TRIALS OF A DEAD LAWYER’S WIFE

Some decades are worse than others. But even when one’s spouse has departed this life under a cloud of scandal and disgrace, the good Southern widow must endure the ghastly ritual of the funeral home visitation, which generally involves an open casket and lots of clucking and whispering by curious Southern Baptist busybodies. I was prepared for stares and whispers as I made my way to my widow’s post next to my husband Scott’s body. The fact I was in the middle of my third divorce—from a disbarred lawyer who had been banned from every Kmart in the state of Georgia—ratcheted up the gossip factor. I was also prepared for the distasteful likelihood I would soon come face-to-face with the woman Scott had taken up with during his recent stint in rehab. But now he was gone, and I was determined to keep my composure. I had no idea of the trouble I was walking into. I wish now I had paid more attention when Rose Bearclaw delivered her prophecy of doom. * * * * * We gaze at each other across a scratched tan dinette table in my friend Carole’s efficiency apartment at the Sandcastle Inn, a funky ’50s motel on Highway 98 in the Florida Panhandle. I’d rather be down by the blue-green Gulf with my husband, Scott, reading a good murder mystery and debating the all-important question of where we’ll dine tonight. But over my protests, Rose Bearclaw, who lives nearby, has insisted on doing this psychic reading for me. She’s dropped by to visit her old friends, Carole and her husband, Jeff; she says that she wants to read for me because of her regard for them. So too polite to refuse, here I sit, holding hands across the table with a sixty-something fortune-teller who looks like George Washington in drag. She closes her eyes and offers a rambling prayer to deities of every stripe, then slips into a trance. “I see you with this gigantic foot over you,” she says, “like it’s going to come down and crush you. It’s as big as a skyscraper, and you’re running around under there like Chicken Little.” Rose smiles happily, as though she finds this amusing. But I’m having a nice life—I don’t want to be crushed by a gigantic foot. “They’re telling me that all you have to do is move over, that you don’t have to be destroyed. But you’ve got to move out of the way. Nobody else is going to rescue you. You’ve got to save yourself.” Great. “Move out of the way of what? And who are ‘they’?” But Rose isn’t slowing down to answer my questions. “And now I see your husband—Scott, right?” She winces. “I see him leaving the practice of law.” I haven’t told her that Scott is a lawyer. “He’s sitting at a table with several old men, like judges or something, and they’re telling him he has to surrender his law license, something about moral turpitude.” “But why? What’s he done?” I can’t fathom such a disaster—Scott and I don’t have problems like “moral turpitude.” I look past her through the picture window, to Scott, reading and sunning in his beach chair, oblivious to Rose’s dark vision. Eyes still shut, Rose squeezes my hands. “You’re going to get through it. And Scott is going to get to higher ground.” “Higher ground? What do you mean higher ground?” Rose makes higher ground sound like a hard place to get to. And what is the “it” I’m going to get through? Her voice is firmer now. “You must promise not to discuss this reading with your husband.” “Okay, right. Of course.” I glance again at Scott. A giant foot? Moral turpitude? Surely not. Back in trance mode, Rose’s voice softens. “Now I see him lying facedown on a table. He’s nude, and there’s a hole in his spine.” “Good God! Do you mean he’s going to die? Does somebody shoot him?” Her eyelids flutter. “Maybe what they mean is that Scott has a weakness, that he’s spineless in some way. Or that he dies spiritually, and then he’s reborn. I’m not sure what this means.” “Well, he’s a recovering alcoholic and addict, but he’s been sober for many years. Does it have something to do with alcohol and drugs?” “Yes, but it’s more complicated than that.” Scowling, Rose shakes her head like a dog after a bath, flinging disturbing possibilities in every direction. Then her grip tightens. “I’m sorry, Maggie, I can’t tell you the rest.”