A Good Woman Read online

  A Good Woman

  Liz Cronkhite

  For Courtney, a good woman, who taught me that love is learning.

  Part I: Fruits of a Chance Encounter

  1

  It was many months since Aly Wong had seen Erika Milton, an acquaintance, a friend of a friend, but even with Erika’s new haircut Aly recognized her as soon as she came out of the courtroom down the hall. Erika was an attractive woman, around forty, some said beautiful, the angles and planes of her face described as handsome or pretty or cute depending on the light and one’s point of view. Her black hair, which was long and sleek the last time Aly saw her, was now cut short in a side parted pixie, boyishly adorable, and even from a distance revealed a long, elegant neck. It was late June and she wore a light, sharply cut cream colored suit and white blouse, which complimented her café-o-lait skin.

  Aly always thought of Erika as taller than herself, but in fact she was, like Aly, under five and a half feet. She realized this because Erika had come out with a tall, elegant, older white woman who leaned down to hear Erika as they stood outside the courtroom. To leave the building they were going to have to pass Aly where she sat on a bench outside another courtroom, so Aly waited to say hello. She was waiting, too, for her friend Cass, who was down the hall in the other direction speaking with her own lawyer. Aly turned to see Cass with her head down, her long, lanky brown hair covering her pink face, her shoulders slumped, her arms crossed. She was clearly unhappy with what her lawyer, a dark middle aged woman of Middle Eastern descent, was saying.

  When Aly turned back Erika’s client was headed across the hall to the ladies’ room and Erika was headed Aly’s way. She seemed preoccupied at first, but then she looked up, glanced in Aly’s direction, and did a double take as she recognized her. She beamed a smile, her teeth white and perfect. Of course. Aly and Toy used to refer to Erika as the Ice Queen because she seemed so perfect and polished and, a couple of times when out with mutual friends, exacting in her demands of wait staff at restaurants.

  Aly was intimidated by accomplished women like Erika. She felt inadequate in their presence. But she didn’t hold that against them. The problem, she knew, was hers. Erika was gorgeous and seemed cold, but Aly didn’t really know her. When they first met, when? Five or six years ago? Erika was just out of a long term relationship. She was a lawyer, had kids, was from… L.A.? That was pretty much all Aly knew. They had only ever interacted in a group, at a party or a dinner. And what had they discussed but the usual party patter? Erika expressed, as all of Aly’s friends did, liberal politics. But there was nothing she said or did that dispelled Aly and Toy’s initial impressions of her. Aly couldn’t remember ever having a one-on-one conversation with her.

  So as Erika approached Aly wondered at the protocol. Were they acquaintances who hugged? She rose in any case and as Erika drew close she put out her right arm, her left holding a briefcase, and took Aly into an awkward half hug. She smelled good. Crisp and floral.

  “Hey, Aly, it’s been a while how are you?” Erika had a soft voice with both high and low notes. She spoke with an African-American cadence that carried hints of the south no matter how far north, east, or west the speaker was from.

  Aly was acutely aware of her own dusty running shoes, blue jeans, and light blue T-shirt, all of them well worn, hanging off her too thin body, her straw blond hair in need of a wash. Who knows how I smell? “I’m doing fine,” she replied. Erika seemed to be checking that statement as she cocked her head and looked with her pretty gold hazel eyes right into Aly’s. “How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m good.”

  “I love your hair. It’s very cute.”

  “Oh, wow, it has been a while. I did this months ago. Cuts my time in the chair significantly.” Erika waved her hand to take in the courthouse. “Why are you, if you don’t mind…”

  “Oh, I’m with Cass,” Aly pointed with her chin down the hall at her friend. “Custody issues.”

  “Oh, wow, Cass and Toni? I didn’t know-”

  “No one did. It took us all by surprise.”

  “And they have kids? I didn’t know they have kids.”

  “Dogs.”

  Light dawned over Erika’s face. “Oh, that’s right. They breed, what is it? Irish setters?”

