Old School Ch. 05: Danville

Rush's shoulders slumped. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands, looking at them as they visibly trembled, as though they were foreign objects. Then looked around the room, confused and dumbstruck. Finally, he looked blankly, almost pleadingly, at me. The raging monster of just a minute earlier was now a defeated old man who knew he was likely on his way to his own termination and the end of his career. I could find no sympathy for him.

"You heard him, Wilson. Airport's a 30-minute cab ride. You better get moving."

In a daze, Rush shuffled out of my office and down the hallway muttering something unintelligible. Donita would later tell me that she couldn't be sure but she thought he was weeping as he waited for the elevator door to open.

By week's end, the legal trade publications were describing it as an "abrupt departure" and "unexpected retirement" of the prominent chair of perhaps America's preeminent trusts and estates practice. Predictably, Sal D'Amucci wasn't commenting other than to call it "a personal decision" that allows Rush to "spend more time with family."

I would never see or hear from Wilson Rush again.

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I cleared my personal possessions from my Cincinnati office by close of business on the day of my final encounter with Rush. By the end of that week, I had met with a realtor and signed a contract to put my brownstone on the market no later than June 1. Harold Reese joined me on Wednesday of that week to sign a contract on a five-year lease for the seventh floor of a high-rise downtown Lexington office building. We benefited from three disastrous years for the commercial real estate market since the quarantined, work-from-home days of the pandemic.

Jerilyn Bates and I joined Kass to tour the Depot District building where I had proposed to Kass a few days earlier. We signed a five-year lease for what would serve as a satellite office Jerilyn and I could use to work remotely and occasionally meet with clients as we maximize family time in Danville.

"Glad you listened to me that day and made things right with this lady," Jerilyn said to me as she looked approvingly at Kass's engagement ring.

"I'm fortunate that you called me," I replied.

Kass and I had agreed that we would find a house on the outskirts of Danville — something with plenty of land and trees and places for kids to play; a farm perhaps — and she would convert her second-story bachelor-girl's nest into the business office for Felson Enterprises. She again asked Ruth Rothermel if she was interested in becoming her company's business manager, but Karl Blankenship had hired her on the spot after meeting with her for two hours on Monday. She had already found an apartment in the Nashville exurbs, enrolled her grandchildren in an elementary school and returned to what she loved doing fulltime at a safe distance from the predations of her brother's unknown followers.

To my personal gratification and our financial blessing, four of my top five clients had independently agreed to migrate most if not all of their work from Gladney to our new firm by July 1, the date by which we would officially be up and running. And in my first professional work post-Gladney, I had begun working on Jerilyn Bates' petition for divorce, which we planned to file in May right there in Danville in Boyle County Circuit Court.

The week was exhausting. By midafternoon on Friday when we finally clocked out a few hours early, Kass and I were both drained. We arrived at Woodland Hills in Louisville for the Easter weekend with Mom just in time to accompany her to a Good Friday service at the chapel in her senior living community. In keeping with the somber tone of the day, Mom's friends resisted swarming her to meet her new daughter-in-law-elect, but I could tell that in the more festive light of Easter morning, there would be no such restraint.

As we sat on Mom's patio in the balmy evening air, Mom and Kass were remarkably at peace, and it was contagious. I had the good judgment to sit back and watch as Mom and Kass sat side by side on her sofa and pored over old family albums from my childhood. In it, they found photos that provoked laughter (that time I wore a plastic bucket upside down on my head and let Kass chase me around, banging on it with a spoon), embarrassment (a photo of us as very small children having an impromptu romp in a lawn sprinkler after stripping to our underpants one blistering summer afternoon) and tears (Kass playing kickball in a vacant lot in the old neighborhood with her father, her brother Louie and me).

But in those quiet, comfortable reflections, it was as though a circuit had been reconnected. The bonds of a lifetime ago had been re-established, at least as much as mortality allowed. But more than that, it was the feeling that pervaded the moment: a sense not just of comfort among the living that the past is in some way survives but a beatific spiritual harmony among the loves we had lost.

