Thursday morning brought clouds and light rain, and my joints ached when I woke up at five-thirty, fed Diva, and made coffee. I wished I’d never agreed to attend the stupid hearing, but a promise is a promise, so I dressed and went for a morning walk to make sure my head was clear. If I were called upon to recall the events of the afternoon I’d spent with Laurel, Paula, and Andrew, I wanted to be sure I could do so coherently.
At a quarter to eight I drove over to Anita’s. Her door was unlocked, as it almost always was, and she was standing over the kitchen sink.
“Good morning,” she said cheerfully. “We can leave in just a moment. I need to get this pen cleaned out and refilled.”
“Why?” I grumbled. I have never been at all cheerful in the morning, and the daily ritual of removing Diva from my nightclothes hadn’t improved my morning mood at all.
“The ink seems to have dried in it,” she replied. “That happens very rarely. To me anyway.” She hummed under her breath and then called out, “Ah, so that’s the culprit! A cat hair! The ink hadn’t dried out after all.” She whistled. “There’s a little sheaf of cat hair between the tines!” She looked down at the floor where Molly was contentedly cleaning herself. “Black and white cat hair,” she said. “I wonder how she managed to do that. The pen has been capped since last night.” She laughed and shook her head. “Of course, I did leave it on the table for two minutes while I made a cup of tea, but it was still in the same place when I got back.” She shook her head. “Well, I’ll need to pick the fur out with tweezers later on. I’d best ink up something else. Excuse me a moment, Marian,” she said and disappeared into her bedroom.
In her absence I watched the kitten. She’d stopped grooming herself and was eyeing me with surreptitiously as she stood up and stretched, arching her back. Then she turned away as if to let me know that I didn’t deserve her attention.
At that moment the door creaked in the wind and caught my attention. I looked up, half expecting the door to open, and Molly, alerted by my shift in focus, launched herself at me, dug her claws into the bottom of my skirt, and began to climb.
I caught her before she managed to do any real damage. “Stop that, you little rascal!” I called out, reaching down to separate kitten from cloth. She dug her claws into my sleeve. “It’s time you learned to retract those claws of yours.” I heard a brief chuckle, but no sooner did I make eye contact with Anita than the telephone rang. She lifted her index finger and smiled at me as she picked up.
“Yes,” she said, “yes, I understand perfectly, but it’s too late now.”
She gave an exasperated sigh. “Well, he’ll have to do without him then.” She glanced at me and shrugged. “I’m sure that’s so, but I can’t reach them. If you can, I’d be glad to comply. No, he doesn’t; he can certainly speak for himself.”
I had no idea what was going on, and I couldn’t afford to give Anita’s mysterious phone conversation my full attention because Molly had decided my hand looked tasty.
“First clawing and now biting!” I scolded her, pulling my hand away. “Down onto the floor you go, you little troublemaker!” I knelt down and released Molly who caught sight of her tail and began to chase it. When I stood up again, Anita had hung up and was shaking her head.
“That was Paula,” she said. “Dennison’s lawyer has been delayed. Apparently his wife went into labor and he’s at the hospital. Dennison wants to postpone the hearing,” she said, “until his lawyer can be present.”
“Well,” I replied, “I agreed to attend today. If it’s postponed, I don’t know if I can make it.”
Anita snorted. “It’s a moot point since Paula tried to contact Laurel and Andy but failed. No doubt they’re on their way.”
“Well then, we should be on our way as well,” I replied.
“As soon as I get this pen filled,” Anita said.
I watched what seemed to me an unnecessarily complicated process of dipping, repeated plunging, and nib wiping. The striated pen was lovely to look at, but I could not imagine ever wanting to spend the time and energy feeding and caring for such a thing. It was more demanding than Diva, I thought with a chuckle, and certainly much more fragile. Of course, it would never claw or bite or tangle itself up in my nightgown and make it impossible for me to get out of bed without a struggle. No, it was more like a baby than a kitten with its potential for leakage, I decided on the spot.
Anita looked at me. “What’s so funny?”
“I was just thinking that old pens, such as the one you are currently involved with, require more care than cats,” I replied. “An they are likely to dribble all over one like a baby.”
She shook her head. “Marian, sometimes you say the oddest things. A well-maintained fountain pen is nothing like a cat or a baby.”
I shrugged. “If you say so, Anita,” I replied, but I didn’t believe it for a minute.

