Brashey Family Story

NOTE: This story is slow-paced at first...

BARBARA JENNINGS' OFFICE...

"Hello, Sarah," Barbara Jennings said, standing up to give the blonde woman a quick hug. Barbara and Sarah were old friends, going back to their college days, but it had been a few months since they'd seen each other, between Barbara's law practice and Sarah's investment business. Both women had serious full-time careers that left them with a limited amount of free time to socialize.

'I need to work on that,' Sarah thought to herself as she sat down in Barbara's well-appointed office. 'There's more to life than work, even when you're divorced with grown kids!'

"Hi, Babs," Sarah said. "I'm glad you were able to make time to see me so soon!"

"For you? It's no problem," Barbara replied. "I saw your name in the papers the other day, by the way, when you won the Businesswoman of the Year award. They actually got a good picture of you for the story, and that's saying something."

Sarah grinned. "Did they get a picture of the look on my face when they announced that I'd won it?"

"Nope," Barbara replied. "I take it you didn't think it was going to be you?"

"My executive assistant and my personal secretary knew, and they lied to me about it," Sarah said with rueful affection. "The awards committee wanted it to be real surprise for once, and they got my employees to help them out, so I was stunned when they announced that I'd won, it was the first hint I'd had!"

"Did you fire your secretary and your assistant?" Barbara asked, knowing her friend too well to believe she would be so vindictive. "Just to make a point?"

"Moi?" Sarah laughed. "No, but I did give them a lot of extra work over the next week to pay them back for the lies," she admitted. "Of course I also threw a party for my whole staff and paid for a wet bar, so they have no complaints coming."

The two women chatted for a while, about their lives, their work, their romantic doings or lack thereof, politics national and local, and their personal lives again, their kids, all the things old friends talk about when they get together. As they did, Sarah sat back in her seat and took a longer look at her friend. Barbara looked good, healthy and well-rested, the strain that had been in her eyes a couple of years before nowhere evident now. Her long brown hair was shining, her blue eyes bright. Dressed in office-appropriate skirt and blouse, Barbara looked every inch the successful divorce lawyer she was.

'She's really turned her life around,' Sarah thought fondly. 'She looks so much happier now than she did a couple of years ago!'

It was about the middle of the afternoon on a Friday, and Barbara had set aside some time for a talk when Sarah called a few days before. Sarah knew her friend was curious, because she still was not sure exactly what was up. Barbara surely knew that it was more than just a friendly chat, Sarah could have had that on any weekend, this was presumably business. But it couldn't very well be a divorce, since Sarah had been divorced for ten years. Barbara had handled that divorce herself, and Sarah was aware that her friend knew that she still had not entirely gotten over it, for all the surface appearance to the contrary.

"Babs," Sarah finally said, "I'm thinking that I'd like to hire you. Or rather, I know someone who's thinking about hiring you, she's divorcing her husband and she needs someone who's good. Someone who'll really push."

"A stone cold bitch, you mean?" Barbara asked with a grin.

Sarah shifted uncomfortably, remembering those exact words from ten years before, hearing herself say she wanted a 'stone cold bitch' to take her then husband Phillip to the cleaners. At the time, the phrase had captured her mood perfectly. Now, ten years later, looking back, she was somewhat more ambivalent.

"Well..." Sarah said slowly, "yes. That's exactly what we need."

"Who is 'we', Sar?" Barbara asked. "And why are you representing 'them'?"

"Well, 'we' is actually my daughter Leanne," Sarah said. "She's planning on divorcing her husband, and she's looking for a good lawyer..."

"...but?" Barbara said, resting her chin on her folded hands. At 45, her face looked disconcertingly youthful, she could put on an 'innocent' look that was a very useful tool in her work. More than one opposing counsel had been utterly undone by that sweet, harmless expression.

'Course, it didn't work on Phil's lawyer,' Sarah remembered. She thought back to the galling moment when her ex-husband had driven away in her convertible, the car that had been her present from her own father. Her husband's lawyer had been able to get that in the divorce, in spite of Barbara's skill. 'Damn but he was sharp!'

"So why isn't Leanne here?" Barbara asked.

