Such a Pretty Face (20 page)

“Mr. Atherton,” Crystal said, voice weak, but still combative, that awful bitch, “you can’t prove that the lack of oxygen was what caused this. We’ve discussed this before—”

“Ms. Chen?” Mr. Atherton said. “Get the hell out before I throw you out.”

“But—” Crystal was rattled. How dare a plumber speak in this tone to her! She was Crystal!

“There’s no buts,” Mr. Atherton said. “You’re here, you’ve seen our son, and I don’t want you in our home. Go back to your firm and tell all the attorneys we’re not liars, we’re not trying to screw the hospital, not trying to pad our wallets, not trying to get rich over our kid’s ‘minor’ health condition. Tell them the truth, but leave my home immediately.”

I turned to go but looked back once at Danny, his head lolling about, his body weak.

He was smiling. He was smiling and angelic and sweet.

He couldn’t eat on his own. He couldn’t pee on his own.

And we were defending the hospital.

Crystal and I drove back in silence to Portland. She was nervous, agitated. I thought it was because she was as upset as I was about Danny Atherton.

Watching a young boy struggling to
be
a young boy, struggling to live, well, it rips your heart out, slings it around, and smashes it against the walls of your own protective shell until you want to curl up in a ball and cry your insides out. At least, that’s how I felt. I snuffled and cried half the way back to the office. I thought I had a problem being so obese, missing out on life, feeling exhausted and sick from my diabetes and hyper-tension, but that was nothing. At least I was alive. I could see outside my window. I could go to work. I could speak and go to the bathroom.

I had spent so many years focused on me, and how miserable I was as a fat person, how isolated and lonely.

I was ashamed. Absolutely ashamed. Give me all of my weight back plus some and it would be only a miniscule bit of the heartache the Athertons were experiencing.

When we got out of the car in the parking lot across the street from the office, Crystal slammed the door, her high heels clicking as we crossed the street to our building, dodging oncoming cars.

“We can’t get that kid into court or we’ll be toast,” she declared. “He’ll have all the jurors crying. You never know what kind of uneducated, blue-collar saps you’ll get on a jury. We have to lowball them and settle the case. Pronto. But first we have to bury their attorneys in papers and make the Athertons’ life hell. Total hell. As soon as they’re worn out, can’t take it anymore, then and only then will that family be ready to settle. You see, people want to get on with their lives. They’re angry and upset for a while and they’re all fired up. They want justice, they want fairness, they want their stupid day in court. It’s our job to dismantle them until they’re left gasping on the floor begging for mercy.”

I have tried not to be shocked by Crystal. It doesn’t work.

“Crystal, I can’t believe you want to make Mr. and Mrs. Athertons’ lives more hellish than they already are. Offer them a fair settlement—”

“Steve, I know this is a little hard to understand without a law degree, without a college degree, I get it. Okay? But this is war. I’m not in this case to do some half-assed job. I’m in it to win it, no matter what it takes. We’re not the ones having financial problems, they are. We can wait them out until they’re eating their grass they’re so poor. I can wait until the moon freezes over if I have to. They want this settled so they can spend time with their son, pay off some bills, and figure out the rest of their lives dealing with…dealing with…
him.
” She spat out the word
him
as if Danny were a thing. “I can do it.
I will do it.
”

“What you’ve offered isn’t enough—”

She whipped around and glared at me, two inches from my nose. “It is enough; it’s more than enough. I’m going to be a partner at Poitras and Associates, and this case is going to get it for me. Now get out of my way, Steve.”

Her heels tapped on the floor to the banks of elevators.

“You have boxes and boxes of papers to get through. I suggest you get to work,” she called over her shoulder.

“I’ll take the next elevator up,” I said.

“Suit yourself, but be at your desk in five minutes.”

The elevator doors shut behind her, and I leaned against a wall, breathing hard, the image of Danny in his bed and his grieving parents stuck in my head.

I wiped tears off my cheeks.

The only good thing about seeing someone in a heart-wrenching position is that it makes your problems appear to be nothing, because, usually, they are. Somebody, billions of somebodys, always have it worse than you on this planet. Always.

They certainly did in the Atherton house.

I did not even attempt to stop the tears that flooded my hot eyes with my shaking hands.

The moral question of working on the Atherton case became paramount to me.

If I was working this case with attorneys who were trying to work out a fair settlement, given this terrible tragedy, and the hospital’s fault in this, I would be okay with it. Being a legal assistant isn’t always pleasant, but it’s my job.

