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Over the next few days, the atmosphere in the Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill offices grows increasingly tense. As Jimmy wheels his mail cart through the cubicles of the upper floors, he overhears snippets of strained conversation, and the name Gurnstetter is paired with his brother’s more and more frequently. The workload from Rolex Vernon’s new divorce case doesn’t subside either, and the heightened press attention on the law firm seems to unsettle everyone except Vernon himself—who Jimmy more than once sees speaking to news crews outside the HHM building and gesturing emphatically.
Or maybe the mood just seems tense because Jimmy can’t stop seeing the tension in Kim’s shoulders, a tension that’s tightening day on day, like a guitar string tuned higher and higher until at a single touch it might snap.
The mailroom staff, bar Kim and her law school commitments, stay late every night until Friday, and Jimmy’s getting sick of arriving at dawn and leaving after dusk. He takes his lunch outside when he can, but it’s not enough, and the thin high windows of the mailroom look more like the gaps in a jail cell with each passing hour.
But then, on Friday, the work lets up. Jimmy hears some good news he doesn’t understand about Chuck and Gurnstetter, and, as he does the afternoon delivery, he sees people patting Chuck on the shoulder or peeking into his brother’s office with a smile on their face. Acevedo, Trisha Westerbrook’s attorney, slows down the relentless deluge of discovery documents too, so, as five o’clock rolls around, Jimmy stares up at the sunlight streaming through the windows and smiles.
He’s grabbing his bag when Kim joins him in the breakroom. She stops before the line of lockers and reaches out to open hers, but then just tips her forehead forward and rests her head against the metal.
“Hey,” Jimmy says softly.
Kim opens one eye and peers sideways at him. “Hey.”
Jimmy leans sideways against the lockers. “You doing okay, Spencer Tracy?”
“Oh no,” Kim says, and she lets out a little huffing laugh. “What this time?”
Behind him, Jimmy hears someone enter the breakroom, and he steps aside for a moment to let Burt grab his backpack and say goodnight to them both on his way out. “Judgment at Nuremberg,” Jimmy says, finally, falling back against the lockers.
“Ouch,” Kim says, closing her eyes again.
“What? It’s perfect! He’s old, he’s cute, he’s got those glasses,” Jimmy says, counting off on his fingers. “He helped post-accident Monty Clift get through his scene.”
“But he’s a judge.”
“So? You can get your degree, pass the bar, practice for twenty or thirty years, and then retire and become a no-nonsense TV judge.”
Kim chuckles, and pushes back off her locker. As she opens it and grabs her bag, Henry enters, and he nods to them both and wishes them a good weekend. Jimmy watches the older man go, then turns back to Kim, who’s staring intently inside her bag as if it contains the answers to her upcoming midterms.
“Hey,” Jimmy says again, and she looks up at him. He smiles. “It’s Friday, it’s happy hour, let’s go get a drink.”
Kim lets out a long wistful sigh.
Jimmy jerks his head towards the door. “Come on.”
“I can’t, I really can’t,” Kim says. “I don’t have the time.”
“Hmm, right, of course,” Jimmy says, and then he smiles winningly. “So how about if we make it a law drink?”
“What?”
“You know, a law drink. So you won’t really be taking a break from the law.”
Kim scrunches her face at him. “And how are you going to make it a ‘law’ drink?”
“Hey, wouldja trust me?” Jimmy says. When Kim sighs and smiles, he claps his hands in delight. “Fantastic! Let’s go—ah, okay, one problem, I don’t know any bars around here, or anywhere in Albuquerque, unless you count the Ramada one, but it’s depressing as hell there—and, well, problem two, you’re going to have to drive us—”
“Jimmy?” Kim says, slinging her back over her shoulder.
He looks at her with raised eyebrows.
“Shut up,” Kim says, and she leads him out the door.
Kim and Jimmy end up at a mock Irish pub near the university. Jimmy orders a pitcher of beer, and they sit together at a table in the corner. The place is filled with young college students, laughing and chattering excitedly about the start of spring break.
“Hey, look,” Jimmy says, nodding to the TV above the bar.
On the monitor, the twin tanned faces of Stan and Trisha Westerbrook smile out at them, the couple talking animatedly about Ross Perot.