"She is," Sarah replied. "I'm just...opening the discussion. I'll be paying your fees, too, unless you want to try and take the money out of Gary, that is, out of my son-in-law. I'd really like that, if you do it, by the way. We want to make him _hurt_."

Barbara leaned back, and looked at her old friend thoughtfully. "I still don't see why she isn't here, if she's the one getting the divorce."

"She's here," came a female voice from the door, and Sarah looked up to see Leanne, dressed in a new pantsuit that really showed off her figure and firm C-cup breasts, without revealing a thing. Her blonde hair had a new style, and was a little longer than it had been two weeks before when she'd suddenly come back into Sarah's daily life. "I was just, ah...waiting."

"Come in, and sit down, Mrs-?"

"Norris," Leanne replied. "for a very short time longer, I hope!"

As the younger woman took a seat opposite the lawyer, beside her mother, Barbara looked hard at her, and said, "I remember you, you were the one who called me, let's see...'that sleazy piece of shit' in front of the entire room."

Sarah sucked in her breath, this was the first she'd heard of that!

Leanne blushed red, but she met the lawyer's eyes and said, jaw set, "Yeah, I did say that, didn't I? I guess I was kind of angry about something that day. Like maybe the way you'd just accused my father of, what was it, oh yes, 'neglecting his family'? When you knew _damned_ well that wasn't true!"

Sarah winced, suddenly wondering if bringing Leanne and Barbara back into contact had ever been a good idea. Memories of how angry Leanne had been during her divorce from Phillip came pouring back, she realized she'd blocked some if it out. Memories of things Leanne had said to her during the divorce, and now this new thing she'd just learned.

To her surprise, though, Barbara was smiling, she didn't seem angry.

"Would it surprise you if I told you I agree with you about my actions that day, Mrs. Norris?"

Leanne blinked, and Sarah wondered if she should hide her own smile or not at the surprised look on her daughter's face. Of all the things the lawyer could have said, it was clear that this was the last thing Leanne had expected. "I suppose it would," Leanne admitted, looking confused. "I don't understand."

"There's no reason you would, I guess," Barbara admitted. "Mrs. Norris, ten years ago I was 35 years old, a hotshot divorce lawyer, with one of the most successful track records in my firm, I won five cases for every one I lost, winning being defined as getting what I set out to get for whoever my client was, without regard for anything else. I was making a lot of money, respected in my circles, and as far as I was concerned I had the world by the tail.

"Of course, I was full of it," Barbara went on. "I also had a failing marriage of my own, in large part because I'd become so consumed by my career that I'd let everything else slide, a young son I almost never saw because I spent almost all my waking hours at the office, the law library, or in court, and a reputation for being a 'shark' that I was foolishly proud of at the time."

"At the time?"

"Since then, you might say I've grown up a bit. I managed to avoid a divorce myself, by the skin of my teeth I might add, just a couple of years ago. Your mother was a big help to me then, too."

"I told you the other night, Lee," Sarah put in, "that I was ashamed of my behavior during the divorce. I wasn't kidding, and it wasn't just Babs' idea to say the things we said about your father. I was right in the middle of it and pushing it, I completely got caught up in my war with your father, to the point that I was ready to accuse him of neglecting you and Amy and Kyle. All bullshit, as you said at the time, if I recall."

"Yeah, I think I did," Leanne said a little ruefully. "I meant it, too."

"You had reason to be angry, Honey," Sarah admitted, "and so did your father. What started out as a...well, I won't say a friendly divorce, since I'm not sure such a thing is possible, but at least a civilized one, turned into a civil war. Your father fought dirty too, you remember."

"Yeah, and I said some things about that, too," Leanne pointed out. "He tried to portray you as an irresponsible party girl, and claimed you'd tried to hide assets from him, and accused you of deceiving him about the family finances. That was crap, too! It was like you'd both gone insane!"

Sarah winced at the remembered pain she heard in her oldest daughter's voice. Leanne had been 21 at the time of their divorce, barely an adult really in a lot of ways, and she'd had a ringside seat for what had gone from a cool but civil divorce to a home-grown version of the Hatfields and the McCoys, with her and her siblings caught squarely between. There had been a period when Leanne was hardly speaking to either of her parents because of her anger and hurt over what she'd seen them doing to each other.

