Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

I nodded, but I kept my eyes on the road. Francis had a thing about that-he wouldn’t let me drive with the radio on, for example, in case I got too easily distracted.

“I got a question for you, Turk,” he said. I waited for him to ask me how we could get top placement for LONEWOLF in a Google search, or if we could stream podcasts, but instead he turned to me. “When are you going to make an honest woman out of my daughter?”

I nearly swallowed my tongue. “I, um, I would be honored to do that.”

He looked at me, appraising. “Good. Do it soon.”

As it turned out, it took a while. I wanted it to be perfect, so I asked around on LONEWOLF for suggestions. One guy had gotten all decked out in full SS regalia to propose. Another took his beloved to the site of their first real date, but I didn’t think a hot dog stand with gay guys blowing each other in the woods was a terrific setting. Several posters got into a vehement fight about whether or not an engagement ring was necessary, since Jews ran the diamond industry.

In the end, I decided to just tell her how I felt. So one day I picked her up and drove back to my place. “Really?” she said. “ You’re going to cook?”

“I thought maybe we could do it together,” I suggested as we walked into the kitchen. I turned away because I thought for sure she would see how terrified I was.

“What are we having?”

“Well, don’t be disappointed.” I held out a container of hummus. On top, I had written: There are no words to tell you hummus I love you.

She laughed. “Cute.”

I handed her an ear of corn and mimed shucking it. She pulled down the husk and a note fell out: I think you’re amaizing .

Grinning, she held out her hand for more.

I gave her a bottle of ketchup, with a sticker on the back: I love you from my head tomatoes.

“That’s pushing it,” Brit said, smiling.

“I was limited by the season.” I passed her a stick of margarine. You’re my butter half.

Then I opened the fridge.

On the top shelf were four zucchini propped up to form the letter M, three carrots creating an A, two curved bananas: r, r, and a piece of gingerroot: Y .

On the next shelf was a cellophane-wrapped package of chopped meat that I’d shaped into the letters ME .

On the bottom shelf was a squash with Brit’s name carved into it.

Brit covered her mouth with her hand as I dropped to my knee. I handed her a ring box. Inside was a blue topaz, which was exactly the color of her eyes. “Say yes,” I begged.

She slipped the ring onto her hand as I stood. “I was kind of expecting a Hefty twist tie after all that,” Brit said, and she threw her arms around me.

We kissed, and I hiked her up on the counter. She wrapped her legs around me. I thought about spending the rest of my life with Brit. I thought about our kids; how they would look just like her; how they’d have a father who was a million times better than mine had been.

An hour later, when we lay in each other’s arms on the kitchen floor, on a pile of our clothes, I gathered Brit close. “I’m assuming that’s a yes,” I said.

Her eyes lit up, and she ran to the fridge, returning a few seconds later. “Yes,” she said. “But first you have to promise me something. We…” She dropped a melon into my hands.

Cantaloupe .

–

WHEN I COME back from court and walk into the house, the television is still on. Francis meets me at the door, and I look at him, a question on my lips. Before I can ask, though, I see that Brit is sitting in the living room on the floor, her face inches away from the screen. The midday news is on, and there is Odette Lawton talking to reporters.

Brit turns, and for the first time since our son was born, for the first time in weeks, she smiles. “Baby,” she says, bright and beautiful and mine again. “Baby, you’re a star .”

THEY PUT ME IN CHAINS.

Just like that, they shackle my hands in front of me, as if that doesn’t send two hundred years of history running through my veins like an electric current. As if I can’t feel my great-great-grandmother and her mother standing on an auction block. They put me in chains, and my son-who I’ve told, every day since he was born, You are more than the color of your skin- my son watches.

It is more humiliating than being in public in my nightgown, than having to urinate without privacy in the holding cell, than being spit at by Turk Bauer, than having a stranger speak for me in front of a judge.

She had asked me if I touched the baby, and I’d lied to her. Not because I thought, at this point, that I still had a job to save, but because I just couldn’t think through fast enough what the right answer would be, the one that might set me free. And because I didn’t trust this stranger sitting across from me, when I was nothing more to her than the other twenty clients she would see today.

I listen to this lawyer-Kennedy something, I have already forgotten her last name-volley back and forth with another lawyer. The prosecutor, who’s a woman of color, does not even make eye contact with me. I wonder if this is because she feels nothing but contempt for me, an alleged criminal…or because she knows if she wants to be taken seriously, she has to widen the canyon between us.

True to her word, Kennedy gets me bail. Just like that, I want to hug this woman, thank her. “What happens now?” I ask, as the people in the courtroom hear the decision, and become a living, breathing thing.

“You’re getting out,” she tells me.

“Thank God. How long will it take?”

I am expecting minutes. An hour, at the most. There must be paperwork, which I can then lock away to prove that this was all a misunderstanding.

“A couple of days,” Kennedy says. Then a beefy guard has my arm and firmly pushes me back to the rabbit warren of holding cells in the basement of this godforsaken building.

I wait in the same cell I was taken to during the recess in court. I count all the cinder blocks in the wall: 360. I count them again. I think about that spider of a tattoo on Turk Bauer’s head, and how I hadn’t believed he could possibly be worse than he already was, but I was wrong. I don’t know how much time passes before Kennedy comes. “What is going on ?” I explode. “I can’t stay here for days!”

She talks about mortgage deeds and percentages, numbers that swim in my head. “I know you’re worried about your son. I’m sure your sister will keep an eye on him.”

A sob swells like a song in my throat. I think about my sister’s home, where her boys talk back to their dad when he tells them to take out the trash. Where dinner is not a conversation but take-out Chinese with the television blaring. I think about Edison texting me at work, things like Reading Lolita 4 AP Eng. Nabokov = srsly messed up dude.

“So I stay here?” I ask.

“You’ll be taken to the prison.”

“Prison?” A chill runs down my spine. “ But I thought I got bail?”

“You did. But the wheels of justice move exceedingly slow, and you have to stay until the bail is processed.”

Suddenly a guard I haven’t seen before appears at the door of the cell. “Coffee klatch is over, ladies,” he says.

Kennedy looks at me, her words fast and fierce like bullets. “Don’t talk about your charges. People are going to try to work a deal by prying information out of you. Don’t trust anyone.”

Including you? I wonder.

The guard opens the door of the cell and tells me to hold out my arms. There are those shackles and chains again. “Is that really necessary?” Kennedy asks.