She was happy to exchange her grown-up, career-day clothes for jeans and one of her Duke Blue Devils basketball T-shirts. Considering how much she and Ben owed the law school, she was surprised they hadn’t been forced to wear sandwich boards until the loans were paid off.
The time was close enough to lunch for her to be hungry, so she ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and half a bag of Doritos while she dialed into the messages on her office phone. Charlie had a court appearance Friday and there was a last-minute motion to be filed. A judge was asking for a brief on a point of law that would not help her client. And because her life wasn’t difficult enough, she had a call from her credit-card company that was likely not a warm thank you for being a v
alued customer.
Charlie searched the filing cabinet and found the previous month’s bill, which, according to her handwritten note on the statement, had been paid a day late, but that didn’t usually warrant a call. They were fifteen hundred dollars away from their limit.
Charlie called Visa on the number from the message. She was searching her wallet for her card when her cell phone rang. She kept her home phone to her ear while she answered the other one.
“Miss Charlie,” Dexter said. “Please don’t hang up.”
“I think you meant to call Carter Grail.”
“Come on, now, don’t be like that. You told me to call the dude.”
“Because you owe me two grand.” Charlie listened to the Visa hold Muzak, a sax rendition of REM’s “Losing My Religion”.
Dexter said, “Lookit, Miss Charlie, I’m’a pay you Tuesday.”
Charlie thought of Wimpy, who was always offering to pay people on Tuesday for a hamburger today, and then she realized that she was still hungry. “Dexter, I’ll be really happy if you pay me, but I can’t give you any legal advice until you do.”
“But, lookit, it’ll help you, too, ’cause like I said, I get paid, then you get paid.”
“I’m not allowed to bargain with you like that. It gives me a vested interest in the outcome of your—shit.” Her Visa card wasn’t in its usual slot in her wallet.
“Miss Charlie?”
“I’m here.” She rifled her wallet, her stomach in free fall until she found the Visa crammed between the dollar bills in the folded part.
The YWCA bathroom. Her purse spilled onto the floor.
Flora must have put the card back in the wrong place.
Dexter said, “I just need you to tell me can I do this thing I’m gonna do, and would I be okay if I didn’t do the thing, like, exactly, because see, the person I’m dealing with, well, shit, let’s just say they don’t play.”
“I can’t negotiate for you in bad faith.” Charlie saw the trap she’d walked into, because now she was giving him legal advice. “I’m not negotiating for you, period, Dexter. I can’t tell you how to break the law. And if I was your lawyer, I couldn’t put you on the stand knowing you were going to lie, and I couldn’t allow you to sign a plea deal knowing that you intend to obfuscate.”
“Obfuscate,” he repeated. “Yeah, I know that word from The X-Files. Did you see that episode? Dude stuck this metal thing up people’s noses and sucked the color outta their skin.”
“Teliko,” Charlie said, because her husband was a geek and they had every season of The X-Files in both VHS and DVD. “Dexter, is there something that I can help you with that won’t involve me breaking the law, or advising you on how to break the law, or wasting the minutes on my cell-phone plan, or all three?”
“Uh…”
Charlie yawned. She suddenly felt exhausted. “Dexter?”
He waited a few more seconds, then asked, “What was the question again?”
Charlie hung up her cell phone.
Static filled the home phone at her other ear. The recording advised her that her hold time to speak with a Visa representative was only sixteen more minutes.
Charlie put the phone back on the hook.
She jammed the Visa bill into her purse for a later follow-up. She looked at the couch and thought about how nice a nap would be. And then she remembered Flora’s situation. Charlie’s calendar was generally full, but she had kept today light because she’d planned on an assortment of eager Girl Scouts wanting to ask her tons of questions about how to make their lives as awesome as Charlie’s. If she was going to figure out how to help Florabama Faulkner, today was the only day she could do it.
She grabbed the Doritos on the way out the door and drove with the bag between her legs, carefully handling the chips, making a mental list of things she needed to do.
First, she would talk to Flora’s grandparents and see if the situation was as bad as the girl claimed. The question of abuse was still unanswered. Maybe Flora had been honest in the bathroom and there was nothing untoward going on. Or maybe she was willing to sacrifice the truth in order to keep her grandfather out of jail. Or maybe Charlie had watched too many made-for-TV movies. Whether it was pills or neglect or abuse, the fact that Flora was actively working to keep her guardians out of jail said a lot about the girl’s character.
Next on the list, she would need to get some idea of Nancy’s living situation. That was the name of the girl whose parents had offered to take in Flora. Charlie had their address courtesy of the list Flora had made at the Y this morning.
