When Amy came down for morning coffee, a man in a chef's coat was standing in her kitchen. Another man in a waiter's outfit – complete with long apron – was standing at the ready. "Bon jour, you honour," he said. "Coffee?" He held a silver coffee pot.
"Ahhh –?" Amy cast a questioning look at her mother, who was already drinking hers.
"Compliments of your persistent, faithful, servile, 'nice guy'," Maxine informed her daughter. Deep inside, however, she couldn't help but be reminded of the persistence with which Jared had pursued her. The memory made her smile in a way that very few things did these days.
"Ahhh – yeah – coffee, yes, please." Amy sputtered.
"Scones, your honour?" the chef queried; he lifted the silver lid from the silver tray to reveal scones, jam, marmalade, fresh butter and Devonshire cream.
"Try the strawberry jam," Maxine advised her daughter. "You do at least have to give the man marks for tenacity," she added. "But I hope he doesn't hire strolling minstrels to come – strolling – through. I don't think we have the space."
"What the – ?" Peter and Vincent came ambling down the stairs.
"Fresh scones, miseur?" The chef queried.
"Coffee?" Asked the waiter.
"This guy has problems, Amy," Vincent said, helping himself to a scone nonetheless. He plopped it into the cream and took a seat at the counter.
"Real problems," Peter added, waving aside the offered scones.
There was a knock at the front door. "I'll get it," Amy said, before anyone could say a word. She was determined not to accept a single gift – be it flowers or a vase or more food…"Look – oh. Elliot. I – wasn't expecting you."
He smiled, "I thought I might join you for coffee, if you don't mind too terribly much."
"Ahh – yeah – " she was suddenly, painfully, conscious of her old t-shirt and cut off sweats; he was only wearing jeans an a sweater – but – she'd just rolled out of bed and hadn't even brushed her teeth yet! "Sure – come on in. Thanks. The flowers are beautiful – and I love the vase. And the coffee and scones."
Elliot smiled, "You issued the challenge. But I guess I should call and cancel the minstrels, huh?"
"Ah – please, yes."
"So – dinner?"
Amy laughed, "Dinner would be great," she guided him to the kitchen. "Ma – Vincent, Peter – Elliot Burch. Elliot, my mother and brothers. Who seem to think you have problems," she added.
"I should apologize for turning your house into a flower shop, Mrs. Gray," Elliot took her hand, kissing it. "And a French café."
"You can turn my house into a café any time," Maxine smiled. "But not so many roses next time. It's starting to smell like a funeral parlor."
Any was horrified – Elliot took the admonishment in stride. "Perhaps orchids next time?"
"I would find that quiet acceptable," Maxine smiled at him. "If you all will excuse me," she headed up the stairs.
Elliot smiled. He turned to Vincent. "I have a good friend called Vincent."
"Does he have the same flare for the dramatic that you do?"
"In some ways. Oh, yes please," Elliot said as the waiter handed him a cup of coffee.
Peter was glowering at the man over his paper. "Elliot Burch? The Elliot Burch?"
"In the flesh. Or at least I really hope there's only one of me running around," He continued to maintain good humour. Sadly, Elliot was used to this. "If not, some other guy is getting a lot of flack for my mistakes."
"Mistakes?" Peter intoned. "Don't you think that's putting it a little mildly?"
"Peter?" Amy queried.
"Don't you have any idea who this guy is?" he looked from his sister to the man in question and then back again. Burch was just standing there, smiling, like a hyena – or a jackal, maybe. Amy looked like a dear caught in the headlights.
"I'm afraid you've got me – Elliot?" Amy asked.
"It's just what I said it was – in my youthful zeal I made some very bad decisions. People were hurt. People still remember that. I don't hold it against anyone, except maybe myself."
"How magnanimous of you."
"Peter! That's enough," Amy snapped.
"It really is all right," Elliot said, gently. "I deserve what I get."
"Oh please," Peter got up and walked out of the room.
"Elliot – I'm sorry," she said, blushing.
