Free The Street Lawyer by John Grisham Page B

for this to sink in. I wasn’t sure what to ask next. He was too busy eating to worry about conversation. I had asked three questions; he’d given three honest answers. They lived in a car.
    I wanted to run and ask Mordecai what you do when you find people who live in a car, but I kept smiling at Ontario. He smiled back. He finally said, “You got more apple juice?”
    “Sure,” I said, and walked to the kitchen, where I filled two cups.
    He gulped one down, and I handed him the second cup.
    “Say thanks,” I said.
    “Thanks,” he said, and stuck out his hand for another cookie.
    I found a folding chair and took a position next to Ontario, with my back to the wall. The basement was quiet at times, but never still. Those who live without beds do not sleep calmly. Occasionally, Mordecai would pick his way around the bodies to settle some flare-up. He was so large and intimidating that no one dared challenge his authority.
    With his stomach filled again, Ontario dozed off, his little head resting on his mother’s feet. I slipped into the kitchen, poured another cup of coffee, and went back to my chair in the corner.
    Then the baby erupted. Its pitiful voice wailed forth with amazing volume, and the entire room seemed to ripple with the noise. The mother was dazed, tired, frustrated at having been aroused from sleep. She told it to shut up, then placed it on her shoulder, and rocked back and forth. It cried louder, and there were rumblings from the other campers.
    With a complete lack of sense or thought, I reached over and took the child, smiling at the mother as I did so in an attempt to win her confidence. She didn’t care. She was relieved to get rid of it.
    The child weighed nothing, and the damned thingwas soaking wet. I realized this as I gently placed its head on my shoulder and began patting its rear. I moved to the kitchen, desperately searching for Mordecai or another volunteer to rescue me. Miss Dolly had left an hour earlier.
    To my relief and surprise, the child grew quiet as I walked around the stove, patting and cooing and looking for a towel or something. My hand was soaked.
    Where was I? What the hell was I doing? What would my friends think if they could see me in the dark kitchen, humming to a little street baby, praying that the diaper was only wet?
    I didn’t smell anything foul, though I was certain I could feel lice jumping from its head to mine. My best friend Mordecai appeared and turned on a switch. “How cute,” he said.
    “Do we have any diapers?” I hissed at him.
    “Big job or little job?” he asked happily, walking toward the cabinets.
    “I don’t know. Just hurry.”
    He pulled out a pack of Pampers, and I thrust the child at him. My denim jacket had a large wet spot on the left shoulder. With incredible deftness he placed the baby on the cutting board, removed the wet diaper, revealing a baby girl, cleaned her with a wipe of some sort, rediapered her with a fresh Pamper, then thrust her back at me. “There she is,” he said proudly. “Good as new.”
    “The things they don’t teach you in law school,” I said, taking the child.
    I paced the floor with her for an hour, until she fell asleep. I wrapped her in my jacket, and gently placed her between her mother and Ontario.
    It was almost 3 A.M., Saturday, and I had to go. My freshly pricked conscience could take only so much in one day. Mordecai walked me to the street, thanked me for coming, and sent me away coatless into the night. My car was sitting where I left it, covered with new snow.
    He was standing in front of the church, watching me as I drove away.

Nine
    S INCE MY run-in with Mister on Tuesday, I had not billed a single hour for dear old Drake & Sweeney. I’d been averaging two hundred a month for five years, which meant eight per day for six days, with a couple left over. No day could be wasted and precious few hours left unaccounted for. When I fell behind, which rarely happened, I would work twelve hours on