by Wick Downing
I woke up in the middle of the night, still waiting.
“Bye, Kate,” Mom said the next morning, giving me a kiss.
I nuzzled into her, then realized I was still in bed. “Mom!” I yelped, sitting up. “What time is it?”
“Eight thirty, lazykins.” I love it when she smiles at me for no reason, especially when I’m half-asleep and can’t fight back. “Your grandfather called me this morning to apologize for keeping you so late last night, and ordered me not to wake you up.”
I threw off the covers and bounded out of the sack. “But there’s so much to do!” I reached for my bathrobe. “You look nice.” She did, too. Her hair was the color of the sun. It floated across her forehead and hung over her ears like a summer cloud. I just wished she’d connect with some guy! . . . although my head couldn’t deal with the details. What if he wanted me to call him Daddy?
“Kate darlin’,” Grandfather said as I sat down in his office an hour later. “How’d you sleep?”
He looked okay, but not great. “Wonderfully well,” I said.
“I just might get some work out of you, then. The Alvarez case. Is it ready for trial?”
“I haven’t done the instructions yet, Judge. But I met with Reginald Applewhite, the DA, who’s a horrible little man. He thinks you’re senile.”
Grandfather smiled at that. “That’s just fine.”
“It is?”
“If we’re lucky, he’ll underestimate me. Is he holding anything back, or is our file complete?”
“He isn’t holding anything back, I guess, but the file isn’t complete, either. The officers took photos of the tools and stuff Mr. Alvarez supposedly stole. You know, where they found them in his truck? But they can’t find the photos. So he hasn’t seen them, but neither have we.”
“Umm. What else?”
I told him I’d gone to the county jail to talk to Two-Fingers.
“What’s he in jail for?”
“Stealing cigarettes. Judge Tooley gave him thirty days.”
“Well, now, jail just might do him good. Did he help you?”
“He’s such a nice man, Grandfather. A big help, especially on Miss Willow’s case.”
“We’ll worry about her later,” he said. “Kate, what you’ll find out about lawyers is that nine-tenths of the time they make it up as they go along. There ain’t enough hours in the day to do it right. You’ll get used to it. Now, there are a few things we need today.” I started taking notes. A few things? Two contracts to draw up, a will, an answer in an eviction case, and a divorce complaint with a temporary restraining order against the husband.
I tried calling Mike, but his mom answered both times and told me he was at City Park with Sally Lipscombe. Did he have to spend the whole day with her? was what I wanted to know. Investigating what? I started working on the first contract Grandfather wanted me to write, but he interrupted me. I had to look up a statute that he needed now. I found it and started concentrating on the contract again, when he needed a copy of a case we didn’t have. So I had to run over to the law library at the courthouse for it. I couldn’t get anything done! Mrs. Roulette told me not to worry, but how could I not worry? She said it was just a typical day where the things you start get finished later, when no one is around. The problems of the client who is in your face are always more pressing than work that has to be done for someone else. “Fridays are a bit slower than Thursdays,” she said. “You can do those instructions tomorrow.” Like I should feel relief or something, knowing that there’s always tomorrow.
At seven that evening, Mom came by the office. Mrs. Roulette was still there, but the Judge—not feeling great—had gone home early, for him. I still had a will to write, and needed to call Mike to find out if he’d met with Willis Suggs. But Mom wanted to take me to see a James Bond movie.
“The will can keep,” Mrs. Roulette said, “and so will your young man. Go.”
Jury instructions are these short little paragraphs the judge reads to the jury, telling them what the law is and what they have to decide. It’s the lawyers who write them, and they’re a lot of work, because they have to be perfect. The next morning—Friday, when things were usually slower at the office—I called Mrs. Roulette and told her I’d be at the law library with my nose in the books until noon and then with Mike the rest of the day, looking for witnesses. “Your grandfather called a few minutes ago,” Mrs. Roulette said. “He’s under the weather.”
“He won’t be coming in?”
