The Woman They Never Met

I Live My Life in Stories

At approximately one o'clock that afternoon, Aveline received a telephone call from her daughter's elementary school. By two, she had managed to retrieve a sick child, overhear a rather unflattering assessment of her own existence, and resist the overwhelming temptation to provide two grown women with an impromptu lesson in acoustics and professional courtesy. Given the events of the afternoon, she was beginning to suspect Monday had developed a personal grievance against her.

Her daughter had called with another stomachache, something that might have been relatively ordinary in another family. In theirs, it carried a particular kind of fear. Aveline suffered from an incurable autoimmune disease affecting her colon, the same condition that had afflicted her recently deceased aunt and continued to affect another family member. Now her little girl was experiencing persistent stomach problems of her own, and both parents were terrified of what that family history might mean. She had promised her daughter that morning that if she began feeling worse, she could call, and her mother would come get her.

So she went.

While waiting in the elementary office for someone to locate her daughter, Aveline took a seat beside the reception counter. The area was small, with an open window separating the administrative workspace from the chairs where visitors waited. It was not an especially complicated architectural arrangement, although the two administrators on the opposite side apparently believed it possessed soundproofing capabilities.

They began discussing her.

Aveline heard enough to understand exactly who was being discussed and just how negatively she was regarded. There is a particular indignity in having to pretend you cannot hear someone insulting you because acknowledging that you can would somehow make you the person behaving inappropriately. She found herself studying the surrounding office with the concentration of a woman preparing for an examination while privately considering whether either administrator would benefit from a brief demonstration of how sound travels through an open window.

Her first instinct was to stand up and address the conversation directly. She possessed a law degree, years of courtroom experience, and a remarkable ability to construct a sentence that could make a grown adult reconsider every decision leading up to the moment it was delivered. She was reasonably confident she could manage two women and a reception counter.

But then she realized what would happen afterward.

There she goes again. Her daddy handed her everything. She thinks she's better than everybody. She's crazy. Always making a scene. Always pitching a temper tantrum.

The story practically wrote itself, and all they needed was for Aveline to provide the entertainment.

So she sat quietly, collected her daughter, and left.

It was an impressive display of maturity. Unfortunately, maturity did very little to prevent the humiliation from settling somewhere beneath her ribs. She had entered that building as a mother frightened for her child's health and walked out feeling like a worthless little girl who had overheard the popular table discussing why nobody wanted her sitting with them.

Later that afternoon, she stopped at a bank to sign paperwork, where the atmosphere appeared to undergo a noticeable change the moment she walked through the door. Faces closed. Her greetings received little response, and nobody seemed particularly inclined to smile back. Perhaps everyone was having an unfortunate afternoon. Perhaps the bank had recently implemented a policy prohibiting basic pleasantries toward women named Aveline. She really couldn't be sure, but by the time she finished signing, she had experienced quite enough public interaction for one day.

Two buildings. Two humiliating experiences. An impressive return on what had been intended as a fairly ordinary afternoon of running errands.

The problem was that these incidents didn't occur in isolation. They landed on top of months of heartbreak, exhaustion, and an increasingly painful awareness that Aveline did not belong in the community where she had built so much of her adult life. It seemed everyone had an opinion about her, including a remarkable number of people who had never actually met her. She wasn't particularly concerned with being popular. She simply hadn't realized basic human kindness had become something for which she was apparently ineligible.

And the day, being the generous bastard that it was, still had a few things left to offer.

Later, she saw her former husband.

The women in her office had recently been telling her how well he was doing, how healthy he looked, and how different his life had become since finding sobriety. She had been ecstatically proud of him when they told her, but hearing about it and seeing it were two entirely different experiences.

There he stood with clear eyes, neatly cut hair, and a face that looked almost impossibly familiar. He looked like the young man she had known sixteen years earlier, before alcoholism had interrupted so much of what they had planned.

The reaction was physical. Her stomach tightened, her eyes threatened to fill with tears, and for a moment she wanted to run toward him and wrap her arms around him.

There you are.

Not the butterflies of a woman falling in love. Something older and considerably more complicated. The overwhelming relief of seeing someone who had once meant the world to her finally looking like himself again. She had spent years hoping that man would find his way out of the darkness, and there he was, standing in front of her with a future she had once feared he might never have.

