Free Just Mercy: A Novel by Dorothy Van Soest Page A

resist, but she didn’t help, either, so it was a challenge for him to hold her up and dry her off while trying to warm her with the soft, thick bath towel at the same time. He half carried her to the bed with her feet dragging along behind, her head pressed against his chest. He laid her down and pulled the sheet over her. She sighed and he felt the warmth of her breath in his ear.
    “It’s not over,” she said.
    He kissed her cheeks and her eyelids, then caressed her head until a change in her breathing assured him that she had fallen asleep. He ached to have her back as his lifelong companion, the one person in the world he had always been able to count on. He felt as desperate as if he’d lost her for good—until he reminded himself that she had reached her limits like this once before, but that the day had come when he arrived home from the university to a house that no longer reeked of disinfectant. Just as she had come to her senses then, she would come to her senses now, too, once she got some rest. He tucked the covers up around her neck and tiptoed from the room.

TEN
    Annamaria was beside herself. Dad kept telling her to call back later, but now their phone didn’t even ring when she tried. Probably disconnected. She could just see the newspaper reporters all over this, pestering her folks to death. But what the hell was she supposed to do? She had to talk to someone, now, someone in the family. Fin would have to do. He wouldn’t see things her way—he never did—but at least she could count on him to listen.
    “You are not to talk to strangers under any circumstances,” she said to Patty after a heated argument over whether Patty should come with her to Fin’s house or go to the mall with her friend Kitty instead. “Call me every hour, do you understand? Every hour.”
    With a final warning, she dropped Patty off at the mall and then headed for the freeway.
    “God, I hate this road,” she grumbled as she steered her car around the broken pieces of asphalt in the merge lane.
    I-35 was notorious for its confusing exits and entrances and its poor condition, but mostly Annamaria hated it for what it symbolized: the duplicity of the politicos who built it right down the middle of Austin to avoid the 1960s’ school-desegregation mandates. Now, four decades later, the neighborhoods east of the freeway—where most of the black, Hispanic, and poor people still lived—served as receptacles for the city’s growing pollution and waste. Because she and Fin agreed about this, it was unfathomable to her why he—or anyone else, for that matter, with the means and any common sense—would choose the east side’s untended potholes and dusty streets over the west side’s prolific live oak and pecan trees.
    But that was just what Fin insisted on doing. Two years ago, when he first came up with the harebrained idea of buying a small fixer-upper on the east side, she’d done her best to talk him out of it. But, of course, he wouldn’t listen.
    “People should live near their jobs,” he had said. “I can walk to school this way, see the kids I work with around the neighborhood, play soccer with them, watch out for them, talk to their parents at the corner grocery store.”
    Well, that’s my brother , she said to herself as she navigated the confusing exit off the freeway. She did give him credit for choosing to live near the Eastside Café, the upscale restaurant popular with westsiders like her who enjoyed strolling through the prolific organic gardens out back after a gourmet lunch before heading back to their cushy jobs on the other side of the freeway.
    Also to his credit, Fin had transformed the ramshackle house into an elegant home, all done on the cheap with the help of flea markets and friends’ cast-offs. The outside, royal blue with rust-red trim, was too garish for Annamaria’s taste. But she had to admit that his little house, right down to the name Casa Azul—painted above the front door, in