Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

1018 Justified and Ancient

Justified and Ancient

You may have noticed that not a word was said at the lawyer meeting about any of the other lawsuit stuff hanging over our heads. I wasn't even sure which ones were real threats and which ones weren't. You might think if nothing had happened in two years on a case that nothing was every going to happen, right?

But as Feinbaum once explained to me, the courts really had no incentive to hurry, especially on cases where the main stakes were money. The longer they waited, the more likely the parties would settle with each other and then no court date would be needed. Often they'd only get scheduled if the statute of limitations was approaching, which meant that sometimes people came really close to getting away with something before their time in front of a judge.

If I remember right, the statute of limitations on embezzlement was two years if the amount was small, and three years if it was large? Something like that. The penalties also went up as the amount went up. Which I suppose was fair. No one had told me yet what amount of money Digger had embezzled from Sarah, or if they had, I didn't remember. But my guess was they wouldn't have bothered if the number didn't have at least four zeroes, and more likely five.

Carynne took me out for a meal then which I guess was either really late lunch or really early dinner. Maybe it was just an excuse to get out of the office and talk, but we just kind of talked around some subjects without talking about them directly. I think she sensed I was too wrung out to handle much. The city felt familiar and strange at the same time.

The one thing she did ask me head on was, "How's your mom?"

"Insane and probably driving Flip crazy, too, by now." We were in a Chinese place in midtown, one of the ones that looked kind of fancy to appeal to the business types, but the food wasn't any different from takeout. I was picking the cashews out of a plate of chicken and cashews and eating them one by one.

"I mean, you know, health-wise."

"It's hard to tell. She's having these treatments that are supposed to shrink her tumors so they can try to take them out, but basically any time she's not high, she's vomiting. Or worse."

"Sounds awful."

"It is awful." The cashews were salty and crunchy despite having been tossed in the gravy and for whatever reason I was enjoying eating them by themselves instead of with the chicken and green peppers in the stir fry. I shook my head.

"You don't think she's going to make it?"

"I really don't know. The chances are not great." I put down my chopsticks so I could take a sip of tea. "I don't know how to feel about it."

"Because all of a sudden you're responsible for her?"

"Because I'm involved with her," I said. "I'm trying to do the right thing, and she needs someone, and I'm not enough of a jerk to abandon her, am I? At the same time... she tried to split me and Ziggy up because she thought he'd be against her drugging herself into a stupor."

"He's not? I mean, why did she think he'd be against that?" Carynne was also not eating much, but maybe too much talk about vomiting can affect the appetite.

"She somehow took the fact that he's staying drug-free himself to mean that. If I had to guess it's because if Claire decided not to do drugs, she'd expect everyone around her to stop doing them, too." I sprinkled some sugar into my tiny chinese teacup and poured some more tea from the porcelain pot. "Come to think of it, that's exactly why. When Claire quit sugar, the whole family quit sugar. And she thinks that she and Ziggy are alike."

"Are they?"

"In some ways, yeah." I cupped the tea and the warmth felt good on my hand, which had been stressed by the examination and test exercises as well as by all the picking up of cashews I had done. "I'm just... I don't know what to do with myself, Car'. I can't really do anything to help my mother get better. I haven't touched a guitar in months. I fell off the wagon on my voice exercises. I can count on one hand the number of song ideas I've had in the past year. What the hell is wrong with me?"