“They’re doing a good job of faking it,” Kim says earnestly, twisting around to stare at the television. “The whole city already knows about the divorce.”
“I’d do a good job of faking it, too, if I got paid that much.” Jimmy takes a sip of his beer, then swallows it quickly and points. “Oh hey, look, they’re bantering now!”
Trisha Westerbrook’s lips peel back in a laugh, and she lays a manicured hand on Stan’s forearm.
“Charming,” Kim says, turning back to face Jimmy.
“I wonder who’s gonna get the four-hundred-grand yacht,” Jimmy says. “Would be a shame to have to sell it. It’s so, you know, useful.”
But Kim frowns. “I’m more worried about the kid.”
“There’s a kid?”
“Six-year-old daughter,” Kim says. “The poor girl spends most of her day with the nanny, but seems like it’s turning into a pissing contest over custody now.”
Jimmy has another sip of beer. He stares at the fake-looking couple laughing on the TV set. “Damn,” he says.
“Yeah,” Kim says. She takes a long drink, then looks at him assessingly. After a moment, she taps her hand on the table, palm-down. “But enough of that. You have some explaining to do.”
“I do?” Jimmy asks.
“Yes,” Kim says, but there’s the hint of a smile at the corners of her eyes. She gestures at the table. “How is this a ‘law’ drink?”
Jimmy laughs, then he leans forward. “We’re talking about a case, aren’t we?”
“Jimmy.”
He shrugs. “I dunno. Hamlin Hamlin and McGill. You’re drinking with a McGill. Osmosis?”
Kim rolls her eyes. “You are so not Charles McGill,” she says, but she says it warmly, and he watches her, unsure how to reply. She stares back at him, then slowly says, “And you are so not what we expected.”
Something hot grips the back of Jimmy’s neck, and he unconsciously pulls his hands in closer to his body. “Oh yeah?” he asks warily.
Kim takes another drink. “The boss’s brother… We thought you were starting in the mailroom as a statement against nepotism after Hamlin Senior handed Howard his job on a silver platter.” The hint of vitriol in the last few words takes Jimmy a little by surprise, but Kim continues, “We thought you were going to put in the hours for a while, you know, just long enough until they could move you on up and eventually stick that extra ‘M’ on the end of the firm.”
The conclusion is painfully clear to Jimmy now that he hears it put to him, and he remembers Kim’s surprise last week as they’d smoked together in the parking garage, when he’d said he didn’t understand Chuck’s love of the law.
“I think you set everyone’s minds at ease that first day, though,” Kim says, watching him closely. “You told that story of you and Chuck stealing the neighbor’s apples and then getting chased by the Rottweiler. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing an upcoming partner would tell the mailroom staff. Did you mean to do that?”
“No,” Jimmy says. “I didn’t even realize that’s how you’d think of me.” He shifts in his chair, and takes another long drink of his beer, then adds in a low voice: “That story wasn’t true, anyway.”
“No kidding,” Kim says, wryly.
Jimmy lets out an awkward laugh.
Kim shrugs. “But you told it well.”
“I mean—Chuck wasn’t there, it was me and my buddy Marco. And we didn’t steal apples, we broke in and stole the old guy’s stamp collection and pawned it for, like, two hundred bucks. Damn Rottweiler really almost bit me, though!”
Kim laughs brightly. “The apples did seem a little Huck Finn.”
“Hey, I borrow from the best,” Jimmy says. He studies Kim as she takes another sip of her beer and looks around at the celebrating college students.
He can tell that she isn’t going to ask the real question, he somehow knows she’s never going to push on that door—the door that leads to the past: to Cicero and Marco and Chet. Maybe because she knows that he’ll feel like he has to answer, and she doesn’t want to take that choice away from him.
So he tells her. “Chuck got me out of jail.”
And, to her credit, Kim doesn’t look nearly as horrified as she could have. Her eyes soften, and she waits.
“Up in Cicero. Cook County. It’s a long story,” Jimmy says. Across the bar, there's a loud cry from a group of students as they all down a round of shots. Jimmy shifts in his chair. “It’s long,” he says quietly, “and boring, and really it’s more embarrassing than anything else.”
