by Wiehl, Lis
The bowl was half full of chocolate chip cookie dough. And no baked cookies in sight. It wasn’t too hard to guess where the rest of the dough had gone.
On the nights Mia wasn’t home, the plan called for Kali to make dinner for the kids. And even Gabe knew how to take a blue box of mac and cheese off the shelf and pour the noodles into some boiling water. With all the effort they had put into making cookies, they could have made a halfway decent dinner.
The anxiety Mia had been feeling since the jury deliberations began now found an outlet. She grabbed the mixing bowl and opened the compost jar that sat on the kitchen counter. Scraping the dough into the coffee grounds and table scraps, she smashed the eggshells on top. There. Now none of them would be tempted to pick at it.
She went back into the hall. “Gabe, Eldon, Brooke! I need you down here.”
When they lined up in front of her, it was clear they had totally forgotten about the evidence they had left behind.
“What is this?” she demanded, pointing into the kitchen.
After a pause, Eldon said, “Sorry about the mess. We forgot to clean up.”
“We made cookies,” Brooke said. “And I helped.”
“And what about dinner?”
From the guilty looks they exchanged, it was clear there hadn’t been any other than cookie dough. Mia stamped her foot, all her tiredness forgotten. “That’s it. We’re not doing this anymore. Things are going to change around here. No more junk food.”
“But that’s not junk food,” Gabe protested. “It’s homemade.”
“It’s still junk food, especially if you eat it for dinner.” She walked over to the fridge, yanked off the menu from Pagliacci’s, and stuck it in the recycling bag under the sink. “That’s it. No more takeout pizza. No more fast food. From now on, we’re going to eat salads! And if we want to have dessert, we’ll have fruit.”
“But I don’t want fruit.” Brooke pushed out her lower lip. “I want cookies.”
Paying her no mind, Mia handed grocery bags to Gabe and Eldon. She began opening cupboards and looking for things to get rid of. Sugary cereals, a bag of chips, crackers made from white flour. The contents went into the compost, the containers into recycling. Still-sealed containers went, with a few misgivings, into the grocery bags the boy held. She would take them to the food bank.
With each jar, box, or bag, Gabe’s face got redder. Eldon looked like he wished his mom had never said yes when Mia had offered them a place to live. And Brooke was on the verge of tears.
“Okay,” Mia finally said over her shoulder. “You guys can put your bags down and go upstairs. I’ll finish up here.”
“Do you need any more help?” Gabe asked.
She had seen his face when she put the new jar of Nutella into the bag. Maybe he was hoping to sneak it back to his room.
“No. I think you’ve done enough in here for one day.”
At 1:12 a.m., Mia woke up to a growling stomach and realized she had completely forgotten to eat dinner. In her dreams she had been standing behind the prosecution table, waiting for the jury to announce their verdict. But something kept happening to delay it: an earthquake, a fire drill, a microphone that didn’t work.
She lay in the dark, looking up at the ceiling. She had done the best she could. But was it good enough? Wheeler had done an excellent job. And Sindy was flown to the wind.
Finally she got up and went downstairs to make herself a bowl of cereal—one of the kinds she had deemed healthy enough to keep. But as she was opening the cupboard door, she remembered the secret stash of Kettle Brand chips she kept in one of the basement’s Rubbermaid cabinets, hidden behind a twenty-five-pound bag of basmati rice from Costco. Those chips definitely had to go into the compost bin.
But when she opened the first package, and the smell of spice and grease hit her nose, Mia found herself sitting on the back step in her pajamas, barefoot in thirty-eight-degree weather, shoveling in the chips one handful after another.
CHAPTER 9
WEDNESDAY
When the blare of Mia’s alarm woke her, her mouth tasted terrible.
This must be comparable to how Scott had felt on the mornings when he’d had a hangover. Feeling low and ashamed, his mouth tasting like something had died in it. Only in Mia’s case, what had died in her mouth was an entire bag of Kettle Brand Buffalo Bleu potato chips.
