To be fair, the first time I asked her, I had yet to ruin her life.
And Birdwine? When he quit me at the end of August, he’d made it plain that I was worse than bad. I was evil and he was all three monkeys. He had a paw on each ear and each eye and two clapped over his mouth. Maybe more than two over the mouth; he said he couldn’t talk to me.
I hadn’t seen that as a problem. Birdwine and I weren’t the kind who went around having swampy feelings, much less yammering about them. If he needed to talk, well, wasn’t that what AA was for? He’d known I wasn’t anybody’s priestess or therapist years before we rolled into the same bed. But one day he decided—almost randomly, it seemed to me—that he was done with me.
Well, fine. But I wasn’t done with him.
All ye gods and little fishes, stalking Zach Birdwine was dull work, though. I didn’t know how crazy people managed it, squatting in the closet of whatever movie star had caught their fancy, fondling undergarments, sniffing shoes, and waiting, waiting, waiting. I’d been here so long, I’d had to go refill my gas tank to keep the car warm. All apologies to Mother Earth, but I couldn’t properly stalk Birdwine with no heater here in February. Not unless I wanted to turn blue again.
I’d worked on a motion I was drafting until my laptop battery ran down. I’d eaten the tacos I’d gotten from the taquería across the street and all the Tic Tacs I had picked up at the gas station. I’d paid all my bills online via my iPhone, finished the book I was reading, and practically worn out my touch screen playing the sudoku app.
Now I sat stewing, staring back and forth between Birdwine’s junky bungalow and the road, willing his old Ford to come belching down the street. Maybe it already had. Maybe he’d seen my Lexus and kept right on driving. I thought of it as an anonymous kind of car, and in my neighborhood, it was. But here, on this edge of the village, gentrification was a failing work in progress. My car stuck out like a sleek, black thumb, parked between some barista-slash-musician’s little Civic and ancient Mrs. Carpenter’s crumbling heap of Buick.
Still, he had to come home sometime. He lived here, and the second bedroom was his office. So far, he’d ignored two voicemails, three emails, six texts, and a pricey muffin basket with lemon curd and local honey. Now he got me on his doorstep until he either faced me or abandoned his dog and all his worldly belongings.
The funny part was that Birdwine himself could well be sitting in his own car with a sack of tacos and a sudoku puzzle, stalking someone else. He was a private investigator; stakeouts were his bread and butter.
Perhaps the waiting is less onerous when one is being paid for it, I thought, and then realized that I should be paid, actually. Zach Birdwine was my ex, sure, but I was a stalker-by-proxy, acting on behalf of Daphne Skopes. As soon as I got my laptop charged, I’d log these hours and add them to the huge bill she’d already run up with my partner Nick. He’d looped me in because this case had started rotten and was quickly going rancid.
It had begun when Daphne Skopes came home from a girls’ weekend in Turks and Caicos to find her husband had changed the locks and canceled her credit cards. He’d drained their joint accounts, as well.
To be fair, the other “girl” on the getaway had a Y chromosome, a silky mustache, and a place in Daphne’s bed. Her husband was not feeling reasonable, and his last settlement offer had been the title to her car. Period. No alimony, no part of the retirement accounts, no cash, and neither their house in town nor their Savannah beach house.
Bryan Skopes was trying to starve his wife, who had no real assets, into accepting any bone he cared to throw her. His role was to alternately bluster and look martyred, while his lawyer practiced obfuscation and delay. Between them they had stretched every step of these proceedings past all reason. They had botched discovery, sending partial documents or unreadably poor copies. They had filed endless motions for continuance. They had rescheduled every mediation at the last minute. Nick hadn’t even been able to get his motion for fees before a judge yet. Months had passed, the bill was deep into five figures, and our firm had yet to see a dime.