Kim raises her eyebrows expectantly.
“I did a lot of bad stuff, you know. Stealing some old geezer’s prized stamp collection included.” He gives a faint laugh, then draws in a deep breath.
“Jimmy,” Kim says, and her eyes grow soft.
He stares at her.
“You don’t need to tell me,” she says quietly.
“No, no, it’s not that,” Jimmy says. He grips his beer and taps his fingernails on the glass. “It’s just—” He huffs, looks down, then meets her gaze. “It’s just…”
Kim waits, her face still.
So he tells her. “I took a shit through some guy’s sunroof.”
Kim almost manages to hold it together. She stares at him, lips quivering, cheeks trembling—and then bursts into violent laughter, big loud guffaws that have the other patrons staring over at her, and something unpleasant and shameful uncoils in Jimmy’s stomach.
He swallows, taking a sip of his beer, watching her grip her chest.
“I’m s—I’m sorry,” she gasps, words faint through her laughter. “I just—” she says, reaching up to wipe tears from her face. She forces air out her mouth, a calming breath, then meets his eyes and says gently, “I’m sorry, Jimmy.”
But her gaze is kind, not full of the disgust he expected, and suddenly the shame in him breaks, and he starts laughing too, slowly at first and then louder, until the two of them are cackling together over their half-empty beer glasses, laughing and laughing until they run out of breath and have to stop, winded.
And Jimmy thinks that it’s the first time in a long time he’s had a great night out without conning anybody, and he thinks that maybe he can do this forever.
Though Kim had looked much more relaxed when Jimmy said goodnight to her outside the Irish pub that Friday, by the time Monday morning rolls around the tension seems to have returned to her shoulders tenfold. She’s so fixated on her textbook that at first she doesn’t notice Jimmy arrive at all, and then her distracted, monosyllabic answers let him know to leave her be. He thinks of all the spring breakers down in Florida, crowding beneath the sun along long stretches of white sand, as Kim spends her mornings and evenings and lunch breaks hunkered beneath the fluorescent lights and prison windows of the basement breakroom.
“So how’s it feel to look into your own future?” Jimmy asks Burt over lunch one day, as the two sit at the kitchen table opposite Kim’s textbook fort.
Burt takes a painful-looking swallow of his ham sandwich.
“And this’s only second year, right, Kim?” Jimmy asks, raising his voice a little.
Kim either doesn’t hear or chooses not to respond. Her eyes trace the pages before her so intensely Jimmy’s surprised they haven’t cut grooves in the paper, thousands upon thousands of horizontal slices, ribbons of liability and provocation and inchoate crimes.
And Slippin’ Jimmy, for once, comes up short. He’s only so much help in reading her notes back to her, and he can sense Kim’s growing frustration with any moment that she feels she isn’t maximizing study potential. But he can’t think of anything else to offer. It’s his natural inclination to look for a shortcut, the easy-way-out where Kim instead picks hard work, but the only thing he can think is to ask Chuck, and Chuck’s never been one to offer handouts even when it’s in his power to give them. Other than taking Jimmy under his wing and into his shiny glass and Hamlindigo blue world.
That last is a thought that particularly strikes Jimmy when, later that week, Chuck invites him for lunch in the café adjacent to the HHM lobby. He suddenly can’t remember if he’s really thanked his brother yet or not, but he’s sure that the right time to do it isn't over day-old cabinet sandwiches.
“This looks nice,” Chuck says, pointing at Jimmy’s trimmed hair. “Still a bit long, but…” He smiles. “A real job suits you.”
Jimmy feels a rush of warmth. “Thanks,” he says. He tears off a piece of his crust and pops it into his mouth.
Chuck unfolds his paper napkin and lays it on his lap. “Howard said you had a chat last week, too.”
“Uh—yeah,” Jimmy says. He glances at his own napkin—already scrunched up through general fidgetiness. “Yeah, he seems like a good guy.”
“He is,” Chuck says. “And a real credit to his father.”
Jimmy nods thoughtfully. “You tutored him through law school, right?”
“That’s right,” Chuck says.
“Is it really as hard as it looks?” Jimmy asks.
