One Fine Day Read online

  Usually it didn’t bother Jill too much. The dinners with clients, or prospective clients, were often tedious, but it wasn’t like she really had anywhere else to be. She’d given up a lot to get where she was.

  Still, she always preferred evenings like this one, when she could close the door, turn up her music, and really focus in on the work. There was a thirty-two page commercial lease waiting for her painstaking review.

  Jill opened the document on her computer and, before she started reading, grabbed the remote control. Her iPod was already securely nested in her Bose speaker system, and she punched up the volume as the first bright, cheery notes of Pavarotti singing “La donna è mobile” filled her office. She found her reading glasses, a recently added accessory, and reminded herself that she didn’t really need them, they just made the small print a little easier to read. She began to review the contract, marking up the document as she went on the word processing program.

  Bryce, one of the fourth-year associates, had done the preliminary draft of the lease for one of their major corporate clients, using an old form Jill herself had written some years ago. The first few changes she had to make were based on a change in the law since the last time the form was used. Bryce might not necessarily have known about the change at this point in his career.

  But as she read further, Jill began frowning. Bryce hadn’t been careful about changing the provisions for the specifics of the lease, relying instead on a “find and replace” command in the word processing program. By the third time Jill had to correct a square footage provision in the lease, she could feel her blood pressure beginning to soar.

  She sat back in her leather chair, and tossed her glasses back on the desk. Shutting her eyes, she tried to lose herself in the music, letting it soothe her temper.

  It was a soprano whose song filled her office. She wasn’t just hearing the voice with her ears, for this voice sounded in her head as well. It was, as always, a balm to her spirit. Jill could hear that voice, not just as it was on the recording, but as it had sounded in the practice room and in the rehearsal hall. The voice soared, lightly came to earth again, then rose up as if it were mightier than gravity, lifting the words and music to heaven.

  Jill didn’t know if there was an actual heaven or not, but she did know for certain that if there were angels, their singing made a sound just like that voice. She didn’t hear the knock on her door, and she jerked upright with surprise when a man said, “Jill?”

  She opened her eyes to see Walter Calvert standing in her doorway. Jill groped for the remote to turn off the music.

  “No, it’s fine,” Walter said quickly. “It’s nice, actually. What is it? It almost sounds like a lullaby.”

  “It’s Puccini,” Jill answered, turning down the volume a little. “An aria called ‘O mio babbino caro.’ She’s asking her dear papa for permission to be with her lover, saying that she will die if she can’t be with him.”

  Walter sat in her visitor’s chair, cocking his head as he often did when listening. Jill suspected that he had some hearing loss in one ear, but for a sixty-eight-year-old man, he was remarkably vigorous and she wasn’t about to suggest to him that a hearing aid might be a good idea.

  “Who’s the singer?” he asked, as the piece ended.

  “Caroline Prince,” Jill answered.

  “She’s really wonderful,” he said, with firm conviction.

  “Yes,” Jill agreed, unable to say anything else. “She is a wonderful singer.”

  “I’ve often wondered about your love of opera,” he said. “Forgive me for saying this, but opera seems like a bit of an esoteric taste for a woman who comes from good, solid, working-class stock.”

  Jill knew that he didn’t mean it in any way but as a compliment. Walter himself was the grandson of a coal miner, and she knew he liked her better because Jill’s father had been a bus driver.

  “My Aunt Renata, my mother’s sister, was the musician in the family,” Jill answered. “I was listening to the stories from the operas and the music from the time I could talk. She taught me piano, and later, I played for some of her singing students.”

  He smiled at her, showing very white teeth that were a bit too perfect. “No singing yourself?” he asked.

  Jill laughed a little. “Let’s just say that I lack any kind of vocal talent. But I do love music, I can hear it in my head, but it never comes out of my mouth properly. I’m a fair pianist, though.”

  “I’m always interested in the paths that lead us to the law,” he said. “Why did you go to law school?”

