Res Judicata (2 page)

She sort of laughed. “You're never going to see a sheriff on the street doing that kind of hands-on stuff.”

It was almost too easy.

I said, “Looked pretty hands-on to me.”

That got her. She scrunched her mouth up so tight it looked like the knot on a balloon. “Listen, mister,” she said. “You can't talk to me that way. I'm still your mother. So you better just
watch...your...mouth
!”

Can you believe her? Me? Watch
my
mouth? She can't see the irony in that? Who's the one who swears like a rap star around here? Who's the one with the three contempt-of-court citations? And, oh yeah—whose mouth was just nuzzling some sheriff ‘s ear?

Exactly.

“I mean it!” she said. “So you better just smarten up. And by the way”—she walked ahead so she wouldn't have to look me in the face—”I have a little something I need you to do. That factum on the Iqbal file has to be written up by tomorrow morning.”

I've got to stop here and explain something.

In case you haven't noticed, Andy's got guts. Not just nerve, gall, gumption, the run-of-the-mill stuff. She's got guts coming out her ears. Not literally—at least most of the time— but you know what I mean.

Sometimes that's good.

For example, that old Mr. Zed guy and his twenty-two cats would be living on the street if Andy hadn't had the guts to take his big fancy landlord to court.

Spotless Drycleaners would still be dumping their not-so-spotless toxins into the harbor if Andy hadn't had the guts to sue them.

And, to tell you the truth, I'd probably be in a foster home today if Andy hadn't had the guts to raise a kid all by herself, go to law school, keep us fed and mostly out of trouble. Emphasis on “mostly.”

But there's the downside to her having guts too.

Like this, for instance. I catch her red-handed with some guy in the middle of the street and she actually has the guts to tell me
I
have to stay in all night and do
her
work.

Please. Like, seriously, I wasn't the one around here who should be grounded.

I suddenly felt like the Incredible Hulk right before he bursts out of his shirt. I totally exploded. I went, “No way, Andy! That's
your
job!”

“It was. Now it's yours.” She made it sound like she was giving me a present.

“How come?!”

“Because I can't do it. I'm busy.”

“And I'm not? Trust me, I've got better things to do than sit home, putting some legal document together for you.”

“Oh. Really? Like what?” She turned and looked at me all suspicious, as if she had just caught me up to no good.

I wasn't going to let her turn the tables on me. It might work for her in court, but it wasn't going to work here.

“No,” I said. “Not a chance. You first. What do
you
have to do tonight that's so important you can't write that factum yourself?”

She fiddled with her rings. She held her hand out and checked her nails. (You'd swear the chipped black polish was just the look she was going for.) She cleared her throat. “Well, there's, ah...”

“No. Stop. Let me guess,” I said. “There's that little, ah,
thing
tonight.”

She started rifling through her purse for her cigarettes. “No!” she went. “It's not that. Why would you think that?
It's just that there's...Oops, sorry. Just wait a sec while I light this...Disgusting habit...I really should...”

I couldn't take it anymore. I went, “Would you quit stalling! We both know you're going out with that guy tonight!”

She looked up from her cigarette. She squinted at me. She licked her fingers and put out the match with this loud
pschhht
. By the look on her face, my guess is she was imagining the match was my head.

I said, “Why don't you get Atula to write the factum for you? She's a lawyer. She's your partner. Ask her.”

She flicked the ash off her cigarette. She looked down the street as if she was suddenly wondering where her bus was or something. She went, “I'd rather not. I don't like to, you know, disturb her.”

Yeah, “disturb” her by letting on that you're getting behind in your work again! No, Atula wouldn't have liked that. She wouldn't have liked that at all. It's just the two of them, running their law firm out of some cheesy little office over a fish-and-chip shop on Gottingen Street. They've got too many clients in too many bad situations not to stay on top of things. Atula figured that out ages ago. Why hadn't Andy?

