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“A coffee with room and… the chocolate chip cookies?” The one bright spot at Kettle’s was their shrink-wrapped packages ofthree greasy chocolate chip cookies for a dollar. Most of the time, the cookies turned out to be hard, just tolerable when dipped in coffee, but every once in a while they were soft and falling apart with melted butter and completely worth it.
“Sure,” the barista said. “I’ll bring it right out.”
She would not. No matter what you ordered at Kettle’s, you would wait for it.
Wil took a deep breath and turned toward the table in the back.
Beanie was a paralegal, quietly but deeply integrated in the Green Bay legal world. In fact, if Wil’s mother had any kind of secret power, it was that a raft of lawyers in the greater Northeast Wisconsin area would die for Beanie Greene, which meant that she could actually get away with capital crimes, corporate sabotage, or ecoterrorism if the mood struck her.
For years, Beanie had done paralegal work for Mike Jerry, the kingpin of legal empires and politics in Green Bay. A small, quiet, elderly white man, Mike was an emeritus partner in the firm he’d founded, housed right next to the courthouse, in probably the late 1800s.
Mike Jerry ruled over a secret cabal of other legal scions in Green Bay, and together, at a back table at Kettle’s, they directed the fortunes of every J.D. within a hundred miles.
Careers were ended and made at these tables, according to Beanie.
Wil’s mother had been trying to get her to talk to this group for at least a couple of years, convinced that if she did, she might identify a direction for her own career. Get unstuck.
Though being stuck wasn’t exactly why Wil hadn’t gone to Michigan Law. Beanie knew that, but “stuck” was what Wil and Beanie called the lifestyle consequences of Wil’s guilt-shot mortal terror, which had only just begun to ease up and give her some room to breathe.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m Wilifred Greene.”
Mike Jerry looked up. He gave her a very small smile. His blue eyes were bright and a little terrifying. “I haven’t seen you since you started at Michigan,” he said. “Sit down. Let me introduce you.”
Wil settled into the chair beside Mike. She already knew two of the other people at the table by reputation. One was Mary Lyddle, whose German and Belgian forebears had been lawyers in Green Bay since the first white men arrived and pretended not to understand that all the land belonged to the highly competent First Nations people who had literally guided them to the bay by canoe. Maybe in response to this craven colonization, Mary was notorious for upending Green Bay power legacies whose exclusionary practices held so many in the community back. Wil knew that Jasper had liked Mary very much.
The other was Cord Schiff, a Black man in his fifties who regularly offered criminal law perspectives on left-leaning national news networks.
“And this is Sam Rafferty,” Mike said. “He went to East like you, but he’s been practicing in Chicago until a few years ago.”
Sam was a white guy who looked about forty, but in the way that a fully adult, grown, seriously fucking hot guy looked forty, with the eye crinkles and dark hair shot through with only the tiniest bit of silver at his temples.
Wil wondered if he would be interested in kissing her.
Coming up with two new people to kiss every week created a certain amount of pressure that had taught Wil not to look too hard at these impulses. She just arrowed herself straight at them and let the chips fall. But in this context, with the lawyers, she might need to exercise some discretion.
Sam solved this problem for her. “My girlfriend is obsessed with your TikTok channel.” He had a little color in his cheeks. “Ibenefit from her obsession, so it’s really nice to meet you. Don’t let me forget to get your autograph before you go.”
“You’d both be welcome tobeon my channel.” Wil raised one eyebrow.
Sam laughed. “Hold up. Can you say that again, but I’ll record you this time? It would be entirely for points with Robin. I can’t be on your channel, I have a minor child. Plus, if these three get their way, I’m headed for the bench. I have to keep myself squeaky clean.”
“Aren’t you suggesting, then, that my project will create problems for me, should I decide to pursue a career in the law?” Wil made it clear with her tone that she didn’t take her own question seriously.
Mary laughed. “Honestly, I think it’s adorable that Sam, a rich white man, thinks that kissing an attractive woman on the internet would in any way damage his electability in Wisconsin. Not to mention that his girlfriend is Robin Dahl, who’s probably one of the sharpest political minds the Midwest, and especially Wisconsin, is going to see in this generation. If Robin wanted to kiss you, or Sam did, Robin could spin it into a win. Sam’s just scared.” Mary gave Sam a cutting look.
“I am. All true. Hiding behind my privilege.”
“As usual,” said Cord. He extended his hand for Wil to shake. “It’s good to meet you. I’ve known your mother for years. Knew your dad, too, and liked him a lot. When he switched to consulting after he had to resign, he helped me out with preparing the VGL Corps fraud case on behalf of the county. My condolences to you and Beanie.”
“Thanks. He liked you, too,” Wil said. “When you first started doing TV commentary, he’d have me watch it with him. He told me I’d be good at that. I think he liked the idea of me someday verbally eviscerating the bad guys on network television.”
There must have been something in the way she said it that betrayed Wil’s doubts about that vision of her future, because Cord leaned back and put an ankle on his knee and started looking at Wil in a way that she was sure he had perfected in order to keep people from knowing what he was thinking. “What doyoulike the idea of?”
This meeting had gotten deep much faster than Wil had imagined it would.
Even at eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old, she’d been perfectly aware that she was trying to be the best pre-law student the University of Michigan had ever seen mostly so that her dad—of course her dad, who else but her dad?—would know that she was absolutely going to thrive after he was gone.
When he thought of her, she’d wanted him to feel nothing but pride. Not worry about what might happen to her. Not regret that he wouldn’t be around.