Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

My mother raises her brows. “Kennedy,” she says. “Don’t you think Violet would be happier as Cinderella? Or Rapunzel? Or even that new one with the white hair who makes everything ice over?”

“Elsa?” I fill in. “Why?”

“Don’t make me say it out loud, sugar,” my mother replies.

“You mean because Tiana’s black?” I say. Immediately, I think of Ruth Jefferson, of the white supremacists booing in the gallery.

“I don’t think Violet is making a statement about equality as much as she is about frogs. She told me she’s going to ask for one as a pet for Christmas and kiss it and see what happens.”

“She’s not getting a frog for Christmas. But if she wants to be Tiana for Halloween I’ll buy her the costume.”

“I will sew her the costume,” my mother corrects. “No grandbaby of mine is going trick-or-treating in a store-bought piece of trash that would probably go up in flames if she walked past a jack-o’-lantern.” I don’t fight her on this. I can’t even sew a seam. I have a pair of work trousers in my closet that are hemmed with superglue.

“Terrific. I’m glad you can overcome your resistance in order to make Violet’s dream come true.”

My mother lifts her chin a notch. “I did not tell you this so you could scold me, Kennedy. Just because I grew up in the South doesn’t make me prejudiced.”

“Mom,” I point out. “You had a black nanny .”

“And I adored Beattie like she was family,” my mother says.

“Except…she wasn’t.”

My mother pours more wine into her glass. “Kennedy,” she sighs. “It’s just a silly costume. Not a cause.”

Suddenly I’m so incredibly tired. It’s not just the pace of my job or the overwhelming number of cases I have that wears me down. It’s wondering if anything I do actually makes a difference.

“Once,” my mother says, her voice soft, “when I was about Violet’s age, and Beattie wasn’t looking, I tried to drink out of the colored water fountain at the park. I stepped up on the cement block and turned the knob. I was expecting something extraordinary. I was expecting rainbows . But you know-it was just like everyone else’s water.” She meets my gaze. “Violet would make the most beautiful little Cinderella.”

“Mom…”

“I’m just saying. It took how many years for Disney to give all those little black girls their own princess? You think it’s right for Violet to want something they’ve been waiting on forever?”

“Mom!”

She lifts her hands in concession. “Fine. Tiana. Done.”

I lift the bottle of wine, tilt it up, and drink down every last drop.

–

AFTER MY MOTHER leaves, I fall asleep on the couch with Violet, and when I wake up, The Lion King is being aired on Disney Junior. I blink just in time to see the death of Mufasa playing out on-screen. He is being trampled by the water buffalo just as Micah walks in, pulling off the garrote of his tie with one hand. “Hey,” I say. “I didn’t hear you drive up.”

“Because I am a ninja ingeniously masquerading as an ophthalmological surgeon.” He leans down and kisses me, smiles at Violet, who is softly snoring. “My day was full of glaucoma and vitreous fluid. How was yours?”

“Considerably less gross,” I say.

“Did Crazy Sharon come back?”

Crazy Sharon is a repeat offender, a stalker who has a thing for Peter Salovey, the president of Yale University. She leaves him flowers, love notes, and once, underwear. I’ve done six arraignments with her, and Salovey has been president only since 2013.

“No,” I say, and I tell him about Ruth, and Edison, and the skinheads in the gallery.

“Really?” Micah is most interested in the last. “Like, with suspenders and flight jackets and the boots and everything?”

“Number one, no, and number two, should I be scared that you know all that?” I move my feet on the coffee table so he can sit down opposite me. “In fact, they looked just like us. It’s pretty terrifying. I mean, what if your next-door neighbor was a white supremacist and you didn’t know it?”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Mrs. Greenblatt is not a skinhead,” Micah says. As he talks, he gently lifts Violet into his arms.

“It’s all a moot point anyway. It’s too big a case for me to be assigned,” I tell him, climbing the stairs to our daughter’s bedroom. And then I add, “Ruth Jefferson lives in East End.”

“Hunh,” Micah replies. He settles Vi into her bed and pulls up her covers, dropping a kiss on her forehead.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, combative, even though I had the same sort of reaction.

“It’s not supposed to mean anything, ” Micah says. “It was just a response.”

“What you really mean, but you’re too polite to say, is that there aren’t black families in East End.”

“I guess. Maybe.”

I follow him into our room and unzip my skirt, peel off my panty hose. When I’m wearing the T-shirt and boxers I usually sleep in, I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth beside Micah. I spit, wipe my mouth on the back of my hand. “Did you know that in The Lion King, the hyenas-the bad guys-all speak in either black or Latino slang? And that the little cubs are told not to go where the hyenas live?”

He looks at me, amused.

“Do you realize that Scar, the villain, is darker than Mufasa?”

“Kennedy.” Micah puts his hands on my shoulders, leans down, and kisses me. “There is a slight chance you’re overthinking this.”

That’s the moment I know I’m going to move heaven and earth to be Ruth’s public defender.

I’M GUESSING THIS LAWYER’S PRETTY decent, given how swanky his office is. The walls aren’t painted, they’re paneled. The glass of water his secretary gets me is a heavy crystal tumbler. Even the air smells rich, like the perfume of a lady who would normally shy away from me on a public street.

I’m wearing again today the jacket Francis and I share, and I’ve ironed my pants. I have a wool cap pulled low on my head, and I keep twirling my wedding ring around and around on my finger. I could pass for any ordinary Joe who wants to sue someone, instead of a guy who would normally skirt the legal system and take justice into his own hands.

Suddenly Roarke Matthews is standing in front of me. His suit is ironed with knife-edge pleats, his shoes are buffed to a high gloss. He looks like a soap opera star, except that his nose is a little off-kilter, like he broke it playing football in high school. He holds out a hand to greet me. “Mr. Bauer,” he says, “why don’t you come with me?”

He leads me into an even more imposing office, this one full of black leather and chrome, and gestures to a spot on the love seat. “Let me say again how sorry I am for your loss,” Matthews says, like everyone else does these days. The words have gotten so ordinary in fact that they feel like rain; I hardly even notice them anymore. “On the phone, we talked about the possibility of filing a civil suit-”

“Whatever it’s called,” I interrupt. “I just want someone to pay for this.”

“Ah,” Matthews says. “And that is why I asked you to come in here. You see, it’s quite complicated.”

“What’s so complicated? You sue the nurse. She’s the one who did this.”

Matthews hesitates. “You could sue Ruth Jefferson,” he agrees. “But let’s be realistic-she doesn’t have a pot to piss in. As you know, there’s a criminal prosecution under way that the State has undertaken. That means that if you file a civil suit simultaneously, Ms. Jefferson would ask for a stay of all discovery, so she couldn’t incriminate herself during the pending criminal prosecution. And the fact that you’ve filed a civil suit against her can be used against you in cross-examination during the criminal lawsuit.”