The Shyster's Daughter by Paula Priamos

Author:Paula Priamos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Etruscan Press
Published: 2012-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

I park on the street in front of my father’s office because I don’t plan to stay long. All I need is twenty bucks for gas and a drive-thru dinner at Jack-in-the-Box.

From outside I hear shouting, the kind that brings men to blows. As I open the door, I recognize it’s my father and another man—the ex-husband is back. Nora is nowhere to be found and must still be at lunch.

Uncomfortably, I take a seat on the couch. I don’t need to eavesdrop since I can hear everything loud and clear from the reception area. I think about waiting in the car. I think about calling the cops.

“You won’t get away with robbing her blind,” the man says. “I’ll have you disbarred.”

“You’re the fucking thief,” my father fires back.

His voice is thunderous, yet controlled. “This is about my finding all that property you tried hiding from her.” Like a good defense attorney, he counts a calculated beat for effect. “Did you really think I wouldn’t know where to look?”

In a strange way, I’m proud. Even if my father is as guilty as her ex-husband of stealing her money, it’s been months since I’ve seen him take a swing at anything, let alone the ex who’s been harassing us for weeks.

My father isn’t finished with him yet. I hear an ominous rustling sound, like he might have the man by the shirt, maybe by the throat. Whatever my father says next he can’t risk another person hearing, and I think of the red eye home from Hawaii, how he said he’d never let anyone come near me or Rhea. He’s making up for more than somebody’s camera happy ex-husband who snapped my picture. He’s making up for having ignored in his younger brother what he’d so obviously seen in the pedophiles he’s defended. Their excuses as flimsy as a groin pull in the backseat of a car or steadfast in the denial like the local congressman who passed a lie detector test with flying colors after having been caught literally red handed, jerking off behind a dumpster at a local park.

Maybe what happened to my sister and me was payback for their sentences being reduced or thrown out altogether because she was seventeen, not sixteen, because the children out playing didn’t really see the man all that clearly and the woman who did was well into her sixties, wore prescription sunglasses, and clearly needed to have her eyes checked again. The politician, in his suit and tie, could’ve been rooting through garbage as he claims, looking for cans to recycle. He campaigned on cleaning up the environment, after all.

I’m contemplating heading into the room and breaking it up before my father needs a lawyer himself, when the decision is made for me. By fear or by rage, in the ex-husband’s haste to leave, he flashes past without even a glance at me seated picture perfect on the couch.

Minutes later we’re on the 60 freeway in my father’s Mercedes. He cancels the rest of his afternoon and insists on driving me to Studio City, to see the shrink.

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