"If it's any consolation, I've never heard of you," Vincent took another scone from the tray.
Elliot smiled, "I should probably get going."
"No – wait, you came all the way out here from New York – and you're going to turn around and leave again after five minutes?"
"Well – I'd hoped to ask you out to a movie – but I don't want to cause any further – discontent."
"Give me forty minutes," Amy told him. "Vincent – don't let him go anywhere."
Vincent blinked, "What do you want me to do –" he asked his sister's back, as she bounded up the stairs, "Sit on him?"
Elliot laughed, "Hopefully that won't be necessary. May I?" He gestured to the empty chair next to Vincent.
"Be my guest. So – do I even want know what that was about?"
"It's a long story."
"If my sister says forty minutes, you can bet we're going to be here for at least an hour."
Elliot laughed. Then, "In my youth I had a great deal of pride…" he began. He'd gotten to the woeful demise of Burch Towers – complete with how he tried to strong arm a wonderful woman into marrying him – before Vincent Gray stopped him.
"And you want to date my sister?" Vincent asked, just as Amy came down the stairs, fifty seven minutes after she'd gone up them.
Elliot, feeling saved by the bell, got his coat. "Only if she'll have me," he answered. "I left the black mail techniques behind me a long time ago."
"Well that's good to know," Amy smiled – he gently took her coat from her and held it for her. Amy turned and smiled, "Because blackmailing a judge is a pretty serious offence."
Elliot smiled at her good humour. "Hopefully flowers don't count."
"That's bribery – but I think we can let it slide. This time."
"I will consider myself reprimanded," Elliot grinned.
"I don't think your brothers like me," Elliot observed as they walked out of the theatre.
"Not really. I'm not worried about it."
"Maybe you should be."
"I thought you said you weren't doing anything the other side of legal – short of bribing a judge with flowers and genteel behaviour."
He laughed, then more seriously, "I'm not doing anything the other side of legal – I haven't come even close in a long, long time. But I have a reputation and it's mostly bad. It seems like even when I was trying to do good, it still ruffled feathers. My life has been sort of a damned if you do and damned if you don't."
"Can you tell me about it?"
Elliot steered them across the street from the movie theatre to a small coffee shop. "I was zealous – over zealous. I got into business with the wrong guys because they said they could get the job done. The project was supposed to be my crowing glory," he laughed, "At the ripe old age of twenty seven. I was a fool. The project cost people their homes – it almost cost people their lives. It turned me into a monster – or at least it made me realize the monster I had lurking inside of me. That was worse than the other stuff – the legal stuff. My lawyers were able to 'fix' that – but they couldn't fix the real damage."
"The real damage?"
"They couldn't change the things I'd done or heal the people I'd hurt."
"Sounds like you're sufficiently remorseful to me," she smiled.
He returned the smile, "I am. Then I made some other mistakes; I was doing what I knew was right, but there were people who didn't agree with me. Some people lost money a few others lost 'good standing' – and the rumors spread like wild fire. I was accused of just about every vice you can think of."
"Was any of it true?"
"The only thing I did wrong was speak out against something that I didn't believe was right – and to put actions behind my words. I never broke any laws. That doesn't change what I'd done before – people were still judging me on earlier mistakes. A lot of people still look at me as that guy I was almost twenty years ago."
"You have a talent for vagary."
Elliot laughed, "It's all public record, I'm not hiding anything by not wanting to talk it to death. Amy – I would love to see you again, but if you feel that it would in any way jeopardize your career, I'll understand. Don't get me wrong – I'd be hurt – it's been a very long time since I've felt like this about a woman. I'm sorry – I'm going out on a limb and probably out of bounds as well." Her expression had gone from sweetly interested to – something he couldn't quite read.
"No – no, I mean, yes – you are – but that's ok. I just – I want you to understand that I've had really, really bad luck with men. It seems like every time I meet a guy I think I like, something goes horribly wrong – either I blow it because I decide to go for the other guy whose practical and stable – only he ends up going back to his ex wife – or I end up with guys who don't understand me – or who get jealous over stupid things. I still really care for David – but – you probably don't want to hear about my ex boyfriend, do you?"