Eating all those chips hadn’t done a darn thing to erase her anxiety about the jury deliberations. How many times must she learn the lesson that food didn’t solve anything—and then promptly forget it? Plus, what kind of example was she setting? Thank goodness she had eaten the chips long after the kids were in bed.
With a groan Mia got up, pulled on a bathrobe, and padded into Brooke’s room. “Brooke, honey, time to get up.”
Brooke pulled the pillow over her head. “Go away. Brooke isn’t here.”
“Uh-oh. If you’re not Brooke, then who am I talking to?”
Enchanted by this idea, Brooke threw off the pillow and sat up. “My name is … Break.”
“Break? What kind of a name is Break?”
“It’s because I break things.” She jumped out of bed and started walking stiff-legged toward a pile of toys, her arms outstretched.
What was she picturing herself as—a giant rampaging lizard? A zombie? At four, you could almost convince yourself that you could be anything you wanted to be. Thirty or so years older than four, Mia sometimes felt she was barely capable of being herself.
She swept up her daughter just as an outstretched foot was about to crush a half-dressed Barbie. “Well, just for today, I think you have to be Brooke again. So let’s go have breakfast.”
Downstairs, Mia opened the kitchen cupboards, momentarily confused by their barrenness. “Cheerios or Raisin Bran?” she asked.
“I want the chocolate cereal!”
If memory served, that was the one with thirteen grams of sugar per serving. “We’re not eating that one anymore.” Luckily she had stashed the food bank bags in the hall closet. “Your choices are Cheerios or Raisin Bran.”
“Then the one with marshmallows.” Brooke seemed to have forgotten the events of the night before.
“No, remember, both those cereals have too much sugar. From now on, we’re going to be eating healthy food.”
“But I like sugar.” Brooke’s expression looked mulish.
“I know you have a sweet tooth, honey, but we’re going to be eating less sugar from now on.” Mia pulled a coffee filter from the pack.
“Do you want to see my sweet tooth?”
“Huh?” Mia stopped measuring coffee.
“My sweet tooth. Do you want to see it?” Brooke opened her mouth wide and pointed at one of her back molars on the left side. She spoke around her finger. “Tha my swee too.”
Gabe and Eldon shambled into the kitchen, and suddenly it felt really small. They both seemed so … male.
At least they didn’t complain about the newly truncated choices. Gabe had started eating hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, as well as juice and a big spoonful of peanut butter. He plunked four pre-cooked, pre-peeled eggs into a bowl, then took the now-empty plastic wrapper to the garbage can.
“What is this?” His foot was still on the pedal, and he was looking down. At the empty chip bag.
Mia started with the truth and ended with a lie. “Last night I remembered we had some chips, so I put them in the compost.”
“Uh-huh.” He tossed a dubious look at Eldon, who had the grace to look as if he believed her.
Brooke tugged at Mia’s robe. “We have chips? I want chips!”
And that was pretty much how the morning went.
Before she went into the office, Mia stopped at Perk Up, a nearby coffee shop, and ordered a sixteen-ounce nonfat latte, even though she had already had coffee at home. The dairy was much-needed protein, she reasoned. And besides, she was exhausted.
“Name?” the barista asked her.
“What?”
&nb
sp; “What name should I put on your order?” The girl was Asian American with bleached blond hair. A reverse skunk stripe marked her part.
“Mia.”
“Mia?” The girl’s gaze sharpened. “Hey, what’s your last name?”
“Quinn.”
“So did that Chinese guy ever find you?”
“What Chinese guy?” Mia was feeling lost, but then again she was not at her best this morning.
The girl looked up at the ceiling, remembering. “He came in like, what, two weeks ago? He was trying to speak in Mandarin to me, but I barely know enough to order in a restaurant. He had a business card with your name on it, but he was asking for a Mrs. Scott.”
