Kenneth Cartwright sat in the City Java Cafe, a bohemian-style coffee bar located on the corner of downtown Dallas’s busiest intersection, Grand and Broadway, a little after ten a.m. The tall buildings shielded the cafe from much of the sunlight. However, the sun’s reflection off the windshields of dozens of passing cars and heat radiating from the massive window to Ken’s right told him that this day would be like most in that part of Texas on a late-spring day—blisteringly hot with no chance of rain.
He sipped a large nonfat mocha and stared out of the window at pedestrians walking past the cafe on the wide sidewalk, mostly other professionals rushing from one point to another.
It was Monday. Despite the good weather and sweet taste of mocha, a heaviness settled on his shoulders that belied his outward appearance. He wore his most expensive navy blue, custom-tailored suit, red power tie, and French-cuffed white pinpoint oxford shirt, complete with diamond-studded gold cufflinks. The ensemble complimented his closely cropped hair, dark brown and flecked with gray, though he wondered if his attempt to look successful and satisfied mattered anymore.
As a lawyer, Ken had been working on deposition questions for a case he had been dealing with for more than two weeks and was taking a few minutes away from his office, just one building to the left, and ten floors above his seat at the cafe, to let his mind relax. No book, no Kindle, laptop, or tablet computer, nothing but his mocha and the classical music pumping through the cafe’s tiny ceiling-mounted speakers that the noise of the many patrons almost drowned out, to occupy his thoughts.
Ken was a junior partner at the firm, thus, he was accustomed to senior partners dropping cases in his lap that they were too ill-equipped, too lazy, or simply too busy to handle, and this case was one of these, qualifying on all three of those levels to some degree. The deposition that he was preparing for the assigning partner would make or break the case, as well as Ken’s reputation. He knew such was the blessing and curse of being, as one of the senior partners called him, “the firm’s sharpest mind.” But that hadn’t compelled him to take a break from his helter-skelter life of one-hundred-hour workweeks and deadlines that even his work ethic wasn’t enough to meet. Nor was it Monday-morning depression. Instead, it was a question that had dogged him for as long as he could remember.
Why had he chosen the path he had taken so many years before?
By all the world’s standards, Ken was successful before his divergence to the law occurred. He had more money than he knew what to do with, a five-figure monthly net cash flow from the ventures other people now ran for him. Yet he had decided being rich wasn’t enough. He wanted prestige, too, the prestige that came from becoming a lawyer like his grandfather. So when he graduated college he moved on to law school, all the time collecting weekly checks from the many business ventures he had begun from his early teens and during his college years—paper routes, real estate investments, coin-operated laundries, and car washes—with the first dating back to his freshman year in high school. He had known at the time what led him to become so ambitious at such a young age, but he had managed to block out most of those haunting memories. His dedication to excellence in his studies and making money masked something deeper and very troubling in Ken’s psyche.
As with everything else that preceded it, he excelled at law school, too—at Harvard, no less. Upon graduating with his service as editor of the Harvard Law Review on his resume, as well as a summer clerkship with the firm after his second year in law school, he was offered a prestigious U.S. Supreme Court Clerkship, which was followed by a $200,000 a year associate offer at the multinational, one thousand-lawyer-plus law firm where he was now a junior partner, the partnership offer coming after only two years of brilliant work on the firm’s most challenging cases. Until this very moment he had no regrets.
“Why did I do it?” he whispered to himself as his eyes moistened.
His facial tension relaxed as he allowed long forgotten and suppressed memories to dominate his thoughts. As happened every few years at unexpected moments, images of another life flooded his consciousness. “I miss them,” was all he said before tears burst forth unabated. “Why?” He dabbed his eyes with the paper napkin in the hand not grasping the mug’s handle. “They are only a dream.”
The cafe was packed with people, a couple of them lawyers taking similar breaks from his own firm. He glanced around the room. No one seemed to notice him. The hustle and bustle of the city somehow masked his mental breakdown from almost everyone there. They were too busy either chatting and talking about their own lives, or ordering and then waiting for their coffees before other patrons mistakenly scooped theirs up by mistake.
Someone touched his shoulder and said, “Are you okay?”