  “Yeah. They’re both pets and business. It’s messy.”

  “Oh, I know about that.” Erika turned back to Aly, her beautiful eyes again closely examining her face.

  “What have you been up to?”

  “Oh, not much. You know about me and Toy.” Erika nodded solemnly. “It’ll be two years next month, if you can believe it. Still trying to find my feet.”

  Erika cocked her head, her eyes sympathetic. “Divorce is hard.”

  “You see it every day,” Aly said, her turn to wave a hand to take in the court house.

  “And I’ve been there myself.” She touched Aly’s arm lightly. “You’ll find the ground again.” She let that sit a moment and then made to move away. “Hey, it was good to see you. I guess I’ll be seeing you around.”

  “Probably at one of Anita’s Things.”

  "Yes! I’m having lunch with her tomorrow, actually. It’s my girls’ weekend with their dad.”

  Aly felt bad for not asking after Erika’s family. “How are your girls?”

  Erika was moving away but stopped, beamed, and seemed, if possible, even more radiant. “Beautiful. And trying. And exhausting. And a joy.”

  Aly couldn’t remember how many there were.

  “How old now?”

  “Thirteen and ten.”

  Aly could see Erika needed to move on. “Well, it was good to see you, too, Erika.”

  Erika pointed her chin toward Cass. “Give my best to Cass, will you?”

  2

  A minor encounter in Aly’s mind that lasted only long enough for her to imagine saying to Toy, “Guess who I bumped into?” and telling Toy and her response, “You mean Black Ice?”, Toy’s variation for their characterization of Erika Milton. Having conversations in her mind with Toy about the trivia of the day was a habit from marriage Aly had yet to shake and it annoyed her. It wasn’t that she missed Toy specifically. She missed the shorthand of marriage; the small, everyday interactions, looks, phrases, and gestures that contained so much history and drew tighter the threads that made up the fabric of their lives together. Contained in that one, small imagined interchange were the first time she and Toy saw Erika (exactly when and where Aly did not remember), their mutual drooling over her looks, their assumptions about her, and their subsequent judgments on her as a perfectionist and demanding.

  Aly had not approved of “Black Ice.”

  “It’s not racist to call a black person black,” Toy had said.

  “I didn’t say it was racist. But does it always have to be noted? Anyway, black ice is something dangerous in the road that you can’t see.”

  "For all we know that is an apt description of her.”

  Aly ground her teeth remembering this. It was a thing with Toy that she would never examine any criticism of herself to see if it had any validity. Deflect, deflect, deflect. Aly shook herself. All roads in her mind still led back to Toy somehow.

  She could see that Cass was finishing up with her lawyer and approached them. “I’ll let you know,” the lawyer said to Cass and she smiled at Aly and left.

  Without a word Aly embraced Cass. She was a little older than Aly, in her late thirties, a few inches taller than Aly, heavyset, with pink white skin and long, straight, mousy brown hair. For court she was wearing a dark blue pantsuit that was probably ten years old.

  In a choked voice Cass said, “We have to split them up evenly. It’s a good thing we have an even number of them.” Aly knew she was talking about her six Irish
setters. Cass felt that, as the primary caregiver and business manager, she should get them all. The judge apparently felt otherwise.

  This day in court with a friend was typical of Aly. Her family and friends knew she was available and willing and she was the one called on when someone needed support and everyone else had work or other obligations. It had always been this way for Aly, who felt, even when married to Toy, that she was essentially drifting through life. She had no career, no family of her own, no focus. She did not allow others to use her. She said no when she needed to. But others took her for granted and she knew it. She, too, took it for granted that when others needed someone to accompany them to the doctor’s, to dispel the tedium of waiting at the DMV, to babysit, to support them in divorce court and custody hearings and any other stressful situation, she’d be the one they called. It had even reached a point where she felt hurt when someone needed a companion and she wasn’t the one they called. Toy teased once that Aly’s profession was being a friend. “You should hand out business cards that say ‘I’m Here For You’.”