This was different.

This was Crystal Chen, on full-blast, vengeful, fighting, warrior mode. When she said she would smash the family, she would. She was making it personal, and she was attacking them with the full force of her rigidly ambitious, cold personality.

That
I had a problem with.

I pondered all the boxes of paperwork, files, folders, exhibits, and so on, of the Atherton case by my desk.

Endless amounts of stuff.

And somewhere in there Crystal wanted an e-mail from Dr. Dornshire. Desperately. Why did she want it? What did it say?

Yoo-hoo, Dr. Dornshire? Where are you?

Ashville, Oregon

G
randma always took me with her to the city council meetings she presided over as mayor of Ashville.

“Women do a better job of leading than men, sugar, don’t forget that. When you’re older, it’ll be common practice for women to be running or owning many companies. They’ll be ambassadors, professors, heads of law schools, the president of the United States. Most men, excluding your grandpa, don’t have half the working brain cells women do, and most of their brain cells have the words ‘I am selfish’ imprinted on them. They think of themselves first, second, and third. Don’t forget I told you that.” She held her hand up. “Praise the Lord for your grandpa.”

I held my hand up the same way. “Praise the Lord.”

“Praise Mary and Joseph, but especially praise Mary,” Grandma said. “If you want something done right, ask a woman. Now take Mary. She gave birth, as a teenager, in a stable, after riding on a donkey.”

“Praise the Lord for Mary.” I raised my hand again. “And praise the Lord for giving Mary a good donkey.”

“And praise the Lord, the next time Jesus comes, do not send wise men bearing impractical gifts.”

“Praise the Lord, no bad gifts.”

At the council meetings, everybody called Grandma different names, depending on their relationship with her. She was Mayor Glory, Mrs. Glory, or honey, depending on which one of her family members was present and wanted to make a point. Great-Aunt Chari called her Darlin’ Girl. Second Cousin Twice Removed Ed Shantal called her Boot Kicker, in all seriousness, and her great-niece Tally, a born-again Christian, called her Aunt Glory Be to God. I’m told that before Helen sang naked on stage she would stand up and argue with her mother. “Momma, I don’t understand why we can’t…Momma, we need more money for…Momma, I don’t agree with you….”

Grandma also had a few council members up there with her. Two were women. One was a Latina woman named Connie Santiago, who was kind and sweet and could recite the federal, state, and local laws for you, verbatim, paragraph after paragraph, and often did.

And there was Evie Webster, who had a white mother and a black father, and owned tons of acres on the farm bordering ours. She bred race horses. Evie had straight black hair with gray streaks running through it. She was tough, smart, and had the word
compassion
running through her veins. Grandma had told me that.

There were two white men. One was Cason Phillips. He had seen action in World War I and World War II. Nothing fazed him and he was sharp as a whip.

There was also Devon Wilts, a shy young man who was a whiz of an accountant and could add, subtract, and multiply numbers in his head. “He’s a genius,” Grandma told me. “Don’t forget it.” He was Grandpa’s top money man.

And my grandma? She ran a tight ship. Those council meetings had an agenda, and the agenda was followed. People had their time to speak, but there were rules. 1) Three minutes each. 2) Be polite and cordial. 3) No shooting of firearms. Ever. 4) Stay for the potluck dinner and dessert. Remember to label any food if there’s nuts. Frankie’s boy is allergic.

(Frankie’s boy was in his twenties when I knew him, but the rule stood.)

To remind the townspeople of appropriate behavior, there was a bow and arrows on the wall behind Grandma. She was an expert, taught by her daddy, who was taught by his daddy, and up and up the line. Fact was, she won each year in the bow and arrow competition on the Fourth of July. Grandma won for best shot. She’d been mayor for years and someone hung the bow and arrows up as a joke saying, “Don’t mess with Glory or she’ll shoot ya.”

It was only partly a joke.

One time three farmhands, their huge cowboy hats, and their flaming attitudes came to a meeting. They had clearly been tipping the bottle and they were shocked to see a woman mayor up there, and I don’t know what hole or what time machine they’d crawled out of, but they didn’t appreciate what they saw. They decided to test the authority of my grandma. They were rude, they talked out of turn, and they were clearly disrespectful of others, catcalling and sighing.

After they groaned and scoffed at eighty-five-year-old Maybelline Terrace, who wanted a giant, gated cat run built in the city park and who asked the council once a year to do just that, Grandma warned them a second time. “That’s it. One more outburst of uncouth and demeaning behavior, and you will leave. You will pretend you are civilized people, gentlemen.”

