Authors: Kristin Lee Johnson
Tags: #Minnesota, #Family & Relationships, #Child Abuse, #General Fiction, #Adoption, #Social Workers
“You bet,” Max said, setting a thin manila file on her desk. “These are the notes on the program. Call the EBD teacher, tell her you’re the social worker assigned, and she’ll take it from there.” Max moved to stand up, but suddenly yelped like an injured dog and grabbed his crotch.
The crack must have gotten him. Amanda was mortified. His eyes widened and he was immediately sweating and rocking gingerly on the chair.
“Did you catch your … uh … skin in the chair?” Amanda asked.
“Important skin,” he squeaked. “Oh, god.” He lifted his right butt cheek off the chair quickly emitting a final squeak, and then he relaxed, his “important skin” obviously free. He wiped his face with both hands. “Let’s keep this horrifying moment between us, Amanda.”
“Of course,” she said, avoiding eye contact.
“And, I’ll get you a new chair.”
* * *
Amanda sheepishly admitted to Zoe that she had forgotten the paperwork. Zoe was gracious about it, even offering to meet with LaToya to get it signed. Amanda decided she would take care of it on her way home.
When she got into her car after work, something didn’t feel right. She was sitting at an angle. Getting back out of the car, she saw she had a flat. Since she was parked behind the building, no one else leaving work would realize her predicament. She glanced at her cell phone but didn’t even bother trying it because she knew she hadn’t charged it for days and the battery was dead.
First, she tried to get back into the building, but it was locked for the day, and Amanda hadn’t been issued a key card yet. Across the street, she could see several attorneys including Jake leaving his building. Her options were to walk downtown, a good twenty blocks, to use a phone to call a garage and spend the rest of the evening dealing with the mess, or ask Jake for a ride and deal with it from home. Since it was almost dark, Jake was the best option.
“Jake,” she yelled out weakly, running across the street awkwardly in her high heeled boots. He looked up, waved, and got in his car. “No, you idiot,” she said under her breath. “Don’t leave!” she yelled. That sounded desperate enough.
He opened his window. “Do you need a ride?”
“I have a flat,” she breathed, stopping and panting.
“Hop in,” he said, moving two files from his front seat into the back of his VW Jetta. Leather seats. Great stereo. She would have loved a car like this, and thought for the first of a million times that she might be in the wrong profession.
“Thanks, Jake.” She slid into the front and clicked her seat belt on.
“Since I have you hostage, you have no choice but to get a drink with me.”
She couldn’t contain her smile.
* * *
They went to Las Margaritas, a tiny bar that was packed with happy hour drinkers. They served fantastic margaritas served in big plastic cups with endless baskets of nachos and real salsa. It was decorated with kitschy jalapeno-shaped Christmas lights and crepe paper limes hanging from the ceiling. Amanda loved the warm atmosphere.
They sat at a table in the front window, and the waitress brought a basket of chips and salsa and two-for-one lime margaritas. Amanda sipped slowly, not knowing what to say.
“So …” Jake said, “how do you like the county?”
“Fine … good.” They had already had this perfunctory conversation, and both of them knew it.
Jake took a deep breath. “Amanda, let’s try not to act so weird, okay? Everything that happened was a long time ago. We’re going to have to work together, so let’s try to be friends.”
Amanda took a bigger drink. “It’s hard for me not to act weird, Jake. I’m a fish out of water everywhere I go.”
He rolled his eyes. “Wah wah, Amanda. Don’t start the pity thing.”
Her jaw dropped. “Pity?!”
He waved his hands in the air in front of her. “That’s not what I meant to say, please don’t freak out. I just mean that you have always had this thing about being such an outsider in the world, and you’re not. You need to quit thinking that way.”
Amanda knew Jake was well intentioned, but she couldn’t believe his nerve anyway. “Jake, you knew me for three months over five years ago, and we have seen each other three times since then. You don’t know me at all.” She had never known anyone who was willing to lecture her like a nine-year-old. Not even her mother talked to her the way he did.
“Keeping track, huh?” He smiled at her.
She got up to leave.
