Second Time Around
an excerpt

Second Time Around

“Micky, put that down, you’ve just got to hear what I heard in court this morning!”

I looked up at my partner Brenda, and rubbed my tired eyes. Two thirty already. Damn, I hope she brought back some fruit salad from one of the vendors in Philly. Theirs were the best. I gave her my hopeful look, trying to see if she had any nice, square brown bags.

“Dare I hope it was, ‘summary judgment for the defense, granted, and may I say what a brilliant brief, Ms. Carson, convey my compliments to your partner?’” She snorted and threw herself down in the chair opposite my desk.

“Yeah, that’s Judge Bell for you, always dishing out the compliments. He reserved judgment. We’ll get a decision sometime...maybe before the New Year...maybe not and of course, wouldn’t we prefer to settle? “

We both rolled our eyes. The old hold the case hostage routine. We knew it well. I didn’t see any sign of lunch so it might be time to pull out the menu folder. Before Brenda got too caught up in her story.

“Where is my fruit salad?” I asked, just as she exploded with, “Guess who caught his second wife spread eagled on the conference room table with his paralegal?”

“No way!”

“Way.”

I looked at my desk and the discovery I really needed to get done tonight. Not to mention the condominium by-laws I’d promised to review before the end of the week. I glanced up at Brenda’s smug smile and knew it was a losing battle with my better nature. I had to hear this dirt.

“Ok, a quick lunch at Callaghan’s, but then I am absolutely working late at home tonight...you heard me, that laptop and those two files are going home with me and actually going into the house. Come on, I’m treating.”

“The firm is treating for news this good,” she generously offered. “John Finnegan gets some of his own served back to him, in spades, and the whole legal world is hearing about it, well, our whole legal world, at least? I think that’s worth a firm conference at the very least. Hell, it’s worth a firm party but I’m willing to be sensitive to Johnny’s feelings. I am his aunt after all.”

“You’re John’s cousin, too, or did you happen to forget that?”

“I do my best to forget that,” she happily conceded. “If only we didn’t all look so damn much alike, you know? Although his branch of the family got the height, I like to think mine got the morals.”

I didn’t respond to that. I didn’t agree but some points of dispute were so old they were moot. I knew what she would say and she knew what I had to say and after being best friends for twenty-five years and partners for half of that, it was easiest just to smile and move on to the next topic. In this case, my ex-husband, her cousin,

I closed out the windows on my laptop and packed my things up while she let the small staff know we’d be leaving early for a lunch “conference” and they could call us on our cells in case of emergency.

With the ease of long habit, we chattered about inconsequential things until we were settled into our favorite booth in Callaghan’s with two beers in front of us and our lunches on the way, salad for me, hot roast beef with everything on it for her. Finnegans never gain weight, which is another of their annoying habits, like deep blue eyes and black hair with just the right amount of curl to it. You’d hate them if they weren’t so damnably easy to fall in love with. And therein, as we lawyers were apt to say, was the crux of the issue.

I fell in love with a Finnegan when I was just seventeen years old and now at forty years of age, that one uncharacteristic act of romantic folly was still messing up my life. You have to understand, first of all, that while I was by no means an unattractive girl, I was never going to be voted homecoming queen either. Student council president, possibly; head of the honor society, almost certainly; year book editor, in the bag. But I was not the first one whom the sports stars thought of when it came time to choose a date for the prom or even Saturday night.

John Finnegan was both a sports star at our high school and an even bigger one at the college we both went to. But what made this handsomest of the half dozen sons of the local pub owner and ward leader Jack Finnegan especially attractive to me was that this one was really smart. I was just a Sophomore when he was a Senior on the Debate team, but I would listen to his arguments and they were really good. He didn’t notice me. I was a lowly underclassman and had just moved to town. I became friends with his cousin Brenda though, not, as she later accused me, to get to know him, as apparently many girls often did, but because in her I found someone I could truly be myself with. She didn’t care if I disagreed with her. In her large Irish Catholic family, everyone disagreed, it was par for the course. So, for the first time in my life, I found myself not having to pretend I wasn’t as smart as I was or as sarcastic, or even as liberal minded. We didn’t always agree, but she taught me that when someone liked you, they liked the real you, not the person you pretended to be to get them to like you.