  “Because I almost flunked chemistry,” Jill admitted, wondering why Walter had dropped in to have this little chat with her. “My parents were dead set on getting me as much higher education as possible, and my dad figured medical school was as much education as a person could get. Unfortunately, I also lack a scientific turn of mind. Law school was his second choice.”

  Walter chuckled. “Just goes to show you how well things can turn out,” he said. “You have a real talent for this kind of high-level transactional work, you know.”

  Jill fiddled with the glasses on her desk. “Thanks, Walter.” She smiled a little. “I certainly learned from the best.”

  He chortled happily at that. “I would tell you that flattery will get you nowhere, but the truth is that you’ve done very well for us. Very well.”

  “You and the firm have given me a lot of opportunities,” she answered, wondering again where this was going.

  “That’s true. And you took appropriate advantage of them.”

  He steepled his fingers, and Jill knew he was finally getting to the point of his visit. “I’m thinking of…well, not really retiring, of course, but stepping back a bit,” he began.

  She was vaguely shocked. She’d thought, for some reason, he would die with his boots on, as his father had before him. The senior Calvert had keeled over dead from a massive heart attack in the midst of a complex negotiation for the office space they now occupied.

  “You’re surprised,” Walter said shrewdly.

  “I am,” she admitted. “You look wonderful, I must say.”

  He chortled again. “That’s the point, I think,” he said. “Marjorie has been at me to take some time and enjoy some of the fruits the years of hard labor have brought us. So I’m cutting back. And that means bringing in fresh blood for some of my biggest clients.”

  Ah, Jill thought. He’s giving me work. “That’s kind of you, Walter,” she said.

  “Yes, well, I’m not interested in throwing my favorite client accounts onto the table like pieces of meat for the wolves to fight over. And there would be fighting, you know.”

  “Yes,” Jill agreed, mentally flipping a coin. The Denver Stock Show? Or the airport authority?

  “I want you to represent the Rocky Mountain Opera,” he announced, presenting her the account with the flourish of a magician producing a coin from behind her ear.

  “What?” Jill thought she’d misheard him.

  “I know it’s not the single most lucrative account, but it’s the most prestigious,” he said. “The jewel in the crown, so to speak. It’s usually not an excessive amount of work and it has the single best perquisite in the office.”

  “Better than a luxury suite at the Broncos games? Better than V.I.P. passes to the stock show?” she teased him.

  “Much better. Season box seats to the opera.”

  She realized how much he wanted her to be thrilled with his little surprise. He’d arranged this because he knew how much she loved opera, and because he wanted her to have at least a piece of his client list before the infighting started over the power vacuum his “stepping back” would cause. “That’s wonderful, Walter,” she said, with as much sincerity as she could manage. “But won’t Marjorie miss going to the opera?”

  “Oh, no!” He laughed. “She only goes to wear her politically incorrect mink and emeralds. I’ll take her to the ballet or something. It will be all the same to her. And you can u
se the seats to finally impress some nice woman enough to have a second date.”

  Jill appreciated the fact that her law firm, well-established and old-school though it may have been, made it easy for her to be out, but she wished Walter would show a bit less interest in her social life. Such as it was.

  “I’ll work on that,” she said. “Thanks again for this. I assume you want me to meet with the RMO board soon?”

  “Next week, in fact,” he said. “The board is having a cocktail party for their hundred or so closest friends, by which you can assume they’re sucking up to their biggest donors. They have a new artistic director, and the board likes to trot out their legal counsel and show us off. I’ll e-mail you the details.”

  She stood to walk him out. “Are you sure Gary won’t mind?” she asked.

  “Oh, I’m very sure he will mind a great deal,” Walter smiled. “That will be part of the fun.”

  Oh, wonderful. Gary doesn’t know. Walter’s twisting the knife, and using me to do it. “Fun for you, maybe,” she murmured.

  Walter patted her arm in an avuncular manner. “Don’t you worry about my son-in-law,” he reassured her. “I’ll handle him.”

