Betty was sharp, collected, and responsible, and Lilly was sure that if anyone had ever given her any opportunities in life, she would have been the attorney today rather than the unemployed maid.
“So good to see you,” Betty said, offering her hand.
Lilly took it and they shook like family. Betty was wonderful. She was the type of client who made Lilly want to be perfect – the type of client who reminded her why she went to law school in the first place.
Maria Rodriguez arrived a little while later, but Lilly did not fault her one bit for keeping them waiting. Maria had three kids to get off to school, and she was raising them all by herself.
Then, finally, a few minutes behind Maria, came Preston King on behalf of his wife Hillary, the only one of the three plaintiffs in the case who had found a new job. There was no need for Preston to be there, but it boosted Lilly’s spirits nonetheless. This really was a good group of clients.
“Ok ladies,” Lilly started, “and gentleman.” She smiled at Preston. “Today the Court is going to hold a hearing on Liberty’s motion to dismiss. Now, as I was saying on the phone, this is not going to determine who wins the lawsuit or anything like that. This isn’t a trial, and I don’t need you to do anything. Today is just to determine whether the lawsuit can go forward in this Court.”
“Are you sure there’s nothing we can do to help?” Betty asked.
“No, you’ve done your job just by being here,” Lilly said. “When Liberty’s lawyer sees you, he’ll know you’re serious about this case and that they’ll have to make a real offer if they want to settle.”
“Ho Ho Ho! Did I hear the word settle?” It was Russell Trueheart, Liberty’s lawyer.
Lilly halted. In 6,000 years of recorded human history, from the Sumerians, to the Romans, to the Brooklynites of the present day, if ever there was a lawyer with an inappropriate last name, she thought, it was Russell Trueheart. She was pretty sure he had changed it from Hammerhead.
“Excuse me Russell, but I’m having a confidential meeting with my clients. I could report you to the Bar for sneaking up on us like that.”
“Oh, don’t worry Lillian, I only heard that one word. Besides, I already knew that you were desperate to settle. Your case is weak.”
“Our case is strong,” Lilly said forcefully, “and I’m going to do everything I can to get my clients justice.”
“All right, all right,” Trueheart said, making a stopping motion with his palms and revealing a very expensive looking silver watch and ring set, which no doubt impressed his clients, even though this was like the turkey getting excited because he heard there was going to be a Thanksgiving feast. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean any offense. I know you’re a tough cookie and all – a killer attorney. But the facts and the law just aren’t with you on this one, and I know that your organization doesn’t have the resources to push it forward, what with the state cutting your funding and the layoffs and all… so I just think you’re barking up the wrong tree. Tell me, did you think some more about my last offer?”
“No, we didn’t. That offer was insulting. $20,000 does not even begin to compensate my clients for what Liberty put them through. They’re entitled to at least $90,000, and that’s not even counting multiple damages, interest, and attorney’s fees.”
“Well, what’s your counter-offer?”
“I just told you, $90,000 plus.”
“Well, we’ll just have to see. I don’t think you’re being very reasonable about this, and I think I might just have to give your director a call over there at ‘Justice is Blind’ and see if she doesn’t have a little more sense. We go way back to law school you know.”
“The Director has my back.”
“You know Lillian, it’s a shame, it really is. I truly believe in the work that you good people do over there, and my firm donates pretty significantly to your cause every December.… It would be a shame if it turned out that you were wasting that money on pointless suits that didn’t go anywhere. It might force me to do some thinking.”
“Ok, well that’s your second ethics violation this morning Russell. Got any more before I call the Bar?” She pulled out her cell phone.
“Haha, you just try it Lillian, you just try it.” He looked at Betty and Maria. “Ma’am,” he said, nodding his head. Then he looked at Preston. “Sir.” Then he walked away.
“Don’t be intimidated,” Lilly said, “he’s just trying to bully us.”