Trouble was, it was a lesson I needed to learn over and over in my life.

As I was saying, I fell in love with John Finnegan at seventeen. So, you might have guessed, even I realized that what I felt for him at fifteen wasn’t LOVE with the capitals and the death do us part kind of hearts and flowers and let’s pick out our china pattern. No, I told you already. I was a bright girl. I waited a good two years until the ripe old age of seventeen for that. I finished high school early and went to college on a scholarship. Anything to get away from home was part of it, but the main part was, I was ready for the big, wide world. And I was more than ready to reinvent Michelle Ryan, smartest girl in the class, maybe the school, and all around nerd, into someone interesting. To me, if not to the rest of the universe.

The second day of college, I “met” John Finnegan again. He met me for the first time as far as he knows. I’d lost a lot of weight the summer before, a lot being a relative term, but I was definitely a cute girl now. With a good figure. With all the girls swarming around his tall, summer tanned figure, it wasn’t going to be easy to attract his attention, slimmer me or not, but this was college and I had a plan. And a mind. Sitting in the cafeteria with my new roommate, a very nice, very shy girl from Ohio, and the girls from the next room, two much wilder, much dimmer girls from New York who were oohing and ahing over John and his roommate, both varsity soccer players, I just starting talking nonsense about the two handsome jocks. Who weren’t really jocks, I explained, but retired special forces soldiers from military action in southeast asia in the early eighties.

“So sad,” I told them.

“Why?” Went the chorus of high pitched, breathless up-speaking voices. I am so glad I forced myself to stop that at a very early age. Like ten. I never would be the success I am today as a lawyer had I been an up-speaking. I am sure of it. I taunted Brenda mercilessly all through law school until she stopped it. It is the bane of all women who grew up in the eighties.

“Because,” I made my voice extra low, “they served their countries so bravely...poor men. The black-haired one, I understand he lost a leg in Indonesia. That’s why he’s always in long pants, you’ll notice. And the one with the dirty blond hair? Well...I don’t like to say what he lost. But don’t expect to be asked out, that’s all I’m saying. But, they’re heroes, true heroes, men like that. And really, just because he doesn’t ask you out is no reason why you shouldn’t ask him out.”

Now, in point of fact, it wasn’t all lies, they shouldn’t have expected to be asked out because Thom Matthews was as gay as Elton John, but they didn’t know that. And indeed, John Finnegan never did like to wear shorts. It was a thing with him that a year of obsessive watching had gleaned, but these new fellow freshman couldn’t be expected to know these inside facts. Of course, a little visit out to the soccer field to watch practice might prove revealing but the sports fields were way outside of the main campus. It required a bus ride or a very strong minded female. I was fairly confident there was only one of those at the table.

Gossip spreads really fast on a college campus. It’s truly amazing. You’d think that people would have better things to do. Of course, this was orientation week when it was only the freshman and housing staff around, the hall directors and R.A.s and such. Topics of discussion besides all the new classes, our rooms, our classes, our entire new way of life apparently wasn’t enough to keep everyone occupied so since John and Thom were RAs, they were particularly of interest, but still. People really should have been ashamed of themselves for spreading tales like that.

I was sitting out on the grass in front of the dorm, trying to make sense of the campus map on the second day when a long shadow fell over my papers.

“Hi, Michelle, isn’t it? Mind if I join you?” John Finnegan was looking down at me. This was one of those moments when your life crystallizes and you know that from that moment forward, everything was going to be very different. Of course, it was either going to be very, very bad, or incredibly great, was the way I figured it then.

I told you I was a very bright girl. Even at seventeen. I guessed it exactly right. It was both.

I nodded, but then fixed a cocky smile on my face and leaned back, thus showing off one of my best features. And my new tight red t-shirt, which read “so many men” in large letters across the front, and in tiny letters under the left breast, it said, “so little time.”

John raised one eyebrow as he read the small print. “Thom should get one of those. But then, what with that tragic war injury of his and all, the message is even more bittersweet, don’t you think?”