Why did I have to be the one worrying about junk like that? She's the mother. She's the lawyer. I'm just a kid. I'm supposed to be worrying about my skin (which I do), about girls (which I do), about school (which I don't, at least not much). This was adult stuff. It wasn't fair.

And it wasn't fair that I couldn't even let her see that I was worried about it. The last thing I needed right then was Andy worrying that I was worrying. That would just make me worry more. I only had one option: block it out, do what I had to do.

I spun around and started to pace in front of her like I was some big-time courtroom lawyer addressing the jury on
Law & Order
. “So let me see if I've got this right. You expect
me
to spend the whole night writing up some legal argument on one of your files—that's right,
your
files—just so you can go out with your cop boyfriend?”

That made her wild. “I told you. He's NOT a cop and, for your information, he's NOT my boyfriend! We're just... ah, friends.”

“Right,” I said. I knew she was lying. She wouldn't get that mad if it weren't true. “I have a video project for my media arts class that I was going to get started on tonight, but that's okay. Don't you worry. Not a problem. I'll write your factum for you.”

That weird orange glow went out of her eyes. The poisonous fumes stopped oozing out her nose. She got all misty.

“You will? Oh, C-C! I knew I could count on you!” She took her cigarette out of her mouth and threw her arms around my neck. She started kissing me all over my face. I hate it when she does that. If the embarrassment or secondhand smoke doesn't kill you, the nose stud will.

I peeled her off me. “All right. All right. All right. Save your public displays of affection for the Boys in Blue,” I said. “I'm not finished. I'll write the factum for you
IF
you promise to buy me a new long board.” I figured I may as well get something out of it too.

She stumbled back and gawked at me with her mouth wide open. She looked like she was choking on a bone or something. She even made that gacking sound.

“Are you blackmailing me?!” she said. “Your own mother?!”

I stopped and thought about it for a second. “Yeah,” I went. “I guess you could say that.”

She gagged on that bone again.”This is unbelievable! I'm...I'm...stunned! We're family! We help each other!”

“Right,” I said. “My point exactly. I'm helping
you
by writing a factum so that you can go to that ‘thing' tonight with Biff the Sheriff. You're helping
me
by using some of the money you're charging for the factum to purchase a skateboard. Some people might call that blackmail. I call it fair pay for fair work.”

Andy was doing that twitchy thing she does when she's cornered. She took a big haul on her cigarette and wound up for a major rant, but we both knew it wouldn't get her anywhere. She didn't have a leg to stand on.

“Okay,” she said and blasted this jet stream of smoke out the side of her mouth. “Be that way. There'll come a time in your life when you'll look back on this and be as shocked as I am now. You'll be appalled to remember how, instead of relishing the opportunity to work on a case that could save a deserving family from being deported to their war-torn homeland, you exploited the situation for your own personal gain. You thought nothing of the sacrifices your mother,
who loves you more than anyone or anything on earth
, has made to give you the life you have today. No. None of that mattered to you. You saw a chance to get rich quick, and you leapt at it. Fine. I have faith that some day you'll be mature enough to shudder at your behavior. I'll wait patiently until then for your apology.”

Right. Like Andy has ever waited patiently for anything. You should see her lunge at the microwave when the popcorn's ready. She's like a piranha at a Mom ‘n' Tot swim class.

“In the meantime, get that factum done—to my standards!—and I'll, like, buy you the stupid skateboard.”

Most kids would have been happy with that, but not me. I knew who I was dealing with. Like any good lawyer, Andy was no doubt already looking for a loophole.

I wasn't going to let that happen.

I opened my backpack and took out the video camera I'd borrowed from the school media lab. I made her repeat her promise, this time with her hands out front so I could be sure her fingers weren't crossed. I even got a girl walking by to witness it on video.

No way was Andy worming out of this one.

I practically skipped home.

I never realized extortion could be so much fun.

Disturbing the Peace
The unsettling of proper order by creating loud noise,
fighting or conducting other unsocial behavior.

