Free The Year She Left Us by Kathryn Ma Page B

on my phone. If Charlie had awakened and come out of her bedroom, she would have seen flashing light coming from under my doorway as I checked and rechecked to see if WeiWei had answered. But WeiWei didn’t call, and Charlie didn’t come looking, and I couldn’t rise to tap on my mother’s door.

CHAPTER 10
    CHARLIE
    C harlie waited for the conference room door to open. It was four o’clock in the afternoon; she had booked the room for a client meeting, but her boss, Hal Nugent, the public defender, was in there with two senior deputies who handled felonies. She could see them arguing through the smudged glass. Hal’s white shirt was stained and rumpled. Danny and Paula were leaning against the table, Danny drinking from the mug he carried around the office with a picture of his kids holding butterfly nets. Hal stabbed the air and started yelling at Paula, who threw up her hands and yelled right back. The best advocates, Charlie believed, were the ones hard-wired for combat, who brought the fight to the other guy and gave no quarter. She wasn’t that kind of lawyer. In her twenty-three years of being a public defender, she had learned how to raise her voice and when to pound the table, but tenacity, not fireworks, was Charlie’s secret weapon.
    She had realized early on that she would have to figure out how to stand up for herself without imitating the men. It was years ago in a courtroom, before a grumpy law and motion judge. Her supervisor at Legal Aid, a wily lawyer named Marcus with twenty years on Charlie, had brought her along to see how things were done. She stood nervously, ready to speak if asked. The case was routine; the bailiff was yawning, and the courtroom clerk was on the telephone right in front of the bench, but Marcus bulled ahead, loudly complaining, to the enjoyment of the lawyers waiting their turn in the gallery, that the landlord’s attorney was willfully obstructing the process.
    â€œYou’re wasting the court’s time,” the judge said. He glared down at Marcus, ignoring Charlie. “This is a simple matter, and yet you’ve managed to make this file”—he looked over at his bailiff, who was standing close to counsel table—“what is that, Fred, six inches?”
    The bailiff held up the fat file. “Looks like that to me, Judge,” he said.
    Marcus grinned. He muttered just loudly enough for the bailiff to hear. “What do you know about six inches, Fred?”
    Charlie was shocked. Had she heard him correctly? She expected Fred to turn and tell the judge what Marcus had just said. Instead, Fred grinned back and replied with a brief hand motion for Marcus’s entertainment. The judge ruled against them, but Marcus was undaunted. He clapped his hand on the client’s shoulder and sent the guy home with fifty bucks from Marcus’s pocket.
    â€œWhat do you know about six inches?” Charlie tried it out a couple of times in her office. She’d be skewered, probably fired from her job and hauled up for misconduct. She decided to watch and learn from the senior women attorneys, but there were only two, and both of them were vicious. Les, her sister, was in trial all the time, but Charlie couldn’t duplicate Les’s cool command of the courtroom.
    Over the years, Charlie had learned to follow her own instincts. She left Legal Aid and became an assistant public defender, choosing, after a few years, to handle parental abuse and neglect cases. Sometimes she was the kid’s attorney; other times, she represented a mother or father whose kids might be taken away. Where Hal Nugent might bellow and bluster—to good effect; he cowed a lot of opponents—Charlie mastered the details. She would never be a performer. Instead, “I object,” became the essence of Charlie’s practice. What she brought to the game was the strength of her convictions. Stubbornness was her method, and indignation her