“No, dear. Can you?”
Instant mood swing on my part, from fair to foul. “Does it smell in there already?” I asked her, which was mean and cruel of me, but it popped out of my mouth. They couldn’t help the way they smelled. They couldn’t afford soap! “I mean, are there some clients there now?”
“Yes.”
The James Bond movie had not been good for me either. I’d dreamt last night that Zozo and Law were in a car chase that ended in a horrible crash. “How did Grandfather sound?” I asked.
“Like death warmed over. I wanted to call a doctor, but he won’t hear of it.”
“I’ll swing by the hotel and—”
“He ordered me to tell you not to do that.”
“The old bastard.”
“Kate!”
Both of my eardrums were drilled simultaneously with sound: Mom from six inches away, and Mrs. Roulette blasting me through the phone. “He is an old bastard,” I said into the telephone while glaring at Mom. “Will you screen the clients for me, Mrs. Roulette?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll be in at eleven, okay?” I’d have to call Mike and tell him I couldn’t go with him to City Park to look for witnesses.
What had happened to my life? Would Mike still take me to his party? Would I even be able to go?
The temperature was in the nineties at eleven that morning when I locked my bike on the office porch and dreamed of entering an air-conditioned atmosphere instead of a suffocating one that would sweat up my clothes. Mrs. Roulette peered at me over her glasses and smiled, and I checked the lobby for clients. She’d narrowed it to four and each one looked at me as though I was their last hope on earth. “I need a shower,” I whispered to Mrs. Roulette. “Be back in a minute.”
“Take your time, dear.”
But one doesn’t take one’s time in the shower at Grandfather’s office. When I turned the water on, the sudden shock of ice was so intense it was hard not to sing. I controlled myself, toweled off and powdered my body, and put on clean underwear and a light denim dress. It looked strange with saddle shoes, but no one from Seventeen would be by that day to take my picture. I moved across the hall to the Judge’s office, and Mrs. Roulette sent in the first client.
Then time and space disappeared as I lost myself in other people’s problems. They seemed much more fascinating than mine. Was that what happened to Grandfather, too? Had it happened to my dad?
Mrs. Bronson and her five children were being evicted because she couldn’t pay the rent, so—just as Grandfather would have done—I told her how to drag it out a few days. Then we called around and found an agency she could go to that would help her find another place to live.
A finance company had foreclosed on Mr. Washington’s trailer home, where he lived with his three kids and his mom. She took care of the children because his wife had died of cancer. He hated the finance company with a passion, and wanted to know how much trouble he’d be in if he burned his trailer home down. I told him arson was frowned upon by society and that he could spend the rest of his life in jail, so it was not a good idea even though he’d get a rush out of watching it go up in flames. Then I called the finance company to plead Mr. Washington’s case.
The lawyer I talked to turned out to be a decent man, which shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. He gave Mr. Washington three months to catch up on the payments, and he even agreed to cut his own fees in half.
The last two were divorces, which I hated because marriages are
supposed to be forever, or at least until death do us part. A fourteen-year-old girl who has lived in one home all her life doesn’t have enough experience in the real world to do divorces. Does anyone, when it comes to chopping a marriage vow into bits?
Mr. Hamilton was the defendant in the first divorce case. He worked at night as a janitor, but a sheriff’s deputy had yanked him out of bed that morning and served him the papers. The deputy stayed in his room while he dressed, then escorted him out of the house without letting him take anything, even a toothbrush. When Mr. Hamilton came back later to pack a suitcase, his wife wouldn’t let him in. The poor man obviously needed more than the clothes on his back.
I called the sheriff’s office and finally talked to the deputy who’d booted him out of the house. He felt sorry for my client, and told me he’d call up Hamilton’s wife and work something out.