"I know," Sarah said, unable to meet her daughter's blue eyes, the same eyes she saw in her own mirror every morning. "I think maybe we were a little nuts, by the end of it. But-"

Sarah paused, and looked up at her daughter, and continued, "-your father only resorted to fighting dirty after we did. Every thing that went wrong, each escalation, it was Barbara and me that initiated it, your father and his lawyer only responded in kind. It doesn't make his part in it all right...but keep in mind that I was the one who escalated it into a war."

Sarah swallowed hard and blinked back moisture, for a moment she felt as if she might bawl in front of her friend and her daughter, but she regained her self-possession and continued, "Your father kept trying to...well, to lower the temperature, too. I recall three different times he and Mr. McDonald, his lawyer, contacted us and tried to cool things down, made peace overtures. But somehow it always caught me at a moment when I was eaten up with anger and I slapped them down, and it just got worse and worse and worse. There were moments when I wanted to ask for a truce, too...but I didn't have the maturity or maybe I just didn't have the guts to ask for it. Maybe I had too much pride.

"So don't be too hard on Phillip, Honey. We both took part in the war but he didn't start it and he tried more than once to end it before it got to the finish line."

"It wasn't all your mother's fault, Mrs. Norris," Barbara put in, having remained tactfully silent during Sarah's sudden and unexpected confession of responsibility. "We were...goading each other on, I guess you could say. I was a young hotshot lawyer and I wanted to prove I was a match for Mr. McDonald, I was sure I was, I thought he was a hayseed amateur. Your mother and I were always friends, and we always pushed each other to go for the brass ring, to settle for nothing but first prize...and that wasn't a good attitude under those circumstances. We went too far."

Leanne looked uncertain, her former righteous anger was now mixed with something else. "This isn't quite what I expected to hear from a divorce lawyer," she said. "Next thing you know you'll be telling me I should try to save my marriage!"

"I have told some clients that, in recent years," Barbara admitted. "I don't see every case as a chance for the 'shark' to feed. Sometimes I try to discourage a divorce, if I think it's avoidable, or foolish, even if it means I don't get my money, I learned a few years ago that being able to look myself in the mirror is worth a lot of greenbacks."

"It doesn't apply to your case, Darling," Sarah said reassuringly. "Your father was a good man caught up in a nasty situation, one he might have contributed to but that basically wasn't his fault. Your husband is neither good nor a man."

Leanne blinked, and then giggled. "As low as my opinion of Gary is now, Mom, I have to say from first hand experience that's he's definitely a man. I know the anatomical signs."

"All that makes him is a male, not a man," Sarah said with a sad, bitter smile. "A real man doesn't behave the way he's behaved, he doesn't treat his wife, or anyone else for that matter, with the casual disregard he's shown for you! A real man doesn't manipulate people that way, or try to destroy his wife's self-respect for his own convenience!

"No, your father was and is a man, one of the best I've ever known," Sarah went on. "Your husband would have a hard time passing the qualifiers for boy, much less man, I've met many a teenage boy who was a better human being, closer to being a man, than your husband is at 32."

As she said that, Sarah thought back over their many talks during the previous two weeks since her daughter had come to her. Leanne had told her many details of how Gary had treated her, a hundred little things that were individually mostly innocuous, but which added up, in Sarah's opinion, to emotional abuse. She had no doubt that everything Leanne had told her was true, she had years of experience in 'reading' her kids and none of them had ever had any luck at trying to lie to her. On top of that, what Leanne said 'meshed' with what Sarah had observed over the years too well. Even if Leanne had been trying to lie to her about her husband, there would have been no way she could match her story up so perfectly with things Sarah had seen Gary or herself say or do over the years.

"No kidding," Leanne said grimly. "The more I think back on it, the more I can see just what he's been doing to me all these years."

"Tell me the story, Mrs. Norris," Barbara said. "Just the high spots, if I take the case we'll get into the fine details later, but I need to know the big picture now."

Sarah mostly sat and listened as her daughter told Barbara the story, pretty much the same things she'd told her mother over the previous two weeks. The story was more condensed now, more ordered and clear, because Leanne had had time to boil it down to the basics out of her emotional furor, but hearing it laid out clearly and concisely in some ways only made it more ghastly. Leanne told of the affairs, of his controlling ways with their money, insisting that she pay her wages into a checking account in his sole name, of his efforts to minimize her contact with her family, and many other things as well.

