“Around what year are we talking about?”
I shift in the uncomfortable wooden chair. If they keep this furniture much longer, they can sell it as antiques. This is one agency that doesn’t get in trouble for spending state money to redecorate bureaucrats’ offices.
“Maybe close to fifteen years ago,” I say, wondering if Olivia had another name back then. For all I know, she could have been married four times since her divorce.
Abruptly, Shelley stands, telling me, “I think I know who you’re talking about. I’ll be back in a minute.”
While she is gone, I look around her office, stilling an urge to go see who has my desk. Shelley has told me only three people remain in the entire office from the time I was there, which was only three years ago. The turnover is enormous.
Insufficient staff, low pay, and unqualified people who shuffle paper until the next tragedy hits the news have long made the place a revolving door. Why did I stay so long?
Much of the time I felt like a voyeur of horror. I know I would have gone crazy if I had accepted a supervisor’s job.
In a system this bad, you have to prove that a case worker lay in bed drunk for six months before you are allowed to fire him. Ordinary incompetence and negligence are part of the job description. On Shelley’s wall is a sign she has lettered herself.
“IP YOU GET YOUR PANTIES IN A WAD BEFORE 10 A.M.” YOUR MEDICINE ISN’T STRONG ENOUGH.”
Shelley returns, panting a bit as she comes through the door and shuts it behind her. Her blue polyester pants, freak-show size, strain against her hips as she turns the handle on the flimsy door.
“If you reveal where you got this information, I’ll be in bad trouble.”
I watch her ease her huge body into the chair, thinking she could set the governor on fire and no one would touch her.
“You know I’d never do that.” What motivates her to stay?
She’s been here twenty-five years. Low pay and bad working conditions only explain part of it. Actually, I know the answer.
Without making a federal case of it, she is totally convinced there is nothing else on earth she could do with her life that is more important. “Don’t you remember this?” She grins happily, delighted by her superb memory.
“Good, good talker. We were about to file once before and she talked us out of it. This case was not your run-of-the-mill, attractive middle-class single white woman struggling to sell real estate and raise two small children;
and we kept getting calls she was neglecting the one-year-old. The older child, a girl, was retarded. We never exactly understood the problem, but when there was an incident with boiling water that burned the boy, she agreed to a placement with her mother in Ohio and we closed the file.
We never went to court. We’d file on a case like that now instead of having an informal agreement.”
I feel a chill run down the back of my neck. Olivia has never mentioned a word about any of this. Boiling water?
Give me a cattle prod any day. I think of her commercials.
She is a damn good talker all right, but, I suspect, a better actress.
“Can you live with a subpoena?” I ask.
“All of a sudden my memory’s crystal clear.” It isn’t, of course, but I have no qualms about lying to protect her.
My old friend’s smile becomes a smirk.
“You better say that,” she says, squinting at the file in front of her.
“And I didn’t tell you a damn thing.”
After getting a few more details (Olivia would admit only that her infant might have pulled a pan off the stove but had no answer when Shelley pointed out he wasn’t tall enough to reach it), I thank her and leave through the rat’s maze of cubicles, watching the workers at their desks, some gobbling sandwiches and talking at the same time. Almost always it is the poor who get caught up in abuse and neglect proceedings.
Was Olivia that down and out? This child would have had to have been born only a year or so after Pam but before the settlement with the obstetrician came through. Her husband left her, so maybe at one time she wasn’t all that much different from the terrified parents who are sitting across from the desks of my former colleagues. I look into the eyes of a young black man sitting in my old cubicle. Does Andy know about this part of Olivia’s life? I seriously doubt it. Just because she abused one child and let it be sent away doesn’t mean she wanted Pam to die. Yet, if I were a prosecutor, I’d be rubbing my hands with glee and wondering what else I could find out about the past of the star of the River City Realty Commercials.
“My brother’s a little naive,” Morris Chapman says soon after Andy introduces us. He flew in this morning from Atlanta and has accompanied Andy to my office for our final interview before the trial begins tomorrow.”
“You’ve noticed,” I say, unable to resist sarcasm now that I have an ally. Morris Chapman does not have his brother’s flair for clothes. For this visit at least he is dressed in a drab blue business suit that in no way announces its wearer’s presence Taller than Andy, he is also skinnier, but the family resemblance is there around the eyes and mouth. Yet, where Andy’s intelligent face mirrors his emotions even beneath his trim beard and glasses, his brother has a wary, pinched look as if he has an internal computer clicking off prices that he knows aren’t ever coming down. So this is where the money has come from, I think, already wishing this guy had been around for the last couple of months. His long fingers, clenched until this moment like talons around the arms of the chair, finally uncurl but do not relax. He lives in the real world; his brother does not. Uncertain how he will take the information about Olivia, and still wondering how to use it at the trial, I have not yet told Andy about what I learned at the Blackwell County Social Services office.
Andy, who seems to have returned to his more open and accessible personality now that his brother is here, flashes his first smile in days.
“Just a few days in prison will make me like y’all,” he says easily crossing an ankle over a thigh.
The half grin, half smirk on his face suggests to me that some of the weight he has felt in the last two months has been shifted to his brother.
“Not that normal,” Morris replies, shrugging, each digit of his hands now a blunt poker testing the strength of the wooden arms of the chair.
“Any dude dumb enough to get involved with a white bitch in your circumstances needs a lot of work.”
His crudeness crashes over his brother’s face like a tidal wave. I lean back in my chair, content for now to watch the family dynamic work itself out. Andy cocks his head at his brother as if he is amazed that Morris can use such terms, and especially in front of me. Yet his tone, when he finally speaks, is mild.
“White bitch?” he says, laying equal emphasis on both words.
“Mo, you haven’t even laid eyes on her.”
“Damn straight,” Morris says dispassionately as he looks squarely but blandly at me as if I were a poorly painted bowl of fruit in a frame on the wall.
“She’s played you for the starry-eyed, guess-who’scoming-to-dinner nigger aristocrat you’ve always wanted to be. If you had to have some respect able pussy, what’s wrong with Yettie? She’s always gone into heat every time your name comes up. You’ve dragged Yettie down to work with those shit-for-brains fuck-ups and now you won’t even look at her ‘cause you’re too busy sniffing white pussy. Damn, Andy, the only way they’ll let more than one nigger at a time in that bunny hutch where you live is in a maid’s uniform.”
As awful as Morris sounds, I have to resist the urge to hug him. I have thought everything he is saying. But white people can’t talk to blacks that way. Afraid I will end what is be coming an embarrassing but revealing harangue, I stare into the space between the two brothers, wondering how much more of this Andy will take. Yet surely Morris is no surprise to him. Everything comes with a price, and perhaps Morris is merely presenting his bill. After a few polite minutes of chitchat to show him I was real, I had intended to ask Morris to wait outside, but now I wanted him to stay. Despite his crudeness, he is delivering some badly needed reality therapy to his brother, who, amazingly, doesn’t seem angered by it.