  He left, and Jill returned to her desk. From the speakers, Villazón was singing from Romeo y Julieta. She punched off the music, suddenly in no mood for songs about doomed lovers.

  * * *

  Jill drove toward home down Speer Boulevard after e-mailing a copy of the marked-up lease to Bryce. She had rewritten the e-mail to him three times in order to convey the correct tone of restrained disappointment. Bryce had potential, but he seemed more interested in following the questionable example set by Gary Watson.

  Gary was married to Walter Calvert’s only daughter. Jill remembered the discussion at the partnership meeting about bringing him into the firm. The nuances of the nepotism policy had been delicately debated, and Jill, newly admitted as a member of the firm, had felt it wise to say nothing. Walter had been the person who had largely sponsored her admission as a partner, and she was grateful to him, but not to the extent of alienating several other partners by supporting an exception to the nepotism rule.

  In the end, Walter had prevailed, convincing a majority of the other partners that the rule shouldn’t apply to in-laws, only to blood relatives. Jill thought the argument was, in a word, specious, but kept her mouth shut. If she’d known what a royal pain in the ass Gary Watson would turn out to be, she’d have risked losing Walter’s support to oppose his hiring.

  It wasn’t that Gary was a particularly bad lawyer, although, in Jill’s opinion he wasn’t really up the intellectual standard of most of the other attorneys in the firm. The problem was that, having played the family card to get his job as an associate, he seemed determined to do as little work as possible. His ability to avoid difficult or time-consuming assignments was now legendary at Worthington & Steele.

  Gary had been assigned to her to work on some delicate negotiations with Adams County over zoning for a new golf course and its associated housing development. Too lazy or bored to do the difficult review of the land-use regulations or preliminary plat, Gary spent most of his time playing golf with the developer and, on one occasion, a member of the planning commission.

  Worse than that, Jill knew him to be a bigot as well. After she had gotten the work done largely by herself, she had challenged Gary to a friendly little golf match at Cherry Hills, the highly exclusive country club not far from downtown Denver where the firm had a corporate membership. They went with Walter and his daughter, Gary’s wife, Stacy. When Gary claimed a seven handicap, Jill, a legitimate twelve handicapper, maneuvered him into a side bet and got him to give her five strokes. From the warm-up on the driving range, she couldn’t imagine he was better than about a fourteen or so.

  Nothing got Jill’s adrenaline flowing more than competition. She played particularly well that day and beat him by seven strokes. Gary was very sullen, although Walter seemed quite amused at the drubbing.

  Stacy, a well-maintained blonde, was largely oblivious to the hostilities. She focused more on her brand new, very expensive putter that still didn’t seem to be able to get the golf ball into the hole.

  After the match, Jill had showered and dressed and was finishing up her hair when she heard Stacy leave the women’s locker room. Gary was outside waiting for her.

  “I should have known better,” he grumbled, “than to try to beat a dyke who’s more butch than I am.”

  Jill had stopped brushing her hair in faint shock—not at the sentiment, because God knew homophobia was still alive and well—but at the terrible judgment Gary showed in saying it in public. Walter, she knew, was scrupulous in his refusal to tolerate prejudice of any kind and if his father-in-law had heard him, Gary would at a minimum have been reassigned to the Boise office the next day.

  Nevertheless, she knew better than to rat out Gary to Walter. Gary was Walter’s family, after all, and Jill knew Gary was probably not the only one in the firm who wasn’t thrilled with having a lesbian admitted to the partnership. Jill’s professional strategy had always been to work harder than anyone else, prove herself, and keep her head down. She was out, but she wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it.

  Still, she managed to avoid working with Gary Watson whenever possible, and did nothing to criticize him in front of Walter, especially. Over time, she sensed that Walter was finally figuring out that Gary was not the hardest-working member of the team. After six years at the firm, Gary was agitating for a partnership himself, and Walter had simply refused to do anything about it.