  But, in fact, since her divorce, Aly’s availability to others was restricted. She was living with a cousin who needed help with her kids. Gemma was a home healthcare worker who had returned to school to get a degree in nursing and her husband, Nick, was a social worker for the state. When Aly lost her house Gemma rescued her from having to move in with her mother and step-father. She offered Aly room and board in exchange for childcare for her four children. Aly, who, though unfocused, was always employed, had just finished classes in medical billing not long before she found out about Toy’s secret gambling life and lost her marriage, her home, her dream of a family, and found herself crushed under half of Toy’s mountain of debt. She worked at that during the day while the Gianni kids were in school.

  That day Gemma was on summer break from school and it was her day off, which is why Aly was available for Cass.

  Aly and Cass stepped from the cool, boxy Family Court building in downtown Las Vegas into the glare and intense dry heat of late morning in mid-June in the Mojave Desert and headed for Aly’s seven year old blue Hyundai Elantra. “Thank you for doing this, Aly. I’ll buy you lunch,” Cass said, pulling sunglasses out of a backpack. “I want comfort food.”

  They stopped at a Dairy Queen on the way to her home in the northwest of the city so Cass could have a Chocolate Extreme Blizzard with a hamburger and fries. Aly had a sandwich and soda and listened to Cass rail against the judge. Aly could sympathize with anger at family court judges, though she was not as sure of the validity of Cass’s frustration as she was of her own. Before the divorce Aly was told she would not be responsible for Toy’s gambling debts if she could prove that she didn’t know about Toy’s addiction. And she had been completely blindsided when the truth came out. But the judge did not accept this. Toy’s lawyer successfully enumerated the signs of Toy’s secret life that Aly missed. To have her own cluelessness so artfully delineated in open court had been as big a blow to Aly as the debt she incurred through it.

  But three things had worked in Aly’s favor at the time of her split from Toy. One, their home, bought in a buyer’s market after the housing crash that lingered in Las Vegas after the Great Recession, was just right side up so they broke even on the sale. Two, she had just paid off her car. Three, she had an inheritance from her late Aunt Paula to pay for the divorce. But the latter was also a loss as it had been set aside for having a baby.

  Cass lived in a part of town that a decade before was still semirural, with large lots that often had stables and a horse or two. With Toni she had bought one of those lots. It looked incongruent now next to walled housing developments that hedged it in. But it was perfect for their breeding business.

  For now, Cass was staying in the house and Toni, who worked in IT for the Metro Police, was in a nearby apartment. Aly did not know the reason for their break up. Cass didn’t give details and Aly didn’t press. All she knew was that Toni left one day.

  Aly pulled into the circular driveway of Cass’s sprawling ranch style home. Cass said she wanted to be alone with her dogs. “How can I choose which babies to keep? It’s like a Sophie’s choice,” she choked, one leg out of the car.

  “Cass, they’re not being put down. Won’t you have visitation with the other three?” Cass nodded. “So you’ll still see them.”

  Cass wiped her eyes. “Except that I’ll have to see her.”

  Aly stroked her arm. “It will be hard at first, but you can just focus on the dogs.”

  Cass got out. “Thank you, Aly.”

  “I’ll call you later.”

  3

  Heading - well, “home” wasn’t the word Aly would use. “Back to the Gianni’s” was how she thought of it. She considered herself basically homeless. In any case, she realized heading back to the Gianni’s that her mother’s home was somewhat between Cass’s and the Gianni’s. Her mother had been nagging her to pick up her mail. When her house was for sale Aly had changed her address to her mother’s expecting to move there. After Gemma’s offer she had changed it to Gemma’s address, but somehow she still got mail at her mother’s. She dreaded seeing her mother, but knew she needed to do it. So she headed for US95 south, took the Lake Mead exit, and headed west to the Sun City adult community.

