T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

Another pause. Her stomach was crawling. She didn’t want to say anything but he held the pause so long she had to bow her head and say, “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”

And then suddenly, without warning, his voice was lashing out at her: “But you don’t know it. Do you know what’s at stake here? Do you really?”

“No,” she said, and it was a whisper.

“Your father is going to plead no contest to the charge of driving under the influence. He was wrong, he admits it. And they’ll take away his driving privileges and he’ll have to go to counseling and find someone to drive you and your sister to school, and I don’t mean to minimize that, that’s very serious, but here’s the thing you may not know.” He held her eyes, though she wanted to look away. “The second charge is child endangerment, not for the boy on the bike, who barely even scraped a knee, luckily, luckily, and whose parents have already agreed to a settlement, but for you, for allowing you to do what you did. And do you know what will happen if the jury finds him guilty on that charge?”

She didn’t know what was coming, not exactly, but the tone of what he was conveying — dark, ominous, fulminating with anger and the threat about to be revealed in the very next breath — made her feel small. And scared. Definitely scared. She shook her head.

“They’ll take you and Lisette away from him.” He clenched both hands, pushed himself up from the rail and turned as if to pace off down the aisle in front of her, as if he was disgusted with the whole thing and had no more to say. But then, suddenly, he swung round on her with a furious twist of his shoulders and a hard accusatory stab of his balled-up right hand and a single rigid forefinger. “And no,” he said, barely contained, barely able to keep his voice level, “in answer to your unasked question or objection or whatever you want to call it, your mother’s not coming back for you, not now, maybe not ever.”

—

Was he ashamed? Was he humiliated? Did he have to stop drinking and get his life in order? Yes, yes and yes. But as he sat there in the courtroom beside Jerry Apodaca at eleven-thirty in the morning, the high arched windows pregnant with light and his daughter, Marcy, Dolores and the solemn-faced au pair sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the gleaming wooden bench behind him, there was a flask in his inside pocket and the faint burning pulse of single-malt scotch rode his veins. He’d taken a pull from it in the men’s room not ten minutes ago, just to steady himself, and then he’d rinsed out his mouth and ground half a dozen Tic Tacs between his teeth to knock down any trace of alcohol on his breath. Jerry would have been furious with him if he so much as suspected… and it was a weak and cowardly thing to do, no excuse, no excuse at all, but he felt adrift, felt scared, and he needed an anchor to hold on to. Just for now. Just for today. And then he’d throw the thing away, because what was a flask for anyway except to provide a twenty-four-hour teat for the kind of drunk who wore a suit and brushed his teeth.

He began to jiggle one foot and tap his knees together beneath the table, a nervous twitch no amount of scotch would cure. The judge was taking his time, the assistant D.A. smirking over a sheaf of papers at her own table off to the right. She wore a permanent self-congratulatory look, this woman, as if she were queen of the court and the county too, and she’d really laid into him before the recess, and that was nasty, purely nasty. She was the prosecution’s attack dog, that was what Jerry called her, her voice tuned to a perpetual note of sarcasm, disbelief and petulance, but he held to his story and never wavered. He was just glad Angelle hadn’t had to see it.

She was here now, though, sitting right behind him, missing school — missing school because of him. And that was one more strike against him, he supposed, because what kind of father would…? — but the thought was too depressing and he let it die. He resisted the urge to turn round and give her a look, a smile, a wink, the least gesture, anything. It was too painful to see her there, under constraint, his daughter dragged out of school for this, and then he didn’t want anybody to think he was coaching her or coercing her in any way. Jerry had no such scruples, though. He’d drilled her over and over and he’d even gone to the extreme of asking her — or no, instructing her — to wear something that might conform to the court’s idea of what a good, honest, straightforward child was like, something that would make her look younger than she was, too young to bend the truth and far too young even to think about getting behind the wheel of a car.

Three times Jerry had sent her back to change outfits until finally, with a little persuasion from the au pair ( Allie, and he’d have to remember to slip her a twenty, a twenty at least, because she was gold, pure gold), she put on a lacy white high-collared dress she’d worn for some kind of pageant at school, with matching white tights and patent-leather shoes. There was something wrong there in the living room, he could see that, something in the way she held her shoulders and stamped up the stairs to her room, her face clenched and her eyes burning into him, and he should have recognized it, should have given her just a hair more of his attention, but Marcy was there and she had her opinion and Jerry was being an autocrat and he himself had his hands full — he couldn’t eat or think or do anything other than maybe slip into the pantry and tip the bottle of Macallan over the flask. By the time he thought of it, they were in the car, and he tried, he did, leaning across the seat to ply her with little jokes about getting a free day off and what her teachers were going to think and what Aaron Burr might have done — he would’ve just shot somebody, right? — but Jerry was drilling her one last time and she was sunk into the seat beside Marcy, already clamped up.

—

The courtroom, this courtroom, the one she was in now, was a duplicate of the one in which her father’s attorney had quizzed her an hour and a half ago, except that it was filled with people. They were all old, or older anyway, except for one woman in a formfitting plaid jacket Angelle had seen in the window at Nordstrom who must have been in her twenties. She was in the jury box, looking bored. The other jurors were mostly men, businessmen, she supposed, with balding heads and recessed eyes and big meaty hands clasped in their laps or grasping the rail in front of them. One of them looked like the principal of her school, Dr. Damon, but he wasn’t.

The judge sat up at his desk in the front of the room, which they called a bench but wasn’t a bench at all, the flag of the state of California on one side of him and the American flag on the other. She was seated in the front row, between Dolores and Allie, and her father and Mr. Apodaca sat at a desk in front of her, the shoulders of their suits puffed up as if they were wearing football pads. Her father’s suit was so dark she could see the dandruff there, a little spray of it like dust on the collar of his jacket, and she felt embarrassed for him. And sorry for him, sorry for him too — and for herself. And Lisette. She looked up at the judge and then the district attorney with his grim gray tight-shaven face and the scowling woman beside him, and couldn’t help thinking about what Mr. Apodaca had told her, and it made her shrink into herself when Mr. Apodaca called her name and the judge, reading the look on her face, tried to give her a smile of encouragement.

She wasn’t aware of walking across the floor or of the hush that fell over the courtroom or even the bailiff who asked her to hold up her right hand and swear to tell the truth — all this, as if she were recalling a fragmented dream, would come to her later. But then she was seated in the witness chair and everything was bright and loud suddenly, as if she’d just switched channels on the TV. Mr. Apodaca was right there before her, his voice rising sweetly, almost as if he were singing, and he was leading her through the questions they’d rehearsed over and over again. Yes, she told him, her father was late, and yes, it was getting dark, and no, she didn’t notice anything strange about him. He was her father and he always picked her sister and her up on Wednesdays, she volunteered, because Wednesdays were when Allie and Dolores both had their day off and there was no one else to do it because her mother was in France.