"I will listen to anything you want to talk about."
Amy shook her head.
"What?"
"It's just – when you say that, you sound like you really mean it."
"That's because I do mean it – otherwise I wouldn't have said it. I'll never lie to you about anything."
"What's the catch? I mean – ok, so there's this stuff in the past, skeletons that aren't really in the closet – but what's the catch? What's wrong with you?"
Elliot gave her a bemused look, "What's wrong with me?"
"You're smart, you're funny – you're good looking – you drive a Lexus, so you must be doing pretty well financially despite these past mistakes. If you're to be believed you're honest – and according to you, you do the right thing, even when it hurts your reputation – and you let me pick the movie and didn't even flinch when I said I wanted to see a chick flick. What's wrong, where's the catch?"
"Ahh – you wonder why it is that some other woman hasn't caught me up by now – or why women keep throwing me back, once they get to know me."
"Something like that, yeah."
Elliot laughed, "I have no real problem getting dates, Amy. For the last ten or fifteen years, I've made the upper half of the top ten 'most eligible bachelor's' list in at least two national magazines and every local social page that I know of. If my mother were still alive, she'd have every woman in town calling her to set up dates with their daughters."
"Wow. I guess I should feel special."
He smiled, despite the sardonic edge in her voice. "You should, but not because I want to go out with you. You should feel special because there is something very special about you. It's not your hair or your eyes or your nose or your lips, though they're all very beautiful – there's something about you that makes me wonder how any man could leave you for his ex wife or get stupidly jealous over something that obviously didn't matter. I cannot fathom why I'm lucky enough to get to spend an afternoon with you."
"Ok – now you're laying it on a little thick."
"Am I? I'm just speaking from the heart, telling you what I see when I look at you. I told you, I'll never lie to you."
"You're serious."
"I'm always serious."
"Ok, so what's the catch – why aren't you already taken?"
"The truth is that I only fell hard for one woman – at least so far."
"What happened?"
"She was already in love with someone else – but despite my amazing and oft times painful stupidity, she stuck by me, as a friend. She's married now – to a guy named Vincent – and together they gave me the privilege and honour of beinga god fatherto their oldest son, Jacob Elliot."
"Talk about your happy ending. I mean – other than somebody else getting the girl."
"Once I got to know Vincent, I didn't mind not getting the girl. They're their own happy ending – and very dear friends."
Amy smiled. There was something – magnetic – about him. She remembered her own words – every time she thought she'd met someone special – the one – something happened. Every time…even now…? "I don't know about happy endings – but I'm not worried about seeing you again – I mean – as far as reputations go. Whatever happened with you, it was in the past. Right?"
"I will tell you exactly what happened, if you want to know the details. Or you can look it up yourself, I'm sure as a judge you've got the contacts to find out just about anything you want to, and I won't mind. Even though I'm ashamed of a lot of what I did, that doesn't change the fact that it happened."
"I don't understand how you can be so fearlessly honest."
Elliot smiled, "Because there is no other way to live life, Amy. If you're not honest with yourself, what is there? Once I learned to be truly, brutally, honest with myself, the rest of the world was easy. They'll never judge me as harshly as I judge myself. I never intentionally broke any laws – which isn't an excuse. But – things changed. I changed. I'm not the guy I was ten or even fifteen years ago. I'm not perfect," cautioned her. "I'm still driven to succeed – I still want to be the best at what I do – but the goals are different. Sometimes I still get so caught up in a project or a goal that I forget about the little things, the important things – until I get a very specially delivered, hand made invitation asking me to attend a concert put on by a wonderful group of children who have been working very, very hard," he smiled. The beautiful hand made card that still sat on his desk at work, a reminder of life's more important things. "That's when I realize that I need to stop, at least for a moment, to savour the sweetness of life. But the truth is that I've driven off at least a couple of women because I got caught up in some project I was working on – it's a bad habit and one I keep promising myself I'm going to break. But there you have it – the 'catch.'"
