“Mumbo jumbo. I will trust your skills.”

I studied him for a moment and decided we’d talked enough for the day. I would bring up the rest with him the next time. I had come to realize that while he was paying lip service to the idea that I was the trial boss, there was no doubt that he was firmly in charge of things.

And I couldn’t help but believe it might lead him straight to prison.

Twenty

By the time I dropped Patrick back at his car in downtown and headed to the Valley in heavy evening traffic, I knew I was going to be late and would tip off another confrontation with my ex-wife. I called to let her know but she didn’t pick up and I left a message. When I finally got to her apartment complex in Sherman Oaks it was almost seven forty and I found mother and daughter out at the curb, waiting. Hayley had her head down and was looking at the sidewalk. I noticed she had begun to adopt this posture whenever her parents came into close proximity of one another. It was like she was just standing on the transporter circle and waiting to be beamed far away from us.

I popped the locks as I pulled to a stop, and Maggie helped Hayley into the back with her school backpack and her overnight bag.

“Thanks for being on time,” she said in a flat voice.

“No problem,” I said, just to see if it would put the flares in her eyes. “Must be a hot date if you’re waiting out here for me.”

“No, not really. Parent-teacher conference at the school.”

That got through my defenses and hit me in the jaw.

“You should’ve told me. We could’ve gotten a babysitter and gone together.”

“I’m not a baby,” Hayley said from behind me.

“We tried that,” Maggie said from my left. “Remember? You jumped on the teacher so badly about Hayley’s math grade – the circumstance of which you knew nothing about – that they asked me to handle communications with the school.”

The incident sounded only vaguely familiar. It had been safely locked away somewhere in my oxycodone-corrupted memory banks. But I felt the burn of embarrassment on my face and neck. I didn’t have a comeback.

“I have to go,” Maggie said quickly. “Hayley, I love you. Be good for your father and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okay, Mom.”

I stared out the window for a moment at my ex-wife before pulling away.

“Give ’em hell, Maggie McFierce,” I said.

I pulled away from the curb and put my window up. My daughter asked me why her mother was nicknamed Maggie McFierce.

“Because when she goes into battle, she always knows she is going to win,” I said.

“What battle?”

“Any battle.”

We drove silently down Ventura Boulevard and stopped for dinner at DuPar’s. It was my daughter’s favorite place to eat dinner because I always let her order pancakes. Somehow, the kid thought ordering breakfast for dinner was crossing some line and it made her feel rebellious and brave.

I ordered a BLT with Thousand Island dressing on it and, considering my last cholesterol count, figured I was the one being rebellious and brave. We did her homework together, which was a breeze for her and taxing for me, then I asked her what she wanted to do. I was willing to do anything – a movie, the mall, whatever she wanted – but I was hoping she’d just want to go home to my place and hang out, maybe pull out some old family scrapbooks and look at the yellowed photos.

She hesitated in responding and I thought I knew why.

“There’s nobody staying at my place if that’s what you’re worried about, Hay. The lady you met, Lanie? She doesn’t visit me anymore.”

“You mean like she’s not your girlfriend anymore?”

“She never was my girlfriend. She was a friend. Remember when I stayed in the hospital last year? I met her there and we became friends. We try to watch out for each other, and every now and then she comes over when she doesn’t want to stay home alone.”

It was the shaded truth. Lanie Ross and I had met in rehab during group therapy. We continued the relationship after leaving the program but never consummated it as a romance, because we were emotionally incapable of it. The addiction had cauterized those nerve endings and they were slow to come back. We spent time with each other and were there for each other – a two-person support group. But once we were back in the real world, I began to recognize in Lanie a weakness. I instinctively knew she wasn’t going to go the distance and I couldn’t make the journey with her. There are three roads that can be taken in recovery. There is the clean path of sobriety and there is the road to relapse. The third way is the fast out. It is when the traveler realizes that relapse is just a slow suicide and there is no reason to wait. I didn’t know which of those second two roads Lanie would go down but I couldn’t follow either one. We finally went our separate ways, the day after Hayley had met her.

“You know, Hayley, you can always tell me if you don’t like something or there’s something I am doing that is bothering you.”

“I know.”

“Good.”

We were silent for a few moments and I thought she wanted to say something else. I gave her the time to work up to it.

“Hey Dad?”

“What, baby?”

“If that lady wasn’t your girlfriend, does that mean you and Mom might get back together?”

The question left me without words for a few moments. I could see the hope in Hayley’s eyes and wanted her to see the same in mine.

“I don’t know, Hay. I messed things up pretty good when we tried that last year.”

Now the pain entered her eyes, like the shadows of clouds on the ocean.

“But I’m still working on it, baby,” I said quickly. “We just have to take it one day at a time. I’m trying to show her that we should be a family again.”

She didn’t respond. She looked down at her plate.

“Okay, baby?”

“Okay.”

“Did you decide what you want to do?”

“I think I just want to go home and watch TV.”

“Good. That’s what I want to do.”

We packed up her schoolbooks and I put money down on the bill. On the drive over the hill, she said her mother had told her I had gotten an important new job. I was surprised but happy.

“Well, it’s sort of a new job. I’m going back to work doing what I always did. But I have a lot of new cases and one big one. Did your mom tell you that?”

“She said you had a big case and everybody would be jealous but you would do real good.”

“She said that?”

“Yeah.”

I drove for a while, thinking about that and what it might mean. Maybe I hadn’t entirely blown things with Maggie. She still respected me on some level. Maybe that meant something.

“Um…”

I looked at my daughter in the rearview mirror. It was dark out now but I could see her eyes looking out the window and away from mine. Children are so easy to read sometimes. If only grown-ups were the same.

“What’s up, Hay?”

“Um, I was just wondering, sort of, why you can’t do what Mom does.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like putting bad people in jail. She said your big case is with a man who killed two people. It’s like you’re always working for the bad guys.”

I was quiet for a moment before finding my words.

“The man I am defending is accused of killing two people, Hayley. Nobody has proved he did anything wrong. Right now he’s not guilty of anything.”

She didn’t respond and her skepticism was almost palpably emanating from the backseat. So much for the innocence of children.

“Hayley, what I do is just as important as what your mother does. When somebody is accused of a crime in our country, they are entitled to defend themselves. What if at school you were accused of cheating and you knew that you didn’t cheat? Wouldn’t you want to be able to explain and defend yourself?”

“I think so.”

“I think so, too. It’s like that with the courts. If you get accused of a crime, you can have a lawyer like me help you explain and defend yourself. The laws are very complicated and it’s hard for someone to do it by themselves when they don’t know all the rules of evidence and things like that. So I help them. It doesn’t mean I agree with them or what they have done – if they have done it. But it’s part of the system. An important part.”