“Okay, Amanda, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Sit down.” He handed her a margarita. She glared at him.
“Quit being an ass and we’ll get along fine,” she finally said.
“A guy can try.” He winked.
* * *
Their conversation settled down after that. Jake asked about how she got hired, and she ended up talking about college and how hard she worked in the last two years to graduate. She tried not to act like her first years were wasted with drinking, and tried to look like she had no regrets.
He caught her up on law school in Chicago. Most of the law students he met went to private schools and had a lot of money and a lot of interest in making more money. He lived near downtown Chicago, clerking for the office of public defenders and Cook County Attorney.
“It’s drugs and poverty. All we did was prosecute poor people who committed crimes to get drugs, and committed more crimes once they were on drugs.
“Being poor doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to use drugs,” she said, feeling herself reacting again.
“Of course, it doesn’t,” Jake said. “I’m not talking about not having very much money. I’m talking about the whole lifestyle of inner city poverty. I felt like I was banging my head against a wall.”
She tried to squash down her defensiveness. It wasn’t always about her.
“So, if you felt so hopeless, why are you still in criminal law? Why don’t you go make a lot of money doing something for some big company?”
“Because brand new lawyers don’t get hired ‘doing something for some big company.’ Plus, I didn’t go to a private school, and I don’t have any connections.”
“Now who’s feeling sorry for himself?” Amanda said, eyebrows raised.
“The whole law school experience soured me on a lot of things, but not law. Most of the people there came from families of lawyers, and they had firms waiting to offer them clerkships or practices to step into right out of school. During my work in the OPD, I realized I’m more cut out for prosecuting. It’s cleaner.”
“Well, no kidding,” Amanda said, dipping her chips into the salsa. “What’s clean about defending criminals?”
“It’s really easy to get righteous about it until you do it. These people have a right to a defense, a good defense, too. Just because you’re a nineteen-year-old black kid in Chicago doesn’t mean you’re automatically guilty of whatever they say you did. But I couldn’t take it because most of them
were
guilty, but they also had such shitty lives that it’s no wonder they were criminals. None of these people had any hope, so they flushed their lives down the toilet in exchange for feeling powerful, or just to feel something until it wore off and they shot up again.”
“That’s really depressing,” she said, now playing with the salt on her glass. Jake held up his hand, waving two fingers at the waitress. She returned instantly with two more margaritas.
“I tried to get everyone into treatment,” he said, starting on his second drink with an ironic smile. “Most of the time they got one shot at treatment, and then the funding was refused. A lot of times they just took the jail because it was quicker and easier. The whole thing was a black hole, and I couldn’t stand it. It drove Trix nuts because I was so disillusioned. She couldn’t stand all the negativity.”
Amanda smiled hearing Trix’s name.
“She still asks about you, by the way. Asks if I have tried to reach you. I haven’t told her that you work here yet.”
“I can’t believe she still remembers me.” She tried to sound casual to disguise the lump rising in her throat.
“Amanda, you were a big deal in our house for a long time, especially after you took off.”
Amanda chewed on her glass, biting on the bitter salt. The margaritas were dulling her defenses. Her belly swelled, making her think she was going to vomit. There was no way she could speak, even though Jake was waiting for a response.
She finally swallowed hard. “I thought we were going to let all this stuff go.”
“Yeah, well, I lie sometimes.” Jake was feeling it too, the tequila and their past.
“Just like a lawyer,” she said with a weak smile.
They were quiet for a minute. Then Jake said, “Let’s order some food and talk about sports.”
* * *
They ended up staying at the restaurant until after 9:00 p.m. talking about the Minnesota Vikings, Gophers, Timberwolves, Wild, and Twins. Jake had ordered fajitas and used his vegetables to diagram what he thought the Vikings needed to do to bolster their defense. They were having a great time until Amanda suddenly realized that she hadn’t done anything about her car.
“We gotta go,” she said, jumping up and grabbing the check.
“Hey, that’s mine,” Jake said, grabbing the bill out of her hands. “I made you come, so it’s my bill.”
Amanda wanted to argue, but she was too panicked about her car. “It’s way too late to get someone to fix it tonight. What am I supposed to do now? I need my car.”