She was happy for him, genuinely happy, and for the woman who shared his life now. He deserved every opportunity sobriety had returned to him. But somewhere beneath that happiness was a question Aveline wished she could have prevented herself from asking.

What if I had just waited a little longer?

Would they still be married? Would their children still come home to both parents? Would the man standing in front of her be returning to their house that evening instead of a different life with a different woman?

She knew the unfairness of those questions. The woman who had eventually left an alcoholic marriage had not possessed a crystal ball or any guarantee that sobriety would arrive. Still, regret was rarely interested in the evidence.

What made it particularly painful was recognizing the loyalty her former husband had shown her through difficult periods of her own life. He had known her struggles intimately, witnessed the complicated parts of her health, and remained present through things that other people could scarcely understand. She had eventually reached her limits with him, and later, when her own struggles became difficult for someone else to endure, she had found herself on the other side of a similar decision.

In her mind, the arithmetic seemed painfully straightforward. Perhaps the loneliness she was experiencing now was simply the bill arriving for a decision she could never take back. It was a cruel calculation, but Aveline had become exceptionally good at finding ways to make every loss her own fault.

At another point during the day, she had come across a bridal shower. It was an entirely ordinary celebration, but something about the bride, the excitement, and the anticipation of a future built around two people choosing one another stopped her in her tracks.

Damn. That will never be me.

The thought arrived so quickly that it frightened her.

She wanted the white dress. She wanted a ring on her finger that actually represented the kind of love she had spent her life believing was possible. Not an arrangement maintained for appearances or a promise contingent upon her remaining sufficiently healthy, productive, and easy to understand.

She wanted someone who knew the whole woman. The successful attorney and the sometimes frightened person beneath her. The woman with bipolar disorder, chronic health problems, considerable professional ambition, fierce loyalty, a genuinely kind heart, and an occasionally spectacular ability to be a pain in the ass.

All of it. The good, the bad, the complicated, and the things she was still working to improve.

She wasn't asking another human being to surrender every personal boundary in the name of loving her. She simply wanted to believe that a difficult season did not automatically make a person disposable. That somewhere in her future was a love substantial enough to accommodate ordinary human imperfection without treating every complication as evidence of a regrettable investment.

Perhaps she would wear the white dress again. Perhaps the ring would finally represent something that endured. She wasn't particularly interested in another expensive ceremony or a collection of beautiful photographs documenting the beginning of something temporary.

She wanted the marriage that was supposed to come afterward.

By evening, the children had gone to their respective fathers, and Aveline returned home alone. There were no schoolbags to unpack, no arguments to referee, and no little voices demanding snacks or assistance locating objects that were generally sitting directly in front of them. Ordinarily, a few hours of uninterrupted silence might have been a welcome luxury. Tonight, however, the quiet seemed to have developed its own personality, and it was not particularly interested in being kind.

She had already begun making arrangements to leave. Not merely changing houses, but relocating herself, her physical office, and her children to the place where she had grown up, approximately thirty miles away. A relatively insignificant geographical distance for what felt like the possibility of an entirely different life.

There, people greeted her warmly. They knew where she came from, asked about her children, and seemed genuinely pleased when she walked into a room. She could have an opinion without it becoming a community event. She could laugh too loudly, speak too directly, and exist without constantly feeling as though her presence required explanation.

She belonged. Not because she had earned sufficient professional recognition or successfully defended herself against the latest rumor, but simply because she did.

Getting there, however, was proving to be slightly more complicated than changing her mailing address. There were two full-time jobs to manage, three children to consider, an office to relocate, and enough practical obligations to occupy a moderately staffed government agency. Her parents were helping as much as they could, but they worked full-time themselves. Every other week, the daily responsibilities of three children and two demanding jobs fell largely on her shoulders.

There was a light at the end of the tunnel. She had a destination and was actively working toward it. Unfortunately, knowing a tunnel has an exit does very little to shorten the distance between where you stand and where you need to be.

And tonight, she was heartbroken.

She was frightened for her daughter, regretful about parts of her past, humiliated by the day's events, and desperately uncertain about whether she would ever experience the kind of love she still hoped existed. She wanted the white dress, healthy children, a home filled with laughter, and a place where she could exist without feeling perpetually unwelcome.

None of those seemed like particularly unreasonable things to want.

