Free House Rules by Jodi Picoult Page A

the one who filed the lawsuit. That honor belongs to Buff (short for Buffalo, and I swear I am not making this up) Wings, a three-hundred-pound motorcyclist who was riding his vintage Harley down a road in Shelburne when a gigantic rogue pig wandered off the side of the road and directly into his path. As a result of the accident, Mr. Wings lost an eye something he showed the jury at one point, by lifting up his black satin patch, which of course I objected to.
    Anyway, when Wings got out of the hospital, he sued the owner of the land from which the pig wandered. But it turned out to be more complicated than that. Elmer Hodgekiss, the owner of the pig, was only renting the property from a landlord who lived down in Brattleboro an eighty-year-old lady named Selma Frack. In Elmer‘s lease was a direct clause that said no pets, no animals. But Elmer defended his forbidden pig keeping (and his equally subversive chicken keeping for that matter) on the grounds that Selma was in a nursing home and never visited the property and what she didn‘t know wouldn‘t hurt her.
    I was representing Selma Frack. Her caretaker at the Green Willow Assisted Living Facility told me that Selma picked me out of the phone book because of my Yellow Pages ad:
    Oliver O. Bond, Esquire, it read, with a graphic that looked like 007‘s gun except it was OOB, my initials. When you need an attorney who won‘t be shaken OR stirred.
    Thanks, I said. I came up with that myself.
    The caretaker just stared at me blankly. She liked the fact that she could read the font. Most of them lawyers, their print is too tiny.
    In spite of the fact that Buff Wings wanted Selma‘s insurance to cover his medical bills, I had two strikes in my favor.
    1. Buff Wings‘s convoluted argument was that Selma should be held responsible even though she (a) didn‘t know about the pig, (b) had expressly banned the pig, and (c) had evicted Elmer Hodgekiss as soon as she learned that he had loosed his killer pig on the general populace.
    2. Buff Wings had chosen to represent himself.
    I had trotted out experts to refute Wings‘s claims about damages both emotional and physical. For example, did you know that there is a guy from Ohio who actually is an expert on driving with one eye? And that in almost all states you can continue to drive even a motorcycle as long as your other eye has 20/20 vision? And that in certain circumstances, the term blind spot can be politically incorrect?
    After the judge had ruled in our favor, I followed Selma and her caretaker to the elevator at the courthouse. Well, the caretaker said, all‘s well that ends well.
    I glanced down at Selma, who‘d been asleep for most of the proceedings. It‘s all fun and games till somebody loses an eye, I replied. Please extend my congratulations to Mrs. Frack on her victory in court.
    Then I ran down the stairs to the parking lot, punching my fist in the air.
    I have a hundred percent success rate in my litigation.
    So what if I‘ve only had one case?
    Contrary to popular belief, the ink is not still drying on my bar certificate.
    That‘s pizza sauce.
    But it was an honest accident. I mean, since my office is above the town pizza joint, and Mama Spatakopoulous routinely blocks my ascension on the staircase to thrust a plate of spaghetti or a mushroom-and-onion pie into my hands, it would be downright rude to turn her down. Coupled with that is the fact that I can‘t really afford to eat, and turning away free food would be stupid. Granted, it was dumb of me to grab a makeshift napkin from a stack of papers on my desk, but the odds of it being my bar certificate (as opposed to my recent Chinese take-out order) had been pretty slim.
    If any new clients ask to see my bar certificate, I‘m just going to tell them it‘s being framed.
    Sure enough, as I am headed back inside, Mama S. meets me with a calzone. You gotta wear a hat, Oliver.
    My hair is still dripping wet from my shower at the high school locker room.