“One could look at it that way,” I agreed solemnly. “Or you could see it as an expression of defiance, of that old, le chaim spirit, you know, to....”

“Yes, to life.” He flashed his dimples at me, and they were devastating close up. I mean, I had crushed on them from across the debating room, but from just two feet away, they were lethal. He nudged me with his sneaker. “So, you haven’t answered. Do you mind moving over a little bit on that blanket so I can sit down? This prosthetic leg of mine is acting up a bit and you look like the type of girl who wouldn’t begrudge a war hero a space on her blanket.”

Danger, Will Robinson. All of my warning bells were going off, but did I listen? Hell no. I scooted over and made room for six foot four of male gorgeousness on my little bit of blanket.

“So, you want to explain, Miss Ryan, why in hell you are spreading...I can’t really say nasty rumors, but you sure are spreading weird ass rumors about my roommate and me. We’ve had some strange ones spread, mind you, but this is the first time we’ve been green berets. I’ve had a couple dozen freshman offer to carry my knapsack for me today and Thom has had at least that many vague expressions of sympathy for his ‘affliction’ since yesterday. We’ve been trying to figure out what the hell it is but if it’s what I think it is, you’ve either solved one of his major problems in the area of unwanted female attention or you’re going to be killed if this rumor drifts over to the wrong gender and is believed.”

“No,” I said thinking out loud, “I think guys would be more likely to check it out for themselves, plus there’s always the chance that he could bottom...no, I didn’t just say that!” My face turned three shades of red at that Sometimes, well, most times, I tend to think out loud when figuring something out. Thom was really just window dressing to my elaborate “Get John Finnegan’s Attention” ploy and I was chagrined to realize I hadn’t considered all of the ramifications to the plot on him. I knew John’s real leg would be discovered soon enough, and I didn’t think Thom would care if a bunch of girls were discouraged for the short run.

John had started laughing uproariously, but soon calmed enough to say, “you might not want to make that suggestion to him, hon. Rumors of his miraculous recovery may need to be spread before the suggestion that Thom Matthews is now condemned to be a bottom. Trust me on this.”

The long and the short of it was, he stayed talking for over an hour and ended up asking me to the movie showing in the student center that night. When I really hated it, I can’t even remember what it was now, but it was something amazingly sexist, he offered to leave early. We went for a walk instead. I was so nervous, finally walking under the stars with my crush of two years, John Finnegan. We talked for two hours.

Then, before he walked me all the way back to my dorm, he asked me casually about the two New York girls. Did they have boy friends?

Teasingly, he even asked me if I thought whether Nicole, the prettier of the two, would consider going out with a one legged man? He actually looked shocked when I told him she was just airhead enough to be thrilled to have the chance. He was even more surprised when I closed the door in his face just when he was bending to kiss me goodnight.

I don’t think I cried more than an hour or so. My roommate Lorie said it was two, but she was asleep long before I was done, I know she was, so she was just exaggerating. It probably seemed like two. One for each year I’d wasted having a crush on that boy.

If that was the rule, I’d never be finished crying. But then again, I’d never have a water retention problem either.

It was two weeks before I deigned to show John Finnegan the slightest bit of attention, by which time he was becoming quite bewildered by his inability to charm his way past my chilliness. As one of the Resident Assistants for our coed dorm, he had a reason to be around the lower classmen once orientation week was over, but his actions went beyond mere attention to duty. I was thrilled, of course, since the death of my crush didn’t mean I didn’t want revenge. And, late at night in my dorm room, a small, quiet voice in my head would admit that I still loved John Finnegan. A lot. If only he weren’t such an ass.

That could well be put on my tombstone, Brenda has often pointed out. But she wasn’t the first to make that observation. Dear sweet Lorie, short for Lorinda, straight from the farm in Ohio, was first to wryly note that sad fact about one of the smartest girls to come out of Northeast Philadelphia in the last quarter of the twentieth century. A delayed case of ‘boy stupid’, she called it. Lorinda didn’t ever suffer from ‘boy stupid’ in her life but she had a whole different problem. Which I’ll save for a different digression.