The last thing on the list was to talk to Flora’s boss at the diner to make sure the girl was gainfully employed. Or maybe it wasn’t the very last thing. If there was extra time, she could make some calls from home to interview a few of Flora’s teachers. Charlie had cut her teeth working juvenile cases. She knew that teachers saw a hell of a lot more than the average person in a child’s life, even the parents.
That was a lot to fit into one day, but talking to people, sussing out the truth, was the hard part. The rest was just paperwork.
Charlie felt her stomach rumble. She felt sick, but she also felt hungry. She did the math again in her head, reminding herself that her period was due any minute now, that the spotting and the cramping and the soreness in her breasts and the PMS-induced hunger were all pointing to the same damn sign they pointed to every month.
She ate a handful of Dotiros as she passed an open semi-trailer filled with chickens. The chickens stared at her, but Charlie’s thoughts were squarely on what Belinda had said about how being pregnant changed everything.
Charlie supposed that was the point, that things changed when you had a baby, but from what she had noticed, it was like any big life event: either it brought you closer together or it pulled you apart. Ryan, Belinda’s husband, had done a tour in Iraq as some kind of technical support person. So, he’d been in the desert, but not in the middle of combat. For a while, it seemed like he only came home to yell at the television set and make Belinda pregnant. War had changed him. Not just war, but the niggling suspicion that the war he was fighting was more like running in quicksand. The sense of futility was only part of the problem. The other part was the nature of his extended deployments. His long absences had given Belinda time to get used to making all of the decisions. When Ryan came back with different ideas about how things should be run, the tension had spilled over into every aspect of their marriage.
To Charlie’s thinking, their main issue was usefulness. Both Belinda and Ryan wanted to have a purpose, to give their family direction, and both of them were making each other miserable because they couldn’t share the responsibility.
Charlie laughed at her Oprah-esque observation. She had to blame her mother for this line of thinking. Charlie’s childhood had been shaped by her mother’s constant refrain—
If you’re not being useful, then you’re being useless.
Was Charlie being useful? Flora was so eager to carry out the life that her mother had envisioned. Charlie felt that same sense of urgency. Was she honoring her mother? Did her life have purpose?
It sure as hell lacked focus.
She’d been so zoned out that she had passed right by the cinder-block apartments.
“Shi-i-i-it,” she drew out the word as she glanced behind her, catching the two-story building in her side-view mirror. She pulled a wagon wheel of a U-turn across the empty four-lane highway and pulled up at the two-story cinder-block building tucked down in a ravine behind a long stretch of busted guard rail. To her surprise, she saw that the apartments had a name. A discreet sign welcomed visitors to the Ponderosa. Ropes twined around the border in homage to the Bonanza TV show, but this was no place for Little Joe to hang his hat. Unless he wanted to crack open a light bulb and smoke a bowl.
The majority of the parking spaces were filled with beat-up old cars; not a good sign, considering most people should be at work this time of day. She drove to the end of the
parking lot on the off-chance she would see the Porsche that Belinda had told her about, but Charlie’s three-year-old Subaru wagon was the sportiest car around. She took a space near the exit, thinking that was smart in case she needed to make a quick getaway. She remembered what Ben had said about the building being surveilled. It made her feel safer, knowing that some cops, somewhere, were watching her back.
Or, if you looked at it another way, they were watching her go into a place known for drug traffickers and junkies.
Charlie stared up at the sad, squat building. Twelve units total; six on the bottom, six on top. Cinder-block walls painted a dull gray, a rusty railing lining the second story, rotted-out wooden doors with faded plastic numbers, a low roof with a rotting overhang. Every door had a plate-glass window next to it, and every window had a whining air conditioning unit underneath. A steep pathway led to a filthy-looking pool. Unlit tiki torches circled the chain-link fence. The place reminded her of the airport motels her mother had forced them to stay in every vacation because they were cheap and close to mass transportation. Charlie’s clearest memories of Disney World were her night terrors that the wheels of an airplane were going to hit her head while she slept.
“What do you think we’d get in the lawsuit?” her father had asked when she had shared with him the reason for her screaming.
Charlie pulled her purse onto her shoulder as she got out of the car. Hot air hit her like a slap to the face. She was sweating by the time she turned around and locked the car door. The smell of fried chicken, pot and cat urine—which was either from a bunch of cats or from a bunch of meth—stung her nostrils.
According to the Girl Scout roll, the Faulkners resided in unit three on the bottom floor, smack in the center, which was probably the worst of all worlds. Neighbors on each side, always waiting for the other shoe to drop upstairs. As she walked across the parking lot, she heard the distinct bass of Petey Pablo’s “Freek-A-Leek”.
Earring in her tongue and she know what to do with it…
The music got louder as Charlie navigated the broken sidewalk.
With my eyes rolled back and my toes curled…