The Jodi Picoult Collection #4

by Jodi Picoult

  . . . and he took it to show-and-tell as proof of Santa Claus?

  I sit down on the couch. The television remote is on the coffee table, so I pick it up. I put my sandwich down beside me on the couch and turn on the entertainment system, which is much nicer than you’d think for ol’ Grandpa and Grandma. They have shelves of CDs, with every kind of music you can imagine. And a state-of-the-art, flat-screen HDTV.

  They have TiVo, too. I punch buttons until I reach the screen to show what they’ve recorded.

  Antiques Roadshow.

  The Three Tenors on Vermont Public TV.

  And, like, everything on the History Channel.

  They’ve also taped a hockey game on NESN and a movie that aired last weekend—Mission Impossible III.

  I double-click that one—because it’s hard to believe Mr. and Mrs. Professor watching Tom Cruise kick ass, but sure enough, there it is.

  So I decide to let them have that one. The rest, I delete.

  Then I start adding programs to tape.

  The Girls Next Door

  My Super Sweet 16

  South Park

  And for good measure, I go to HBO and add a dollop of Borat.

  When that movie came out, it was playing at the same theater as Pirates of the Caribbean 3. I wanted to see Borat, but my mother said I had to wait a decade or so. She bought us tickets to Pirates and said she would meet us in the parking lot after the film, because she had to go grocery shopping. I knew that Jacob would never have suggested it, so I told him that I wanted to let him in on a secret—but he had to promise not to tell Mom. He was so psyched about the secret he didn’t even care that we were breaking the rules, and when I sneaked into the other theater after the opening credits, he came along. And in a way, I guess he did keep his promise—he never actually told my mother that we’d gone to see Borat.

  She figured it out when he started quoting lines from the film, like he always does. Very nice, very nice, how much? I like to make sexy time!

  I think I was grounded for three months.

  I have a fleeting vision of Mrs. Professor turning on her TiVoed programs and seeing the Playboy bunnies and having a heart attack. Of her husband having a stroke when he finds her.

  Immediately, I feel like shit.

  I erase all the programming and put back in the original shows. This is it. This is the last time I’m breaking in somewhere, I tell myself, even though there’s another part of me that knows this won’t be true. I’m an addict, but instead of the rush some people get from shooting up or snorting, I need a fix that feels like home.

  I pick up the telephone, intending to call my mother and ask her to come pick me up, but then on second thought I put down the receiver. I don’t want there to be any trace of me. I want it to feel like I was never here.

  So I leave the house cleaner than it was when I first entered. And then I start walking home. It’s eight miles, but I can try to hitch once I reach the state highway.

  After all, Leon’s got the kind of parents who wouldn’t mind dropping me off.

  Oliver

  I’m feeling pretty good, because this Friday, I won my case against the pig.

  Okay, so technically, the pig was not the one who filed the lawsuit. That honor belongs to Buff (short for Buffalo, and I swear I am not making this up) Wings, a three-hundred-pound motorcyclist who was riding his vintage Harley down a road in Shelburne when a gigantic rogue pig wandered off the side of the road and directly into his path. As a result of the accident, Mr. Wings lost an eye—something he showed the jury at one point, by lifting up his black satin patch, which of course I objected to.

  Anyway, when Wings got out of the hospital, he sued the owner of the land from which the pig wandered. But it turned out to be more complicated than that. Elmer Hodgekiss, the owner of the pig, was only renting the property from a landlord who lived down in Brattleboro—an eighty-year-old lady named Selma Frack. In Elmer’s lease was a direct clause that said no pets, no animals. But Elmer defended his forbidden pig keeping (and his equally subversive chicken keeping for that matter) on the grounds that Selma was in a nursing home and never visited the property and what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

  I was representing Selma Frack. Her caretaker at the Green Willow Assisted Living Facility told me that Selma picked me out of the phone book because of my Yellow Pages ad:

  Oliver O. Bond, Esquire, it read, with a graphic that looked like 007’s gun—except it was OOB, my initials. When you need an attorney who won’t be shaken OR stirred.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I came up with that myself.”