When Sarah had first heard Leanne telling her about how Gary had tried to cut her off from her parents and siblings and friends, she'd actually given a moment's thought to buying a gun and just blowing his head off, her anger had been that extreme. Sanity had returned a moment later, but she still shook with fury at the idea whenever she thought about it.

Of course the bastard hadn't presented it to her little girl that way, oh no, that wasn't his style. He'd framed it as protecting her family from her 'perversions'. That thought made Sarah smile bitterly, thinking of her own and her ex-husband's interests, but of course it had never been about that anyway. It had been about making Leanne as emotionally dependent on her manipulative spouse as possible. He'd managed to cut her off, more or less, from her relatives, her friends, everyone. He'd done it so subtly that nobody had quite realized he was doing it, not even Leanne herself. Sarah knew she hardly ever saw her daughter anymore, but somehow she'd never made any sinister connection to it, she'd just been sad at how busy and disconnected everyone was!

'Oh, you're slick, you bastard,' Sarah thought again of her son-in-law, 'but the party is over!'

When Leanne finished her story, Barbara nodded. "I think there's definitely grounds for a case here, Mrs. Norris. Three separate affairs, which you say you can document, is that right?"

Leanne laughed sourly. "Oh yes. I've got photographic proof of one instance, and I can find several witnesses to back up the other two. That's the affairs that I know about, mind you. I have reason to suspect others, but no proof of them."

"We can work on that," Barbara said, making a note on a yellow legal pad. "The more the merrier, if we're going for divorce and maximum impact. If there were others there are probably witnesses who can verify them, if he's been as careless as you describe."

"He's hardly made that big a secret of it," Leanne said bitterly. "I can't believe I kept taking him back!"

"That could be a slight problem, depending on how slick his counsel is," Barbara warned. "They may try to portray you as having consented to it, since you admit to having known of at least some of the affairs. He may try to claim that you knew what he was doing and that he had your approval."

Leanne blinked. "Could that work?"

"I've seen it tried," Barbara said. "Sometimes it flies...and sometimes it's even true. There are some men who get off on seeing their wives with other men, and some women who are the same way. There are also some couples who just don't give a damn what the other spouse does out of their sight. The important thing for us is that we not let them try to spin this that way. So for the record, you did not give you consent, is that correct?"

"I did not! He never asked me!!" Leanne said hotly. "If he'd asked me, maybe I'd-" Leanne started to go on, but then she suddenly she fell silent.

Barbara looked at her sharply, but said nothing. Then she nodded.

"All right, you did not give consent. Now, I need to ask you a few personal questions, please believe me that I need to know! They're important to your chances of coming out of this with what you want."

"All right," Leanne nodded. "Ask."

"You say you decided to divorce upon discovering your husband in the act of sexual congress with another woman, two weeks ago, is that correct?"

"Yes," Leanne said grimly. "Up until that time, during the course of your marriage, were you ever sexually unfaithful to your husband?"

"NO!" Leann snarled.

Barbara blinked at her vehemence, and smiled a little. "Good, that helps. If fact, it's potentially crucial. Now, since then, I assume you have not had sexual contact with your husband?"

"Hell no," Leanne said. "I haven't even been in the same room with him since that night, all our communication has been by phone, and I'd sooner screw a cactus than touch him now!"

Sarah blushed a little at her daughter's frank words, she certainly was anything but a prude, and she knew her children were adult snow, but hearing such language from her daughter still caught her by surprise. Then she giggled, considering how minor that was compared to something else that had recently happened.

"All right," Barbara said with a slight smile as she made some more notations. "As of now, I need you to make sure that all further communication, and I do mean ALL, is either through me or with my knowledge, for Heaven's sake don't go behind my back with anything! You'd be amazed what trivial things can sink a suit like this, all right?"

"No problem," Leanne nodded. "I want as little direct contact with the sleaze as possible."

"Now, since your decision to divorce, have you had sexual contact with anyone else?"

Barbara blinked, because for some reason Leanne and her mother both suddenly blushed scarlet. For a moment she wasn't sure Leanne wanted to answer, then she said, "Yes. One time."