Her teeth were clenched so tight her jaw ached. Outrageous, unjust, hypocritical – When was any society so unfair? Not in any time I ever heard of. Not in any, ever. I d bet.

While she stewed in silence, Gallagher got up and made himself another drink. “More coffee?” he asked. Nicole shook her head stiffly. Gallagher’s Adam’s apple worked as he swallowed half the Scotch he’d poured into the tumbler. He filled it again and set the bottle down on the refrigerator with a sigh of regret. He wobbled a bit as he walked back to his desk. “Where was I?”

Halfway to Skid Row. Nicole’s thought was as cold as the ice in his glass. More than halfway, if you can’t remember what you’re saying from one minute to the next.

Well then, she thought, colder yet – the kind of coldness she imagined a soldier must feel in battle, and she knew a lawyer felt in a bitterly fought case: an icy clarity, empty of either compunction or remorse. In that state of mind, one did what one had to do. No more, not a fraction less. Maybe she could take advantage of his alcoholic fog to steer him away from the line he’d been taking and toward one more useful to her. “We were talking,” she said, “about ways to improve my chances for the next partnership that becomes available.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right.” But, even reminded, Tony Gallagher didn’t come back at once to the subject. At least, for the moment, he wasn’t leering at her. He was staring out the window instead; he had a view as splendid as Mr. Rosenthal’s, as emblematic of both eminence and power.

Nicole began to wonder if he’d forgotten she was there. She pondered slipping quietly away while he sat there in his semi-stupor, but she couldn’t be sure if he was drunk enough to let her get away with it. She stirred in her chair. As she’d half hoped, half feared, the motion drew his attention back to her. He wagged his forefinger in her direction again, as if it were something else, something not symbolic at all. “Say, I heard a good one the other day.”

“Did you?” Nicole said. Gallagher told jokes constantly, both out of court and in. He insisted he’d caught several breaks from judges and juries over the years because of it. Nicole could believe it. Not that she’d have cared to try it herself, but with his personality and his – well – attributes, he could carry it off.

“Sure did,” he said now. “Seems this gorgeous woman walked into a bar and asked the bartender for a six-pack of Budweiser. She…” From the very first line, Nicole hadn’t expected she’d care for the joke, but she hadn’t expected the disgust that swelled up in her as Tony Gallagher went on telling it. When he finished, he was grinning from ear to ear: “ – and so she said, ‘No, give me a six-pack of Miller instead. All that Budweiser’s been making my crotch sore.’ “

He waited, chortling, for her to fall over laughing. No, she thought. Not even for a senior partner. “Mr. Gallagher,” she said with rigid deliberation, “that was the most sickening, sexist thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” She could have stopped there – should have, if she’d started at all. But something in her had snapped. “Nobody,” she said, shaking with the force of her disgust, “nobody should tell a joke like that, under any circumstances, to anybody. If that’s what it means to ‘cooperate,’ to be ‘one of the boys’ – if I have to crawl down in the gutter with all the rest of you, guzzling pricey liquor and laughing at sick jokes – then frankly, Mr. Gallagher, I don’t want to play.”

There was an enormous silence. Nicole knew with sick certainty that he’d erupt, that he’d blast her out of her – his – chair.

He didn’t. His eyes went cold and hard, like green glass. He was, she realized with dismay, much less drunk than she’d thought. “Ms. Gunther-Perrin,” he said with perfect and completely unexpected precision, “one of the complaints leveled against you by your peers and by the senior partners was that you did not get along with people as well as you should. I took the contrary position. I see now that I was mistaken.”

“What exactly do you mean, I don’t get along?” Nicole asked. Maybe he would give her enough rope to hang him.

She should have known he wouldn’t. He was a lawyer, wasn’t he? “I mean what I said,” he snapped. “No more, no less.” But even while he played the lawyer’s lawyer, his eyes slid down to her hemline again. Maybe – and that was worst of all – he didn’t even know he was doing it. He straightened in his chair. “Good afternoon, Ms. Gunther-Perrin.”

“Good afternoon,” Nicole said, with the starch of generations of Midwestern schoolmarms in her voice and in her spine.

She left with her head high. Oh, he wanted her to cooperate, no doubt about it – in bed and naked, or more likely wearing something vinyl and crotchless from Frederick’s of Hollywood.

So now she’d offended not only the founding partner but the one senior partner who’d even pretended to be on her side. At least, she thought, she still had her self-respect. Unfortunately, it was the only thing she did have. She couldn’t eat it, put it in the gas tank, or pay the mortgage with it. She’d shot her chance for a partnership right between the eyes.

On the other hand, if she’d read Sheldon Rosenthal right, she’d never been in line for a partnership. She’d been a blazing fool from start to finish.

“Thank you so much, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin,” Josefina said when Nicole handed her a check that afternoon. “You are the last one. I got to cash this, then run for the airport.” Nicole’s nod was grim. She’d have to get a cash advance from her MasterCard to keep the check from bouncing. She was buying groceries, gasoline – everything – on plastic till she got paid again. The MasterCard was close to maxing out. So was the Visa. Her whole life was on the verge of having its charging privileges revoked.

Kimberley and Justin hugged Josefina so tightly when she bent to say good-bye to them that she laughed a little tearily and said something half reproving, half teasing, in the Spanish that they understood and Nicole never had. At that, Kimberley, who professed loudly and often that “only babies cry,” wept as if her heart would break. Nicole’s own heart was none too sturdy, either. Damn it, it pulled her apart to see her baby hurt.

“Oh.” Josefina straightened, wiping her eyes and sniffing. “I got to tell you, Mrs. Gunther-Perrin, we got a virus going around the kids. I had to call two mothers this afternoon.”

Great, Nicole thought. Why not? The way this day had been going, all she needed was a nice round of the galloping crud. “Thanks,” she managed to say to Josefina, though the last thing she felt was gratitude. She fixed Kimberley with a mock-severe look, one that usually made her erupt into giggles. There were no giggles today, just tears. “Don’t you dare get sick, do you hear me?” Nicole said – as if by simply saying it she could make the virus sit up and behave.

Kimberley had stopped sobbing, at least. “I won’t, Mommy,” she said, sounding stuffy and forlorn. “I feel fine.”

“Me, too,” Justin declared, not wanting to be left out.

Then why were you wailing like that? Nicole thought uncharitably as she buckled her daughter into her car seat and got Justin into his. It wouldn’t be much longer before Kimberley outgrew the one she was in. Another milestone. These days, Nicole measured time by how her children changed. First step, first time dry through the night, first dirty word… Her mouth twisted. Her own life was on the downhill side. First abandonment, first divorce, first partnership lost – first firing next, probably, if things didn’t get better fast.

On the way home, Victory was slow. Sherman Way would have been slower. The 101 would have been slowest. Nicole had got past White Oak and was heading for Reseda Boulevard – halfway back, more or less – before Kimberley gulped. “Oh, baby,” Nicole said in despair – she knew what that sound meant. “Don’t be sick. See if you can hold it till we get there.”