13

I spent the next few days in a fog of grief and disbelief. In the South, we have lots of traditions that occupy our hands and minds in the days following a death that allow us to push the real mourning back by at least a week. On the day my dad died, Chris and I finalized the obituary and made plans for the funeral. The next day, Chris and Amanda helped clean the house so we could have a proper reception for family, friends, and well-wishers. Food arrived in massive quantities, as if the house were a staging area for disaster relief rather than the home of a family who had just lost a loved one.

The greatest torture was the two hours I spent in the receiving line at the viewing. The line snaked out the door of the funeral home and seemed interminable. When people finally got to the head of the line to shake my hand and hug Chris, Amanda, and their two girls, they would speak in hushed voices and tell me how sorry they were, as if they might have somehow caused my dad’s death themselves. Everybody was ill at ease, and you could tell there were a million places they would rather be.

Well, not everybody. The few exceptions brightened my night. One was an old law school classmate of mine named Isaiah Haywood. He had always been irreverent, loud, and obnoxious, and he obviously saw no reason to make an exception just because my father had died.

“Thanks for coming,” I told Isaiah. As usual, he had decided to be the best-dressed man at the occasion. He was now working as the in-house attorney for a sports agency and was apparently making enough money to afford five-hundred-dollar suits.

“I would have crawled here across broken glass just to see you in that black dress again,” he said. The comment made me blush. Isaiah had made similar remarks all through law school. I had rebuffed him every time, but that didn’t seem to bother him.

“I really am sorry for your loss,” Isaiah said. “He must have been a great man to raise such a wonderful daughter.”

I leaned in to give him a hug. It was one of the few that I judiciously parceled out that night.

Two days later, we staged a funeral that was attended by a large part of the Atlanta legal community. My dad had been a minor legend. Chris did an amazing job eulogizing him and somehow kept his composure throughout. We tried to make it a celebration of my father’s life, and we generally succeeded. I cried only once, and that was when I saw Chris’s girls, ten-year-old Lola and eight-year-old Sophie, each put a rose on their granddaddy’s casket.

I was touched by the showing from the DA’s office. Bill Masterson was there and had apparently decreed that every person not in trial should show up as well. They occupied two full rows, and it was heartwarming to see the prosecutors paying their respects to a defense attorney who had generally been a thorn in their sides.

By the time the funeral ended, I was drained from the pain and protocol and just wanted to be alone. But that wasn’t possible, because I lived in my parents’ house, where we held the reception. My aunts and uncles all came, along with my closest friends from law school and work. Justice made the rounds, working the crowd for scraps of food and scarfing down anything left on plates that had been abandoned on coffee tables.

When the crowd thinned out, Chris and I started telling stories about our dad, and everyone had a few good laughs.

My friends and relatives cleaned the place before they left, and finally, at eight that evening, I hugged Chris and his family, assured them again that I would be fine by myself, and waved at them from the front porch as they pulled away. When I went back inside, the house was deathly quiet. I felt the loneliness begin to descend and knew I needed a distraction. We had done a wonderful job of honoring my dad at the funeral, and putting that ceremony behind me seemed to alleviate some of the pressure that had been building in my chest. I didn’t believe for a minute that my dad would want me to sit around and wallow in self-pity. His solution to pretty much everything was to work a little harder. And even though Masterson had told me that I should take at least a week off, I was anxious to get back to the office and start wreaking havoc on the bad guys again.

I spent the evening organizing the Rikki Tate materials that I had. I took the burgundy tablecloth and silver candlesticks off our dining room table and spread the case file on it, converting the dining room into my Rikki Tate war room. As I’d hoped it would, the task temporarily took my mind off my loss. I needed to get back into a routine, and I was more determined than ever to see that Caleb Tate got what he deserved.

Justice responded to the uptick in my mood, and we played a game of tug-of-war before we went to bed. That night, for the first time since my dad’s death, I kicked Justice off the bed and made him sleep in his traditional spot on a blanket on the floor.

Jamie Brock was back. And it was time to restore a little discipline.