  The caretaker just stared at me blankly. “She liked the fact that she could read the font. Most of them lawyers, their print is too tiny.”

  In spite of the fact that Buff Wings wanted Selma’s insurance to cover his medical bills, I had two strikes in my favor.

  1. Buff Wings’s convoluted argument was that Selma should be held responsible even though she (a) didn’t know about the pig, (b) had expressly banned the pig, and (c) had evicted Elmer Hodgekiss as soon as she learned that he had loosed his killer pig on the general populace.

  2. Buff Wings had chosen to represent himself.

  I had trotted out experts to refute Wings’s claims about damages—both emotional and physical. For example, did you know that there is a guy from Ohio who actually is an expert on driving with one eye? And that in almost all states you can continue to drive—even a motorcycle—as long as your other eye has 20/20 vision? And that in certain circumstances, the term blind spot can be politically incorrect?

  After the judge had ruled in our favor, I followed Selma and her caretaker to the elevator at the courthouse. “Well,” the caretaker said, “all’s well that ends well.”

  I glanced down at Selma, who’d been asleep for most of the proceedings. “It’s all fun and games till somebody loses an eye,” I replied. “Please extend my congratulations to Mrs. Frack on her victory in court.”

  Then I ran down the stairs to the parking lot, punching my fist in the air.

  I have a hundred percent success rate in my litigation.

  So what if I’ve only had one case?

  * * *

  Contrary to popular belief, the ink is not still drying on my bar certificate.

  That’s pizza sauce.

  But it was an honest accident. I mean, since my office is above the town pizza joint, and Mama Spatakopoulous routinely blocks my ascension on the staircase to thrust a plate of spaghetti or a mushroom-and-onion pie into my hands, it would be downright rude to turn her down. Coupled with that is the fact that I can’t really afford to eat, and turning away free food would be stupid. Granted, it was dumb of me to grab a makeshift napkin from a stack of papers on my desk, but the odds of it being my bar certificate (as opposed to my recent Chinese takeout order) had been pretty slim.

  If any new clients ask to see my bar certificate, I’m just going to tell them it’s being framed.

  Sure enough, as I am headed back inside, Mama S. meets me with a calzone. “You gotta wear a hat, Oliver.”

  My hair is still dripping wet from my shower at the high school locker room. Ice has started to form. “You’ll take care of me when I have pneumonia, won’t you?” I tease.

  She laughs and pushes the box at me. As I jog up the stairs, Thor starts barking his head off. I open the door just a crack, so that he doesn’t come flying out. “Relax,” I say. “I was only gone for fifteen minutes.”

  He launches all twelve pounds of himself at me.

  Thor’s a miniature poodle. He doesn’t like to be called a poodle within hearing distance—he’ll growl, and can you blame him? What guy dog wants to be a poodle? They should only come in female denominations, if you ask me.

  I do the best I can for him. I gave him the name of a mighty warrior. I let his hair grow out, but instead of making him look less effeminate, it only makes him look more like a mop head.

  I pick him up and tuck him into my arm like a
football, and then I notice that there are feathers all over my office. “Oh, crap,” I say. “What’d you do, Thor?”

  Setting him down, I survey the damage. “Great. Thank you, mighty guard dog, for protecting me from my own damn pillow.” I drag the vacuum out of the closet and start to suck up the debris. It’s my own fault, I know, for not putting away my bedding before running my errand. My office is currently also doubling as my living quarters. Not permanently, of course, but do you know how expensive it is to pay rent on a law office and an apartment? Plus, being in town, I can walk to the high school every day—and the janitor there has been very cool about letting me use the locker room as my own personal shower. I gave him some free advice about his divorce, and this is his thanks.

  Usually, I fold up my blanket and tuck it with my pillow in the closet. I hide my little thirteen-inch TV inside a cavernously empty filing cabinet. That way, if a client comes in to retain my services, they won’t get the vibe that I’m hideously unsuccessful.

