The smell of fresh latex paint and sawdust still hung heavy in the air when Arthur unlocked the door to suite 204 at 8:15 on a Tuesday morning. It was a tiny room over the barber shop on 4th Street, just big enough for a secondhand walnut desk, two folding chairs that squeaked if you shifted your weight, and a brass floor lamp we found at the salvage yard off Highway 9. Arthur had spent four hundred and twenty dollars on his business cards, all crisp white cardstock with gold-foil lettering that spelled out Arthur J. Vance, Attorney at Law.
He spent another fifty dollars on a framed diploma from a state school he barely managed to graduate from after three tries and two different majors.
I was there to help him set up the filing cabinet because Arthur always got butterfingers when he was nervous, dropping every paper clip within a ten-foot radius. My brother has this habit of smoothing down his tie whenever things aren’t going his way, rubbing the silk between his thumb and forefinger until the threads start to fray. He did it three times while we were just standing by the empty coat rack waiting for the morning mail delivery that wasn’t going to bring anything except three circulars for pest control.
“It looks professional, doesn’t it, Clara?” he asked, looking around the twelve-by-twelve room like he was standing in the Supreme Court. “People want to see mahogany. They want to see a man who means business.”
“It looks like an empty room with a desk in it, Artie,” I told him, blowing the dust off the corner of the blotter. “You need a stapler. You need some actual law books instead of old encyclopedias with the covers taped up.”
“Nobody checks the spines,” he muttered, pulling out a legal pad and laying a yellow highlighter beside it at a precise forty-five-degree angle. “Law is ninety percent presentation anyway. If they think you’re busy, they think you’re good.”
We sat there together for almost an hour watching the dust motes drift through the shaft of sunlight coming in past the dirty venetian blinds. A pigeon landed on the exterior brick ledge outside, cooing and scratching at the mortar until Arthur waved his hand at the glass to shoo it away. He was terrified that the first person through that door would see right through his brand-new suit and his rented briefcase.
He had the knots in his stomach I used to get back when we were kids waiting for Daddy to come home from the feed store after a bad harvest.
Then the downstairs heavy glass door creaked on its hinges.
You could hear every footstep coming up the uncarpeted wooden stairs because the landlord was cheap and hadn’t laid down any runners yet. Step, creak, pause. Step, creak, pause. Arthur went rigid behind the walnut desk, his hands diving straight for the landline telephone we had plugged into the wall twenty minutes earlier. He didn’t even check to see if there was a dial tone. He just grabbed the receiver, pressed it hard against his ear, and started nodding like he was listening to the most important settlement negotiation of the century.
“No, sir!” he shouted into the dead plastic, loud enough to rattle the windowpane. “I won’t settle for less than five million dollars!
My client deserves justice! Tell the judge I’ll see him in court tomorrow!”
He slammed the cradle down with a theatrical clatter that made the brass lamp jump an inch off the table. He looked up at me with his chest puffed out, sweating through the armpits of his polyester jacket, trying to look like Perry Mason on a Tuesday morning.
The office door swung open without even a knock.
A tall man in a faded utility jumpsuit walked in carrying a heavy coil of gray cable over one shoulder and a canvas tool pouch slung around his waist. He had a yellow pencil stuck behind his ear and a smudge of drywall dust right across his forehead. He didn’t look at Arthur’s gold-foil business cards. He didn’t look at the fake diploma with the crooked frame. He just walked straight past my chair, stood right in front of the desk, and looked down at the phone line trailing across the baseboard.
Arthur cleared his throat, trying to regain his courtroom voice. “Ah. Come in, come in. Take a seat. As you can see, I’m right in the middle of a very delicate matter with a corporate client. What can I do for you today, son?”
The technician didn’t blink. He reached down, picked up the modular plug that was dangling loose against the floorboards two feet from the wall jack, and dangled it between two fingers like an old fishing worm.
“I’m just here to connect your phone line,” the man said, his voice completely flat and tired. “It’s not working yet.”
The silence in that little office got so thick you could have sliced it with a butter knife. Arthur sat there with his mouth half open, his face turning the color of a bruised plum, staring at the little plastic clip swinging back and forth on the end of the wire. I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I tasted copper just to keep from laughing out loud right there in front of a stranger.
“Oh,” Arthur whispered, all the five-million-dollar air leaking right out of him at once. “Right. The phone line.”
“Yeah,” the man said, walking over to the baseboard box with his small screwdriver. “Main cable on the pole outside wasn’t even spliced yet. You wouldn’t have heard a dial tone if you stood here all week shouting into that thing.”
He got down on one knee right then and there, pulling a wire stripper out of his pouch with a sharp little snap. Arthur slowly took his hand off the receiver, reached into his breast pocket, and pulled out a tissue to wipe the sweat off his forehead. He looked at me with this pathetic, cornered look that went right through my ribs, because I knew how much he wanted this office to work out after the third try at the bar exam nearly broke his spirit.
“Do you need me to leave while you work?” Arthur asked, his voice cracking just a little bit at the end.
“Nah,” the technician said without looking up, twisting two copper wires together with practiced fingers. “Just keep your voice down. I’ve got three more offices to wire on this floor before noon, and none of the other guys are pretending to sue anybody.”
I stood up, smoothed out my skirt, and walked over to the small metal filing cabinet to check if the drawers actually opened, because honestly, that felt safer than looking at my brother’s face. The technician taped the gray line down against the molding with a strip of grey duct tape, packed up his pliers, and walked out without another word, leaving the door wide open to the hallway. Arthur sat there staring at the telephone for a long time, not saying a single thing, just rubbing his thumb back and forth over the plastic receiver where the grease from his palm was already starting to leave a mark. It cost us eight hundred dollars a month just to keep the lights on in that room, and by noon we hadn’t made a single dime, but Arthur didn’t put his suit jacket back on for the rest of the afternoon.