I was struggling home from classes, late on a Friday afternoon. Most people had the sense not to schedule any classes for Friday afternoons but I was taking a upperclass seminar by special permission, once an over-achiever, always an overachiever, so while most people were either already well on their way to drunk or getting ready to go out and achieve that state, I was dropping my books all over the path from the library.

Right in front of tall, dark and too handsome to be legal.

So much for exuding cool disdain and strolling right past him. John dropped to his knees immediately to help me pick the books up, as I tried to brush off his offer of help, insisting I was fine and didn’t need any, thank you very much.

Deep blue eyes looked into my green ones as he placed his very large warm hand over my small cold one, stilling its frantic scramble for books. “I know I offended you but how am I ever going to make it up to you if you won’t even talk to me? And did you know you have the most amazing green eyes I’ve ever seen?”

That was an acceptable compliment, delivered in a more than acceptable way. I knew I was on the short side, and could stand to lose ten pounds or so, and my hair, as one hairdresser put it, was what they meant when they called something mousy brown, but I was quite vain about my eyes. They were gorgeous. The green was a true green and the lashes dark, long and naturally curled. My brows were just the right thickness (thank you Brook Shields) and arched the right amount. My eyes, I wouldn’t change a bit. Clearly, this man was sincere, I thought back then, and I forgave him his understandable lapse in the beginning of our new, kind of, relationship.

But I never forgot. At least not for awhile. I’d learned not to let John take me for granted, and also that he was used to women coming to him easily. Yes, I realize that the second point does seem like a no brainer, but when one is seventeen, some things are easier believed when seen in practice than in theory. Like the fact that John and Thom, easily two of the best looking, most popular, and even brightest guys on campus, preferred hanging out with Lorie and me than with the tall, beautiful cheerleaders who constantly sought their attention. We knew why Thom didn’t mind. He was gay and hanging with us gave him an excuse to blow them off without having to come out. His “romances,” such as they were, were pursued in the city when he wasn’t busy with training. He wasn’t interested in love, he told me, quite seriously. He was quite content with sex, and from the stories he told, he was one very contented young man. He loved to shock Lorie with his wild tales of back rooms and bath houses, while she, a pre-med student, would ply him with questions and then return from the medical center library with brochures and condom samples on AIDs. Thom would laugh at her but he took them. I bless Lorie’s memory to this day, thinking that if it hadn’t been for her, we might not have Thom with us. Thanks to her, my son still has one of his godparents. Lorie, however, died five years ago. She never would bother getting a pap smear. Always said she’d get around to it. Next year for sure, she’d tell me. Sometimes next year is too late. As much as I love Brenda, sometimes I miss Lorie and her dry humor, her calm good sense so much I can’t stand it. Lorie was my friend, the one non-Finnegan, in a world that was too full of them and I always could count on her being on my side. Some days, I really need that.

John and I became one of those fixtures around campus, a golden couple, mainly by virtue of him being so golden there was enough to spare to cover me too. I missed classes sometimes because I was busy typing his papers. Or, he just wanted me with him and for the first time in my life, I relaxed enough to put a person first, ahead of grades. That was important, wasn’t it? Later on, I could admit it was boy stupid, but I didn’t see it that way then. I saw it as being a better person, a more caring person. If Thom got beat up in NYC and needed us to take the train up to see him in the hospital, did it really matter that I had an important paper due? This was my boyfriend’s best friend we were talking about.

Then, in John’s first year of law school, the ax fell. John had been accepted at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, full scholarship. Really big deal. The plan was for him to go full time, and I would graduate in another year and work on my masters in English while he finished. We’d marry then, and he and Thom were going to open their own firm while I would work as a professor and earn money to help the family finances, all while starting work on my PhD and writing the great American novel.

It was a great plan.