At one point, as Kass leaned forward to look at the album with Mom's arm nestled around her, I saw a childlike wonderment on the face of my bride-to-be, very much like Kass as the little girl she was in those photos. And for my mother, the moment was sublime: the daughter she always wanted was home at last.

Finally, as the enormity of the week and her exhaustion caught up with Kass, I saw her eyelids grow heavy, flutter and eventually close as she fell asleep leaning against my mother. The only time I would ever see Mom this content would be the not-too-distant future when she would hold her first newborn granddaughter.

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It wasn't a long engagement. We had already let too many years slip away.

Kass and I married in late September of 2023 on a Saturday afternoon, one day short of the first anniversary of the last time I saw Dano Albertson. We considered the Presbyterian church in Versailles were we had been baptized as small children, but neither of us had lived there for well over a decade. We opted for an outdoor wedding amid the fall splendor on the sprawling front lawn of Jerilyn Bates' family estate. There was a large, covered area attached to her family's stables that could be a fallback in case of rain, but it turned out to be a perfect Kentucky early fall afternoon.

Kass was, predictably, stunning because she didn't try to appear as something that she was not. Her bright, smiling girlish face is always perfect for any occasion. She eschewed the traditional veil and instead let her unruly copper-colored curls glisten in the sun and fly in the breeze. Her brother stood in for their late father and gave her away. Karl Blankenship served as my best man. I conspicuously left a groomsman's spot — the one Dano Albertson would have filled — empty. Kendall Rothermel was the ringbearer; his sister, Kylie, was the flower girl. Ruth Mae Rothermel sat beside my mother because both, in different ways, gave me life.

The reception was also on the manicured grounds of the Bates family farm with a large, rented tent for the reception dinner and lights strung from tree to tree as a natural-turf dance floor. Of course, our first dance as husband and wife was "It Had To Be You," a smoky jazz version with a standup bass, a saxophone and a drum played with brushes. The singer, only 20, had made it through the first round of "American Idol" and a chance to compete in Hollywood two seasons earlier and was about to make another run at it after refining her voice and style and developing significant followings in Louisville, Nashville and Lexington.

When the day was done, we spent our wedding night in her apartment atop Felson's on Main, even tho0ugh much of its contents had already been put into a portable, on-demand storage device. For the first time, we made love to completion without consideration for birth control and fell into a sound sleep with my alarm set for 6 a.m. Our bags were packed and ready for a 9:30 flight out of Lexington that, eleven hours later, would land us in Belize for a tropical weeklong honeymoon, a week when we stayed either fully naked or barely clad for probably 95 percent of our stay. She'd had her intrauterine device removed almost two months earlier and we'd made love exclusively using condoms until after our wedding.

Well, almost.

Lorene Elise Walker was seven pounds, eleven ounces when she arrived on May 25, 2024. She was named after her grandmothers. For those of you doing the math, that's only eight months after our September wedding.

Lori, as we would call her, had Kass's auburn hair and my mother's hazel eyes.

It wasn't hard to pinpoint the act of love in which she was conceived.

Three weeks after Kass had her IUD removed, I was inside the storage POD behind Felson's on Main early one Saturday morning loading the first of the furniture from her upstairs apartment into it. We had made an offer in June on a four-bedroom, brick, ranch-style house on seven acres just inside the Danville corporate limits and closed in late July. We were having renovations done to the kitchen and two bathrooms and the addition of a large outdoor pavilion with a fireplace, grill, wet bar and television mount in the back yard plus a play area with a swing for the children we hoped to have. So we couldn't just start loading our possessions into it.

I had risen before Kass and left her to sleep in on one of her Saturdays off from the store when Millie was in charge, but she got up anyway, brewed coffee and brought it to me outside, still wearing her droopy sleep shirt.

"Here you go, stud," she said, walking into the almost empty POD, slapping me on the ass and handing me the mug. "This'll warm you up."

In the back half of August, warming up isn't something one generally needs in Kentucky, but on this morning there was a brisk, cool breeze blowing in ahead of a line of thundershowers predicted to hit in the afternoon. It had an effect on Kass's nipples, causing them to noticeably stiffen beneath the flimsy cotton material. It caught my eye as I turned around to take the mug and thank her with a good morning kiss.

