5. Law

At eight o’clock in the morning, Lana Andrews arrived at the law offices of Fetterman and Weinstein in downtown Parkersburg. She had graduated from West Virginia University School of Law, the only law school in the state, suma cum laude, a mere year and a half ago. Law school was an odd choice for a free spirit like Lana. She made it at the urging of her husband, who wanted a bit of help with details of his business. She took to it with all her heart. She found the law not dry, as we might suppose, but teeming with the realities and vagaries of human existence. She meant to take the Bar straight away, but Scott objected. He wanted info, not a lawyer. She was confused by her husband’s volte face. She assumed that he didn’t understand what it took to become a lawyer. Lana felt that this was only temporary, and that she had every expectation of bending her husband’s will to her own. She had yet to find the way in to this argument with Scott. Scott, for his part had mixed feelings. He liked the idea of a significant second income, not that he felt himself a poor provider. The aircraft parts business did quite well, thank you very much. His alarm arose when he came to understand how much autonomous power this would give his wife. Perhaps it is a southern thing, Napoleonic Code and all of that: he wanted his wife to be submissive in all things. He wanted the upper hand; he wanted to be in control. Lana, meanwhile wanted to keep her legal mind sharp, so she took a job as a paralegal. The two lawyers in the firm would have preferred her full time, but here again, Scott pitched a fit. A woman’s place is in the home. He wanted his dishes done, his meals prepared and his clothes cleaned: when he was home, which was only about half the year. When Scott traveled, he kept tabs on Lana’s doings by phone. He called at odd hours. He gave her tasks to do while he was away, but she was ruthlessly efficient when it came to housework. She had her own standards, not quite, perhaps, up to his.

All that being the way it was, her day job was a pleasure.
“Good morning Dave!”
“Top of the morning to you Lana!”
She makes for her desk and turns on her computer. She boots up Amicus, a very poorly implemented legal project management package that David Weinstein’s been using for years. She checks out her to do list. She sees that the matter of Wilkins vs. Davidsson has reached the discovery phase. She must develop a set of interrogatories asking the opposing party to answer questions about their knowledge of the matter. The “matter” is that Wilkins fucking hates Davidson. Davidson has taken up with a “slut.” Wilkins has put up with about all (and actually more) than she can stand. She is suing for divorce.

West Virginia is one of the forty-eight states that handle divorce as a no-fault action. This means, vis-à-vis Wilkins vs. Davidson, that it’s not Davidson’s fault that he took to fucking his employee. Lana has latched on to the fact that the no-fault law is actually an example of the male domination in the legislatures that give men the upper hand. Men cheat and women swing. Nevertheless, she sets about the task of preparing interrogatories. It’s not a pleading per se; it’s a discovery request wherein you ask your opponent for information relevant and material to the matter that you have the legal right to request. Wilkins would be asked for all of her diaries and journals, as well as any photographic evidence of her husband’s infidelities with the “paramour,” (aka ‘slut’). In fact, as it turned out, Wilkins did have pictures of Marni fucking Chuck at the business. She had hired a private investigator to employ a telephoto lens to capture in flagrante dilecto the doings of her wayward spouse. Fuck in truck; Chuck is fucked. In discovery. So, you can see why a sensitive, lovely spirit like Lana found this slice of truth cake riveting. She worked diligently on the pleadings, the interrogatories, the filings, the motions, the requests to admit, the summons, the motions for summary judgment, and all of the many intricate and specific relations of the counselor to the court in the effort to extricate a pair of humans and perhaps their offspring from what had been so full of promise and was now a lost cause. She was in a firm that dealt with family law. If Scott had any clue of what his wife was involved in, and the implications of it for him down the road, he never let on. He was, in fact clueless. He was flapping in the breeze, at about five thousand feet in his Cessna Skylane.