“Hey, A,” Zelda Outterson says, sliding into the well-worn seat across from Attalah’s desk. They went to high school together, but the past ten years weigh like twenty on her face.
“How’ve you been, Zelda?”
“You know. Getting through it.”
“That’s all any of us can do.”
Originally, Attalah had planned to use a client as her proxy. She’d ransacked her files, read deep into sordid stories. Assessing the parents she knows are terrible, versus the ones who ended up under the watchful eye of Child Protective Services only because of a messy divorce or a vengeful ex or a racist neighbor with CPS on speed dial. Attalah has access to so much information. For hundreds of parents, she knows precisely how they had failed their children. All their oversights and errors, whether due to ignorance or malice or addiction or sheer dumb blistering bad luck. And she knows the fault lines of hate and rancor between friends and neighbors—who snitched on who, who phoned in false reports. And she has a lot of leeway in the work she does. A huge amount of power over the outcomes of the cases under her purview.
In the end, she realized there was no ethical way to use a client.
And anyway the perfect person has been right under her nose all along.
Zelda Outterson has worked at CPS for five years. One of five people Attalah supervises. She is quiet, and kind, and hardworking. Attalah remembers hearing that she’d had a bit of a bad reputation back in high school, but who hadn’t? All she needs to know about Zelda is, she loves her town and she’s struggling to make ends meet.
“How’s your downstairs neighbor been treating you?”
Zelda rolls her eyes at the perennially sore subject. “That fucking asshole. Every time I fucking watch TV or have one fucking friend over, he’s banging on the ceiling or knocking on my door, asking, Would I please please make less noise? And he’s some rich city fucker, paying three thousand dollars a month, and my rent is a thousand because I been there so long, so you know damn well which one of us the landlord sides with.”
Shouting, from an adjacent office. Shannon Gallo, probably. One of the hottest of the many hot messes on Attalah’s caseload. Three hours late for her appointment, and pitching a fit because they wouldn’t let her in to see Attalah right away.
“And your sister? Where’s she these days?”
“Philmont, like pretty much everybody else who got pushed the fuck out of downstreet.”
Attalah nods and bites back a smile. She can smell it on Zelda: the hate. The anger. So palpable that she feels comfortable scrapping the long and roundabout map she’d charted, for how to bring the conversation around to the Ask. “What if I told you there was something you could do about them? The people jacking up the rents?”
“I’d say I’m not trying to go to jail for murder, and I’m not sure what the fuck you can do about it other than that.”
“I’m working on something,” Attalah says, and leaves it there.
Zelda looks out the window, onto Long Alley. Kids go by on bikes. Someone has spray-painted SATAN’S GOT YOUR NOSE on the door to Mitch Teator’s garage. Eventually she leans forward and says, “‘Something’ sounds a hell of a lot better than the nothing that we’ve been doing.”