When 9:00 rolled around, Lilly, her clients, Russell Trueheart, and at least a hundred other people were patiently waiting in the courtroom, seated on those awful wooden benches that, by design, were so uncomfortable that no human being could ever even think of sleeping in them. Lilly looked around. No matter how many times she had been in these courtrooms, she could never get over the cheap wood paneling that assaulted the eye from every angle.
A few minutes later, a clerk appeared out of a hidden door behind the Judge’s bench. “Hear ye, hear ye!” he cried, with artificial grandeur.
Everyone stood, and the Judge followed the Clerk in and took his seat above.
Then, one by one, the attorneys came forward to make their arguments, and Lilly half-listened as she reviewed her own notes. One case was about a couple who bought a house infested with ants. Another involved a bakery worker who hurt his arm in one of the machines. Two others concerned stolen credit card numbers. The Judge hurried them through, but when noon arrived, he had not even heard half of the cases on the schedule, including Lilly’s.
“All rise!” the Clerk cried. “This Court is now out of session.”
The litigants broke into noisy chatter as they rushed for the door, and Lilly, Betty, Maria, and Preston left the courthouse and went to the sandwich shop around the corner. Lilly paid, and she and her clients took their food to the wobbly little table next to the soda cooler and strategized about their case, taking frequent detours to discuss Betty’s, Maria’s, and Preston’s children.
Then, just as they were finishing, Lilly got a birthday call from her mother, which she brought to the other side of the shop to take care of as efficiently as possible. “Yes, yes, thank you Mom, I love you. No, don’t worry if the present comes late. I keep telling you, I’m a grown woman, you don’t have to buy me anything!” Lilly always hated people making a big deal over her birthday. Why, she wondered, did people need an entire day dedicated to celebrating themselves? Birthdays are the epitome of selfishness, she thought.
Lilly hung up and motioned to the group, and a few short minutes later, they were back in the courtroom.
“Hear ye, hear ye!” the Clerk cried, even less convincingly than before.
The afternoon session went like the morning one. There were more scams, more injuries… more greed, hate, and pride. Then, finally, at 3:50, the Clerk called Case Number 16-169-DIT, Hill v. Liberty Cleaning Corp.
Lilly and Betty came forward and sat down at the table on the right, while Trueheart sat down alone at the table on the left. For just a second, Lilly was distracted by the ink-stained wood of her embattled old chair. How many thousands of sad travelers must have found themselves in this chair over the years? she wondered – broken, abused, and spent – asking the law to fix them.
The Judge’s voice brought Lilly back to attention. “Counsel for defendant,” he said, “you filed this motion?”
“Yes,” Trueheart said, “may it please the Court, my name is Russell Trueheart, and I represent Liberty Cleaning Corp. Today, Liberty is moving to dismiss on five separate grounds –”
“Yes,” the Judge interrupted, “and we’re not going to get to all five. I’ve got three more motions to hear before 4:00, and I don’t work overtime. I also haven’t had a chance to read your motion or plaintiffs’ opposition, so why don’t you each just give me a brief summary of what this motion is about, and then I will study the issues more closely when I get to your papers.”
“Sure,” Trueheart began, “Liberty is a small home cleaning service. Mr. McCarter, the owner, is an honest
, hardworking man who got his very own start as a city janitor here thirty years ago. The plaintiffs are independent cleaning professionals that perform work for Liberty on a contractual basis.
“Now, there are numerous defects with plaintiffs’ suit, but for starters, Liberty is headquartered in New Jersey and incorporated in Delaware, and when I walked into the courthouse this morning and looked at the sign at the door, I’m pretty sure that I saw the words ‘New York’ in there somewhere.”
The Judge rolled his eyes. “Ok, that will do,” he said impatiently. “Counselor?” He looked at Lilly.
“Yes.” It was her turn to massage the facts. “May it please the Court, I represent the plaintiffs in this matter. Each one of them is a maid with small children at home to feed. Each one of them worked her hands to the bone for Mr. McCarter, who owns several local businesses. Each one of them trusted him for her livelihood.” She raised her voice. “Each one of them found that trust sorely abused.” She frowned. “Mr. McCarter paid Mrs. Hill, Mrs. Martinez, and Mrs. King under the table so that he could work them for fourteen hours a day, six days a week, without paying minimum wage, overtime, benefits, or taxes. Then, when they complained, Mr. McCarter fired them.”
