The Firm My Family Never Knew I Owned
The Cornerstone
Friday evening I put on my good navy dress, the one I wear to weddings and the occasional funeral, and I drove myself into town instead of waiting for anybody to offer me a ride, because I wanted to walk into that building on my own two feet, in my own time.
The old brick building on the square has held that firm for as long as this county has kept written records of much of anything. The cornerstone, low near the entrance, worn soft by sixty years of rain and boot scuffs, still reads Tolliver and Combs, Attorneys at Law, in letters cut deep enough to survive a great deal of forgetting.
I have walked past that cornerstone more mornings than I can count, unlocking the front door before the associates arrived, and in all those years, exactly one person other than Gerard ever asked me about the name. A summer intern, maybe nineteen years old, who wanted to know if I was any relation to the Tolliver on the wall.
I told her it was a common enough name in this county. That was true. It was also, I will admit now, a small mercy I gave myself, a door I kept quietly shut for reasons that had stopped making sense to me somewhere around year twenty.
Inside, the reception room was filling fast. White tablecloths on the long conference tables pushed together for the evening. The Aldridges near the window, Mr. Aldridge in a sport coat that fit him like it had been bought for exactly this kind of evening. Judge Purnell’s wife by the coffee station. A dozen other faces this county would recognize, clients and neighbors and men who had done business with this firm since before Samantha ever set foot in the state.
Samantha stood at the head of the table, a note card in her hand, practicing a toast under her breath on Gerard, who nodded along with the patient, unreadable face of a man who has sat through a great many toasts and knows exactly what is coming after this one.
She looked up and saw me in the doorway. Navy dress instead of church shoes. Standing straight instead of near the food.
Something crossed her face that I had never once seen there before, in eleven years of whispers at the door. It was not quite fear. It was closer to the look a person gets when the ground under a familiar room suddenly does not feel as solid as it did a moment ago.