A strange look passes over Chuck’s face. “What do you mean?”
“Oh! No, I know how much you worked,” Jimmy says, chuckling and holding up his hands. “It’s just—Kim’s got her midterms next week and I’m worried she’s gonna implode from stress before she can even sit them.”
“Kim?” Chuck repeats.
“Sorry, my friend Kim,” Jimmy says, and then he adds, “in the mailroom.”
“Ah, right, Ms. Wexler,” Chuck says. “Well, she’s very promising, I’m sure she’ll do fine.”
Jimmy nods, and there's a beat of silence before he says, “But how did you tutor Howard, did you—”
“There are no shortcuts, Jimmy,” Chuck says, and Jimmy hates how transparent he is before his brother. “If Ms. Wexler needs assistance, I’m more than happy to make time before her exams, but I’m sure she’s got things well enough in hand.”
Jimmy chews slowly, swallows, then nods. The two sit in silence for a little while, and Jimmy looks around at the other patrons, professionals in suits having serious discussions over their midday coffees. Others have yellow legal pads with them and are flicking through sheets of handwritten notes as they eat almost automatically. An intense woman at the far end makes Jimmy think of a future Kim—she’s in her sixties, maybe, and she taps a pen on her legal pad as her eyes flicker back and forth determinedly.
“Listen, Jimmy.” Chuck’s tone is sharp, and Jimmy turns back to face him. Chuck has pushed his plate away, and his fingers are laced before him on the table. He looks, Jimmy thinks, like a judge. His next words arrive with fitting precision: “Mom called.”
Jimmy swallows his half-chewed bite of sandwich, his mouth suddenly dry.
“She says you haven’t spoken to her since prison.”
Brown rings mark the inside of his coffee mug like high water marks. Jimmy reaches for the cup and takes a sip, downing the gritty dregs, grimacing.
“She rang me on Saturday,” Chuck continues. “She’s doing well. She wants to hear from you.”
Jimmy nods slowly. He sets his mug back down on the table gently.
“I told her I would ask you to call,” Chuck says, and Jimmy meets his eyes. Chuck looks flat, his gaze benign.
“Okay,” Jimmy says.
“Good,” Chuck says. He taps his interlaced hands on the table as if arriving at a verdict, then adds, “She’s all alone, Jimmy. She worries.”
“I know.”
“All right,” Chuck says. He stands, shrugs on his suit jacket back and then tidily pushes in his chair. Looks down at Jimmy, who’s still sitting. “I’m glad to see you doing well, Jimmy. Tell Ms. Wexler good luck from me.”
Jimmy nods and watches his brother exit the café. The other patrons incline their heads as Chuck passes, offering him congratulations beneath white smiles and bright eyes.
Jimmy sits on the edge of his hotel bed and stares down at the phone in his hand. The cord is looped and tangled over itself, and the numbers on the handset are worn down. The #1 button is the most worn of all, the prefix to dial out of the hotel. He hovers his forefinger over it tentatively, like a wild animal waiting for the right moment to pounce.
It’s Sunday afternoon. Jimmy spent the morning looking at furniture in second-hand stores, putting in orders and arranging deliveries for his move-in date. He found a small table and a couple of chairs, and got a good deal on a little television. And he passed over the racks of colorfully-patterned shirts that seemed almost to wave at him from across each store, as if each owner wheeled them out just before Jimmy’s arrival.
Jimmy glances wistfully at the George Sanders autobiography on the bed beside him, which he picked up at last store and that he’s spent the afternoon reading, and then looks back at the phone. He inhales sharply, dials one, and then punches in his mother’s phone number.
Ruth McGill answers on the fourth ring.
“Hey, Mom,” Jimmy says softly.
He hears a rustle of fabric as she sits down, then she says, “Hello, honey.”
Jimmy stares vaguely at an empty corner of his hotel room, where the old wallpaper is peeling away from the wainscoting. “I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner.”
“Oh no, that’s all right,” she says, light but transparent. “I know you’re busy.”
Not something he’s used to hearing. “Yeah,” he says.
“Where are you calling from?”
“The Ramada. It’s—it’s nice. But Chuck helped me with an apartment, Mom. I’m moving in in a couple of weeks.” He hears a scratching in the background. “Is that Delilah?”
