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“You shut that fool all the way down,” Malak said later, sitting across from Zena at Margarita Town. Before her was a behemoth of a margarita glass, the size of a baby’s head, filled to the rim with frothy blue ice chips and liquid. “I thought he was going to hop out of his chair and run across the room to start choking you at any moment.” Malak laughed and held her hands up as if she had them wrapped around Zena’s neck.
Behind her was the normal fare of a margarita bar. Nothing fancy. Nothing too nice. Soft red lights set aglow garage-sale rainbow ponchos, sombreros and dusty, half-clothed Lupita dolls tacked to the walls. No one was there for the decor, though. It was just a theme for the real prize that attracted professionals to Margarita Town’s lopsided high-top tables and sticky bar each night after work. The clientele included burned-out teachers, lawyers, doctors, publicists, business owners, even yoga teachers.
The red ice in Zena’s significantly smaller margarita glass was nearly gone, and Zena was already feeling the soothing affects of the concoction, so she laughed more deeply than Malak had expected.
“Slow down, cowgirl,” Malak teased. “You know you’re a lightweight. I don’t want to carry you out of here.”
Malak and Zena had been best friends since high school. They were nothing alike, but since the first day they met when Zena had moved to Atlanta, Georgia, from Queens, New York, and chose a seat behind Malak in her first-period history class, they were together through most of life’s laughs and hard times. That was why when Zena finished law school at Howard and returned to Atlanta to start her own practice, she called Malak, who only finished high school with a GED, and offered Malak a job as her assistant. Zena trusted Malak, and as a new attorney building a practice in the ever-cliquish legal field, she wanted someone by her side who would anticipate her moves, encourage her and keep her laughing. Malak was good at all of those things, but what made her most valuable to Zena, what she knew when she hired Malak, was that she was whip smart. While she’d made some poor choices, including getting pregnant by her boyfriend senior year of high school, Malak was smarter than many of the cohorts Zena went up against during mock trials in law school. While Zena always made it a point to check in on her old friend and encourage her to go back to school, Malak wanted to try to make her family work and got married right out of high school. By the time she was twenty-five, she was divorced with two children. Zena vowed to return home to make sure Malak had a chance to really turn things around.
“No slowing down for me tonight. Actually, I think I’ll have another,” Zena said, signaling for the waitress to bring a second margarita. “I need to wash the memory of that sneaky, slithering snake out of my mind. We have new blood in the morning, and I don’t want to stay up all night thinking about—” She stopped and looked off, forlorn.
“I know what you mean,” Malak agreed pensively, flipping ombré tendrils over her shoulder. “He really did a number on her. A number on you, too.”
“Me?” Zena smiled as if Malak had to be joking. “How did he do a number on me?”
“Um...” Malak nodded to the new margarita the waitress was sliding on the table before Zena.
Zena was no drinker. While she always indulged a little after they’d closed a case, too much alcohol almost always made her a bit emotional.
“Come on. I’m just celebrating. Of course, I hated that toad, but it’s not like I took anything he did personally. It’s not like he did that mess to me.”
“I couldn’t tell,” Malak pointed out. “Not the way you were carrying on these last few days—hell, since the case began. It was like you had to win. You had to beat him.”
“Isn’t that common? Why I have an unblemished record in the courtroom?” Zena’s tone was snarky. Overly confident. But still comical. While she was just thirty-one, after six years in the courtroom as the sole attorney at Z. Shaw Law, she made a name for herself as a fearless and swift attorney. One of her first cases was a long shot. Her sorority sister from Bethune-Cookman had married a football pro who was smart enough to lock her into an ironclad prenup before making her his punching bag. The football wife came to Zena with no money and no way out of the dysfunctional marriage. While Zena had little ex
perience and could barely pay her bills, she took on the case pro bono. There was something about the messy marriage that turned a knife in Zena’s gut, and she spent day and night on the case. In the end, she found a loophole in the prenup and won a nice settlement for her client.
