John Lescroart - Damage

To say nothing of the fact that he’d probably saved Ro’s literal ass in prison, and maybe his life as well.

The young man blew out the smoke he’d been holding. “You don’t agree with me?” he asked. “About Farrell?”

Eztli kept his eyes on the road, took a minute before he answered. “I believe what your mother and father believe.”

“What’s that?”

“That if Farrell wants you in jail, you’re in jail.”

“But he…”

Eztli was shaking his head. “He’s playing a game.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Because he’s a politician. He’s playing both sides. That’s what they do.” Eztli held out his right hand and Ro handed him the joint, which he sucked down to its last half inch. Letting the hit out, he went on, “Look. Don’t kid yourself. Farrell makes the call. He goes to a judge-any judge-and says you don’t get bail, period, then you don’t get bail. But he didn’t do that. Not either time it’s come up. Meanwhile, he gives your lawyer half a year to get up to speed. Which won’t happen in any six months, either. That’ll go a year, maybe two, maybe forever. And this makes Farrell the best friend you got. He’s giving you time, and time’s the main thing.”

“For what?”

“Hey, come on, for everything.” Eztli flashed him a look. “For doing what you have to do.”

Gloria Serrano, née Gonzalvez, loved doing her own family’s laundry. She sometimes felt she could do it forever in perfect happiness, so long as it was in her own house, for her own sons and daughter and husband. She loved the smell of it-the musky tang as she pulled the clothes from the hamper as well as the sweet detergent scent when it came out of the dryer almost too hot to touch. She liked to separate the whites from the colors, to take the shirts out as soon as they’d dried so that she could fold them so they wouldn’t wrinkle.

She even loved the challenge of finding the lost sock that seemed to go along with nearly every load.

Now, Sunday afternoon, her one day off, she had her piles of clothes stacked and folded on the wooden workbench next to the washer and dryer in the garage of the two-bedroom house that she and Roberto had finally managed to buy in Sunnyvale.

Today one of her husband’s red socks had made itself disappear. Gloria went down to one knee and put her head almost inside the dryer, then pulled back and reached in with her hand to turn the drum. No sock.

She hoped it would not be among the clothes she’d already folded. The only other place it could be was the washer itself, but she was usually very careful about making sure the washer was empty before she started the dryer because this was when she often found the coins and also, very occasionally, the bills, that she hid to use for presents for Roberto and the children.

Since she’d bought the last present for Ramon’s seventh birthday in November-a Lego battleship that he’d loved and rebuilt so far about twenty times-she’d amassed a new total of nearly twenty dollars, including today’s unusually large haul of two dollar bills and a quarter.

She never considered that she was stealing from her husband by keeping the money she found. The money always went back to one of them. She looked on it more as though it were a fine that fate imposed on her husband when he didn’t check to empty his pockets before he threw clothes in the hamper.

But that sock was missing, and she didn’t really want to unfold all of her already folded clothes and check again. Maybe in the excitement of finding so much money earlier, she hadn’t been as careful as she usually was. So she opened the washer and reached around where a sock might have stuck in the spinning process. And today-a good luck sign-she found it clinging to the top of the drum.

She wasn’t about to run a whole load of drying for one sock, so she took the wet sock and its dry partner and threw them both into the dryer, where they would wait until the next load went in. Then she gathered the other clothes in her arms, opened the garage door to the kitchen, and went to distribute them through the house.

She was making enchiladas for Sunday dinner and their wonderful smell stopped her in her tracks in the kitchen. Caught in a rogue wave of emotion, she put the clothes down on the table and pulled out a chair to sit on. Roberto had taken the children-all the children, bless him-to Costco for their biweekly run there, and this had left Gloria free to clean and do the laundry in an empty house, get it ready for the next week.

After a minute, she got up to pour herself some of her delicious Guatemalan coffee. Sitting back at the table, she wrapped her hands around her mug and stared out at the overcast sky through her kitchen window.

The color of the sky didn’t matter. Sitting with her clean washing in her own house on a Sunday afternoon, drinking the wonderful coffee, smelling the good food that they’d have for dinner, she felt kissed by God, in complete contentment.

And who could ever have imagined she would have gotten to here? Especially after those first few months when she’d just arrived to work with the Curtlees. And after their horrible son, who’d started in on her within the first few days, finally got his way again and again over the months she’d stayed.

What else was she going to do? Whom could she turn to? The family chose to turn at best a blind eye to Ro’s advances. And, at worst, they were complicit. That she’d eventually gotten out and placed with another family had been miracle number two.

And that would never have happened if the new girl, Dolores-the one Ro had finally killed-hadn’t been on her way in the pipeline from Guatemala. The poor thing.

Gloria had no doubt that, but for the grace of God, that might have been her.

And then the scary months before and after she’d actually gone in and testified and Ro had gone to jail, when Cliff and Theresa Curtlee had first tried to buy her silence, and then had threatened her, through their lawyers, with extradition. But even with all of their connections, they had not been able to call on as many as Gloria herself had among her extended family. So they could not track her as she disappeared first to live with friends of some cousins in Gilroy, nor after she met and married Roberto and reestablished herself as a housekeeper in Sunnyvale.

Now she had a good business cleaning twenty-five homes in Palo Alto and Menlo Park every week-steady, legal work, and two employees besides herself. She had a dependable babysitter, her own home, a family, and a documented, hardworking husband who loved her.

And-she thanked God every day-no Ro or any other Curtlee in her life.

Not now.

Not ever again.

The Novios had a semi-enclosed redwood gazebo in their backyard, hexagonal in shape, about ten feet in diameter. When Chuck came out to get firewood as dusk closed in on this cold and cloudy Sunday evening, he noticed his brother-in-law sitting on the bench that encircled the inside of the gazebo. He was faced away from the house, canted forward, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him.

Chuck walked over and knocked on one of the posts and Michael’s shoulders rose and fell as he looked over. “Hey.”

“You all right?”

“Just taking a break.”

Kathy had insisted that the whole Durbin family stay with them at least until the memorial next Thursday. Individual pockets of grief were piled up inside the house like snowdrifts. Kathy. Chuck’s twins. And Michael and Janice’s own Allie and their boys-angry Jon and devastated Peter. All of them were flopped, wasted on the furniture in front of the television, tuned to sports round the clock.