Jodi Picoult - House Rules

So I leave the house cleaner than it was when I first entered. And then I start walking home. It’s eight miles, but I can try to hitch once I reach the state highway.

After all, Leon’s got the kind of parents who wouldn’t mind dropping me off.

I’m feeling pretty good, because this Friday, I won my case against the pig.

Okay, so technically, the pig was not the one who filed the lawsuit. That honor belongs to Buff (short for Buffalo, and I swear I am not making this up) Wings, a three-hundred-pound motorcyclist who was riding his vintage Harley down a road in Shelburne when a gigantic rogue pig wandered off the side of the road and directly into his path. As a result of the accident, Mr. Wings lost an eye-something he showed the jury at one point, by lifting up his black satin patch, which of course I objected to.

Anyway, when Wings got out of the hospital, he sued the owner of the land from which the pig wandered. But it turned out to be more complicated than that. Elmer Hodgekiss, the owner of the pig, was only renting the property from a landlord who lived down in Brattleboro-an eighty-year-old lady named Selma Frack. In Elmer’s lease was a direct clause that said no pets, no animals. But Elmer defended his forbidden pig keeping (and his equally subversive chicken keeping for that matter) on the grounds that Selma was in a nursing home and never visited the property and what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

I was representing Selma Frack. Her caretaker at the Green Willow Assisted Living Facility told me that Selma picked me out of the phone book because of my Yellow Pages ad:

Oliver O. Bond, Esquire, it read, with a graphic that looked like 007’s gun-except it was OOB, my initials. When you need an attorney who won’t be shaken OR stirred.

“Thanks,” I said. “I came up with that myself.”

The caretaker just stared at me blankly. “She liked the fact that she could read the font. Most of them lawyers, their print is too tiny.”

In spite of the fact that Buff Wings wanted Selma’s insurance to cover his medical bills, I had two strikes in my favor.

1. Buff Wings’s convoluted argument was that Selma should be held responsible even though she (a) didn’t know about the pig, (b) had expressly banned the pig, and (c) had evicted Elmer Hodgekiss as soon as she learned that he had loosed his killer pig on the general populace.

2. Buff Wings had chosen to represent himself.

I had trotted out experts to refute Wings’s claims about damages-both emotional and physical. For example, did you know that there is a guy from Ohio who actually is an expert on driving with one eye? And that in almost all states you can continue to drive-even a motorcycle-as long as your other eye has 20/20 vision? And that in certain circumstances, the term blind spot can be politically incorrect?

After the judge had ruled in our favor, I followed Selma and her caretaker to the elevator at the courthouse. “Well,” the caretaker said, “all’s well that ends well.”

I glanced down at Selma, who’d been asleep for most of the proceedings. “It’s all fun and games till somebody loses an eye,” I replied. “Please extend my congratulations to Mrs. Frack on her victory in court.”

Then I ran down the stairs to the parking lot, punching my fist in the air.

I have a hundred percent success rate in my litigation.

So what if I’ve only had one case?

Contrary to popular belief, the ink is not still drying on my bar certificate.

That’s pizza sauce.

But it was an honest accident. I mean, since my office is above the town pizza joint, and Mama Spatakopoulous routinely blocks my ascension on the staircase to thrust a plate of spaghetti or a mushroom-and-onion pie into my hands, it would be downright rude to turn her down. Coupled with that is the fact that I can’t really afford to eat, and turning away free food would be stupid. Granted, it was dumb of me to grab a makeshift napkin from a stack of papers on my desk, but the odds of it being my bar certificate (as opposed to my recent Chinese take-out order) had been pretty slim.

If any new clients ask to see my bar certificate, I’m just going to tell them it’s being framed.

Sure enough, as I am headed back inside, Mama S. meets me with a calzone. “You gotta wear a hat, Oliver.”

My hair is still dripping wet from my shower at the high school locker room. Ice has started to form. “You’ll take care of me when I have pneumonia, won’t you?” I tease.

She laughs and pushes the box at me. As I jog up the stairs, Thor starts barking his head off. I open the door just a crack, so that he doesn’t come flying out. “Relax,” I say. “I was only gone for fifteen minutes.”

He launches all twelve pounds of himself at me.

Thor’s a miniature poodle. He doesn’t like to be called a poodle within hearing distance-he’ll growl, and can you blame him? What guy dog wants to be a poodle ? They should only come in female denominations, if you ask me.

I do the best I can for him. I gave him the name of a mighty warrior. I let his hair grow out, but instead of making him look less effeminate, it only makes him look more like a mop head.

I pick him up and tuck him into my arm like a football, and then I notice that there are feathers all over my office. “Oh, crap,” I say. “What’d you do, Thor?”

Setting him down, I survey the damage. “Great. Thank you, mighty guard dog, for protecting me from my own damn pillow.” I drag the vacuum out of the closet and start to suck up the debris. It’s my own fault, I know, for not putting away my bedding before running my errand. My office is currently also doubling as my living quarters. Not permanently, of course, but do you know how expensive it is to pay rent on a law office and an apartment? Plus, being in town, I can walk to the high school every day-and the janitor there has been very cool about letting me use the locker room as my own personal shower. I gave him some free advice about his divorce, and this is his thanks.

Usually, I fold up my blanket and tuck it with my pillow in the closet. I hide my little thirteen-inch TV inside a cavernously empty filing cabinet. That way, if a client comes in to retain my services, they won’t get the vibe that I’m hideously unsuccessful.

I’m just new in town, that’s all. Which is why I spend more time organizing the paper clips on my desk than actually doing any legal work.

I graduated with honors from the University of Vermont seven years ago with a degree in English. Here’s a little nugget of wisdom for you, just in case you’re interested: You can’t practice English in the real world. What skills did I have, honestly? I could outread anyone in a quick draw? I could write a totally smoking analytical essay about the homoerotic overtones of Shakespeare’s sonnets?

Yeah, that and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee.

So I decided that I needed to stop living in the theoretical and start experiencing the physical. I answered a classified ad I’d found in the Burlington Free Press to be a farrier’s apprentice. I traveled around the countryside and learned to spot what was normal gait for a horse and what wasn’t. I studied how to trim a donkey’s hoof and how to shape a horseshoe around an anvil, nail it into place, file it down, and watch the animal take off again.

I liked being a farrier. I liked the feel of fifteen hundred pounds of horse pressed up against my shoulder as I bent the leg to examine the hoof. But after four years I got restless. I decided to go to law school, for the same reason everyone else goes to law school: because I had no idea what else to do.

I’ll be a good lawyer. Maybe even a great one. But here I am, at twenty-eight, and my secret fear is that I’m going to be just another guy who spends his whole life making money by doing something he’s never really loved to do.