“Oh, yes, you can hear that? Yes, she wants to go outside,” his mother says fondly. “Dee, sweetie, I’m on the phone.”
Jimmy gives a soft chuckle.
“If I get up to let her out she’ll only change her mind,” Ruth says, but then Jimmy hears rustling fabric again and the sound of a sliding door. A little bell tinkles distantly as the cat trots outside.
“How is she?” Jimmy asks.
“She’s good,” his mother says. “A bit slow moving around these days. But, you know, she’s getting old.”
Jimmy hums. “And how’s my mom?”
“Oh, she’s good,” Ruth says again, and Jimmy can hear the smile in her voice. “A bit slow moving around these days, but, you know, she’s getting old.”
Jimmy laughs warmly, and it feels like being tucked into bed on a winter night in Cicero.
“So tell me about this job,” his mother says.
He leans back on top of the covers, phone gripped to his ear, and stares up at the ceiling. His gaze traces at the discolored paint around the fixture of the ceiling fan. “It’s strange,” he says, finally. “I don’t know. I haven’t screwed anything up yet. But I don’t know.”
“What don’t you know?” Ruth asks, voice soft over the miles between them.
Jimmy stares at the ceiling. His mother doesn’t say anything else, and he breathes, letting the light bulb above him burn holes in his eyes. “Everyone else around me knows exactly who they are and what they’re doing here.”
More silence, but in his mind, his mother is nodding as she listens, her eyes gentle and sympathetic.
“I mean, Chuck”—Jimmy laughs weakly—“Chuck’s got it all figured out, of course, and everyone else here is a big shot lawyer. Even in the mailroom, my—uh, one of people I work with, she’s at law school too, and she works so hard, Mom.” He lets out another long breath. “How can people work so hard?” The image of his father packing up shelves in his closed-down store floats into his mind, and he’s sure his mother’s thinking of it, too.
“You’ll figure it out,” Ruth says, eventually. He hears her stand, and the raking grind of the sliding door and then the tinkle of Delilah coming back inside. “Have a good walk, honey?” he hears her croon.
“How?” Jimmy asks softly, eyes burning with the bright light.
“Trust me, will you?” His mother sits again, another soft rustle of cloth. “I’m old now, Jimmy, you should listen to me. Start with the job. Your brother’s very proud of you, you know.”
Something unfolds in Jimmy’s stomach, and he wants to ask how she knows, if Chuck really told her that. But he doesn’t say anything.
They talk for a little longer about everyday things, about his mother’s struggles with her vegetable garden and with the neighbor's cats. Ruth’s happy to talk about herself, but he can sense her waiting to see if he’ll add anything else, and he can sense the moment she gives up. He tells her he loves her, and then says goodbye, setting the phone down with a gentle click, wishing he could see her face.
When the phone rings again later that night, Jimmy’s immediate reaction is panic. He glances at the electronic clock on the bedside table: it’s after two in the morning. The phone trills again, and he reaches out a blind hand, fumbling for the receiver then holding it to his ear.
“Hello?” he says, voice thick with sleep.
Silence from the other end of the line.
Jimmy clears his throat, pulse thudding beneath his skin. “…Hello?”
“Sorry, did I wake you up?” a voice, crisp and awake and—
“Kim?” Jimmy says. He shifts, sitting upright.
“Sorry, go back to sleep, I didn’t—”
“No, no!” Jimmy says quickly. “I was up, I’m watching TV.” He reaches for the remote and clicks on the set; it blinks awake into a colorful infomercial, and he hops through the channels until he spots something familiar: William Holden handing Judy Holliday a stack of books. “Is everything all right?” he asks, after Kim doesn't say anything.
“Yes, it’s fine,” Kim says. “I didn’t realize the time.”
“How did you—oh, the hotel.” Jimmy says, reaching up and rubbing his eyes with one hand.
“Right. Look, Jimmy, did you notice if I left anything in the breakroom on Friday? I just can’t—I can’t find—” Kim’s voice cuts out, and there’s a crinkling of papers. He can hear her murmuring to herself, and heavy thuds like books being shifted around.