But it seemed that everywhere she turned, something was reminding her that she was too much or not enough. Too opinionated for one person, too complicated for another, too outspoken for the community, too difficult to love, and apparently too offensive in her mere existence to receive a returned greeting at the bank.

She knew she wasn't perfect. In fact, she could have prepared a rather comprehensive list of her own shortcomings without assistance from the local population. She had never been particularly talented at being fake. Her opinions generally reached her mouth before the department responsible for public relations had completed its review, and she had accepted long ago that certain people would find that objectionable.

She didn't need everybody to like her. She simply hadn't expected so many people to treat her as though disliking her was sufficient grounds to disregard her humanity.

The people who had known her intimately had, at different times and for different reasons, decided they could no longer remain beside her. The people who barely knew her seemed perfectly comfortable deciding what kind of woman she was without bothering to investigate. It left her wondering whether she had somehow misunderstood herself entirely.

She had spent years believing she was a good woman. A complicated one, certainly. But loyal, loving, hardworking, and genuinely kindhearted. Now, sitting in an empty house, she wondered whether those qualities mattered very much when they were packaged inside a person everyone seemed to find so easy to dismiss.

And she was so goddamn tired.

Tired of defending herself. Tired of being misunderstood. Tired of carrying responsibilities that seemed to multiply every time she successfully managed the existing ones. Most of all, she was tired of feeling profoundly alone in a life that involved almost constant interaction with other human beings.

Every day, people called her because they needed something. They needed an answer, reassurance, legal advice, a signature, a document, a court appearance, a solution. At work, at home, and everywhere in between, there was no shortage of people who needed Aveline.

But being needed and being wanted were two extraordinarily different experiences.

She missed ordinary adult companionship. A conversation that had nothing to do with a deadline, a child's schedule, or someone else's impending catastrophe. She missed laughing with someone without first having to explain the context of the previous sixteen years. She missed existing somewhere without feeling responsible for making the experience worthwhile for everyone else.

And sitting there, feeling utterly defeated by a day that most of the outside world would probably consider uneventful, she thought about something else.

The people who had spent the afternoon discussing her had absolutely no idea what her days actually looked like.

Not that she expected them to. She had never been particularly interested in preparing a résumé for public inspection every time she entered a building. But the extraordinary confidence with which strangers assessed her accomplishments, character, and worth was almost impressive, considering how little information they possessed.

That very morning, before her daughter called, Aveline had met separately with two gentlemen seeking interdictions of their wives, both suffering from progressive cognitive diseases. One gentleman, a particularly sweet man whose wife had Alzheimer's, had been married for more than fifty years. His wife remembered very little anymore, but she remembered him.

He was her husband. Her person.

Unfortunately, he had reached the point where he could no longer physically provide the care she required. Her personal care had become increasingly difficult, sometimes physically unsafe for them both, and the situation had already resulted in a serious infection requiring hospitalization. He knew she needed to enter a facility. Everyone agreed. But agreement did not make the decision any less devastating.

Aveline told him about an article she had recently read concerning the declining health of long-term caregivers. She explained that every time he came into her office, she intended to ask whether he was taking care of himself. He could get aggravated with her all he wanted, but the question wasn't going away. Her eyes filled with tears as she told him she wasn't saying those things for show. She genuinely cared about him.

Then she asked how his wife would react when he eventually had to leave her at the facility.

"She's going to fight," he told her. "I'm all she knows."

He didn't want her to go either. He simply couldn't physically care for her anymore.

For the first time, Aveline truly considered what that particular day would look like. A husband of more than fifty years would help his wife into an unfamiliar room, turn around, and leave the only person she still recognized behind. He would return to their familiar house, where her clothes would remain in the closet and her belongings would remain scattered throughout the rooms. Except now, he would know she wasn't coming home. It might be months, perhaps years, before death officially ended their marriage, but the life they had shared within those walls was about to end much sooner.

She understood the cruelty of discovering that a conversation had been the last one only after there was no possibility of another. This was different. This man would have to experience the goodbye while fully understanding its permanence.

While Aveline cried with him in her office, her staff sat in the lobby with his wife, talking and laughing with her and making her feel like a million dollars. After the couple left, the women gathered in the coffee room and cried together.

There were no billable hours for that part. Apparently, they had all missed the continuing legal education seminar explaining that successful law practices were supposed to avoid developing inconvenient emotional attachments to the people who paid them.

And that was only a small portion of what Aveline's professional life actually involved.

