Love Has Reasons

Chapter 1: Danny

Chapter 1: Danny

He wasn’t any kind of “certifiable” giant, you understand. It’s not like he was being stalked by paparazzi from the Guinness Book of World Records. But unless your name was Jack and you grew up with a beanstalk in your back yard, Danny Hanrahan was probably the biggest guy you’d ever seen. Standing flat on his bare feet he brushed six-foot-ten, and everything about him was outsized. His youngest brother Matt, at six-foot-three the family shrimp, had run to fat pretty early in the game, but if his dad, his uncles, and his towering eighty-three year-old grandfather were any predictors, Danny probably wouldn’t. The little pooch of overindulgence he had popped was undetectable in all but the most intimate circumstances, then adding only an irresistible shade of vulnerability to an already must-have body. If you imagined viewing a scene from A Day in Danny’s Life the way you might view a photograph in a magazine, he looked like nothing so much as a generically pleasant athletic twink from Central Casting who’d been excised from the photo, dressed in an expensive suit, zoomed to about 125%, and then reinserted. He punched in right around two-eighty, but it fit him like 165 pounds of muscle. His thick-measuring waist was proportionately slender, his snowshoe-sized feet in balance and unremarkable in the aggregate.

Revered in his family for his position as the first of three strapping and toothsome sons, reared up among the sweeping lawns in tony lakeside Grosse Pointe, a star lacrosse player and a brilliant test-taker, everything had come easy to Danny. The University of Michigan, for example, had been a no-brainer. If he could go to one of the best schools in the country for his undergrad as well as his law degree and take his laundry home to Mom every other weekend, he saw no reason to complicate things.

Even Santa Fe, which looked uncharacteristically daring at first glance, had been an easy and obvious call. Dutifully married at twenty-two, amicably divorced (before babies, thank God) by twenty-four, he was looking for a change of scenery. When Aaron Schwartz had e-mailed the news that the New Mexico firm he’d joined after graduation the year before was looking for a new associate, Danny had been only too happy to follow his still-smoldering first crush into the desert.

Never mind that Santa Fe was at an altitude of 7,000 feet and got every bit as cold as Michigan in the winter time. Never mind that Aaron Schwartz had gotten ridiculously fat—and ridiculously married, a father of six by twenty-seven—since he and Danny had become best buds their freshman year. Danny fell harder for Santa Fe than he’d ever fallen for Schwartz, and he hadn’t gone back to Michigan for so much as a quick Christmas visit in five years. He never removed the elaborately tooled sterling silver cuff from his right wrist. He ate green chilies on everything from tortillas to toast. He sported an artless tattoo of Kokopelli, the city’s unofficial flute-playing mascot, on his lacrosse-bulged calf. If ever anyone had embraced the tourist brochure version of Life in New Mexico, it was Danny Hanrahan.

Unless he had to be in court, he rode his bike to the office. He frequently clomped around the hills behind his sprawling, covenant-controlled community. In the summer he tanned, in the winter he was windblown and rosy of cheek. The weather beating his face took served only to accentuate the sparkle in his eyes, and he considered his deep laugh lines a hard-earned sign of a life well-lived. He lived in a plush and spacious home, he drove an outrageously expensive car, he still had a firm round butt. He was well paid, well fed, and well liked, and if he hadn’t yet found the right guy with whom to share it all, well, nobody’s life was perfect.

His was close, though, and it’s not like Santa Fe didn’t have options for the hot, rich, and single. Gay tourists thronged the Plaza and the revitalized Railyard District nearby, and the local queer community was small but active and diverse. He’d struggled to find the right combination of short, sexy, and smart that he considered “boyfriend material,” but if he was in the mood for a weekend of no-strings-attached romance with an out-of-towner or a hot one-night stand with a wasp-waisted barfly or a bespectacled bookstore geek, he was rarely at a loss. And if all else failed, there was always The Crossing.

Affable, jocular, whip-quick with his grin and glacier-slow to anger, colleagues and co-workers clamored to befriend him, and he seemed to always have time for a cup of coffee or for the iPhone photo extravaganza that documented the latest doggie haircut or spelling bee near-triumph. Smug and smarmy courtroom rivals found it as easy to underestimate him, but only once. His Dumbo ears and his eternally half-open mouth projected dim wits, but if his intellect wasn’t razor-sharp, he was a dedicated attorney and a determined researcher. What he didn’t already know, he had the good sense and the patience to learn, and he came to court prepared not only for the day’s drudgery, but for even the least likely contingency. He frequently won cases against more hot-shot legal teams, and was developing for his firm the reputation that they were not to be trifled with. His personal outlook seldom jived with the priorities of his firm’s corporate clients, but they weren’t paying him for his opinion, and they paid him rather handsomely, on the other hand, for running to ground legal justifications for theirs.

And working in a small regional office of a large firm that handled huge clients had its advantages. The workload was manageable, for one thing, and highly specialized. If the case didn’t relate to a tract of land or a tribal nation within a hundred miles of his own front door, it never crossed his desk. He seldom traveled for work, and what little he did never involved the stress and mess of flying. He drove his own car, in which he listened to his own music. He bought his own Sonic, and ninety-nine nights out of a hundred he slept in his own bed, a major benefit in the eyes of a guy who hung off the sides of even a large hotel bed like a Beanie Baby draped over a marshmallow.

The office itself was small and personalized, driven by Carlos “Pepper” Esposito, a results-oriented partner whose burning passion for competitive clogging kept the importance of a balanced work life in perspective. If you handled your business, you were free to take whatever time you needed to videotape school plays and keep midweek dental appointments and gallivant off on romantic weekend getaways. And if you were smart, you made a point of recharging your Get Out of Jail Free Card by making an appearance at the occasional Regional Clog-Off and rooting for Pepper and Wendy, his decidedly better half in life as well as on the dance floor.

On paper, Danny, a senior associate, reported to Schwartz, a junior partner, and they shared a glass-front office suite in a refurbished filling station separated from the main building by a parking lot-turned-patio framed by planter-box trees and carpeted in Astroturf. Each buddy had his own office—Danny’s consisting of three chairs arranged around an IKEA desk whose sole discernible function was laptop storage and display, Schwartz’s of a desk chair he couldn’t fit in, a fichus tree that grew even faster than he did, and what was to all appearances every scrap of paper he had ever been handed by every person he had come in contact with since leaving the third grade. His desk—for presumably there was a desk under there somewhere, although Danny couldn’t have described it as anything other than paper-colored—was a springtime high-country runoff of receipts, business cards, takeout menus, legal briefs, personal correspondence, pre-approved credit offers, and children’s art projects that should have rendered finding even a growling grizzly bear under the desk impossible, but through which Schwartz could sift in ten seconds or less and unearth a pertinent five-year-old Post-It note. Schwartz rarely appeared in court, but he could schmooze a big shot like nobody’s business, and he and Danny played to each other’s strengths when parceling out the workload. This meant that Schwartz spent most of his workday wedged into a golf cart or loading up on lunch while Danny had his nose in a book and his fingers on the keyboard for much of his day doing the bulk of what looked like actual work, but the wheels of their department rarely squeaked and, physically separate from the rest of the firm, if only by a hundred feet, most days it felt like they were running their own practice.

More precisely, while Danny and Schwartz certainly enjoyed the high level of autonomy the remote setup afforded them, most days it felt like their assistant Monica was running her own practice, magnanimously allowing them to go about their lawyering with the express understanding that her style was not to be cramped.