"Well somebody's feeling the chill or just excited to see me," I said, gently tweaking one of her protuberant nipples through the shirt.

"Don't start something you can't finish," she said, one eye arched in a jovial gesture of challenge.

"Oh, I can finish, missy," I said, calling her bluff. I kissed her again, but this time with hunger. Her mouth opened onto mine as my free arm — the one not holding the mug of hot java — pulled her into me.

I don't know that either of us intended for things to go so far so fast. But within minutes, both of us had put our mugs onto a table I had loaded into the POD, one of my hands had disappeared beneath her t-shirt where it kneaded her breasts and the other had discovered that she wore no panties and was following the luscious contours of her ass. For Kass's part, she had untied the drawstring of my basketball shorts, now pooled atop my sneakers, as she caressed my erection. The naughty spontaneity of it all, the risk of getting caught and the sheer urgency of the moment prevailed. This was happening. No turning back.

Before things got farther along, we noticed that the door to the POD was still wide open, so I closed it, propping a rake in the jamb to prevent it from closing fully and, perhaps, accidentally latching. In what little morning light streamed through the three-inch gap, Kass and I put one of the dining room chairs I had just brought down to good use. We stripped bare but for our shoes and I sat Kass in the chair, knelt before her, parted her thighs and pressed my tongue into her drooling pussy, pushing it repeatedly upward to tease her clit. Her musk intoxicated me as her mound pressed into my mouth and I felt her control slipping away. Her hands clutched my hair, pushing my face into her slit as she surrendered to her primal need. Then, just as I expected her to crest, she pushed my face away.

"I need you in me. I want to ride you," she rasped, breathing heavily.

Kass stood, turned me around and pushed me backward into the seat she had just left. Then she straddled my legs, poised her pussy over my dick as it pointed skyward and lowered herself onto it, sliding me in to the hilt.

"Oh my God," I said as her tight, creamy warmth consumed my cock. Kass locked her legs behind the back of the chair and began grinding into me, pushing her pelvis and her engorged bean hard into my pelvis. Her jiggling nipples grazed my chest, heightening her arousal. Again we locked our mouths together as she rode me, both as a lewd and natural outgrowth of the moment and as a natural way to muffle the sounds we both make on the journey to orgasm.

We didn't plan this carnal assignation in a storage pod behind an operating retail establishment with its doors subject to being swayed open by a random wind gust. At least I don't think we did. But the fact that both of us were wearing the minimum (what we had slept — and fucked — in the previous evening) as we began our first real day of preparation to move makes it clear to me now that we were open to it. That's particularly true when considered along with the willingness with which we succumbed to full outdoor sex and its attendant risk of being caught.

But here we were, sweating, panting, grunting and moaning, our hips heaving and grinding, our tongues grappling and our loins wet, yearning and insatiable.

"Gonna cum, Les," Kass gasped, a telltale glazed look in her eyes. "Fuck me hard," she said as her back bowed, her hips twitched and her pussy began milking me.

My stamina seemed solid, having filled a condom the previous night, so I enjoyed the wonderous experience of Kass's climactic rapture. Usually, my own buildup has distinct warning signs — my balls tightening, my load massing at the base of my swelling cock. I was relying on those signals in this wild, impromptu lovemaking moment. Without warning, I felt my cock begin to spasm as Kass shuddered through her climax. I shrieked as Kass rode out the downside of her orgasm, a warning to her that I had to pull out of her. She lifted off of me just as the first bolt of cum splashed against her squishy labia. The second and third ribbons of jizz streaked across her belly button and lower abdomen into her pubic curls.

Kass stood over me watching in amazement as my spurting cock exhausted its load on my lower belly and balls.

"Wow," she said, scooping a dollop of semen and her own juices off her labia before it dripped onto the chair. "You were fully loaded, she said," presenting our mingled secretions to me to lick off her fingers.

"And just in the nick of time," I said, still catching my breath. "Maybe I should start carrying condoms around the house for the next month."

