I fight down a new wave of panic. The employment agreement I signed was three pages long and covered every loophole imaginable. The assholes. I slump in the chair, feeling exhausted. “I hope the hell not.”
Over a snack in the break room, Clan fills me in on the deal he has with the Layman Building. Feeling broke, I have a cup of water while he demolishes two packs of Twinkles and a Mars bar. The Secretary of Agriculture, he now calls himself, boasting that he could solve the need for subsidies to farmers all by himself.
I listen carefully and decide the price is right: I can rent a decent office and the use of a secretary for little more than three hundred a month (depending on how much typing I have). That doesn’t include a phone or furniture, but Clan assures me there is a good group of lawyers on the floor who are more than willing to help each other out.
“Hell, you know that by myself I’m a card-carrying incompetent,” he says, now daintily sipping a cup of coffee, “but there are five other attorneys within moaning distance of my office. Our collective IQ is probably 105, but that’s more than enough to get by with the kind of nickel-and-dime crap we mostly get. You know Southerland and D’Angelo, don’t you?”
I nod, sucking on a piece of ice, knowing that I might possibly find something even cheaper but probably more isolated.
Not only does misery love company, in the legal business misery demands it unless you’ve been around forever and remember at least half of what you’ve learned or can lay your hands on it. Besides, I know a couple of the guys and they are pretty good, much better than Clan admits.
“Tunkie” Southerland is probably one of the better lawyers I know, but like me, he is so disorganized he spends half a morning looking for his files. He writes beautifully, though, and ghosts appellate briefs for a number of lawyers in Blackwell County.
Frank D’Angelo, a transplanted Yankee who couldn’t get into law school up North, knows a lot of bankruptcy, so he will come in handy, too.
“If you need some furniture,” Clan says, choking back a belch, “the building manager has a basement full of odds and ends that she’ll rent dirt cheap.”
It all seems too easy, but by 7 p.m. I’m the newest tenant of the Layman Building, and with the help of a janitor I possess some temporary office furniture. And by this time tomorrow I’ll have a telephone and my name on the directory.
Now, if I can just acquire more than one client….
Granted, my office looks like Goodwill South, but it will keep until I can drive around this weekend to some secondhand furniture stores. I know I can get some halfway decent stuff if I’ll take the time to look. In the meantime, if I have any clients I can interview them in the conference room, which is only two doors from my office. Clan has told me to call the federal district court clerk’s office and put my name on the list for criminal appointments for indigent defendants.
The feds pay forty an hour, which is forty more than I’m getting on anything else except Chapman. I decide I will call when the phone is installed. I glance around the bare walls and realize my diplomas and other junk are at Mays amp; Burton, assuming they haven’t dumped them into the trash. I can pick them up first thing in the morning. I’ve had enough of the free-enterprise system today.
4
I do not pull into my driveway until almost eight o’clock.
It is just as well. My daughter is at Arkansas Governor’s School, a summer camp for the gifted and talented. Without Sarah, my house will be a tomb-just me and a presumably hungry dog. It is not until I have to push myself out of the Blazer that I realize I am exhausted; however, there won’t be many times that I will be fired, enter private practice, and pick up a well-to-do client all in the same afternoon.
I walk across tall, scrufiy grass to the house, mulling over the fact that Andrew Chapman is a behavioral psychologist, not a psychiatrist, as I previously assumed. Shrinks work with the mentally ill. I have no idea if the girl carried a dual diagnosis of mental retardation and mental illness. Wouldn’t she have to be insane to mutilate herself? It is an area I know nothing about. Chapman can start my education tomorrow.
Seldom has a lawyer known so little about his client. Despite my ignorance, I do know one thing, and that is this case ought to be great for business. If I can’t pick up some clients from the kind of publicity this case will generate, I’m not long for private practice.
In the mailbox is the usual junk mail (Amnesty International-if they had spelled my name right I’d have given them more money-now I’m glad I didn’t) and, much more pleasing, a letter from Sarah. I am thrilled she was selected to attend Governor’s School but have privately wondered if her unusual racial background didn’t make the difference.
Granted, she is unusually bright and a hard worker, but she is hardly a genius, having inherited my defective math genes.
The selection committee arguably (and probably only theoretically, since she identifies herself as white) could count her as Hispanic, Indian, and black-a cornucopia of unmentioned but undoubtedly very real racial requirements.
I can hear Woogie screeching on the other side of the door.
I usually make it home before seven. I won’t open my letter from Sarah until I have taken Woogie for a walk. He acts so obnoxious and hyper until he’s eaten and gone out, it isn’t worth even opening a beer first. Tonight is no exception. As soon as I open the door, my dog, a perverse mixture of beagle and sometimes I think another species entirely (perhaps a giraffe, so long are his legs), is on me. First a fast suck on my shoelaces for old times’ sake-he hasn’t done that in a while-and then he backs off and makes repeated runs at me, bounding higher each time. Fortunately, beagles-even mixed breeds with long legs-can only jump so high or he would be licking my face, he is so happy to see me.
“Hi, boy,” I say quietly, trying to calm him. Any inflection in my voice only excites him.
“Had a big day?” I turn on some lights, flip the switch on the central air-conditioning, and head for the kitchen to fill his bowl. Rosa and I used to feed him in the mornings until he began waking us earlier and earlier to eat. While he is delightedly crunching on a bowl of what reminds me of rabbit pellets (as a boy in the Delta my father and I hunted cottontails with real beagles-it was really an excuse to get out of the house and do something together, since it never seemed to bother us when we came home empty-handed), I peel off my suit in the sweltering bedroom and slip on some shorts, tennis shoes, and a T-shirt. As I pull out my change and keys and lay them on the dresser, I glance down at a picture of the three of us-Rosa, Sarah, and me-taken outside of Graceland at Elvis’s shrine in Memphis. No matter what she was wearing, Rosa always looked good. Here, just shorts, sandals, and a bright yellow T-shirt that says “Sea World” and a likeness (surely, all killer whales can be said to look alike) of Shamu, a reminder of another trip. Sarah must have been about ten at the time of the Tennessee trip, but she was already a knockout, even without her mother’s sensational figure. She has it now. Genetics. She is Rosa all over again, right down to the tip of her South American Indian nose. I’m missing Sarah a lot more this third week and resist the urge to tear open her letter and read it now. But it is something to be savored over a beer. Actually, she called two nights ago, but our conversations, especially over the phone, are often awkward and frustrating, as if she would prefer to wait until she is about thirty to answer another question about her life. However, I was pleasantly surprised by her first letter, which contained more news and opinions than a week’s worth of conversations around the house. When Rosa and I had a rare serious fight, she would write me a long letter, partly in English, partly in Spanish (though her English was excellent), that invariably expressed her feelings better than she did in person.