  Linda and Dave Gaines’ home was a small, cream colored stucco house with a pink, blue, and cream tiled roof in the midst of a development where only a half dozen floor plans were offered. The lots were small, intended to leave little to do for yardwork but make sure the drip system worked for the few desert plants scattered about. The postage sized front yard faced south and held a spreading Palo Verde tree among pale pink landscaping rocks. A couple of yellow and purple lantana spread out some more color. Aly knew the back had a small covered patio that ended only a couple of feet from a concrete block wall two feet beyond which was a neighbor’s covered patio.

  Linda let her daughter into her dark house. Like many Las Vegans, during the intense summer heat she kept her windows covered during the day to minimize the heat and save on the electric bill. The downside to this was it was depressing.

  It took Aly a moment to adjust to the darkness after the bright day. God, I don’t want to live here.

  “I didn’t know you were coming by,” Linda said, following Aly into the living room. She was a small white woman of sixty, slight and taut and dry. Her hair, once straw blond like Aly’s short shag, was colored a variegated blond that suited her age. She wore it short in a soft style that framed her face.

  “I’ve come to get my mail.”

  “It’s on the bar,” Linda said, pointing toward the dining room.

  Aly passed the kitchen and turned right into the dining room and saw a small pile of mail on the bar above the kitchen counter. She was sorting through it when there was the sound of an unseen door opening and the hum of a garage door closing beyond it. A moment passed and then Aly’s step-father, Dave, came in from the laundry room with a couple of grocery bags.

  “Hello, Kiddo. Saw your car out front.” He was panting and perspiring as he put the bags on the kitchen counter.

  “Hi, Dave. How are you?”

  “Good, good. Getting hot out there.” Dave was a white man, large in both height and girth, ruddy even when he wasn’t hot, with a shaved head, a trim white goatee, and laughing grey eyes. A retired salesman, he was a few years older than Linda. They had been married for ten years.

  “Mom, this is nothing but junk. You could just dump it.”

  “How do I know what’s junk to you? It’s not my place.”

  Dave was putting produce away in the refrigerator but he looked around the door and winked at Aly. “She just wants an excuse to see you.”

  This was so manifestly not true that Aly didn’t say anything. She loved Dave and got along with him, but found his glossing over her mother’s dislike of her irritating. She never knew what he saw in her mother. He was light and Linda was dark. But maybe that was it: opposites attract
. Who could ever understand someone else’s marriage anyway? Her mother was never very nice to Aly’s father during twenty seven years of marriage and Aly never knew why her father stayed so long. The love of Linda’s life was Aly’s brother, Mark.

  Aly headed with her junk mail for the shredder by the desk in the den off the living room. It was Dave’s “man cave”, with a couch and television, where he was banished to watch his news and sports. A sliding door was available to cut it off from the living room so Linda could watch her home improvement shows and forensic procedurals in peace.

  “So,” Linda called out from the kitchen. “Have you found a place yet?”

  Here it was, the inevitable question Aly wanted to avoid. “No,” she answered simply and braced herself. But there was nothing. The silence said everything. What else am I to expect from this aimless daughter?

  “Kiddo, you know you can always come to us. We have the guest room for you,” Dave called out.

  “I guess when your kids come we can put their whole families in the den,” Linda said. Dave had three grown children, each with their own families, each of which visited separately to do the Vegas thing once a year.

  “Don’t listen to her, Kiddo, we have the room.”

  “Didn’t I just say we did?” Linda smirked.

  Aly didn’t say anything. The grinding of the shredder expressed all she felt. But when she emerged from the den, Linda was waiting. “You don’t have much time.”

  “I have a month.”

  “Who’s going to take you in on a month’s notice?”

  “We will!” Dave said cheerfully.

  Aly reached up and kissed his cheek, inhaling salty perspiration and crisp after shave. “Thank you, Dave.” She turned to her mother. “I’ll see you later, Mom. I guess I’ll come by in a few weeks to shred more junk mail.” Aly made to escape by the front door.