Practice Makes Perfect

Seven

“I FOUND THE perfect guy for you.”

Payton barely looked up as Laney strolled into her office and plunked down in one of the seats in front of her desk.

“Hmm, that’s nice,” Payton said distractedly. “Can we talk about this in say . . .” She checked her watch. “Three weeks?” Putting aside partnership issues, she had a trial starting in two days.

“I’m excited about this, Payton. Don’t ruin the moment with sarcasm.”

“Oh, well, then.” Payton pushed aside the mound of files on her desk with a grand flourish. “By all means—continue.”

Laney looked at her pointedly. “Career or not, a single woman in her thirties cannot neglect her personal life forever.”

“Sorry, Laney, you’re right. I had forgotten that we’d traveled back in time to 1950.”

Another look from Laney. “May I continue?”

“Does Mr. Perfect have a name?”

“Chase.”

“And what makes the Perfect Chase so perfect?” Payton asked.

Laney leaned forward, eager to share the details. “He was in Nate’s fraternity in undergrad,” she began, referring to her husband. “He just moved here a few weeks ago. He’s a lawyer, too—and you’ll love this—he does pro bono work with the Chicago Legal Clinic. He went to Harvard Law School, he was president of both the Harvard Law chapter of the ACLU and the Harvard Law Advocates for Human Rights—”

Payton raised a skeptical eyebrow at this. “Harvard Law School?” She already knew one Harvard Law graduate and that was one too many.

Laney held up a hand. “I checked it out. He went there on scholarship and paid the rest with student loans. And he’s good-looking, too. Nate and I met him for dinner last night, and I subtly learned that he’s looking to meet someone.”

“How did you learn that?”

“I asked him if he was looking to meet someone.”

“That is subtle.” Payton shook her head. “You married people are always trying to set us single people up.”

Laney nearly jumped right out of her chair. “That’s exactly what he said! See—you two are perfect for each other.” She paused deliberately. “So? Should I tell him to call you?”

The timing wasn’t exactly the greatest, but Payton found her friend’s enthusiasm hard to resist. And the Perfect Chase did sound somewhat promising. Career-driven. Interested in politics. Passionate about his beliefs. True, these were all things she found attractive in a man. And she certainly wouldn’t hold being good-looking against him.

“Okay,” Payton agreed. “Tell him to call me.”

“Good. Because I already gave him your number.”

Payton mulled things over. “Harvard Law, huh?” She couldn’t help it; she glanced across the hall to J.D.’s office. They hadn’t spoken since the night of the Gibson’s pitch.

Over the last few days, to the extent possible, she had avoided walking by J.D.’s office and had been using the internal stairwells for all trips under five flights (normally two up, three down was her limit in heels) in order to minimize the risk of being stuck in the elevator with him. Because as far as she was concerned, she was done with J.D.

Not to suggest that she had ever begun with J.D., of course.

The way she saw it, she had put herself out there the other night at the restaurant. She had made an attempt to be friendly and—to put it mildly—he had not reciprocated. She had allowed herself to be caught off guard, to be momentarily vulnerable in front of him, and she would not make that mistake again. And now she just wanted to forget the whole thing.

It had been a foolish thought, anyway, her thinking that they could ever get along. At least the Gibson’s pitch was over, putting an end, albeit perhaps temporarily, to their work together. And if the firm did indeed land Gibson’s as a client, she and J.D. would likely both be partner by the time they started working on the case and she would find some way to staff it so that they encountered each other as little as possible.

Of course, there was that small part of her, the teeniest, tiniest part of her, that was disappointed J.D. hadn’t apologized. If anything, he seemed to be avoiding her, too, and that Payton couldn’t understand. She may have had her faults, but at least she owned up to her mistakes. He apparently didn’t feel the same way. Unless he didn’t think he had made a mistake, in which case she had even bigger problems with him.

Not that she had spent any time thinking about these things.

Payton turned her attention back to Laney, who was already thinking ahead to where she and the Perfect Chase should first meet.

“It should be drinks, not coffee,” Laney was saying. “Too much caffeine makes you quippy.”

Payton looked over, offended by this. “Quippy?”

They were interrupted by a knock at her door, and Irma poked her head into the office. “Your mother’s on my line. Should I transfer her over to you?”

“Why is my mother on your line?”

Irma cleared her throat awkwardly. “She said she had been thinking about me and, um, wanted to discuss something before I transferred her over to you.”

“What did she want to talk to you about?” Payton asked.

“She wanted to ask whether I had ever considered trying to unionize the secretarial staff.”

Payton rolled her eyes. Her mother had done the Norma Rae routine on her a million times. Apparently Irma was her newest victim.

Payton waved to Laney, who was already on her way out, and told Irma to put her mother through. She picked up the phone, bracing herself. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hey, Sis,” came her mother’s familiar greeting. In Lex Kendall’s mind (formerly Alexandra, but that name was too bourgeois), all women were sisters under the same moon.