“My husband’s name is Scott,” Mia said. It was easier to use the present tense, to pretend for a moment that Scott hadn’t died, than to explain to a stranger that he had been dead for months. “Did he tell you his name? Was it Lihong?”
“He didn’t say much of anything past asking for you and pointing at your address. We had just opened. And then his friends came in and he left with them.”
Before he died, Scott had befriended a young man named Lihong who worked at a restaurant called the Jade Kitchen. Mia had met Lihong a few weeks earlier. She was pretty sure he was an illegal immigrant, and it sounded like Scott had promised to help him, perhaps with his immigration status. It had been hard to understand Lihong, who only knew a few words of English. She had meant to follow up with him. She had meant to do a lot of things. Just one more item that had fallen off her plate. She made another mental note.
Once she reached work, it was a different kind of torment. She spent the morning aimlessly looking through files, wondering what was going on in the jury room. Every few minutes a well-intentioned co-worker would stop by.
“What time did the jury get the case?” Jesse asked.
A half hour later, Anne stuck her head in. “How long have they been out?”
Each time Mia answered in as few words as possible, hoping to cut off any further conversation. She knew they only meant to be supportive, or to strike up a conversation so they could discuss the case. But that was the last thing she wanted to talk about. She would rather talk about anything else—the stock market, the weather, the latest shenanigans of a movie star.
She told herself she had picked the best people for the jury that she could, based on her experience and intuition and the luck of the draw. That was all you could do. Then you just prayed they could play nice with each other and reach a decision.
When her phone rang, she pounced on it. But the voice on the other end of the line belonged to her father.
“How are things going, honey?”
It struck Mia with a spasm of sadness that the only people who called her “honey” these days were waitresses of a certain age and her dad.
“Fine.” It was a relief to talk to someone who had no idea she was waiting on a verdict.
“I would love to see my favorite daughter for lunch today.”
She laughed. “Dad, I’m your only daughter. You wasted your talents as a manager. You should have been in sales.”
While Mia was growing up, her dad had dedicated most of his waking hours to his job at a packaging company. His retirement funds had been invested solely in company stock. When the company went bankrupt a year after he retired, the CEO got jail time and her dad had been left with nothing but Social Security. Nine months ago, he had started going to church. Her dad! Church! Mia wouldn’t have been more surprised if he had taken up ballet.
“So will you come?”
“Of course.” Half superstitiously, she hoped that if she left the office it would lead to a verdict. “There’s a possibility I might need to come back here in a hurry so I’ll just drive my car and meet you.”
An hour later, she barely registered the other cars as she drove to the restaurant. A clock was ticking in the back of her head. The jury had been deliberating for over ten hours over the course of two days. Was that a good thing or a bad thing? There were various theories—that a quick verdict meant acquittal, or no, that a quick verdict meant conviction—but no one really knew.
She hurried into the restaurant her dad had chosen, then stopped short. Her father was already there. But so was a woman, and they were deep in conversation.
When he saw Mia, he gave her a grin and a wave, while the woman shot her a quick glance and an uncertain smile.
For years her father’s world had had little to do with Mia’s. Before her parents’ divorce, he had spent most of his waking hours at work. After the divorce, when she was in seventh grade, she had barely seen him at all. Now that he had “gotten religion,” he spent more time with Mia than he ever had before. She didn’t know what to think of his transformation. Was he lonely, bored, just feeling mortal? Or was it real?
Now Mia wished she could turn back the clock to when her dad had called so that she could say no. Instead, she pasted on a smile and made her way over to the table. In the past there had been the occasional girlfriend, but her dad had had the good grace to keep them on the down low.
He stood up when she got to the table. “Mia, I’d like you to meet my friend Luciana. Luciana, this is my daughter, Mia.”
Mia stretched out her hand and smiled, but part of her withdrew inside, like a snail in its shell.
Luciana was Hispanic-looking, and at least fifteen years younger than her dad. Maybe even twenty.
