The Proviso (5 page)

“
Thank you, baby. Cows three and four need to be
milked yet.”

Libby McKinley didn’t see any reason to name any
animal that provided food, money, or clothes. The dogs had names
because Justice’s father had insisted, but the barn cats didn’t.
The only animal Justice had been allowed to name was her own cat,
Pontificate. She hadn’t known what that word meant at the time, but
thought it a neat word when she’d heard her mother say it to her
father.

He hadn’t known what it meant, either, so he’d
stormed out of the house.

A week after Justice had heard her mother singing
sad songs in the barn, she had almost tumbled over into sleep when
she felt the familiar depression of the bed. Her mother snuggled up
to her and it only vaguely occurred to Justice that she had been
sleeping with her a lot more lately.

“
Iustitia,” whispered her mother in the dark of
her room, her body warm and soft against her, “you have no idea how
badly I want you off this farm.”

Justice didn’t understand that. She loved the farm,
the work, the chores, even the animals, though her mother didn’t
know she thought of some of them as pets. “Why, Mama?”

“
Because this is not the place for you. You have
a keen mind and I want you to use it for something besides
mindless, endless chores. You’ll be old before your time.”

“
I don’t understand.”

“
Of course you don’t and you won’t until you’re
stuck where I am. I want you to remember this, Iustitia. I want you
to remember that I wanted you educated, off this farm, doing
something grand and making a mark in the world. That I wanted you
to have a philosophy and stick with it, believe in it, even if it’s
not mine.”

That struck Justice as a funny phrasing. “What do
you mean, ‘wanted’?”

“
Do you know how old I am?”

Of course she did. Everyone knows that about their
parents. “Twenty-three.”

“
Yes. Do you know how old your father
is?”

“
Forty-one.”

“
Do the math, Iustitia. How old was I when you
were born?”

Justice gulped. She would be fourteen in five years.
Did that mean . . . ?

“
That’s right. I don’t want that for you. I want
you to understand that having children when you’re young is a
trap—not that I regret having you because I love you dearly and I
wouldn’t trade you for a seat in the Senate—but I want you to make
a name for yourself, something grand and wonderful. The earlier the
better. Promise me this.”

Justice didn’t understand her sense of urgency, her
insistence. Thinking back, everything her mother ever did or said
had paved the path to this moment.

Something bad was going on.

“
What is it, Mama? What’s happening?”

“
I don’t know, Iustitia. I just— I don’t feel
well. I need you to remember this and remember that I wanted you to
get an education, to leave here. Whatever you do, do
not
be
stupid like I was and let a man sucker you. You don’t belong
here.
I
don’t belong here. If I had listened to my father,
well . . . ”

Upon looking at her mother in her casket two years
later, it occurred to Justice that she had never looked prettier or
younger: twenty-five and not a day older than that. Justice had
never seen her like that. The doctors said she had a heart attack,
but Justice didn’t believe that. Twenty-five-year-old mothers
didn’t have heart attacks.

They do if they were born with a heart problem,
one doctor told her bluntly when she had challenged him with an
eleven-year-old’s certainty of medicine.

“
Come, child,” said an old man she had never met,
his hand heavy on her shoulder to steer her away from the rest of
the mourners. “I want to talk to you.”

She wrested away from him. “Who are you?” she
whispered.

“
Your grandfather. Libertas’s—er, your mother’s
father.”

“
I don’t know you.”

“
No, but you will. Perhaps I won’t fail you like
I failed your mother.”

They sat together in a corner, talking. Well, not
conversing: Her grandfather speaking, Justice listening. Absorbing
the things he said, understanding more of what her mother had tried
to teach her, but had not fully understood herself because she
hadn’t had time to before Justice’s father had seduced her, gotten
her pregnant, and been forced to marry her or go to jail.

Justice had known none of this until that
moment.

And at that moment, her father chose to make a
scene, yelling and screaming about what her grandfather had done to
him, and how dare he attempt to glom onto Justice for his own evil
purposes.

But Justice found comfort in her grandfather’s
teachings and so she did chores in the barn and waited until after
her father had gone to bed. Her grandfather would come to her in
the dead of night with books of histories and documents and
theories and fables. The hayloft became Justice’s classroom and her
grandfather her professor.

Then he, too, died and left her with no one but her
father, who didn’t know what she did when he wasn’t looking and
didn’t care—as long as she wasn’t “messing around with books,
because books don’t do nothin’ but put ideas in your head. This is
your home and I’d just as soon you stay here and take care of it
with me.”

“
Okay, Papa,” she whispered, seeing all her
mother’s and grandfather’s hopes burn off like an early-morning fog
in ten o’clock sunshine. “I will.” He was all she had in the world
now.

*

“That’s enough of you,” Justice muttered as she
killed the sad music before her mood tanked. But she had to push
the eject button on the tape deck several times before it would
obey, and her humor gradually worsened each time it refused. She
had very little patience with the thing, preferring instead to play
the mp3 files on her laptop, but the tape player was one of few
precious links to her mother.

Her plan was simple: Fulfill her mother’s and
grandfather’s aspirations for her and still keep her promise to her
father. She juggled so much now that having only one regular job to
work around would be a respite.

She’d wanted to be a prosecutor because her
grandfather thought it a noble profession, but in order to help
with the farm after she got a job, she only had two counties to
choose from: Chouteau and Buchanan. The Clay and Jackson County
seats were too far to drive every day. She had always figured this
reality into her plans and had known nothing about the Chouteau
County prosecutor until that day two months ago, when he had
defended her, validated her, touched her.

Even had she been inclined to think about breaking
her promise to her father, leave the farm, go somewhere else, that
was out of the question now. If the Chouteau County prosecutor
wouldn’t hire her, she’d work in legal aid just to work in
that
courthouse.