About three weeks later, I was down at the skateboard bowl one day after school. Kendall Rankin, my best friend, was having trouble with a back wheel and stopped to fix it. I stopped to fix mine too. Not that it would do much good. I could have given the board one of my kidneys, and I still couldn't have saved it. I'd written that factum for Andy like I said I would, but I still didn't have a new board.

We sat there in the shade for a while, working away on our boards. Kendall's not much of a talker. His job is to sit there looking good and attract the girls. My job is to keep the conversation going. Usually I just stick to sick jokes and movie reviews. I don't know why, but for some reason that day I started telling him about Biff.

Ever since that “thing” he and Andy went to, Biff had been at our place all the time.

It was really bugging me.

He
was really bugging me.

That day, for instance, Biff had showed up in his uniform and bulletproof vest at six in the morning
to take our garbage out
!

I went, “Like what's with that? It's
our
garbage. Not
his
! Doesn't he have his own? He has to go manhandling other people's? I mean, can you believe the guy? Let him sort his own recyclables!”

Kendall went, “Hm. Yeah. Gee,” and went back to tightening his axle. He was trying, but I could tell he wasn't all that sympathetic to my situation.

I obviously hadn't explained myself very well.

So I told him about the love seat Biff just “decided” to “give” us because he didn't “need” it anymore. I told him about the way Biff always hums when he does the dishes and how Andy hums along, even though she has always
hated
people who hum. I told him about how Biff irons his jeans with creases so sharp he could use them to slice the sukiyaki at Tokyo Steak House and, more importantly, how
Andy has never even mentioned it
.

Kendall went, “Really. Huh. No kidding?”

I was starting to feel kind of stupid. There was this long silence. I considered mentioning the fact that Biff insisted on cooking us dinner every night—as if we weren't capable of feeding ourselves, as if there was something wrong with take-out burgers and fries!—but I didn't. My guess was that Kendall wouldn't understand that either. I decided to just let the whole conversation drop. I clicked my tongue and sighed like it was no big deal; then I went, “Whatever. I don't know why the guy irritates me so much, but he does.”

Kendall put down his board. “Yeah. I know what it's like. I felt the same way when Mom started going out with Eddie. It took me, like, months to get over being jealous.”

My head spun around so fast it took my eyeballs a couple of seconds to catch up.

I was like, “Jealous? What?! You're saying I'm...
jealous
?”

“Yeah. Not, like, boyfriend-girlfriend jealous but, you know, jealous. There's nothing weird about it. It's perfectly natural.”

Perfectly natural. I hate it when people say that. They never mean it. In fact, they mean exactly the opposite. Just think of all the stuff they say in health class is “perfectly natural.” It's never “watching TV is perfectly natural” or “liking peanut butter is perfectly natural.” It's always the weird stuff, the stuff that nobody ever wants to admit to, that they call perfectly natural.

I didn't say anything.

Kendall went, “I mean, it's just been you and Andy all your life, and then suddenly some guy comes along and, like, horns in on the two of you, monopolizes her—you know, makes himself at home. Who wouldn't be jealous?”

The answer was obvious.

“Me! That's who. I'm not jealous! Don't make me barf. Jealous of Andy and Biff? Please. You make it sound like I want to spend all my time with my ‘mommy' or something. The truth is, I spend most of my time trying to get
away
from her. I couldn't care less if Biff ‘monopolizes' her. He can monopolize her and have Park Place and Boardwalk too! I'll even throw in my ‘Get out of jail free' card. He'll need it if he's going to hang around with her.”

I had to stop and wipe the sweat off my face with my T-shirt.

“That's not why I don't like him. It's just...I don't know... It's just...I mean, come on! The guy
irons
his jeans! Of course he's going to bug me! I'm only human!”

Kendall was already putting his helmet on. He shrugged. “Yeah. Sorry. You're probably right. I never had to put up with that kind of stuff with Eddie. His jaw clicks when he chews,
but otherwise he's okay. I mean, he makes Mom happy. I figure after everything she went through when Dad left, she deserves to be happy now.”