  Now Walter was “stepping back,” whatever that meant, and giving Jill one of his favorite clients. Gary would be very unhappy, and Jill knew from Walter’s remark that making Gary unhappy was part of Walter’s plan.

  Jill was uncomfortable about being in the middle. Firm politics alternately frustrated and annoyed her, and she just wanted to sit in her office and work without having to negotiate the roiling waters of money, family, and pride.

  When she got to her penthouse, she realized that it was after nine o’clock. She was sure she’d eaten lunch, but she couldn’t remember it. She hung up her suit jacket and went on a scavenger hunt in her kitchen. The granite countertops and cherry wood cabinets were as clean as ice—she rarely made anything in the kitchen but coffee—and bare.

  Leftover Kung Pao chicken would have to do. She poured half a glass of wine, nuked the chicken, and took both out to her balcony to eat in the mild springtime air.

  She watched the headlights of cars leaving the Cherry Creek mall on the other side of the river, bright white pearls joining the necklace of cars already waiting for the traffic light to change. She didn’t want to think about Gary Watson, or Walter, or the badly drafted lease, or the firm.

  She thought instead about Caroline. As she had often done, Jill rearranged her memories so that they played out like a romantic movie with a happily-ever-after ending, complete with Caroline singing the beautiful soundtrack.

  Some nights, if she was very lucky, she could actually convince herself that Caroline was inside the condominium, waiting for her to come in.

  Chapter Two

  “I feel strongly that we need to incorporate more American works and more twentieth-century operas into our seasons,” Boyers said heavily. “That’s one of the reasons we hired Ms. Prince in the first place.”

  They were only eleven minutes into the monthly Friday afternoon meeting, and Caroline could already feel the tension beginning to rise around the table seating the twelve board members.

  “No one’s disagreeing, Charlie,” Jack Parsons, the Chair of the RMO Board, answered. Caroline realized with a start that Boyers’ first name must be Charles. Had his mother been a fan of the 1930’s French movie star? She would have to remember that he pronounced his name as Boy-yurz, not the French version of Boy-yea.

  Parsons continued, “But we have to have productions that people will attend, and enjoy. That is the point.”


  “And ones we can afford,” Barbara Forrester added crisply.

  She was an interesting combination of a beautifully dressed woman with a sharp nose and chin that made her look in profile rather like the Wicked Witch of the West. Caroline remembered that Forrester was a partner in one of the Big Four accounting firms. Arthur, Caroline’s new assistant, had told her that Barbara could always be counted on to watch the bottom line.

  Caroline had sat for a while, cautiously listening to her first board meeting as the newest member. It was time to make some kind of statement. She said carefully, “These are all considerations. And I want to assure you all that I’m only interested in preserving the reputation of Rocky Mountain Opera. This is not about me putting my stamp on the season. I want the RMO to become one of the finest opera companies in the country. One of the ways we can accomplish that goal is by our selection of productions.”

  The board members digested that for a moment. Caroline saw faces of caution, enthusiasm, skepticism, and bewilderment. She was still trying to sort everyone out, matching the faces with Arthur’s descriptions. Jack Parsons was old money, and the pragmatist every board needed. Boyers was a real opera fanatic, and Richard Loomis, seated quietly in the corner, was probably using his membership to further some political agenda.

  Barbara Forrester was tapping a yellow pencil on her PDA, an odd juxtaposition of old and new note-taking technologies. “My concern is that we have a sizeable inventory of costumes, wigs, props, and the like,” she remarked. “If we begin to venture heavily into contemporary works, won’t we have to make a considerable capital investment?”

  “Oh, come on, Barbara,” Boyers snorted. “You’ve got to spend money to make money.”

  “We’re not selling cars, Charlie,” she said peevishly, and he flinched. Clearly he was a bit embarrassed that his money came from half-a-dozen upscale automobile lots. Caroline herself was driving a very nice Audi sedan she’d leased from him when she’d arrived in Denver. It felt odd to have a car of her own. She hadn’t driven herself around very much in, well, a couple of decades.