“Ok, and what about defendant’s motion?” the Judge asked.
“Yes your honor. Liberty and Mr. McCarter do all kinds of business in New York and –”
“Is that in your papers?” the Judge asked.
“Yes.”
“All right then, that will do, I’ll take this matter under advisement.”
Wow, Lilly thought, as she walked back to the table, packed up her notes, and left with her clients. An entire day just for that? It would have been better if the Judge hadn’t given us a hearing at all. Oh well, at least the sun is shining, she noted, as they stepped outside.
“Think about my offer!” Trueheart said, speeding past them down the courthouse steps.
Lilly ignored him and looked at her watch. It was 3:59.
3
Meanwhile, some miles east of the City, Stan was walking toward the Church in the town of his birth. Stan had met Zack in college, where they were freshman roommates together, and it was a happy coincidence that they now lived so close to each other again. In the interim however, their lives could not have been more different. Unlike Zack, who worked for a few years after college and then went to business school, Stan enlisted in the Army and served in Iraq for nearly the entire duration of the war.
Stan’s lifelong dream had been to serve, and nobody – not his college girlfriend, not Zack, and not even his parents, who had forced him to go to college instead of enlisting right after high school – could talk him out of it. As a kid, Stan had the Army t-shirts, the Army keychain lanyard, the Army stickers, the Army water bottle, and about a dozen other various pieces of Army paraphernalia. And while most of the kids in the high school avoided the Army recruiters at all costs when they came to visit, Stan would barrage them with questions until they were sick of him.
Just as Stan was nearing the Church, his phone came alive with the melody of “America the Beautiful.”
“Hello?”
“Hello, is this Stan? This is Dr. Schaeffer.”
“Oh, yes. Thanks for returning my call.”
“Sure, yes. Unfortunately though, I don’t have a lot of time, as I have a lot of other calls to get through this afternoon. But tell me, what’s bothering you?”
“Oh right, I’ll make it quick. I was calling because I saw the specialist about my shoulder, and he scheduled me for surgery in late June, and I was just wondering, is it normal to have to wait that long? I mean, I gotta work, and I need both arms. What am I supposed to do for the next three months?”
“Well, I suppose that is a little long to wait, but not unheard of…”
“Well, is there anything you can do? Can you get me in sooner? Can you refer me to someone else?”
“Well Stan, you know what a bureaucracy the VA is. But I’ll see what I can do. Anything else?”
“No, I guess that’s it.”
“All right, take care then.”
“Ok, thanks so much, I really appreciate it!”
Click.
Oh well, Stan thought, what else can I do?
He folded up his phone, tucked it back into his pocket, and looked up: he was at the Church now. It was a plain white building with three tall, narrow windows on each side, a sloped roof covered in grey shingles, and a slender, white steeple with a little grey cross on the top. In the sun, the brilliant color of the spring-green grass made the Church look even whiter by contrast.
Stan walked around the Church, to the small cemetery that lay behind it. There were not more than a few dozen tombstones. Had the town ever been so tiny, Stan wondered, that the parishioners thought this little space would suffice? Were they unaware of their endless ability to multiply… and death’s endless ability to subtract? Or did they design the cemetery purely for aesthetics?
Stan examined the tombstones as he stepped along the narrow red-brick walkway that ran between the graves. The wind and rain had erased many of the names and dates, but Stan could still make out some of them. Randall Gibbons, 1841-1905, William Carver, 1832-1880, Deborah Paxton, 1845-1920. Although Stan lived here for much of his life, he did not recognize these last names. I wonder, he thought, does anyone ever come to visit you Deborah? Let’s see, if you had a daughter in 1875, then maybe she could have had a daughter in 1905, who would now be… one hundred and eleven! No, no. Not too likely. And I’m almost positive that no one ever visits you, Randall and William, except for me of course. But you’re not really here anyway, are you? You’re up there in Heaven with God playing a harp and batting your big white angel wings, aren’t you? Haha. No, no, I doubt that. But maybe you’re out in California riding a wave, or locked up in your office in the City until five. Or maybe, just maybe, a nurse is handing you, in your tiny new body, to a brand new mother right now. Or not. Maybe you’re just lying there under the grass.