“Kim?” Jimmy says, and then at her silence he tries again: “Kim?”
A shifting noise. “Yes?”
“Kim, I left, like, hours before you.”
“Oh.” Kim lets out a long breath. “Damn.”
“What have you lost?” Jimmy asks. On the TV, Judy Holliday and William Holden explore the Capitol Building’s rotunda, dwarfed by enormous paintings and watched over by The Apotheosis of Washington.
Kim is talking so fast Jimmy almost can’t hear her. “—act versus status, uh—Robinson v. California, I think, but I can’t remember what else—something v. Texas—”
“Kim?”
“—and I can’t remember how they justified—Oh! Powell!—it has to be here somewhere—”
“Kim!” Jimmy says forcefully.
The frantic movement on the other end of conversation slows. “Yeah?”
“I hate to ask, but when’s the exam?”
Kim’s sigh comes crackling over the phone line. “Tomorrow.”
Jimmy glances at the clock. It’s almost two thirty in the morning, and he doesn’t want to know what time Kim needs to be awake by. He can hear her breathing in his ear, and he settles back against the headboard and watches Bill and Judy eat ice cream.
“Jimmy?” Kim says so quietly he almost doesn’t catch it.
“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “I’m here. Hey.”
Kim breathes out. “Hey.”
He wonders if she ever really thought he’d know where her missing notes are. He tucks his arm behind his head and scratches the soft hairs at the nape of his neck. “Turn to channel twelve,” Jimmy says. “Watch a movie with me.”
Silence from the other end of the line.
“It’s just getting to a good bit,” he presses.
“What movie?” Kim asks, but he hears her moving and the sound of a drawer opening.
“Born Yesterday.”
“Oh, Judy Holliday…” Kim says wistfully.
“Yeah,” Jimmy says, settling deeper into his pillows. Muffled voices emerge from the other end of the line, and he smiles. “Hey, I should get some glasses like hers, right?” he says. “For next time I need to read some of your incomprehensible writing.”
Kim chuckles softly. “You’d look good in them.”
On the TV, Bill Holden laughs, too, explaining his newspaper article to Judy. “I’m with her, you know,” Jimmy says. “All this Latin and fancy words, why not just say what you mean?”
“The law’s supposed to be impenetrable, Jimmy,” Kim says, a smile edging her words. “It’s how we keep the riffraff out.”
“Oh, well, that’s fine, then,” Jimmy says. They lie in silence for a while, watching the movie. Jimmy reaches over and switches off his lamp so that the only light in the room comes from the flickering black and white of the television, and a yellow haze of streetlamps that bleeds through the edges of the thin hotel curtains. He hears Kim’s breathing slow down and wonders if she’s fallen asleep.
But then she murmurs, “What about you?”
“Hm?”
“What they’re talking about. Would you rather be a happy peasant or Napoleon?”
“Me?” Jimmy says, and he scratches the back of his head again. “Napoleon, of course.”
Kim snorts, and they’re silent again for a long time. Every so often, as the characters on the screen drown in books, or argue, or kiss in the elevator, Jimmy will again wonder if Kim's finally asleep. But then he’ll hear movement, or laughter, or she’ll have some soft comment, and he’ll reply, maybe joke a little before they lapse back to silence.
But always the sound of her breathing close against his ear, in and out like the tide. If he stares straight forward at the black-and-white figures it’s almost as if Kim’s right here beside him. And part of him wishes he could say that to her right now, that he could look at her and like Judy Holliday boldly say with a smile, You’re crazy about me, aren’t you? and have her reply, like William Holden, forcefully: Yes.
But this is as precious and as fragile to him as crystal, as a string wound to its snapping point, as small human breaths down copper wire. So he says nothing, just watches the movie and matches his exhales to hers.
When the end title comes up, Kim sighs.
“Will you sleep?” Jimmy asks gently.
“I think so,” Kim says.
Jimmy nods. “You know it all already, anyway,” he says. He switches off his television. Presses the phone close to his ear and stares at the empty black screen. “Night, Kim.”
Kim sighs again. There’s another silence that somehow seems to stretch even longer than the others, and then Kim says, “Goodnight, Jimmy,” and the line clicks off.
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