Swan Dive

get a chance to compose herself and have something to eat before she saw her daughter. On the ride from Marblehead , it had been decided that I’d give Hanna and Vickie a lift home. Chris had spent most of the ride gloating over what a great deal he’d worked out on everything but the house, which he thought Hanna should ”rethink.” I was a less than objective observer at the conference, but in my opinion Arnold had stolen Chris’s pants without undoing his belt. The problem was it was Hanna’s, and Vickie’s, future that was on the line.
    We found a small French restaurant called the Lyceum. With exposed-brick walls and high windows and ceilings, it was a pleasant and airy place to hold a postmortem. It being the end of the lunch hour, a few words whispered by me to the hostess got us a nice table away from the boisterous Friday hangers-on ordering one more carafe of the house white. I was pretty sure that if things couldn’t be settled, Hanna and Roy would be litigating their differences in the Essex County Family and Probate Court a few blocks away.
    I tried to make small talk for a while, but received only nods and one-word replies. Finally Hanna said, ”Thank you for trying to help.”
    ”You handled a difficult time well.”
    She nudged the remains of a large spinach salad around with a fork. ”What do you think I should do?”
    ”Change lawyers by sundown” was what I thought, but it wasn’t my place to say it. ”It seems to me that the house, even without seeing it, is probably worth more than the appraisal said. I also think you’re right to want to have it all, especially for Vickie’s sake.”
    ”My husband...” She almost smiled. ”I must stop calling him so. Roy is a bad man to push like that.”
    ”Just what kind of man is he, really?”
    She hooded her eyes. ”The kind you don’t tell to do things unless you can beat him.”
    I considered asking her a lot about old Roy , but I had hired on as bodyguard, not psychotherapist. We closed out lunch by my promising to press Chris to get a second appraisal of the marital home.
    We got a taxi on the corner and rode to Chris’s house. The cab had no sooner pulled away than Vickie came bounding out the front door, laughing and calling, ”Mommie! Mommie! Wait till you see what Eleni and I made!”
    Inside the kitchen, Vickie proudly displayed the file folders they had assembled and the tray of baklava they had made. We each had a slice of the sweet pastry while Hanna kept her daughter focused on the morning with Eleni and away from the conference in Marblehead .
    As Hanna went with Vickie to gather her things for the ride home, Eleni tugged on my sleeve.
    ”Things, they go well?” she said, without much confidence.
    ”No violence. A tough negotiation, but I’m no expert at judging lawyer talk.”
    Eleni rested her forehead in the palm of a hand. ”When the husband come here, I see him. He smile at me when he leave. Not a nice smile, John.”
    ”I’ve seen it.”
    ”And not a nice man, John. Not just bad. He have the look.”
    ”The look?”
    ”The look of the men I leave Greece to get away from. A man who does the gambling, visits the whores, beats the wife. The look of a man who like to hurt.”
    I could hear Hanna and Vickie coming back into the room behind me. Eleni said, quietly but insistently, ”Watch good for them, John. Chris, he... cannot.”
    We got in my car, Vickie pleased with the ancient bucket seats fore and aft. She babbled on the way kids do, about her friends in Swampscott (”There’s Ginny, and Karen, and Fred, but nobody ever wants to play with him”), her cat (”I know Cottontail’s kind of a funny name for a kitty, but she’s all white all over, and...”), her starting kindergarten in the fall (”I hope Fred’s not in my class, but I don’t know how they do things like that”). Ordinarily, I can’t abide kidnoise, but it was nice to have something filling the air.
    We arrived at the dilapidated three-decker and Vickie said, ”Oooooh, wait till you see Cottontail! You’ll love her, too.”
    Before I had turned off the motor, Vickie was out of the car, urging her mother to hurry. Once in the building foyer, Vickie ran to their apartment door. ”Cottontail? Cotton? We’re home!” She put her ear up to the discolored wood and concentrated. ”I can hear her crying. She must have missed us. It’s okay, Cottontail, we’re coming.”
    Hanna put the key in the lock, and Vickie burst in, calling