The Matchmaker's Gift(93)

“I wasn’t fighting against you, Diane. I was fighting for all of them.”



* * *



The only thing Abby took home from her office was the photo of her grandmother. When she got home, there were three long messages from legal headhunters on her machine.

She thought the story would die down in a few days, but then New York Magazine ran a piece on Evelyn Morgan. Both the hotelier and her husband credited Abby as the person who had saved their marriage. The magazine published a picture of the couple standing in front of the window in Evelyn’s office. It was the same place where Abby had seen them embrace, where she had known for sure that they should be together.

In a moment of inspiration, Abby tore the article from the magazine and pasted it into her grandmother’s most recent notebook. The journal was half empty, after all, and Abby saw no harm in filling its pages. She thought, perhaps, she might continue the tradition her grandmother had begun so long ago.

After the New York Magazine article was published, job proposals came in from unlikely places. Abby’s sister, Hannah, called from San Francisco, with the phone number of the friend of a friend. “His name is Gary,” Hannah said, “and he wants to talk to you about some website he’s starting. It’s for dating, I guess, but it sounds pretty strange. Match dot com. What do you think?” Abby told Hannah she knew nothing about computers and could she please tell Gary thanks but no thanks.

Diane’s two biggest competitors called to offer her positions. Like Diane, they specialized in high-net-worth clients and celebrity divorces. Abby told them she’d get back to them, but in her heart, she already knew her answer would be no.

For a week she stayed home, poring through her grandmother’s journals, reading about all the matches Sara had made. She went back to the pages about Marlene Fishman and the other entries from the late 1950s. Her grandmother had never told her these stories, but she had left the journals for Abby to find. The stories proved that there was more than one way to use the gift that she’d been given.

When Abby had first decided to become a divorce attorney, she was only twelve years old. She had wanted to fight for women like her mother—ordinary people who needed an advocate to guide them through a difficult time. She wondered, sometimes, what would have happened if her mother had been able to hire a better attorney—someone savvy enough to defend Beverly and her daughters from the hostile battle Abby’s father had waged, someone compassionate enough to reassure Beverly that she was not alone in her plight, someone strong enough to convince her that no matter how tired and depleted she was, she owed it to herself to stand up for what she deserved. But somehow, instead of representing women like her mother, Abby had ended up going to work for Diane. What if she went back to her initial inspiration for becoming a lawyer in the first place? What if she looked to her grandfather’s career and his devotion to Legal Aid? What if she used her skills and her training to fight for the women who needed her the most? She called back a few headhunters and reached out to law school friends who’d chosen public interest law instead of big firms. By the end of the week, she had lined up a few meetings and was ready to think about her next steps.



* * *



Two weeks after the party, Jessica met Abby for a walk. August in New York was notoriously oppressive, and the heat that day was no exception. They entered Central Park on Sixty-Seventh Street and decided to walk north toward the lake, hoping for a breeze off the water. It was too hot to go very far, however, so they found an empty bench in the shade and fanned themselves with some newspaper pages someone had left on the bench next to theirs.

Abby filled Jessica in on her job search, and Jessica told her about Victor and his girls. After a few minutes, Jessica pulled a black velvet pouch from her purse.

“I have a gift for you,” she said. “For everything you’ve done for me.”

“Jessica, that’s sweet, but it really isn’t necessary.”

“Please. It’s important. It belonged to my grandmother. It was supposed to be the fee for her match.”

“Jessica, I’m not a real matchmaker. You don’t need to give me anything.”

“But I do,” Jessica insisted. “It’s tradition. You don’t want me to have bad luck, do you?”

Abby chuckled. “Come on, you don’t really believe that stuff.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. The only thing I’m certain of is that your grandmother was my grandparents’ matchmaker and now, decades later, you are mine.” Jessica pulled a polished gold bracelet from the pouch and held it out for Abby to see. “Here,” she said. “This was my grandma Miryam’s bracelet. Her father gave it to your great-grandfather, and then your grandmother was made to give it back. I don’t know all the details of the story. All I know is that it should have been hers, and now, it belongs to you.”

Jessica slid the bangle over Abby’s hand and helped to fasten the clasp around her wrist. The outside surface was etched with leaves in an intricate hand-carved design. “It’s beautiful,” Abby said, holding it up to the light. “Thank you.”

They walked back on the path in the afternoon heat, their hairlines damp and their faces shiny. When they emerged from the park at Sixty-Seventh Street, a soft-serve ice-cream truck waited near the entrance. “I’m dying for some ice cream,” Jessica said, reaching for Abby’s hand. “What do you say? Do you want a cone?”