“C’mon, Dad. You know what I mean.” He looked at me. “It’s you and Dad, isn’t it?”
I immediately hopped up to get the coffee pot, unsure whether he wanted confirmation or denial. “What do you think?” I asked him.
“I think she’s probably right. That it’s everybody’s parents. There’s no way one guy—even if he
“He’s got a point,” Dwight told me, holding out his mug for a refill.
“True,” I agreed. “If it was me, though, I’d still hang up my stocking.”
“Yeah, that’s what Mary Pat said.”
“Just in case?” Dwight teased.
“And ’cause Jake’ll notice if we don’t and it might spoil his Christmas ’cause he’s too little to understand. Besides, Mary Pat said we’d probably—”
He broke off, his brown eyes dancing with mischief.
“Probably what?” I asked.
He laughed. “Probably get more presents if we have stockings.”
* * *
Driving over to the Dobbs courthouse an hour or so later with the radio belting out an uptempo country version of “Up on the Housetop,” I was still smiling. Mary Pat certainly had Kate and Rob pegged. No way could they let it appear that Santa had brought her less than he brought Jake and R.W. But she was sweet to enlist Cal in a conspiracy to keep the younger boys from catching on too soon.
I’ve heard that there are people who were so traumatized by learning the truth about Santa Claus that they would never allow their own kids to believe in him. My friends and I figured it out about Cal’s age and none of us were bothered by it any more than Cal seemed to be. Like Mary Pat, we had also agreed that it might be to our material advantage to keep up the fiction since the grown-ups seemed to enjoy it so much.
As I topped the last small hill before the highway leveled off for the straight run into Dobbs, my smile was erased by another of those sad roadside memorials. A fresh new wreath of shiny green plastic holly, decorated with miniature toys and tied with a bright red bow, had replaced the orange pumpkins and yellow chrysanthemums of Thanksgiving. Come February, there would be valentines and red roses, then white lilies and purple ribbons for Easter.
Five or six years ago, a young woman and her two children had died here in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. She had been an only child, her children the family’s only grandchildren. No wonder the grieving grandmother kept their memory green by placing new wreaths here every holiday of the year. I drove on past, wondering if Sarah Johnson would soon be doing the same for Mallory.
At the courthouse, I parked in my reserved space and hoisted a tote bag full of canned goods from the backseat. Ellis Glover, our clerk of court, had placed two large, brightly decorated barrels next to the tree in the atrium lobby, one for donations to the county food bank and the other for needy children. Adding my cans to the overflow gave me a brief glow of feel-good sanctity, a feeling that was immediately replaced by guilt that it wasn’t more considering how much I am lucky enough to have—the old push/pull of conscience.
(And yeah, everyone agrees that a Christmas tree in a courthouse atrium is totally non-PC, but all the ornaments are secular and Ellis calls them Yule bushes. He says he’s going to keep putting them up until people start objecting. So far, no one has.)
As I headed toward the marble steps, I saw my childhood friend Portland Brewer on her way down. “You’re still coming for lunch, right?” she called.
“Right, but it might be closer to one than noon,” I warned her.
“Sounds like you’re hoping to be done for the day by then,” she said as she drew nearer.
“If the prosecution’s prepared,” I said. “Only five cases on the calendar.”
She rolled her eyes in sympathy, knowing exactly what I was talking about. I never thought I would miss Doug Woodall, our DA who ran for governor (and lost), but in retrospect the current DA makes him seem like a combination of Clarence Darrow and that efficiency expert in
As DA, Doug prosecuted most of the major crime cases in superior court himself, and he had made sure that no backlog of cases built up in district court. “Trust ’em or bust ’em” was his philosophy, and his staff worked a full eight-hour day to keep up with the work. Cases were efficiently calendared and defendants who didn’t come to court when they were scheduled had to show him a compelling reason for missing their court date or there would be warrants for their arrest. As a result, add-ons were kept to a minimum.
Chester Nance is way more laissez-faire. His staff is poorly prepared, he gets a half day’s work out of them at best, and he himself hasn’t prosecuted a single case since he was sworn in.
Judges and lawyers both were grumbling over the backlog. “Who knew there was such a steep learning curve?”
Today was no different. In the old Doug Woodall days, I could count on finishing five calendared cases in ninety minutes tops, fifty if they all pled guilty. As soon as I took my place on the bench, though, I was handed up a list of twelve add-ons by the day’s ADA, a newly minted attorney who looked too young to shave, much less pass the bar exam.
Even then we were not ready to go. He spent another twenty minutes thumbing through the shucks, getting facts straight with the officers who were to testify, and even working out a couple of plea bargains—things that should have been taken care of earlier.
I tried not to drum my fingers or look impatient. The defendants and their companions, mostly black or Latino, seemed equally bored. They unzipped their heavy jackets or pushed back the hoods on their dark sweatshirts and