Stan thought about death very differently now that he had become so familiar with it. There is an old saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. After having been in the twenty-first century equivalent of a foxhole, Stan could definitively say that the saying was wrong. Sure, when the moment of truth arrives, all soldiers pray at least a little, even if only in their heads, but at the same time, there is not a single one who does not question his or her faith in the afterlife just a little. Not when you’re so close to finding out. Not when your whole life flashes before your eyes. And that was what ultimately turned him. Unlike Zack and Lilly, Stan was not always a non-believer – he forged his atheism in the flames of war. When people asked him what Iraq was like, he always responded with the same three-word answer: ‘like a desert.’
Stan looked back at the Church. It was funny, Zack always had such complex arguments that supposedly disproved God’s existence, but Stan had never found any of them persuasive. Before Iraq, he had always just felt in his bones that there was a God. But now his bones told him something different. If there was a God, then why did his war memories sear him like there was nothing else in existence? If there was a God, then why did he have to ice his shoulder three times a day? If there was a God, then why, after everything that he did, and after all of the sacrifices that he made, was he still stuck in the same dead-end job begging tips from wealthy businessmen who had probably never heard a live gunshot in their life?
Stan was a bartender in the City. He had come home right in the middle of the Great Recession, and apparently, his military service was not enough to get him a job in finance. No, to get a good job in that economy, you needed an MBA, prior experience, and connections to boot.
Stan remembered how it had started. First there were the resumes and cover letters. Then, when that didn’t work, he picked up the phone. And while he waited to hear back from this cousin’s boss or that high school buddy’s dad, he kept bar to keep the cash coming in and the time going by. It was only supposed
to be for a few months. But every road turned south, and every resume became a ding letter, every series of calls an unreturned voicemail, and in the meantime, the months and years gently walked away from him.
Even Zack failed to come through for Stan, and when his firm rejected Stan without even extending him the simple courtesy of a screening interview, Stan realized that he needed to go back to school. But his heart was never really in it, and his GMAT score reflected that fact. Stan was born to be a soldier. He had never planned on doing anything else.
Still, Stan kept a positive outlook. Things were not so bad. He had a happy life – when he wasn’t thinking about the war or his shoulder – and it was a sunny day. Besides, tonight he needed to focus on Zack, who was going through one of life’s other great tribulations: girl problems. Zack had just learned that Missy had been cheating on him for months, and, adding insult to injury in spectacular fashion, Missy had the nerve to tell Zack that she wanted to take a temporary break while she figured out whom she really wanted to be with. It boggled Stan’s mind. She expected Zack to just sit it out patiently while she screwed around with some other guy? Even worse, when Zack told her that he thought they should break-up for good, she got mad at him! Who did she think she was?
Tonight, Stan would introduce Zack to several new prospects. It was a Monday, which for Stan and a lot of his friends in the service industry who typically worked weekends, was the biggest party night of the week. Zack was at a very crucial stage right now, and unless Stan could distract him, he would surely be on the phone with Missy by Friday. Stan still had plenty of time to wander around the town though. It was only 3:59.
4
Meanwhile, in a big courtroom in a small courthouse, in a little town a state or two to the west, a lawyer, not too much unlike Lilly, was giving her closing argument in a criminal possession case. She was a public defender, and her client was an eighteen-year-old high school dropout whom the police had caught walking down Main Street with a handgun and several grams of cocaine in her purse.
The Alpha and the Omega: An absurd philosophical tale about God, the end of the world, and what's on the other planets Page 2