She sat at her desk feeling the weight of 53 years misspent, her face sallow and puffy, eyes bloodshot from a long night of chasing away the loss of a life that should have been but never was. The husband that never was, the children that never were and a legacy of pulling dram shop ass out of the fire every time the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code cited them for over-serving some drunk driver for coin. They all came to her, the titty bars to the straight joints. She did the paperwork for their liquor licenses and kept them out of trouble as much as she possibly could.
"It's just a job," she would say to her friends. "It's just a job and I'm really, really good at it!"
One evening, a fellow lawyer, Elmer Gantry asked her to leave dram shop law. "Faye, you're better than this. Come over to P.I."
"Elmer, you have got to be kidding," she said laughing, flashing a toothy smile.
"Personal injury is not that bad. We go after people, companies that hurt others," Elmer said.
"For a price, you're no better than me."
"Really? You protect the people who aid in the harm of others."
"You know, nobody is putting a gun to their heads to make them go into these bars. No one is making them drink beyond reason. Sometimes those poor little bartenders need somebody to protect them. A lot of the time they leave a mom-and-pop bar, a neighborhood bar, and they're already drunk, and then they end up at a more corporate bar. They don't get served there but they leave and then they get into trouble. So who do they sue? They don't go after the mom-and-pop because there's no money in that. So, they go after the corporate bar who did not serve them," she'd say with an air of satisfaction.
Elmer laughed, "Gloss it over however you want. Whatever makes you sleep better, that's fine with me but let me tell you, you're part of the problem."
Maybe Elmer was right. Maybe back at law school when they were just kids, she should have taken him more seriously. Maybe back at law school when they were just kids, she should have accepted his proposal.
It's a little too late for maybes. You can't live your life in the past and you can't live your life regretting the idiotic mistakes that you made. The legacy, the history that you build is of your own doing for the most part. Every once in a while somebody else contributes, whether you want them to or not.
Faye tried not to think of the past too often because what's the use? Thinking about the past and what you should have done maybe what you could have done doesn't help what's going on now. Now she sits at her favorite bar, Vernon's, and she is holding court with her lawyer buddies and a couple of judges.
As she sat and swapped stories with her friends at the back of her mind was her retirement case. It was a big fat juicy case involving a major corporate entity and some poor soul who nearly lost his life using their product. How this landed in her lap, she didn't know and quite frankly, she didn't care. She was just interested at the end result, millions of dollars. But she tried not to think about it, she held off as much as she possibly could because this case did just land in her lap so it's nowhere near completion, it's nowhere done billing, and she isn't close to any kind of check just yet. But to think about the possibilities of getting away, getting out of Corpus Christi, Texas and breaking away to who knows where? Spain? Italy? Perhaps Wales? Who knows? Who cares, as long as it's not here.
Corpus Christi, Texas sits on the Corpus Christi Bay which is fed by the Gulf of Mexico. It's a pretty laid-back community with not a whole lot going on. The summers are brutally hot and humid. There is something of an art scene but she didn't care for it. And the live music scene, again not her cup of tea. Her only focus is law and yet she fantasized about the day when she could get away from it.