Yet, as time would tell, I wasn't as quick on the draw as I thought and the most intrepid of my little swimmers made its way into Kass's womb, blessing us with baby Lori.

"Maybe so," she said, smiling as she leaned forward to kiss me and, in so doing, taste the love fluids she had just fed me. When she was done, she straddled my thighs again and used her fingers to clean the pearlescent beads of sperm off our bellies and finish our unplanned liquid breakfast. (For the record, it was my first time tasting myself and it wasn't as awful as I had imagined. And though savoring it with my naked fiancée was indescribably hot, it will never supplant scrambled eggs, toast and bacon.)

I've thought of that reverie many times since, particularly after Lori's arrival. I don't think of it now as the erotic moment it was but as one of those unscripted instances when life charts its own course. Whatever motivated us to get so swiftly aroused in that storage cubicle and abandon ourselves to unprotected sex, it produced this perfect, pink, squirming human I now hold in my arms.

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By the end of the decade, Kass and I would give Lori two siblings: a sister five years her junior whom we named Emma Ruth (after the child's great-grandmother and the woman whose courage saved my life) and a brother three years younger, whom we named Daniel Emmett. We call him Dano.

Walker, Sarvis & Bates LLP fast became one of the nation's elite private wealth services law and tax advisory boutiques. That it is off the beaten path in Lexington, Kentucky, is no obstacle to people who own private jets. Not only did our four clients who followed us from Gladney stick with us, others joined them as word of mouth spread among the closed fraternity of multimillionaires and billionaires. By 2030, we would become a 40-lawyer partnership not counting an entire battery of CPAs and financial advisors, expanding our footprint in Lexington to three floors of our building.

Felson Enterprises grew as well. Kass's brand had become an exquisite, seamless blend of global trends in food, fashion and furnishings (she opened a hugely successful home provisions shop next door to Felson's on Main) that was locally sourced for the most part with a distinctive Kentucky twist. She opened a Lou & Emma's in Lexington as well as a home furnishings shop, and both have become quite successful. Tthat was as big as she wanted to get.

A Louisville investor approached her about selling or franchising her clothing and home furnishings retailing nameplate, and she refused, insisting on keeping her company as a family-owned limited liability corporation rather than selling shares. That assured her of something tangible to pass on to Lori, Emma and Dano, but it also meant that it didn't grow so large that she would no longer fully control or retain her passion for the businesses she built and rob her of time with me and our children.

Mom decided to leave her senior living enclave in Louisville. Parting from friends she had made there was hard for her, but being nearer her grandchildren was her dearest yearning. I helped her find an exclusive luxury retirement community in a development owned by one of my clients in, of all places, Versailles, putting her within half a mile of my childhood home and an hour's drive of Kass, Dano, Emma, Lori and me.

The Eyes of Ebenezer Holiness Tabernacle collapsed. After Elmer Brewer's conviction on a handful of federal charges that included tax fraud, electronic eavesdropping, extortion, bribery and — most devastating — racketeering, his church, home and other possessions were seized and liquidated by the government to provide restitution to his victims. He was sentenced to a total of 87 years in prison and died five years later under uncertain circumstances in a federal lockup in Terre Haute, Indiana.

A few who were convicted in connection with the cult's activities have come up for parole within the federal system or state prisons in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, but it was granted only to one: Markus "Doo" Dooley. He served two years in a minimum security prison before he was freed. Dooley was arrested with my assailant, Billy Joe Heddley, moments after I had been pistol whipped and knocked unconscious in the parking deck of Gladney's office tower. Unlike Heddley, Dooley quickly helped the FBI trap Tony Moorefield and free Ruth Mae Rothermel's grandchildren. Had the kidnapping succeeded and I had been delivered to Moorefield as planned, my remains would be dispersed in shallow graves in wooded expanse of southeastern Indiana.

There is a curse the Chinese have applied to enemies for millennia: "May he live in interesting times."

It's hard to image times more interesting than the six months after Kass and I began our courtship. Those interesting times nearly ended our relationship before it got a foothold, bringing me the grimmest few months of my life. It was pure grace that got us through it. That and some indispensable advice from my mother and my new law partner, Jerilyn Bates.