Short Squeeze by Chris Knopf

Author:Chris Knopf [Knopf, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9780307357304
Google: SqxqVHkMOTYC
Amazon: 0307357309
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 2010-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

Fuzzy?

13

My father didn’t go easily. He took his impending death as just another affront, perpetrated by forces indifferent to his personal dignity, not unlike his engineering clients or the clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In addition to magazine articles about women living alone, I never read inspirational tales about people who fight fatal diseases with valiant determination, turning a two-month prognosis into ten bountiful years. Probably because my father turned a ten-year prognosis, at minimum, into two miserable years of abject surrender, nicely embellished by unrelenting self-pity and complaint.

It was a display of heroic proportions, if not exactly heroic.

Given this, it was unsurprising that something like a will, the ultimate recognition of the inevitable, was the last thing he’d think about, much less compose. I should have known this was the case, but, of course, I didn’t, assuming no intelligent, educated adult would be that selfish and uncaring.

I was only in my first year of law school at that point and couldn’t even spell intestate, much less deal with its consequences. But I learned fast, motivated by the prospect of my mother losing thousands of dollars working through the Kafka-designed theme park called New York State probate, known quaintly around here as Surrogate’s Court.

The period it took me to settle all the legal questions, negotiate the estate taxes of the state and federal governments, and lay the groundwork for the next inevitability was exactly, to the day, how long my mother lived beyond my father’s death.

Having worked side by side with me throughout the process, and too exhausted to celebrate with anything more than a half bottle of week-old Cabernet swiped off the kitchen counter, she thanked me for being the best daughter I knew how to be (not exactly unqualified praise) and went off to bed to die of a massive heart attack.

Real estate was nowhere near as costly in those days as it is now, but neither was law school. So I was able to pay it all off and have a little left over to squander on the transition from frantic, grief-stricken student to frantic, dysfunctional adult. Just to spite my old man’s reckless disregard.

It was that lively concoction of extreme emotion, cold-hearted reality, and sudden loss of childhood that taught me the beauty of the law. Until then, I was doing it just to prove to any doubters that I could. The only real doubter being my father, though his dying did nothing to stem my determination.

I learned it wasn’t just knowing how to gin the system, how to jigger the odds. There was a solid core of brilliance in the law, embedded in thousands of years of experiences far more desperate and ennobling than my own. That everyone had at least a chance, a shot at something akin to justice and fair play. Maybe that’s naïve, but you need something beyond habit to get you up in the morning. At least I do.

Thoughts like these were running wild as I walked out of Sandy Kalandro’s office with my briefcase stuffed with paperwork covered in authorizing signatures.

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