  I’m just new in town, that’s all. Which is why I spend more time organizing the paper clips on my desk than actually doing any legal work.

  * * *

  I graduated with honors from the University of Vermont seven years ago with a degree in English. Here’s a little nugget of wisdom for you, just in case you’re interested: You can’t practice English in the real world. What skills did I have, honestly? I could outread anyone in a quick draw? I could write a totally smoking analytical essay about the homoerotic overtones of Shakespeare’s sonnets?

  Yeah, that and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee.

  So I decided that I needed to stop living in the theoretical and start experiencing the physical. I answered a classified ad I’d found in the Burlington Free Press to be a farrier’s apprentice. I traveled around the countryside and learned to spot what was normal gait for a horse and what wasn’t. I studied how to trim a donkey’s hoof and how to shape a horseshoe around an anvil, nail it into place, file it down, and watch the animal take off again.

  I liked being a farrier. I liked the feel of fifteen hundred pounds of horse pressed up against my shoulder as I bent the leg to examine the hoof. But after four years I got restless. I decided to go to law school, for the same reason everyone else goes to law school: because I had no idea what else to do.

  I’ll be a good lawyer. Maybe even a great one. But here I am, at twenty-eight, and my secret fear is that I’m going to be just another guy who spends his whole life making money by doing something he’s never really loved to do.

  * * *

  I have just put the vacuum back in the closet when there is a tentative knock at the door. A man stands there in Carhartt coveralls, feeding the seam of a black wool cap through his hands. He reeks of smoke.

  “Can I help you?” I ask.

  “I’m looking for the lawyer?”

  “That’s me.” On the couch, Thor begins to growl. I shoot him a dirty glance. If he starts scaring away my potential clients, he’ll be homeless.

  “Really?” the man says, peering at me. “You don’t look old enough to be a lawyer.”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” I say. “Wanna see my driver’s license?”

  “No, no,” the man says. “I, uh, I got a problem.”

  I usher him into the office, closing the door behind him. “Why don’t you have a seat, Mr . . . .”

  “Esch,” he says, settling down. “Homer Esch. I was out in my backyard this morning burning brush and the fire got out of control.” He looks up at me as I sit down at my desk. “It kind of burned down my neighbor’s house.”

  “Kind of? Or did?”

  “Did.” He juts out his jaw. “I had a burn permit, though.”

  “Great.” I write that down on a legal pad: LICENSED TO BURN. “Were there any casualties?”

  “No. They don’t live there no more. They built another house across the field. This was just a shed, pretty much. My neighbor swears he’s suing me for every penny he put into that place. That’s why I came to you. You’re the first lawyer I found who’s open on a Sunday.”

  “Right. Well. I may have to do a little research before I can take your case,” I say, but I’m thinking: He burned the guy’s house down. There’s no way to win this one.

  Esch takes a photograph out of the inner pocket of his coveralls and pushes it across the table. “You can see the place in the background here, behind my wife. My neighbor says it’s twenty-five thousand dollars I’ll have to pay out.”

  I glance at the photo. Calling this place a shed is generous. Me, I’d have said shack. “Mr. Esch,” I say, “I think we can definitely get that down to fifteen.”

  Jacob

  Here are all the reasons I hate Mark, the boyfriend Jess has had since last September.

  1. He makes her cry sometimes.

  2. Once, I saw bruises on her side, and I think he’s the one who gave them to her.

  3. He always wears a big orange Bengals sweatshirt.

  4. He calls me Chief, when I have explained multiple times that my name is Jacob.

  5. He thinks I am retarded, even though the diagnosis of mental retardation is reserved for people who score lower than 70 on an IQ test, and I myself have scored 162. In my opinion, the very fact that Mark doesn’t know this diagnostic criterion suggests that he’s a lot closer to actual retardation than I am.

  6. Last month I saw Mark in CVS with some other guys when Jess was not around. I said hello, but he pretended that he did not know me. When I told Jess and she confronted him, he denied it. Which means that he is both a hypocrite and a liar.