Around town, the popular understanding was that her father had handed her a successful law practice, complete with an office, employees, clients, and presumably a lovely pile of money with which to entertain herself while occasionally expressing opinions nobody had requested. It was an attractive story, requiring almost no investigation and possessing the added benefit of diminishing everything she had accomplished since.

Her father had indeed built a practice and a reputation she was proud to carry forward. Some clients had returned because they trusted him and, by extension, were willing to trust his daughter. She had never denied that advantage.

There was, however, one rather significant financial detail missing from the local legend.

The day her father left the practice in her hands, its operating account was approximately fourteen thousand dollars in the negative. There were seven employees with paychecks coming due within the week, and he was gone without providing any meaningful transition, guidance, or explanation.

The keys were hers, certainly. Unfortunately, nobody had informed the bank that inheriting a set of keys was supposed to constitute financial security.

She found the money to meet payroll. Then she did it again. She reorganized the practice, redesigned the office, updated its technology, configured software and telephone systems, developed the website, and steadily built a functioning business that now maintained operating funds in the neighborhood of six figures. Her father had even acknowledged that, at thirty-eight, she was consistently producing more work and achieving financial marks he had not yet reached at the same age.

But, of course, Daddy had given her everything. Explaining the actual circumstances would have required entirely too many syllables.

And the private practice was only one of her two full-time jobs. Her other position involved felony indigent defense in a neighboring parish, where there were ordinarily three attorneys responsible for dividing the felony caseload. One had recently departed, and on the very morning Aveline intended to submit her own resignation, she awakened to a message informing her that another was leaving as well.

The timing was exquisite. Apparently, the universe had decided her resignation letter would be more useful as a decorative object.

She stayed.

Between the private practice and public defense, approximately five hundred matters demanded varying degrees of attention from one woman who, despite repeated attempts to improve her efficiency, had yet to develop a third hand. Two major murder trials were approaching, along with court appearances, deadlines, jail visits, and an assortment of problems that seemed to reproduce whenever she briefly looked away from her desk.

Later that week, she would be sitting across from a defendant facing extraordinarily serious homicide allegations, discussing a future in which his opportunities for freedom could be severely limited. It was the sort of conversation that required considerable preparation and composure, particularly when conducted behind a locked door in a jail where she had recently experienced a frightening confrontation with another inmate.

That particular incident had escalated to the point that Aveline had hurried out of a small meeting room and positioned herself behind several other incarcerated clients who were waiting to see her.

"If I don't come back here to talk to y'all about your cases, you can blame him," she announced, indicating the man who had frightened her.

It was not exactly the crisis-management strategy recommended in law school, but desperate circumstances occasionally produced creative applications of client relations.

The other men immediately moved to protect her, explaining that she was one of the few attorneys who actually came to see them and that they weren't about to jeopardize that arrangement. The warden later reviewed the camera footage and took steps to address her safety, offering sincere apologies and assistance without her having to request either.

There was something almost poetic about discovering that a group of incarcerated men, several of whom were facing accusations that would make the average citizen reconsider sharing an elevator with them, had demonstrated more concern for her personal safety than some of the perfectly respectable people she encountered during an ordinary afternoon. Apparently, Aveline had been searching for basic human decency in all the wrong places.

She should have checked the jail.

But even those professional responsibilities failed to account for the work nobody saw, much of which she wasn't getting paid to do.

Yes, she operated a business. Yes, she charged for professional services. An unfortunate necessity, considering her employees continued expecting paychecks and the electric company remained stubbornly opposed to accepting good intentions as currency. But an extraordinary amount of her time was spent doing things for which there would never be an invoice.

She spent countless unpaid hours trying to move an overwhelmed criminal justice system forward, meeting with incarcerated clients, reviewing unresolved matters, coordinating with prosecutors, and working toward agreements that might finally give someone an answer about their future. When staffing shortages left the public defender's office struggling, she continued carrying responsibilities she had intended to leave behind because the people depending on that office couldn't simply be placed on hold until everyone figured out who was supposed to represent them.

There were nights when she made the unhealthy decision to skip prescribed sleep medication, convinced that remaining awake was the only way to meet her obligations. She knew the arrangement was unsustainable. But there were deadlines, court filings, clients, children, and employees depending on her, and none of those responsibilities seemed particularly interested in the fact that one human being was attempting to accomplish the work of several.

