CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Arrested, I thought.

As in The spread of the disease has been arrested. It was almost possible to twist the words I had heard into good news—except for the way Cindy was destroying the tissue in her hands.

Jack pursed his lips, preliminary to speech. He was going to pick his words with care, charging by the minute.

Then I realized that Dad must have backed the Queen into a sailboat in a neighboring berth, or perhaps he had fallen into one of those webby, legal hazards, an unpaid parking ticket showing up on the computer when a cop gives you a ticket for a broken taillight. But Cindy was braced in the chair, looking across the walnut reflection of the dining table as if it and the rest of the room were all about to vanish. Jack approached me, lifted a hand, and almost let it fall on my shoulder.

“We’ll get it all put right,” said Jack.

I recognized the oddly British phrasing of the legal world, a verbal landscape that has chain-smoking divorce specialists inserting Esquire after their names.

The expression on my face made him change his vocabulary, and even his voice sounded more regular-guy. “This kind of thing happens,” said Jack, standing close to me, but not touching.

“What kind of thing?” I asked, a little surprised that I could make a sound.

Jack turned to Cindy, as if to let her know that he would say nothing, or tell all, it was up to her.

“It’s a misunderstanding,” said Jack. He tilted his head to one side, I can’t talk right now.

“They won’t post bail until Monday,” said Cindy, in an oddly steady voice, despite the trembling fingers she ran through her hair. It was easy to imagine that she had been good at her job, shepherding a law practice.

“He’s in jail for the weekend,” I said, partly to let them know that they could talk to me, I knew my way around. And also as a reality check—I wanted them to say no, of course that’s not what we mean.

“The district attorney planned it this way,” said Cindy in her small, no nonsense voice. “They waited until Friday afternoon to execute the warrant, and he has to spend the weekend in custody. In Santa Rita,” she added. “There’s an injunction against admitting any more inmates to the jail in Oakland because of overpopulation.” She rubbed a hand up and down her forearm as she said this.

I found myself at her side, my hand on her shoulder, the way Jack had almost comforted me. She looked up at me, her eyes blank but steady. Santa Rita jail was far east of Oakland, in a dry valley near a golf course. Cattle grazed and barns gradually decomposed in the heat. I had passed it a few times on the bus, going to swim and dive meets in Modesto and Bakersfield. It appeared to be a very large, somber junior high school, with guard towers.

Jack rested his hand on the back of a chair. “Your father’s always had his critics,” he said.

Crooked building contractors, I thought. Insurance companies who didn’t cough up after a fire. Maybe the DA was a former real estate broker. Maybe some advice Jack had given my father, some legal caper Dad had entered into as a favor for his old friend, had belly flopped.

Jack gave a little shake of his head, wearing an expression of sorrowful innocence, and maybe I had a speck of intuition, too; for some reason I believed him.

I had to sit down, but I didn’t.

I dealt myself a little solace: It would be better than the Oakland jail. Early in his career Dad had handled a few criminal cases, and he had said Santa Rita wasn’t so bad, once they learned to put an automatic suicide watch on men waiting for arraignment. He said that the Oakland cells were rape holes, no place for a human being.

“I’ll make some tea,” I said, and Cindy put her hand over mine, quickly, as though I had said something that shocked her. But it was only sudden gratitude, or her way of saying no thanks.

“Tea would be great,” said Jack, and if I hadn’t been sure that he simply wanted me out of the room for a while I would have been thankful for his bluff heartiness.

But tea was more my mother’s style, what she gave me when I was in bed with a rare episode of flu. Lipton’s was folk medicine to Mom, what you drank when you got bad news on the phone. I don’t think anyone I know really enjoys the taste. When I had dropped pan lids and tea strainers on the floor, found a tin of Twinings Irish Breakfast that had never been opened, I had water on to boil and a set of questions ready to ask.

I was acting the part of a cool, collected lawyer’s daughter. This tea was loose, not the kind that came in bags, and bits of it scattered all over the countertop, all over the floor. Two spoonfuls of tea, or five? I kept the image from my mind, my father sitting on a jail cell cot.

When I wrestled a tray from the cupboard, and had cups, spoons, sugar cubes all arranged, I reentered the dining room. Cindy was on the phone, speaking in a calm, quiet voice, saying their dinner plans had changed, they wouldn’t be needing a reservation tonight.

Jack was combing his hair in the mirror over the fireplace. He was going to say that he had to rush off, that he didn’t want any tea. I could tell by the I’m-out-of-here lean to his body. One glance at me and he said, “Sure, just what I need.” I saw why Dad might enjoy his company.

I used to perform what Mom called “community activities,” reading to women in a nearby nursing home. Mom donated orchids and bromeliads to the convalescent hospital, the place where her own mother had spent the last weeks of her life. I was probably following my mother’s example when I dropped by on Saturday afternoons to read detective novels to white-haired people who shifted in their wheelchairs to catch every clue.

I remember feeling virtuous on the way home from these readings, but only on a honey-sweet, artificial level. On a deeper level, I felt a sickened dismay that a doctor wasn’t trying to do more for these frail women. And I was both entertained and frustrated by the mysteries I read. “Start at the beginning of chapter sixteen,” a voice would quaver, and I would read all of sixteen, and most of seventeen, enough to recognize that the detective was never going to drag the body out of the creek without going to the village for help. But I never found out who had committed the murder, and I never even knew the names of the patients I read to, careful to keep my voice loud and clear.

I didn’t like the way the nurses played up their own good looks and radiant health, wheeling their patients down the hall with such cheer that it seemed disrespectful. I didn’t appreciate the way a nurse would beam at a stroke victim nodding off in her chair, “We’re getting a head start on our nap, aren’t we,” as though dying were a jolly business, a sort of summer camp PE.

I couldn’t stand the way people pretend that everything is great, when it isn’t. I would have called it hypocrisy, but standing there, splashing tea on the coffee-table books. I couldn’t blame any of us for putting on an act. I got some paper towels from the kitchen, moving fast, as though the most serious crisis confronting humanity was the terrible problem of tea stains.

Dad would be advising his fellow inmates on how to beat their DUI raps. He’d be drawing up petitions, wills, playing five-card draw. He’d come out of the county jail with after-dinner stories to last a lifetime.

When I asked, finally, what crime my father was accused of committing, Cindy sat with one finger making a dimple in her cheek, as though I had spoken in Sanskrit, and Jack took a slurp of tea still way too hot.

“It’s complicated,” he said, his eyes on Cindy, as though to get her okay to say more.

“They say he’ll be disbarred,” said Cindy, her voice vague and almost inaudible, like a talk show left on in another room.

My mind jumped this way and that, eager to twist this statement into something worth celebrating. To be stripped of your license to practice law was a disaster much worse than a weekend eating jailhouse jello.

Jack said, “He’s accused of defrauding his clients.”