that would inspire confidence in the professional working behind it. Chris’s old sedan, a Pontiac that had two years on my coupe, slumped over the macadam abutting the space where the overhead door used to hang.
    I knocked on a human-size entrance and heard Chris’s voice say, ”Yeah, come in.”
    The cramped reception area was paneled in bottom-of-the-line imitation pine that was already starting to yellow. I stepped around three molded plastic chairs of different colors and a low veneered coffee table with some ragged magazines. Chris stood at a desk that seemed secretarial but had no one behind it. He once told me that he was the first member of his family to go to college, much less law school. From what I remembered of his professional stature four years earlier, he was losing ground.
    ”John, John! Jeez, it’s good to see you.”
    He hustled over to shake my hand, clutching and crushing a manila folder in his left fist. His curly black hair looked home-cut. Wearing a shirt whose collar points were a decade too long, he’d also put on thirty pounds that he didn’t carry well.
    ”Chris, it’s been a while. How’s Eleni doing?”
    His broad, mobile face drooped. ”The best she can. With the MS, sometimes it’s the muscles, other times the breathing or the voice. What can you do?”
    He began to walk backward toward a half-opened door. ”Come on into my office so we can sit. I got a temp that was supposed to be here twenny minutes ago, but you and I gotta talk quick if we’re gonna be on time.”
    I figured he’d tell me for what.

    ”Chris, I don’t do divorce cases.”
    ”This isn’t like a divorce case.”
    ”Chris, you’re representing this woman, right?”
    ”Hanna. Her name’s Hanna Marsh.”
    ”Hanna. And she’s got a five-year-old daughter?”
    ”Right. Victoria . Vickie.”
    ”And in an hour you’re supposed to be in Marblehead at the office of the attorney for Hanna’s husband to discuss things like custody, support, and division of property?”
    ”Well, yeah, of course things like that, but—”
    ”Chris, that sounds a hell of a lot like a divorce case to me.”
    Chris whoofed out a breath and held up both his hands. ”Jeez, John, will you just let me tell it all the way out first?”
    ”All right.”
    ”Then you can make up your mind.”
    ”I said all right. Go ahead.”
    ”All right.” Chris collected himself, opened the file, then closed it again. ”Aw, I don’t need the details to tell you the way it is. This Hanna, she and her husband live—lived, the husband’s still there—in Swampscott. She moved out on him and took the kid with her. Somehow she ends up at the doorstep of this woman that I represented some years back in her divorce but never charged.”
    ”Never charged?”
    ”Billed, billed. Never billed. I used to do a lot of kinda courtesy stuff for family and friends in the Greek community here and there, you know? You’re in solo practice, you gotta do those kinds of cases to get the better ones, the bigger ones later.”
    ”Go on.”
    ”Anyway, this former client’s got an apartment to rent, and I guess Hanna musta seen it in the paper. Hanna’s from Germany , met her husband when he was in the army over there, and she hasn’t got any relatives over here. Truth is, she ain’t got a pot to piss in, but Nerida—that’s my former client—she sees Hanna and the little kid and, well, she takes ‘em in, cat and all.”
    ”Cat?”
    ”Yeah. The little kid, Vickie, she’s got a cat, kitten, whatever.”
    ”I don’t see—”
    ”So, Hanna and Vickie are in the crummy first floor of the three-family here while the husband, his name’s Roy, Roy Marsh, lives in a waterfront contemporary he had built over there in Swampscott.”
    ”And you’re representing Hanna against him.”
    ”We already established that.”
    ”Chris, it still sounds like a divorce to me.”
    ”Just wait, just wait a minute, okay?”
    I looked at him but didn’t talk.
    ”You see, I