“How’s my girl?” Lex asked.

“Fine, Mom. I hear from Irma that you’re trying to rally the troops against The Man.”

“See, I knew you’d get all uptight if I called her.”

“Yet still, you did it.”

“I just thought that she and the other laborers at your firm might want to know that they have rights. Not everyone there makes a six-figure salary, Payton.”

Payton sighed. Her mother was the only person she knew who was disappointed that her child was financially successful. “Irma could get in a lot of trouble, if the wrong person overheard your conversation and misunderstood. You forget that I’m a labor and employment lawyer.”

“No, I haven’t forgotten,” her mother said, as if recalling some heinous crime her only child had committed years ago. And in Lex Kendall’s mind, Payton’s sin was egregious indeed.

She had become a yuppie.

Payton had been raised to “live and think freely”—a sentiment that sounded great in theory, but, as she discovered by a very young age, actually meant she was supposed to “live and think freely” exactly the way her mother told her to.

Barbie dolls were sexist. (“Look at her vacant expression, Payton—Barbie doesn’t care about anything other than shopping.”) Fairy tales—in fact, most of children’s literature—were also sexist. (“Look at the message in these picture books, Payton—that beauty is the only important quality of a woman.”) Even Disney movies were the enemy. (“I know that Lisa’s mother lets her watch Cinderella, Payton. Lisa’s mother obviously has no problem teaching her daughter that women must wait passively for a man to bring meaning to their pathetically lonely lives.”)

Yes, Lex Kendall had a reason to protest just about everything.

It wasn’t that Payton didn’t agree with her mother’s principles. She did agree with some of them, just not to the same degree. For example, she was absolutely against people wearing fur coats. Which meant that she personally did not wear one. It did not mean that she stood outside Gucci on Michigan Avenue throwing buckets of red paint on exiting shoppers. (Oh, yes, her mother had, several times, in fact, and had even twice gone to jail for her renegade artistic endeavors, necessitating several of young Payton’s many overnight stays with her grandparents.)

In her mother’s eyes, Payton knew, she had sold out. In fact, when Lex had found out that Payton planned to defend Corporate America as part of her law practice, she had refused to speak to her daughter for two straight weeks.

Ah . . . Payton still recalled those two weeks fondly. It had been the most peaceful 336 hours of her life.

“Can I call you back later this evening, when I get home?” she asked her mother. “I’m pretty busy at work these days.”

“With the partnership thing,” her mother stated in a tone that was, at best, disinterested.

“Yes, the partnership thing.” Payton bit back the urge to say anything further. Was it really that difficult for people to understand what she was going through? Did no one get the amount of stress she was under?

“You don’t need to call me back,” her mother told her. “I can hear the tension in your voice. Are you keeping up with your yoga practice? You probably need to liberate your chakras.”

Payton put her head on her desk. Yes, of course—the tension in her voice had nothing to do with the fact that she hadn’t taken a vacation in nearly four years. The problem was that her chakras were unliberated.

She could hear her mother rambling on through the receiver she held in her hand.

“. . . talk more when I come into town later this month—”

At this, Payton sprung back to life. “You’re coming to Chicago?”

“Steven plans to visit Sarah and Jess in L.A. for Father’s Day,” her mother said, referring to Payton’s two stepsisters. “I thought I’d come to Chicago so we could spend the weekend together.”

Payton peered over at her calendar. She had been so busy she’d completely forgotten about the upcoming holiday. And, despite the rocky start to their conversation, she suddenly felt a rush of affection toward her mother. Lex Kendall could be a difficult woman no doubt, but she had never once let Payton spend a Father’s Day alone, not even after she and her husband Steven had married and moved to San Francisco several years ago. Though they’d never discussed it openly, Payton knew it was her mother’s attempt to compensate for the fact that Payton hadn’t heard from her father in years.

“I’d like that, Mom,” Payton said. They discussed briefly what they might do that weekend. Keeping her fingers crossed, Payton hoped she might have some good news to share by then.

After a few moments of chatting, Payton saw her other line ringing. Through the glass door of her office, she watched as Irma intercepted the call, nodded, then got up and signaled for her attention. Payton wrapped up the call with her mother, sensing it was something important.

“What is it?” she asked when Irma stepped into her doorway.

“That was Ben’s secretary, Marie. He wants to see you in his office.” Irma lowered her voice. “Marie says she heard him on the phone earlier this morning, with Tom Hillman from the Partnership Committee. She heard him tell Tom that he wanted to give you and J.D. the news early.”

Payton felt a thrill of excitement run through her.

This was it.

With a faint smile on her face, Payton got up from her desk and thanked Irma for the message.

Then she headed out the door to Ben’s office.