Until the damn test strip came back with the wrong lines. I always wondered if they really did sacrifice rabbits to find out that a woman was pregnant back in the days before at home test kits. I asked Lorie, my pre-med born on a farm friend, but she just held me tight and ignored my hysterical ramblings. That was a major difference about Lorie. Brenda thinks questions like that need to be answered. The two of them used to get along like cats that have lived in the same house for a long time but still don’t like the fact much. They put up with it because they share a human but if the other one were to disappear they are sure they wouldn’t pine. Funny thing was, when Lorie did die, Brenda took it almost as hard as I did. A rival was gone but not in a way she wanted. To this day, she still starts to make the old cracks about Lorinda from the sticks and her face freezes. She changes the subject in a hurry to something innocuous, like the DSW Shoe Warehouse sale. Just like a cat who keeps pacing past the same old patch of sunshine and wonders why its always free for the taking now.

I got pregnant in my senior year of college. Good-bye graduate school. Good-bye career, at least for awhile. I was lucky I was able to finish college, I was so sick. I tried denial for awhile, telling myself I couldn’t possibly be pregnant. One broken condom does not get a girl pregnant. Especially when you’re so careful, and it shouldn’t even have been the right time, and my God, John had been so wrapped up in law school, I wasn’t even as sure of where we were going anymore.

Which made it even worse. I felt sure he would think I had done it on purpose. To trap him. I know that’s what Thom thought. Because, of course, John immediately asked me to marry him. He put a brave front on things too, saying he was happy about the baby, that he missed me, being away at law school while I was still at college and this would be great. A far better plan. But Thom later told me that John suddenly put his name in for completely different summer jobs. All the top law firms. Big paying jobs, the kind of firms that wanted the best and the brightest. Like John seemed to be, but not the man he really was. Not the kind of work he and Thom wanted to do.

I asked him about it one night as he was looking over information on the firm he was going to be at that summer. He’d made law review and had his pick of jobs. Of course. We were getting married in two weeks, right after my graduation, and after a weekend in the Poconos, courtesy of his oldest brother, who had a place there, we would be coming back to his apartment. Thom was moving out and I was moving in. Home sweet home. He’d be starting his new summer job at one of the most prestigious firms in the city the day after we got back. His weekly salary was more than my father made in a month. Which was some comfort, since my parents were refusing to come to the wedding of their slut daughter. My uncle was coming. I think Mr. Finnegan went and talked to him, convinced him it would be a shame if no one was there from my side of the family. It was hard to imagine anything more humiliating.

John brushed off my questions about his job. Nothing to worry about, he assured me, his manner off-hand. I pushed the issue. His temper flared, and we fought. When we were in college together, our fights were legendary. We both had quick wits, excellent vocabularies and fearless tongues and weren’t afraid to employ all three in pursuit of victory in an argument. This fight was different. We were both more polite and more hurtful, if such a thing makes any sense at all. The more he told me not to worry about things because I just had to think of the baby, the more I read that as, all you’re good for is being a breeding machine and your mind is now non-existent. I left the apartment because I didn’t want to sleep there with him, and that’s when it struck me. I had nowhere else to go. I wanted to marry John. We had planned to do exactly that for at least the past two years. But because of the baby unexpectedly on the way...which neither of us considered for a second getting rid of...we were now feeling as though we were trapped in something that neither of us wanted.

I spent the night in a homeless shelter in the City of Brotherly Love. I will never forget that night for as long as I live. Neither would John, who spent the night frantically calling everyone he could think of, trying to find out where I’d gone, getting an earful from Lorie and Brenda, the first two calls he tried. But he kept trying, putting in calls to my mother, the poor man, his mother, though why he thought I would ever go there, although it was more likely than my own mother I guess, and eventually the city morgue. It was a turning point for the two of us, that night. I think we each grew up, just a little bit. He was relieved when I showed up, apologetic, the next day, and I was...cowed. I was not the same girl who’d brought John Finnegan to his knees four years earlier. I’d come to realize that without him, this young king of the city, the main person who cared about me and the baby I carried, I was just another young woman reduced to the charity shelter, practically penniless, with nowhere to live and nothing to live on. My child deserved the kind of life his father could give him, I decided, and that meant swallowing my ego.