They scoffed. They leaned back. They were tough guys.

A woman, a single mother named Joey Whitefeather, stood up and said she hoped that Madame DePuis was going to teach ballet again this summer. Her son had loved the classes last summer.

Well, I’ll be darned if those three tough guys didn’t laugh out loud. No one else joined them. We all knew Skate Hutchings, anyhow. He was a star basketball and baseball player. He ballet danced, too. What the hell.

“Gentlemen,” Grandma said, politely, as if she was serving tea. “I believe I will excuse you from our presence at this time.”

The men were clearly baffled by that language.

“What? What’d that broad say?”

“I said, gentlemen, you may leave now. Thank you for joining us.”

“I don’t get this broad. All polite. Is she telling us to leave? She think she can do that?”

“Yeah, right. Who’s gonna make us leave? We got a right to be here with Catwoman and with the dancing ballet boy.” They snickered again. “Does the boy like boys?”

“I think I got me a Doberman that can help run your cats, lady,” he said to Maybelline.

“Would you three please stand in the aisle for me?” Grandma asked, smiling.

“Why sure, pretty lady,” one said. “I need more room anyhow. I’m damn squished here.” He grinned, meanly, so meanly, at Florence Shing, who was a heavy woman. Florence ran the food pantry in town that families could go to when times got tough. She and her husband were multimillionaires. He had invented some farm machinery. He and Grandpa went fishing all the time. Grandma volunteered with Florence.

“We need a man to run this meeting,” one of the cowboys announced as they went into the aisle. “She think she the damn-tootin’ boss of me?”

“Stupid to have women up there.” That cowboy smashed his hat back on his head. “This is men’s business. They got no sense to run this.”

“Women. They all gotta be in charge but they ain’t got the brain mash to do it. It’s insultin’ to have a woman up there.”

People later said that it was a good thing my grandpa wasn’t there, because he would have “beaten the brain mash out of all of them.”

So those three men were in the middle of the aisle, and Grandma called out, “Now, Uncle Danny and Bethie and Cousin Cal and Cousin Michael, you all clear out back there, will you?”

They laughed, and they moved. The only people who didn’t know what was going on were those three semidrunken cowboys.

They stumbled into the aisle, hands on their hips. They were cocky, arrogant, obnoxious.

“Hello, gentlemen,” Grandma said graciously. “My goodness, I can see you better now. I need you to apologize to the good people of Ashville for disrupting this meeting. We treat each other respectfully here and with kindness. We agree to disagree and we respect each other’s opinion. This town has run well for 130 years by following these rules.”

“I ain’t agreed to those rules,” one said, moving his tobacco wad from one cheek to the other.

“Me, neither. And I didn’t vote for no woman. Why we got three women up there? One white, one blackish, one Mexicani. What the hell’s this?”

“Politics is a man’s job. You women need to get in the kitchen and stay there. And I ain’t followin’ the rules of a town with a color wheel runnin’ it.”

Oh, now, that did not go over well.

There was no rule against guns inside the council chambers, you just couldn’t shoot them off. A number of people had their guns out whippety snip who were none too slow on the trigger. I knew this because a bunch of them were my relatives and they had hair-trigger tempers. Ran in certain lines of the family, that’s what Grandpa said.

“Oh, now, now,” Grandma said, smooth as silk, gentle lady. “You put those guns away. I’ll take care of things. Come on, now, Grandpa Thomas. Put that away.”

“You gonna handle this, Glory Be?” Grandpa Thomas croaked. He’d been in World War I and II, too. He was Cason’s brother.

“I am.” She eyed the three obnoxious cowboys. “Now, Grandma Lacy, you put that gun away, too.”

“But they’re shitheads,” Grandma Lacy said. She’s hard of hearing so the words binged around that room pretty good.

“Yeah, they’re shitheads,” Grandpa Thomas said. He couldn’t hear too good, either.

“Shut up, old man…shut up, old woman,” one cowboy said.

Grandma stood up. “I am done being polite. Excuse me to all of you good townspeople for my language, but you three need to get the hell out now.”

I could tell that her temper had been tripped. Grandma never swore.

“You can’t tell me what to do, little lady,” one cowboy said as he spit on the floor. The other two followed suit with the spitting.

The outrage in that room was not lost on me.

“All right then, gentlemen, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

And, with that, Grandma slipped that bow and those arrows off the wall, and before you could say, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” again, she whooshed, whooshed, whooshed, and she shot off their cowboy hats. The arrows stuck in the wall behind them.