"Maybe you just need the right woman to help you break that habit," Amy blushed; suddenly her coffee cup was very interesting – was she actually flirting with this total stranger? This handsome, funny, romantic, total stranger? "I'm pretty driven, too. Sometimes too driven – I've been called a perfectionist and been accused of needing to always be in control. I don't know if that's true – but I know I have a hard time giving up control. It took me a long time to realize that it wasn't just my ex husband saying that about me," she admitted. It stung to admit – but there might be some truth in it.
"Being in control isn't necessarily a bad thing."
"No. But it can make it harder to remember that other people have their own way of doing things and that they're not always wrong or bad ways. And I really am a perfectionist. And I have a very good friend who's male. Sometimes – I was supposed to go to dinner with David, this guy I've been seeing. I'd had a bad day – a really, really bad day. Bruce was there for me – we had a couple of beers and talked. Nothing else happened. David was so pissed he wouldn't even let me explain."
"And that's where he made his mistake. If he'd been paying attention he would have realized that you had had a bad day – and obviously you've known this Bruce longer than you've known David?"
She nodded.
"Sometimes a good friend will come before a boyfriend. Only a fool wouldn't see that – but his folly may be my gain," he smiled, a little, sheepishly, "So I shouldn't really complain."
She laughed, "I can't blame him for being mad. He'd made reservations – it was supposed to be this really special dinner," she shrugged. "I showed up at my house almost an hour after we were supposed to be there, looking like hell – he was worried…so he got mad at me. I just – wish he would have let me explain – or cared that I was hurting – it was just – it was the worst day of my life since I realized that Michael – my ex husband – was really going to leave me for this cute little thing named Alicia. Well – I mean, we'd already separated – I separated – said that's what I wanted – I guess – it was hard to swallow that he met someone right away."
Elliot laughed, "It's ok to be mad at David – and it's definitely ok to be mad at your ex husband. As far as Bruce goes, a man and a woman can be friends – just friends – there's nothing wrong with that. But it's also another 'catch', I guess, and something I should say up front."
"Oh?"
"I have a very good friend who's female. Her name's Cathy – and I used to be in love with her. A part of me always will be – but that doesn't mean that any other woman in my life would compete with that memory. It's just a memory, a dream that never was to be. In the real world, Cathy is a woman who is a very real and very dear friend – a woman I'd do anything for, but I no longer love in that way. I love her husband like a brother and can't imagine her with any other man but him. Most women don't understand that."
"I think I do. No one could compete with that memory anyway – it's in your mind and in your heart. What matters, though, is here and now. Bruce and I work together – there've been a few sparks – but – we work together. He's completely and totally professional. Nothing could ever happen between us because he would never let it. Part of me might like it to – but it never will and I know that. It's never stopped me from playing what if, in the dark moments of the night when some guy dumps me for his ex or walks away from me because he's jealous of the friendship Bruce and I have – but even then, I know that 'what if' will never be. To be honest, I'm not even sure we'd end up happy." Amy smiled, "And you've already met my family at their best – so I guess if that didn't scare you off…"
Elliot laughed, "They're not so bad. I think your mother almost didn't hate me."
Amy laughed with him, "Almost. I'm not real worried about what Peter and Vincent think. Peter is separated from his wife – although they seem to be better friends now than they were the last few years of their marriage. Vincent's wife left him after he helped her through a serious illness. So – they don't really get a vote in my love life."
"Given the scowls they were shooting me, I'm just as glad," Elliot took her hand – warm fingers curled around his…in his heart he felt things that he hadn't felt in years…
"You're in a good mood this morning," Bruce Van Axel observed, meeting Judge Gray on the way into the courthouse.
"I met someone. What – don't give me that look."
"Didn't you just get out of a relationship with David?" Bruce queried.
"Yeah. Sort of."
"Sort of?"
"He called while I was out with Elliot – I haven't called him back yet."
"I see."
"What does that mean, you see?"