Mrs. Ishmael was next, a beautiful woman with long black hair, a creamy complexion, and dreamy dark brown eyes that looked like they’d seen things that no one should see. A large bruise was wrapped around her left eye and covered her cheek. Her husband had knocked her down, she told me, before throwing her out of their apartment. He’d socked her because she’d tried to stop him from hitting his eleven-year-old son. The boy wasn’t hers, she explained, just a stepson to her. So it wasn’t really her business, but she couldn’t stand it any longer, and thinking about the boy now made her cry. “I’ve grown to love him,” she said. “But I don’t have the means to keep him, and he would not come with me even if I did.”
I wanted to call the police, but she wouldn’t hear of it. All she wanted for herself, out of four years of marriage with the man of her dreams, was the furniture and clothes that belonged to her, and her personal possessions, and her books. She had found a rooming house where she could stay. So I prepared a complaint for divorce, which we took to the courthouse and filed with the clerk, then got a restraining order from the judge and found a sheriff who would serve it on her husband and stay in the apartment long enough for her to move her things. It took most of the day, and she hugged me and kissed me when she said goodbye. “The boy?” she asked. “What of him?”
I’d already talked to my grandfather about him. “Social Services will find him a new home,” I said, “as soon as we know you’re safe.”
So that was what my grandfather did, day in and day out, on his side of the hall. No wonder he kicked things when they got in his way.
Riding home that evening before the sun went down, I felt a huge sense of relief. I’d survived my first week of working full-time in the practice of law. Did that make me a lawyer?
I didn’t know. But I knew that tomorrow I’d be in Evergreen with my friends.
Chapter Thirteen
JUST BEFORE ONE, Mike trudged over to my house. His mom was already in Evergreen, getting ready for their big party, and his dad was out of town on business. Mom and I would take Mike, which meant I’d sit in back.
Actually, it didn’t matter to me where I sat. I was so glad to see him and get out of town and away from all my problems that I didn’t mind the arrangement at all. He needed the extra room to stretch his legs, which he still had to tuck under his chin. Mike loomed over everyone at Hill except Kenny Benson, but Mike kind of didn’t know how big he was. I liked him for that.
I liked his hair, too, I realized from my vantage point in the back seat. It’s jet black and full of waves and curls, like Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy or Cary Grant in some old movie favorites of Mom’s. I almost wound one of his curls around a finger, just to see what he’d do, but I resisted the temptation. Instead, I asked him if he’d talked to Willis Suggs again. He hadn’t, which didn’t surprise me. But Miss Willow would be at City Park the next day around noon, I told him, for her usual Sunday picnic. Two-Fingers wanted us to be there with her because people have habits that tend to repeat. We might turn up a new witness or two. “Can you go?” I asked him.
“Sure.”
I leaned back in my seat and opened the window, letting the wind blow through my hair. It felt so wonderful just to relax. In less than an hour we’d gotten to Evergreen and arrived at the Doyles’ summer cottage.
We were in a different world. Denver is on the prairie and is mostly as flat as a Ping-Pong table, but Evergreen Lake is surrounded by mountains, grassy meadows, conifer trees, and aspen groves. Snow-covered peaks shimmer in the distance like icebergs, and even when it’s hot, it feels cool.
Calling their place a summer cottage was the understatement of the year. It’s a big, rambling frame house in a mountain meadow that slopes toward the lake, with a large veranda wrapped around it and a sun deck that steps down from the veranda. Tables, shaded by large patio umbrellas, were spaced around the deck, and their huge lawn stretched all the way to the shoreline. A big asphalt parking lot was behind the house, and the lot was nearly full. “Who are all the people?” I asked him.
“Friends of Mom’s, I guess,” he said. “I don’t know who she asked.”
The Doyles made the society page on a regular basis. They entertained a lot, and were part of what my mom called “the country-club scene.” But they weren’t snobs. They were nice to their servants.