Of course, the case took over news headlines for weeks, making young Zena a new name to know in legal circles. Quickly, Z. Shaw became one of a few top firms in the city that represented high-profile clients in divorce cases involving entitlement hearings where large sums of money were on the table. Ninety-nine percent of her clients were women seeking settlements from their cheating and very wealthy husbands. These were cases with obvious winners and losers. Bad boys who’d done good girls wrong. Zena knew the right buttons to push in the courtroom. She always got her ruling.
Zena’s cell phone started rattling beside her margarita on the table. She looked down. Zola was on the screen.
“Oh, man, I don’t even feel like talking to her right now,” Zena said, letting the phone vibrate. “You know she only calls if she needs money—or to borrow something.”
“Maybe you should answer. She’s been calling all day,” Malak said.
“All day?” Zena repeated, surprised and staring at Malak as if she’d somehow failed as an assistant. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Zena moved to answer the phone, but the ringing had already stopped and was replaced with the clatter of an incoming text message:
ZOLA: Z, call me back. I’ve been calling you all day. I have news.
Zena looked at the screen and repeated “news” aloud. “What the hell?” she added. “What kind of news could she have?”
Malak looked away nervously, but Zena didn’t question her because she was busy getting up from her seat to return Zola’s call.
“I’ll be right back,” Zena said, already out of the booth across from Malak. “Don’t let anyone spike my drink.”
“Sure won’t, Boss Lady,” Malak confirmed solidly.
The friends laughed, and Zena made her way through the joyous, drunken crowd of now-smiling professionals. Zena recognized a guy she’d met on a dating website standing by the bar with a beer in his hand. His white business shirt was unbuttoned to his chest; opposing ends of an open tie flanked each shoulder. Men and women who looked as if they must be his colleagues stood laughing at something he’d just said. When he saw Zena, he waved, but she turned her head, pressed her cold cell phone to her ear to pretend to be on a call and padded quickly toward the door.
Outside Margartia Town, Zena found a place on the curb beside a skinny and stylish East Indian couple smoking cigarettes and dialed Zola’s number. Beneath the amber glow of an oversize blow-up margarita glass filled with plastic golden liquid, she pressed the phone to her ear again, crossed her arms and rolled her eyes at the couple in heightened disgust at their activity. While the early-summer afternoon heat had cleared with the sunset, it was still too hot and muggy outside in Georgia to withstand the stale, dry air of cigarette smoke. Just when Zena was about to mention the local ordinance banning smoking in the private dining zone, Zola answered.
“Zeeeennnaaaa!” Zola squealed into the phone so loudly Zena winced and pulled the receiver back from her ear. There was a brazen exuberance and cheeriness to Zola’s voice. She sounded like a pregame high school cheerleader, eager and enthusiastic, but decidedly so. Determinedly so. The voice was simply the calling card of everything else about the little sister on the other end of the phone. She was the metaphor of a smile. Anxiously happy. Not only was her glass always half-full, but it was also filled with sugary pink lemonade and she was all too excited to share with everyone else. But that was how she’d decided to be; how Zola made herself function.
As the sisters exchanged common salutations filled with updates and weather predictions, Zena relaxed in the comfort of her sister’s arbitrary joyfulness. There was always something about the sweet spirit in Zola that calmed and loosened the uptight and upright spirit in Zena.
“I was actually surprised we won,” Zena acknowledged on the tail end of a summary about her adventure in the courtroom closing Priest Rayland’s case. “Of course, we had enough evidence stacked against that fool to make it impossible for the jury to rule in his favor, but you just never know these days. I used to expect the jury to rule based upon facts, but it’s really all emotion. All feeling. You’ll see.” Zena inhaled deeply as the couple departed after taking their final puffs. “Enough about me. What’s up with you? How’s studying going for my future partner?” Zena’s voice was wrapped in giddiness then.