And she was beautiful. Her black shoulder-length hair was parted in the middle and tucked behind her ears, from which hung simple silver hoops about the diameter of a half dollar. Her black-framed glasses didn’t fit her face at all. Both too narrow and too long, they just drew attention to her winged brows and high cheekbones. When she shook hands, she lightly grasped Mia’s fingertips and then released them as quickly.
“So where did you two meet?” Mia asked brightly as they sat down.
Her dad shot her a glance, and she guessed she wasn’t fooling him. “At church.”
She was about to ask another question when the waitress appeared. “So does everyone know what they want to order?”
Thinking of her vow the night before, Mia ordered an egg white omelet and unbuttered toast, and subbed fruit for hash browns. Her dad raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. After the waitress left, Mia said, “So where do you work, Luciana?”
“Um, I am not working right now. I volunteer.” Her dad patted Luciana’s hand and then started asking questions about Gabe and Brooke, which Mia answered by rote. Luciana was quiet, keeping her eyes on her plate and picking at her food.
Meanwhile, Mia was asking herself the questions she really wanted to ask her dad and this woman. What did a beautiful young woman like Luciana see in her dad? Was she even in this country legally? Or was she what Mia had heard referred to as a “green digger”—a woman looking for greenbacks and a green card?
After about ten minutes, Luciana excused herself to go to the bathroom. As soon as she was a few feet away, Mia started in.
“Are you, like, dating her, Dad?”
“What are you really saying? What does she see in an old codger like me?” He grimaced. “We’re not lovers, if that’s what you are thinking.”
Mia felt her face get hot. “Dad. Please. I did not ask you that. But what do you even know about her?”
“I know plenty. And you would too if you would listen with an open heart instead of acting like you’re conducting an interrogation. Don’t worry. Just because I’m spending time with her doesn’t mean I don’t want to spend time with you. So there’s no need to be jealous.”
“I’m not jealous. I’m just concerned.”
The old version of her dad would have been yelling by now. Dad 2.0 just shook his head. “Sometimes I think your line of work has soured you on people. You’re always looking for the worst.”
“I think it’s opened my eyes.” Her phone began to vibrate on the table. “Sorry,” she said, turning it over. It was Judge Ortega’s clerk.
“He
llo?”
“The jurors have sent a note to the judge.”
It wouldn’t be opened until they were all assembled. Mia’s stomach clenched, and she wished she hadn’t eaten anything at all.
“Okay. It will take me about fifteen minutes to get to the courthouse.” She stood up. “Tell Luciana it was a pleasure to meet her. But I’m needed in court.”
CHAPTER 10
As Mia drove back to the courthouse, her hands slid on the steering wheel and her stomach was in knots. She put her dad and his new whatever-that-woman-was into a box and closed it. She would think about them later. Right now she had to concentrate on finding out what the jury wanted, and then divining what it meant, if anything. A note from the jury could turn out to be anything from a simple request for a dry erase board to asking if they could view some of the evidence one more time.
When she entered the courtroom, James Wheeler and David Leacham were already sitting at the defense table. When Leacham turned and saw her, he lifted his chin. It felt like a challenge. Mia matched him stare for stare, keeping her face just as expressionless.
A few spectators were scattered on the benches. Bo Yee was in her customary place in the first row behind the prosecution table, looking as if she had never moved. She nodded at Mia, her expression unreadable behind her tinted glasses.
A hand touched her shoulder, and Mia started. It was Charlie.
“Sorry.” He gave her a half smile. “I didn’t mean to make you jump.”
“Just a little anxious, I guess.” For a second, her dad and Luciana peeped out of their box. “If I gave you a name, could you run it for me? It’s personal.”
Charlie raised one thick black eyebrow. “Who are you and what have you done to Mia Quinn?” More than once he had teased her for being such a straight arrow. When she started to stammer, he took her arm. “Don’t answer that.” He lowered his voice. “Just tell me the name.”