  I was not expecting him to be at today’s lesson, and for that reason I start to feel out of control right away, even though being with Jess usually calms me down. The best way I can describe it is like being in the path of a flash flood. You might be able to sense that a catastrophe is imminent; you might feel the faintest mist on your face. But even when you see that wall of water rushing toward you, you know you are powerless to budge an inch.

  “Jacob!” Jess says, as soon as I walk in, but I see Mark across the room sitting in a booth, and just like that, I can hardly even hear her voice.

  “What’s he doing here?”

  “You know he’s my boyfriend, Jacob. And he wanted to come today. To help.”

  Right. And I want to be drawn and quartered, just for giggles.

  Jess links her arm through mine. It took me a while to get used to that, and to the perfume she wears, which isn’t very strong but to me smelled like an overdose of flowers. “It’s going to be fine,” she says. “Besides, we said we’re going to work on being friendly to people we don’t know, right?”

  “I know Mark,” I reply. “And I don’t like him.”

  “But I do. And part of being social means being civil to someone you don’t like.”

  “That’s stupid. It’s a huge world. Why not get up and walk away?”

  “Because that’s rude,” Jess explains.

  “I think it’s rude to stick a smile on your face and pretend you like talking to someone when in reality you’d rather be sticking bamboo slivers under your fingernails.”

  Jess laughs. “Jacob, one day, when we wake up in the world of the Painfully Honest, you can be my tutor.”

  A man comes down the stairs that lead up from the entryway of the pizza place. He has a dog on a leash, a miniature poodle. I step into his path and start patting the dog.

  “Thor! Down!” he says, but the dog doesn’t listen.

  “Did you know poodles aren’t French? In fact the name poodle comes from the German word Pudel, which is short for Pudelhund, or splashing dog. The breed used to be a water dog.”

  “I didn’t know that,” the man says.

  I do, because before I used to study forensics, I studied dogs. “A poodle took Best in Show at Westminster in 2002,” I add.

  “Right. Well, this poodle’s going to take a whiz if I don’t get him outside,” the man says, and he pushes past me.

  “J
acob,” Jess says, “you don’t just accost someone and start rattling off facts.”

  “He was interested in poodles! He has one!”

  “Right, but you could have started off by saying, ‘Hey, that’s a really cute dog.’ “

  I snort. “That’s not informative at all.”

  “No, but it’s polite . . .”

  At first, when Jess and I started working together, I used to call her a few days before our lesson just to make sure it was still on—that she wasn’t sick, or expecting to have some kind of emergency. I’d call whenever I was obsessing about it, and sometimes that was three in the morning. If she didn’t pick up her cell phone, I’d freak out. Once, I called the police to report her missing, and it turned out that she was just at some party. Eventually, we agreed that I would call her at 10:00 P.M. on Thursdays. Since I meet with her on Sundays and Tuesdays, that means I don’t have to spend four days out of touch and worrying.

  This week she moved out of her dorm room and into a professor’s house. She is babysitting for the house, which sounds like an immense waste of time, because it’s not as if the house is going to touch the stove if it’s hot or eat something poisonous or fall down its own stairs. She will be there for the semester, so next week we are going to meet there for our lesson. In my wallet I have the address, and the phone number, and a special map she’s drawn, but I’m a little nervous about it. It will probably smell like someone else, instead of Jess and flowers. Plus I have no idea what it looks like yet, and I hate surprises.

  Jess is beautiful, although she says this was not always the case. She lost a lot of weight two years ago after she had an operation. I’ve seen pictures of her before, when she was obese. She says that’s why she wants to work with kids whose disabilities make them targets—because she remembers being one, too. In the pictures, she looks like Jess, but hidden inside someone larger and puffier. Now, she is curvy, but only in the right places. She has blond hair that is always straight, although she has to work hard to make that happen. I have watched her use this contraption called a flat iron that looks like a sandwich press but actually sizzles her curly, wet hair and turns it smooth and silky. When she walks into a room, people look right at her, which I really like, because it means they are not looking at me.