Mrs. Doyle came out to greet us with a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and a hostess smile on her face. Taller than a lot of men, she loomed over Mom and me but not Mike. “Hi, Annie,” she said to my mom, whom everyone warms up to because of her smile. “So nice of you to bring my son!” When they hugged, I was afraid her cigarette would set Mom’s hair on fire. “You too, dear,” she said, bending down and giving me a kiss. “You’re certainly keeping Mike busy these days. I hardly see him.”
She herded Mom and me toward the house, chatting us up about how nice we looked and telling me how proud she was to know the sweet little girl from Hudson Street who really could be president someday, while Mike trailed along behind like an ugly duckling. I thought she could have been nicer to her only child. But I guess there are times when Mom treats me like part of her background.
Some adults had spilled out onto the sun deck from the veranda with drinks in their hands, and others stood around the horseshoe pits. Most of them were well-dressed and distinguished-looking, like a collection of important people. Was this just a party, I wondered? Or was something being celebrated?
At least the kids I saw looked normal. Three or four of them were trying to string a volleyball net between posts. “Go help,” Mrs. Doyle ordered Mike, pointing her head toward them. I started to go with him. “Not you, Kate,” she said. “There are some people here who are dying to meet the youngest lawyer in town. And Annie, I’ve asked about a hundred single men who are dying to meet you.”
“How nice,” Mom said. “But what’s the occasion? I’m in shorts.”
“You look fine,” Mrs. Doyle said, not answering Mom’s question.
She sat us down on the veranda, where it was cool and out of the sun, with Mom next to some man and me next to Justice Spriggs of the Colorado Supreme Court. I tried not to watch the kids who were playing volleyball, even though Sally Lipscombe and Mike were huddled on one side of the net over strategy or something. Their heads were stuck together for the longest time. Kenny Benson was laughing and talking on the other side with Linda Frailey. Then the two Jimmys showed up. Big Jimmy got over on Mike’s side, while little Jimmy went with Kenny’s team. As they played and had fun, I tried to make conversation with Justice Spriggs.
We didn’t have much in common. He’d never tried a dog-bite case, and I knew absolutely nothing about antitrust litigation. Then some doctors, psychiatrists, and business people joined us. They were all telling stories, and it was like I was expected to join in.
“You must be proud of Kate, Annie,” Mr. Oleander said. If the hundred men Mrs. Doyle wanted to surround Mom with were all like him, she’d be safe. He’s a little taller than she is, twice as heavy, and sweats buckets. But he’s a pretty nice man who’s even proposed to Mom, and wants me to call him by his firs
t name, which I’d do except I never remember what it is. “Imagine. When she’s thirty, she’ll have been a practicing lawyer for fifteen years!”
All at once, Janet Young—another friend from Hill—muscled her way into the conversation. Janet’s hair hangs over one eye, like a Veronica Lake peekaboo bang. “Kate, we need you,” she said, grabbing me by the hand. “It’s four against three.”
Justice Spriggs looked relieved. “Off with you, young lady,” he said, “or I’ll hold you in contempt of court.”
“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said. “I won’t object!”
My legs were twitching, in fact. I can’t spike a volleyball because I’m way too short, but I can keep the ball in play. My specialty is making my teammates look good.
We started a new game, with Sally and me as captains. I lost the toss, so she chose first and picked Mike. Sally is as subtle as a sledgehammer sometimes. Her flirts are as big and solid as bricks, and I hoped she’d trip over one and break her leg. I chose Kenny, who’s a much better player than Mike—at least when his mind is on the game rather than on girls. Sally picked Big Jimmy, so I took the little one; then she picked Janet, and I wound up with Linda—who either laughs at herself when she misses a shot, or cries, which makes her a serious distraction.
“What’s with your case against my brother?” Kenny asked me before we started. He made it sound like a big joke. “Ron says you’re actually defending some rotten dog who took a chunk out of a baby girl’s leg. Don’t you like babies?”
“Your brother’s a dog beater,” Mike said, before I could open my mouth. “An All-American dog beater.”
“Be careful what you call my brother, Mike,” Kenny threatened.
“Really. Can’t he take care of himself?”