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By Root 791 0

about the serious nature of the charge. As if the angry women were present he urged parents who had complaints about Mrs. Goodwin to either formalize their charges or stop the rumor mills. He set the date for the formal arraignment and the court was dismissed. Alice got up right away. She stood on her toes, trying to see out the high windows. Then she turned to look at me. I don’t know what she expected to see. I wanted to cut over the pews and grab hold of her. She smiled, that pitying crooked smile, before the guard motioned her to go. I leaned forward, resting my chin and mouth against my sleeve. I must have chewed my lip all the way through. Later, when I took the shirt off, there were bloodstains along both of my cuffs.

I sat for a while. I was unsure how I was going to make my way through the ranks outside. Rafferty slid in beside me after everyone else had gone behind the screen and out the back hall.

“It went well,” he said. “Better than I thought it would, actually. Mrs. Dirks doesn’t usually lose her cool.” He chuckled at that.

“Why’d she do it this time?”

“It’s important to go after the boy in the prelim, to be vicious, if you will, so that he’ll turn against me at trial time. He’ll remember what a creep I was, and hold it against me. In front of the jury, you see. Jurors, especially older jurors, don’t warm to disrespectful children.”

He stank of aftershave.

“I think we accomplished that,” he continued. “I don’t have any doubts that Robbie will be belligerent, smug, and foul. I will be all sweetness at that point, trying hard to empathize, to understand.”

He waited for me to say something.

“Mrs. Dirks knows the ploy, of course,” he went on. “She tried at first to keep her objections to a minimum. She didn’t want to give Robbie the idea that I’m as bad as she thinks I am. But when she started caterwauling, in spite of herself, she only reinforced the idea that I am the ogre.”

“I see,” I said.

“I’ve got a hunch about the boyfriends. I went sniffing around all weekend, as I said. I wouldn’t be surprised if they dropped charges. They might try to settle out of court, which I will not allow. Dirks knows me. She knows their only real choice is to drop charges.” His aftershave was a slow-moving, noxious odor which only now had reached my nostrils in full. “Don’t look so shaken up,” he said. “They know now that the boy can’t make it in court, and if they have any brains at all they’ll realize that the mother has less of a chance than he does.”

“What about the admission?” I asked.

“Well, naturally they’ll walk that one around the block and make it piss on every tree. We’ll get it excluded. We knew it was coming, so it wasn’t a surprise.”

“We knew it was coming?” I asked.

“Alice told me that she’d been—what were her words?—’babbling incoherently’ to the investigating officers.”

I thanked him and got out, down the six flights of stairs, away from him. I went as quickly as I could. The band of women in the hall had gone off, presumably to feed their anger elsewhere. I stood on Wisconsin Avenue on the hot pavement across the street from the jail. I stood looking at the narrow mirrored windows on the fourth floor, where Alice’s pod was. She had always spoken about Robbie in such disparaging tones. There wasn’t much substance to him. I had thought he’d be a tough kid, brawny, someone you’d want to wrestle. How could she have hurt a boy without the principal and the secretary and the guidance counselor knowing about it? She had once squirted me all over with whipped cream and come running behind sticking out her long tongue. The topsoil of the entire county could have blown into Lake Michigan right then. I wouldn’t have noticed or much cared. “I didn’t see anything,” I said under my breath. The metal plates over the jail windows were blinding in the noonday sun. “I didn’t see Robbie looking at that doll.”

When I’d finished telling Theresa about the hearing she put her head down in her lap. Just as both Alice and I had done at some point during that long and surreal morning. Theresa was frozen, glued to her chair.