The drive to the town hall took longer than usual because traffic was unusually heavy. I wondered about that but didn’t ask Anita who was sitting tensely in the passenger seat, looking distressed. I was a good driver, but Anita never relaxed in my car. I’d finally called her on that a few years ago, and she told me she was never comfortable when anyone was driving, not even she herself. We’d had quite an argument, with my telling her she was a throwback to horse and buggy days. Of course, she pointed out that I was a fine one to talk with my refusal to become computer-literate. She had a point, though I’d considered automobiles a necessary, modern convenience at the time and computers a bit of post-modern frippery. Now of course, cars are computerized as is nearly everything else, and I feel like a throwback to an earlier time myself.
Despite the traffic we got to the town hall fifteen minutes early. As soon as I’d parked, Anita got out of the car and breathed deeply. She headed into the building at a trot, and I followed more slowly. However, when I turned and started up the stairs to the second floor where mediation hearings always took place, she didn’t follow. Instead she called out, “Marian, not so fast! We’re meeting downstairs today. Dennison’s lawyer said his client isn’t able to manage stairs at this time.”
I turned around and came back downstairs. “Sorry,” she said, “I meant to tell you earlier, but it slipped my mind. Now I’ve got to go hunt up the key to the room. Why don’t you sit down and wait here.” Her last utterance was a command, rather than an invitation or a question, so I sat down on the wooden bench in the hallway near the stairwell. “Here,” she added, “you can peruse these while I’m gone.” She handed me a sheaf of papers that I immediately recognized as Kristin’s letters to Bella and headed down the stairs into the basement to find the custodian.
I didn’t feel like reading the letters, so I stood up and walked around, looking at the portraits on the walls. The ornate old portraits always seemed out of place in the utterly functional building that housed them. The town hall had been built in the nineteen-seventies in the expectation that it would eventually be replaced by something more aesthetically pleasing. However, the town’s tax base began to shrink in the decade that followed and has continued to shrink since that time. So there has never been enough money to build a new town hall.
The portraits are all of elderly men, most of them former mayors and police chiefs. I know that the current mayor had asked Anita to sit for a portrait since she is the first mediator ever elected. She has refused thus far. He has taken to tell her that having her portrait on the wall would be an assertion of gender equality. That always makes her snort in disgust and reply, “Why make a statement that isn’t true?” Someday perhaps he’ll come up with a better argument, but first, I think, someone will have to explain to him exactly what she means. He does not have a very subtle or flexible mind.
I was admiring the portrait of the mayor who ran the town with an iron hand when Lawrence and I married when I heard the sound of someone clearing his throat and turned to see my son Andrew standing only a few inches away.
“Good morning, Mother,” he said, sounding not at all as if he thought that the morning was good.
“Good morning, Andrew,” I replied. “Where is Laurel?”
He smiled faintly. “She’ll be along in a moment. She stopped to fix her hair.” His smile faded. “What are you doing here?”
I sighed. “Anita asked me to attend the hearing, heaven only knows why.”
He shrugged. “She usually knows what she’s doing.”
I nodded, glad there was something about which we could agree. I heard rather than saw Laurel approach. She was talking away to someone, and when I looked in the direction from which her voice was coming, I saw that it was Anita. Laurel sounded annoyed. When I looked at Andrew, he seemed to have shrunk a little.
“Is something wrong?” I asked him softly.
He shook his head. “No, everything is fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” I said.
“Just drop it, Mother,” he growled, as Laurel and Anita reached us.
Anita seemed oblivious to Andrew’s bad mood. “I have the key, and we can start as soon as Dennison arrives,” she announced. We followed her down the hall to a small meeting room without windows. There was a large table in the middle of the room.
“Why don’t you make yourselves as comfortable as possible while I go out and wait for Dennison and Paula?” she suggested.
We all sat down, but didn’t want to be left with Laurel and Andrew, so I immediately piped up, “Why don’t I go and wait for them?”
“No, let me,” Andrew insisted.
Anita shook her head. “What is going on, people?” she asked, seating herself at the head of the table.
Andrew looked at Laurel who looked at me. I shook my head, but before anyone had a chance to say a word in response to Anita’s question, the door to the room opened, and Paula walked in, followed by a man I wouldn’t have recognized, had I not expected to see Dennison Wayne. Handsome wasn’t handsome anymore.