I don’t know what got into me. I was a mess. I made it through the wedding and the pregnancy. John, in all fairness, was really busy. First he had his summer intern position, and then he had law school again. His father helped out enough that between what John made in the summer, his scholarships and the law clerk position the firm gave him for the school year to keep him interested in them, we managed fine while we waited for the baby to come. I even pulled a few shifts in the pub. Being obviously pregnant was excellent for tips.

Brenda was away at school still then; she hadn’t skipped the year I had, but it was during those couple of months that I made friends with John’s younger brother Ryan. Just sixteen that fall, he was a dead-ringer for John at that age, though shorter and with far longer hair. He also had a much freer manner to him. He was the baby of the family and his mother’s darling, so he was able to get away with much that had the older brothers shaking their heads in amusement...and bemusement. He was a soccer star, like his brothers, that was practically ordained at birth by their father, big Sean, but he also danced, sang and played half a dozen instruments, primarily piano and guitar. Ryan was a doll and would move quickly to help me with a tray or bus my tables for me. He never minded doing extra work to ease my load, and managed to do it without making it look like I wasn’t pulling my weight.

“After all,” he’d point out, “it’s not your weight that’s giving you trouble, it’s that lazy Finnegan weight that’s dragging you down. I bet you anything it’s a boy, just by the way it lingers over the smell of the beer and wants to set himself down by the bar and tarry awhile.”

Ryan could get me to smile on days when I wanted to do nothing but feel sorry for myself. He’d put on a thick Irish accent like the older men who hung out all day in the pub and spoke of,

“the old days, doncha know, back in WW II, when you could dance with the girls from the USO for a dime, and even before that, why I’d have to walk ten extra blocks to get home so me own paps wouldn’t take me pennies from me, which I had to get home to ma, so she could feed the little ones, it being the depression and all, they used to pay me for folding newspapers at the old Bulletin building, well, pap, he’d be for spend them all right here at Finnegan’s, of course, it was O’Malley’s back then, may he rest in peace.”

Ryan could go on like that for a good twenty minutes, never missing a beat or seeming to take a breath, until I’d be in stitches and begging him to stop before I’d have an accident. His father would look over sometimes with a odd expression, perhaps wondering what his youngest could be saying to John’s wife that could be so amusing. I mentioned it to Ryan once but he assured me there was no need for concern, wryly commenting.

“Trust me, he’s no doubt pickled pink to see me talking to any female, even my brother’s pregnant wife. No doubt considers it good practice to be exposed to the results of my manly brother’s oat sowing.” Seeing my reddening face, Ryan quickly apologized. “I’m sorry Micky, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I know that John loves you more than life. He really does. But my father...he’s a pig, dyed in the wool, male chauvinist. Once you have that baby, he’ll be disapproving that John lets you have shoes.” Ryan grinned mischievously. “I have it on good authority that John does intend to ‘let’ you have shoes...heard him tell the big brothers that shocking fact myself...as long as they’re spiked heels and red.”

I slapped him with a dish towel that was used to wipe down the bar spills. “You used to be my second favorite Finnegan brother!”

“Second favorite? I’m aiming for first! Considering the competition.” I missed him with the towel that time.

Six years later, when I left John, hauling along a suitcase and a five year old son, it was Ryan that I went to. Knocking on his apartment door in the middle of a terrible rainstorm, my hair all over my face but at least the rain blending in with the tears, I asked him if we could stay with him for a few days until I could make some arrangements.

“Sure,” was his instantaneous answer, with not a single question asked. He stood there, wearing just a pair of jeans, and told the other man in the apartment that he had to go, his sister and nephew were staying.

I loved how Ryan was always able to reduce everything to the essentials. I didn’t mention, did I, that Ryan was gay? It wasn’t mentioned much in his family either. John didn’t mind, hell, his best friend was gay, but it wasn’t something the staunchly Roman Catholic Finnegans were happy about as a general rule. It was one of those topics Brenda and I avoided discussing. She was my best surviving girl friend and my partner, but Ryan was more than my brother-in-law, ex or otherwise, he was my best friend, and at one point in my life, my flotation device when I was going down for the third time.

He convinced me life was worth living when the only man you’d ever loved was caught having sex with his secretary. By you.