My mind flips through what I can remember of Cam’s legal issues. The problem is there have been so many. Beyond the basic hazards in serving the public—falls, broken glass, burns and cuts and food poisoning—there are a million things that can go wrong. Labor laws, noncompetes, immigration issues, liquor licensing, noise and traffic. Most of them frivolous enough he doesn’t bother to share, or if he does, it’s only to vent and complain. I hear him out, but I rarely remember the specifics.
“Did you go to trial?” I ask, because those are the only disputes I know something about, and miraculously, there have been only two. The first was ages ago, a leasing dispute when Cam opened his second shop, which became the impetus for his strategy of owning the real estate for his restaurants whenever possible.
The other was almost two years ago. A location on the outskirts of Atlanta that fell through at the last minute, a disgruntled almost-partner Cam dismissed as sour grapes. He sued, Cam won. The end.
Or so we thought.
“Hell yes, we went to trial. There is something seriously wrong with the legal system in this country when the only way to win is by having the deepest pockets. My attorney went up against a whole team of Cam’s hotshots, who buried her in paperwork and nonsense. They froze my bank accounts, put a lien on my house and intimidated my family with an armed private investigator who followed us all over town. They played every dirty trick in the book, and it worked. I’d lost before I even stepped foot in the courtroom.”
The phone rings again, and he pulls it from his pocket, but he doesn’t look. Not yet.
I keep his attention on me. “So that’s why us. That’s why this house.”
This—all of this—it’s about Cam. About resentment and animosity. The kids and me, we’re just pawns.
The phone rings for a fourth time but my questions have him too riled up. He doesn’t so much as glance down at the screen.
“Do you know what happens when your bank account is frozen? You can’t pay your bills, that’s what. You learn real quick how to space them out, to borrow money from the mortgage in order to pay the electric bill, until your bank tries to take back the house, so you swipe the phone money to pay the mortgage. My point is, that shit catches up with you eventually. They come after you then. Your house, your cars, your assets. They take everything, and they don’t stop until the only thing you’ve got left to your name is the clothes on your back and a credit score that’ll get you laughed out of every bank. They even took my daughter’s medical vest. They took her oxygen tank!”
“That doesn’t seem right.”
“Oh, you think?” He makes a sound, a kind of angry bark. “It’s evil is what it is. She needs those things to breathe. When I threatened to go to the police, they replaced it with an old piece of shit machine that weighs a ton, not caring that carrying anything over a pound gets her winded. You tell me how that’s fair.”
“It’s not. You’re right to be angry.”
The man seems surprised by my answer. He frowns, matching my gaze with his glare, while the phone rings one last time before flipping to voice mail.
“Damn straight I’m right. And don’t even get me started on insurance. It doesn’t get much more preexisting than cystic fibrosis, which means when we were forced to switch, none of the good ones would touch us, and the ones we could afford don’t cover half the therapies she needs to survive. Those companies make it so complicated you give up. Throw your hands up in despair. Do you know what the out-of-pocket costs are, even with decent insurance? Do you?”
“No, but I’m guessing it’s a lot,” I say, but this is where my mind is traveling: down the stairs and out the front door and down the hill and across the road, to the painted brick home across the street. Tanya Lloyd’s house. To those stories she’s always sharing of her poor, beloved niece, the one with cystic fibrosis. The one Tanya is organizing a fundraiser for, the one she just asked me to donate my time and talent to, the one who desperately needs the money to pay for the lung transplant that is this girl’s last hope.
“The FDA came out with this groundbreaking CF drug last year—a game changer, they’re calling it. Do you know what it costs? More than $300,000 a year. If you’re lucky, you’ve got insurance to cover most of that and a big, fat pot of savings to fill the gap, but what about the rest of us? We’re just supposed to sit around and watch our kids dig their own graves?”