Then she pulled that bow back again and said, “Boys, you get on out of here right now or the next one’s going right through those teeny, tiny dicks of yours. Excuse me again, good people of Ashville, for my coarse language.” She whizzed on down the aisle, bow and arrow ready to rip. “None of you gentlemen appear very big in that department, so I’m going to have to get closer and aim careful, but I assure you that I will not miss, even when I’m hitting something the size of a toothpick.”

Well, that seemed to be some sort of sign, because those townspeople, many of them our relatives, got their guns out
again
and darned if those cowboys weren’t surrounded.

“Oh, shit!” one of them muttered.

“Shit yourself,” Joey Whitefeather said. “You made fun of my boy, you ball-less wonders.”

“Yeah, shit yourself,” Grandma Lacy shouted. “I said you’re shitheads, not just shits.”

“Damn right. You’re shitheads, not just shit. There’s a difference,” Grandpa Thomas said, and then he did what he was not supposed to do and he got suspended for a full town meeting and was not allowed in until dinner and dessert time.

Grandpa Thomas shot off his gun into the ceiling. Three times.

Those cowboys. They tried to force their way through a crowd of pushing, pissed-off townspeople, but they couldn’t. My relatives don’t back down.

“One moment, please. I forgot something. I believe, kind sirs,” Grandma said, bow and arrow still pointed, “that you all left your spit on our floor. Now you get that up, right this minute.”

The cowboys were baffled. Pick up their spit?

“I…I…can’t. I don’t got a napkin.”

“No problem,” Grandma said. “We’ll help you. Pally and Cousin Marie and Grandpa Kenneth?”

All three were huge. Cousin Marie won the hog-tying competition every year, and Grandpa Kenneth had been in the army, and Pally was built like a tractor, and they tackled the cowboys in a lick of a second and they helped all three of those cowboys to pick up their spit with both their cheeks. The face cheeks, not the butt cheeks.

Grandma examined the floor. “I think they’ve got it.” She raised her bow again and pointed it at one cowboy’s crotch. “Such a tiny target.” She sighed. “Praise the Lord, I hope I don’t miss.”

Well, the cowboys turned around and flew out into the night.

The town requisitioned their hats and hung them up above the bow and arrows with nails. Above it, someone later made a lovely, hand-painted sign, complete with flowers, our white Schoolhouse House, and a garden. The saying across the middle was, “Don’t mess with Glory.”

The only problem was that Grandpa Thomas had to miss the town council meeting the next time. He protested his suspension twice. Grandma and the council did not give in. No guns could be shot inside council chambers. That was a rule. (There was no rule about arrows.)

He could, however, attend the potluck dinner and dessert after the meeting.

So saddened was Grandpa Thomas that he could not attend the next council meeting that he sat on the steps and played woeful songs on his harmonica the whole time, which we all heard.

Grandma said it added a “haunting, mystical moment” to the meeting, and she thanked him later for it.

He hugged her. Then apologized. “I’ll try never to shoot my gun off again, Glory Be, and I apologize for it. My temper got a hold of me as the devil did in my youth, and I couldn’t get a lasso around it.”

“Don’t you worry none,” Grandma said. “Now, come on down. Ramon has made his marionberry pie and you know it’s the best pie ever.”

And that was that.

Grandpa Thomas didn’t shoot off his gun for one full year.

Church seemed to calm Helen down, and we went every Sunday and sat with The Family.

Sometimes Helen sat quietly, but sometimes she didn’t. She took to preaching a couple of sermons herself. “Everyone here: They’re after you. They’re everywhere. We’re all being watched! Not by God, but by them. They are here. They are among you. Watch out!” she shouted. “Watch out!”

Thankfully, she would then settle back into her seat and go back to her incessant turning of Bible pages and not speak again. Several people commented that it was so kind that Helen was trying to warn us all of impending danger.

The minister knew he could go on without further interruption of his sermon. This did not extend to the singing part of the service.

During singing time Helen would wait until the choir was finished, as if they were the prelude to her act. With the exception of “Amazing Grace,” which brought everyone to tears because Helen ended up crying through the “save a wretch like me” line, her songs were almost always show tunes, and she did a beautiful job, I will admit, even though it was humiliating each time. Grandma tried to stop her, but that made things worse, and Helen would have to start all over again. She usually patted Grandma on the nose first. “Pipe down, chicken,” she’d whisper, then burst back into song.