They went to the front of the restaurant where Jake paid. “Let’s go back and survey the damage,” he said. “I’d like to think I could change a tire if I had to.”
Jake drove them quickly back to Amanda’s car. Amanda started to get out, but Jacob grabbed her arm to stop her. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You have two flat tires. Did you notice anything wrong with your car before?”
“I think I would have noticed if I was driving on a rim,” Amanda told him. “What are you talking about?”
“We better call the police, Amanda. I think someone slashed your tires.”
* * *
After dealing with the police for over an hour, Amanda was exhausted, still a little tipsy, and just wanted to go home. Officer Baer of the Terrence City PD took pictures of her car and confirmed that two tires had been slashed with a small blade. She couldn’t muster any feelings other than fatigue.
Jake drove her home without saying a word. She pointed out her apartment, and he parked the car in front of her house. He suddenly turned the car off and looked at Amanda.
“This isn’t good,” he said.
“I’m not thrilled either, Jacob. It’s going to be at least another day before I’ll have my car back. It means I’m going to have to rely on people like you to get around.” She was hoping he would offer to pick her up for work the next day so she wouldn’t have to ask.
“It’s not your car I’m worried about, Amanda,” he said, looking down at the steering wheel. “What if this wasn’t random?”
The idea that someone had intentionally slashed her tires hadn’t occurred to Amanda, but when he mentioned it her stomach dropped. “Come on,” she said weakly. “That’s stupid. No one around here possibly cares about me enough to do anything to my beat-up hatchback. Are you trying to scare me or what?” She regretted admitting she was scared, especially to Jacob. She didn’t know if she had any reason to be afraid, but at times like these her aloneness was glaring. During college her purse was stolen in downtown Minneapolis by a guy who ran up behind her, yanked the purse off her shoulder and ran. The incident left Amanda sleepless for weeks, and was actually one of the reasons she began to let herself lean on Lucy for more support.
“I really don’t want to scare you, Amanda. But I don’t think people go around randomly slashing tires.”
“Nobody knows me or my car. You’re almost flattering me to say someone knows me well enough to bother slashing my tires.” She couldn’t let this even be possible. He tilted his head in acknowledgement that she had a point. “Plus, the cop said I might have driven over something.”
“He said it was unlikely, Amanda.”
“He didn’t say it was impossible, Jacob.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
“I’m going to go up to my apartment. When I get inside I’ll wave to you and let you know I’m in and you can go home. And if you really want to help, you can pick me up tomorrow on your way to work. Goodnight.” She opened the door to get out, paused, and forced herself to sit back down. “Thank you for helping me tonight, Jake. It’s nice to have a friend in town.”
“You’re welcome.” Jake watched as Amanda climbed the stairs to her upstairs apartment until he saw a light switch come on. In another minute, Amanda waved from the window facing the street before she closed the blind.
In less than five minutes the lights were off and Amanda went to bed, so she didn’t see Jake sitting in his car, staring at her apartment for a long time before he finally drove home.
Chapter Nine
What on earth had she gotten herself into ?The realization that the assignment to do outdoor education for teenagers was actually a curse did not come all at once. Amanda first began to see what a nightmare the program would be when she met her co-facilitator, Blanche Larson. Blanche could not have been even five feet tall. She was built like a tree trunk—almost a perfect cylinder—with round, hard muscles on her arms and legs, and a round hard torso. Blanche had short, dark hair that was tipped with blonde in the worst home coloring job Amanda had ever seen. She wore polo shirts with the collar turned up so it encased her head, and wind pants that had to be sized for a ten-year-old boy. She had seven gold studs in one ear, nine in the other. Blanche was ageless to Amanda, but from the way she talked about herself she had to be almost forty.
They met over lunch in Blanche’s empty classroom. Blanche was the new teacher for kids with emotional and behavioral disorders. The kids were at lunch, followed by various electives, so she wasn’t expecting any students back for nearly an hour. Amanda did not bring a lunch with her, but Blanche had to use their meeting time to eat.
“Go ahead and eat, please,” Amanda told her.