"It means – I see."
Amy walked into her office – flowers. She smiled – then read the card. David.
"What's the matter?" Bruce queried. "Don't like the flowers."
"No – they're from David. It says he's sorry for acting so childish last week – he'd like to see me." Amy set the note down on her desk. She thought back on some of the decisions she'd made. "Why is it I do so well in there, but in my own life I always make a mess of things?"
"I'm just going to assume that that's a rhetorical question," Bruce said. "Come on – let's get to work."
Amy sighed – he was right. She peeled off her jacket and put her robe; the phone rang. Bruce answered – and then handed it to her. "Hello?"
"Sorry to call you at work – did you get the flowers?"
"I – did – yes."
"Is everything ok?"
"No, no everything's fine, David. I – just have a pretty full docket this morning."
"Say no more – can I pick you up for dinner?"
"I – tonight's not good."
"Tomorrow?"
"Ok. Tomorrow." She hung up.
Bruce gave her a look.
"What?"
"I didn't say anything."
"No, but you're thinking it, so you might as well say it."
Bruce just smiled. "Come on – you weren't lying about having a full docket."
Frustrated, she followed him out to the courtroom…
"You're in an awfullygood mood this morning - lastMonday I had to practically drag you out of bed!" Catherine teased, as Elliot joined her at their meeting spot in the park. Three days a week theyjogged two miles through the park. Usually it was Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but last Friday he'd mysteriously called off their 'date', promising to put in an extra day with her this week. Neither could keep up with the 'kids' around them – but since his heart attack, Elliot had been making a point to take better care of himself. Cathy was happy to help facilitate his effoets – and she had every intention of holding him to his promise of an extra day of jogging this week.
"I met someone – coming home from the concert last week."
"You mean a woman?" Catherine inquired – she couldn't think of the last time she'd seen that particular twinkle in Elliot's eye. It was good to see him this happy. Just as he had a few silver hairs sprinkled through out his head, she too hada fairshare of greys streaking through her long honey-brown hair (some of the grays were named Jake, some named Caroline, some called after the twins William and Charles, some in honour of Caroline and others for her youngest child, Jayne...and just a couple with Vincent's name on them as well...)
"Her name is Amy. She's a judge – Hartford Juvenile court."
"She's the reason you blew me off on Friday!" Catherine accused. They finished their stretcing out and started off down the path at an easy pace.
Elliot laughed, "I should have known you'd figure me out sooner or later. No one knows me better than you, except for maybe Vincent."
Catherine smiled, "This Judge Amy must be pretty special to have blown off our 'date.'"
"She is."
"So – when are you seeing her again?"
"Tonight. Dinner. You don't know of any nice restaurants in Hartford, do you?"
Catherine shook her head, "I'll call Nancy and email you from work."
"You're a life saver."
"Than you'll appreciate it when I tell you that date or not, we're jogging tomorrow morning!" Catherine suddenly picked up her pace, making him catch up with her. One thing about living a dual life – the world Below kept her in far better shape than the world Above ever had. There were no elevators, no escalators and no way to get from point A to point B other than putting a good foot under oneself and walking there. She suspected that she was in better shape now than she'd been in, in her twenties.
"Wow, coffee even - what's the occasion, Radcliff?" Joeasked – not only was Cathy humming, but she'd picked up lattes on her way in...
"Elliot met someone last week," she handed Joe a large carry out cup full of espresso and frothing skim milk. Elliot was the only one who had had a heart attack – but it had made her think about a lot of things…ways to cut back here and there so that she wouldn't worry so much about the other things in her life, like real butter or Mary's chocolate chip cookies… "A woman - a very special woman, it seems. She's the reason he blew off our jog on Friday."
"What kind of specialwoman?"
"A judge," Catherine continued to grin.
"Elliot Burch – and a judge?"
"Juvenile court – Hartford Connecticut."
"Elliot Burch – and a judge," Joe repeated. Of all the amazing things he'd seen and heard in his life, somehow this was more amazing than all the rest…