Free Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories by J. Robert Lennon

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    When the trial was over, members of the jury expressed their disgust with the witness, whom they characterized as irresponsible at best, and at worst guilty of some sort of crime himself. The foreman, who had been sitting closest to the witness during the trial, even confessed to a desire to physically harm him, and said that he would have done so had the two not been separated by the walls of the jury box and witness stand.

4. Work and Money
    In the pocket of a pair of long-forgotten pants I was preparing for donation to Goodwill, I found a ten-dollar bill. This pleased me until I realized that the bill was worth far less than when I put it into my pocket, many years ago. As a gift to my future self, and in a bet against inflation, I added a second ten-dollar bill to the pocket, and replaced the pants in the back of my closet.

Sixty Dollars
    All the money I ever found, I found during the same year, in the same town, at exactly the time I most needed it, when I had little income and few prospects for more. I was working part-time at a supermarket and living in a large house with four other recent college graduates, where we subsisted primarily on pasta and beans and cheap beer, and I had begun to pine for a better life, free from incessant worry about my expenses, which at the time included a large credit card debt and a substantial student loan.
    The first time I found money, I was walking over a bridge and stopped to gaze down on the river below. After doing so, I happened to look at my feet and noticed that I was standing on a twenty-dollar bill.
    The second time, I went into a bank to withdraw twenty dollars from my savings account and saw a twenty-dollar bill lying on the floor. Since the bank had just opened and no other customers were around, I kept it.
    The third time, I checked a book out of the library and found twenty dollars pressed between the pages.
    Though the sixty dollars might have had the power to change my life—I could have quit my dead-end clerk’s job and found something worthwhile—I squandered each of the twenty-dollar bills on expensive restaurant meals. In fact, all three of the meals came out to more than twenty dollars, so I ended up spending money of my own that I would otherwise have saved. I seemed to believe that since the money had been found, not earned, it would somehow be taken from me if I didn’t spend it fast. But the result was that I developed a taste for good food and drink, and my near-poverty became all the more difficult to bear.
    I now recognize this year as a turning point, but whether it was for the better or the worse remains unclear.

The Pork Chop
    My father managed apartment buildings for a living, and every June, when the university students left town, he went through each vacated apartment to clean and repair it for the coming school year. Often he found items left behind: radios, shower supplies, an electric typewriter with the price tag still on it. These things would be given to my sister and me, or, in the years after we moved out of the house, sold at an annual yard sale.
    Among the tasks on my father’s list was to defrost and wipe clean the refrigerators and freezers. In those days, most freezers tended to accumulate furry mounds of rock-hard ice, which had to melt before my father could complete the job. Consequently, he would spend one day removing all the moldy food, and then the next cleaning the kitchens and their defrosted refrigerators.
    Entering an apartment one cleaning day, my father was overwhelmed by a terrible odor. He reasoned that it could not be coming from the refrigerator, as he had purged it of food the day before, so he searched elsewhere—under the oven, inside the cabinets, down the heating ducts—for the dead mouse or squirrel he figured was the source of the smell. Eventually, doubting his memory, he checked the refrigerator once more, and that is when he found the pork chop.
    It had been sitting in a plastic bag, sealed into a