I daresay none of you have thought that deeply about
what you want and why you want it.

She swept her fingertips across her chin where
Professor Hilliard had touched her so gently and smiled
dreamily.

She turned on talk radio and knew by the voice
coming out of the speakers that it was four o’clock. If she timed
it right, she could cook all evening to get her week’s orders
filled and write while chili and stroganoff simmered.

Her spirit lightened considerably when she sifted
through the mail and found the latest
National Review.
She
flipped through the pages quickly to find the article she had
written and submitted on a lark, bolstered by one man’s faith in
her opinions.

She had never expected it to be published.

She had also never expected to be asked to write
more.

The water boiled and Justice got to cooking in
earnest. She assembled a plate for her father, who picked it up,
fished a can of beer out of the refrigerator, and walked right back
out of the kitchen without a word.

How long Martin McKinley would pout about her
schooling this time, Justice couldn’t guess. It had taken him three
months into her undergrad for him to speak to her. She shrugged.
Sometimes it bothered her that his silence, intended to punish her,
didn’t bother her.

Two hours later she had enough of a break from
cooking to crack open her laptop, make the rounds of her favorite
political blogs, and post a few comments. Her email chimed.

*

Subject: Come aboard!

Reply-to: [email protected]

Justice,

We’ve been following your comments for a while and
we just read your piece in the National Review. We think you have a
lot of potential as a columnist and we’d like to invite you to
become a permanent contributor at TownSquared.

Let us know!

Cheers,

The TownSquared Crew

*

She gasped. Giggled. Squealed, even. TownSquared was
the biggest conservative blog on the ’net and they wanted
her
to write for
them
?

Very good, Justice.

* * * * *

5:
HOT, LOOSE & CLEAN

APRIL 2005

Giselle put her backpack on a remote corner of her
desk, careful not to dislodge the piles of papers and microcassette
tapes that littered it. She sighed. It just couldn’t happen that
folks would respect her space and the clearly marked IN box she had
set up to reduce just such clutter.

She hated clutter.

After collecting a bottle of water from the fridge,
she set herself to putting her night’s work in order. Not as much
as it looked, once it was in a nice, tidy pile, but it didn’t take
into account the digital dictation on the server. If she finished
early, she could go home to study or, more likely, sleep.

The clock read 4 p.m. when Giselle put the buds in
her ears and began to type. Briefs, pleadings, letters,
contracts—she could do them all by heart. One day, very soon, she
would be the one dictating and not the one transcribing. She
couldn’t wait to get the hell out of this cubicle, which she
resented all the more after having built a business and nurtured it
for so many years—

—only to watch it burn to the ground. Starting over
again at her age and with her background really sucked.

“Thanks a bunch, Uncle Fen,” she grumbled.

Since it was still a half hour before the end of the
workday, the office bustled with secretaries, paralegals, and
lawyers going this way and that. Giselle sat off the beaten path,
but that didn’t stop many attorneys from making pointed detours to
her desk to drop off work, to chat, and every so often, in the case
of the more persistent, to ask her out.

She’d typed for some time before she caught the
sight of an approaching attorney out of the corner of her eye and
sighed. That particular puppy had been hot to trot for a while now.
She had politely declined numerous invitations, but that didn’t
stop him from pursuing her anyway and making himself a general pain
in her ass.

Ralph (who insisted everyone pronounce it “Rafe”)
propped his hip on her desk and waited for her to finish typing a
phrase. Though she would like to ignore him and work, she couldn’t.
If the attorneys wanted to monopolize her time with chitchat, they
could, though it threw her off her self-imposed schedule. It was
now six o’clock. She wanted to leave by midnight.

“What can I do for you, Rafe?” she asked once she
clicked the Dictaphone off, remaining polite but aloof, hoping he
would get the hint.

“Go to the Ford exhibit at the Kemper Gallery with
me on Saturday?”

Ever so thankful her weekends consisted of study
groups, she shook her head. “I have plans this weekend.”

“Ford’s an artist. Have you ever
seen
his
art?” he asked, sly.

She sighed. “Rafe, I really
do
have plans,
but I’ve explained this to you before. I don’t date outside my
faith.” That wasn’t exactly true, but it did provide her a
convenient out.

“Right. How could I forget all about you nice little
Mormon girls?” It was nothing she hadn’t heard before, with the
same contempt, and from more interesting men than Ralph. “I think
that’s just a bullshit excuse.”

Her eyebrow rose. “Oh? So are you saying that I’m
using it as an excuse not to go out with
you
?”

His face hardened just a bit. She knew men’s moods,
so she didn’t miss the change in demeanor. Ralph had always seemed
relatively harmless, but now her annoyance turned to wariness. She
kept her face carefully blank until—

He leaned into her personal space and murmured, “I
could make things very difficult for you here.”

She stared at him a minute before she burst out
laughing. “Is that the best you can do?”

Ralph drew back at that, his surprise evident. His
lips thinned and the rusty cogs in his head ground to come up with
a reply. Giselle chuckled. “I thought so. If you have work for me,
please drop it in my box and I’ll have it done by the time you come
in in the morning.”

His nostrils flared at having been dismissed. “I
don’t think you want to cross me, Miss Cox.”

“Ralph,” she said slowly, pronouncing the “lph”
sound with great precision. Rising from her chair, she closed the
gap between them until her nose nearly touched his. “I am not going
to
fuck
you.” Her husky whisper made his breath shorten.
“Not today. Not tomorrow. Not in a thousand lifetimes.” Adrenaline
pulsed through her arteries even as Ralph’s humiliation visibly
warred with his arousal. “You go on with your threats and
intimidation. Go to Hale. Tell him whatever you like. I
dare
you.” She smirked. “I guarantee you won’t like the
consequences.”