She did not expect a medal for any of it. She was reasonably certain there wasn't a category at the annual bar association banquet for Most Likely to Die at Her Desk While Attempting to Upload a PDF.

And she cared about those people. Genuinely. She worried about their families, their health, their futures, and sometimes things that had absolutely nothing to do with the legal services they had hired her to provide. The women inside the office she had built had learned to extend that same kindness. It was something she was considerably prouder of than the balance in its operating account.

She wondered what the people discussing her over reception counters and coffee cups would think if they followed her for twenty-four hours. Perhaps they would be surprised to discover that the spoiled, opinionated woman whose daddy had supposedly handed her everything was also the attorney whose incarcerated clients had physically stepped between her and danger because they were afraid of losing one of the few people who consistently came to see them.

To some people, she was simply a woman whose father had handed her an office. To a frightened husband, she was someone who cared enough to worry about who would take care of him when he could no longer take care of his wife. To a man sitting in jail, she might be the only person who had bothered to visit him that month.

She wasn't a saint. She wasn't particularly interested in becoming one, either. She was loud, opinionated, occasionally too direct, and possessed the unfortunate habit of expressing her actual thoughts instead of whatever carefully manufactured response might have made her more socially acceptable.

But she was genuine. She was loyal. She had an enormous capacity for love, and for all her shortcomings, she had spent much of her adult life trying to leave people in better circumstances than she found them.

None of those things made her more entitled to basic human kindness than anyone else. They simply made the distance between the woman she actually was and the woman people had decided she must be considerably more heartbreaking.

And perhaps that was what hurt the most.

She had spent her entire professional life insisting that human beings were more complicated than the worst things anyone could say about them. She had defended people accused of terrible crimes, watched lives unravel under addiction and illness, and sat beside families trying to make impossible decisions. She believed people could change. She believed difficult circumstances did not constitute the entirety of a person's humanity, and that compassion was not something reserved exclusively for people whose lives were attractive and easy to understand.

She believed all of it, apparently, unless the person requiring compassion was herself.

When she considered her own failed marriages, her illnesses, her complicated emotional history, and the people who had decided they no longer wanted her in their lives, she found herself reaching a considerably less generous conclusion. Perhaps she really was too difficult, too opinionated, too complicated, and too much of everything people seemed to find inconvenient in a woman. Perhaps she could be an extraordinary attorney, a devoted mother, a fiercely loyal friend, and a genuinely compassionate human being who somehow remained fundamentally unlovable.

It was a particularly cruel conclusion, considering how much love she still had to give.

Tomorrow, she would get up. She would fix her hair, put on her makeup, manage her cases, love her children, and continue the arrangements for the move. She would probably make somebody laugh before lunchtime and express an opinion that irritated someone else before two.

She would keep going because that was what she did.

But tonight, she had no interest in delivering herself an inspirational speech about resilience. She was allowed to be devastated by a life she was actively trying to change. She was allowed to mourn the years she couldn't recover and the version of herself she was increasingly afraid she had lost somewhere along the way.

She thought about the gentleman from that morning. She had cried while assuring him that acknowledging his limitations did not mean he had failed the woman he loved. She had offered him every ounce of compassion she possessed, then returned home and subjected herself to an internal prosecution for which she seemed determined to obtain a conviction.

There would be another town. Another home. Perhaps, one day, even that white dress. She had already begun the long, complicated process of relocating a life that involved two full-time jobs, three children, and approximately five hundred legal matters. An undertaking that had seemed considerably less ambitious when she first decided she was simply going to move thirty miles down the road.

She could see the end of the tunnel. She just couldn't seem to find the energy to get there tonight.

And perhaps that was what frightened her most. Not the gossip, the loneliness, the failed marriages, or even the possibility that she would never become the woman she had once imagined. It was the realization that after thirty-eight years of fighting for people, loving people, and finding value in people the rest of society had long since dismissed, she had somehow become the one person she could no longer find a reason to defend.

She wanted to go home.

Not because thirty miles would magically cure everything that was wrong with her life, but because she wanted to remember what it felt like to walk into a room without wishing she hadn't.

And because she was beginning to understand that leaving this town would accomplish very little if, after packing up her children, her belongings, and the business she had built, she took its opinion of her along for the ride.

Judith L. Hampton

Attorney-at-Law

Hampton Law Firm