destruction and life at the same time, that fruit and grain ripen at a time of year that appears dead.”
They had gone far indeed from the subject of Emily Larsen, and all three of Roz’s unwilling audience cast around desperately for a diversion. Kate got there first.
“Still, I doubt that someone like the woman I talked to today thinks of her husband as particularly divine. I think she’s too busy praying that he comes home in a good mood.”
It took Roz precisely two seconds to pause, blink, and make the shift from academic theoretician to pastoral counselor.
“Most of what I do in the group sessions is to drive home a dose of hard reality. I teach these women to say to themselves, ”My partner won’t change; it’s up to me.“ But I make sure they add, ”I have the support of my friends.“ ”
“Sounds like a mantra,” Lee said. “ ‘Every day in every way I’m getting freer and freer.”
“Change your mind, change your life,” Roz agreed.
“If their husbands don’t catch up with them first,” Kate added darkly.
“There is that. And sometimes it’s so obvious they’re in danger, and they’re so oblivious, it’s all I can do not to take them by the collar and try and shake some sense into them.”
“You might be talking about Emily Larsen. I don’t suppose you’ve met a woman by that name at one of the shelters?”
Roz reflected for a moment. “There is a client named Emily in the one on West Small Street, but I don’t know what her last name is. We don’t use surnames in group sessions, or even in one-to-one counseling, so unless I’m involved with the paperwork, I usually don’t know their full names.”
“Her husband’s name was James, or Jimmy.”
“Was?”
“He’s dead.”
“Oh dear. That’s her. Black hair, glasses? She’ll be crushed, I’m afraid. She must have said his name fifty times during the session on Monday. Classic. I must go see her.”
“So you were at the shelter on Monday night?” Kate asked, trying to sound casual but aware of Al Hawkin’s sarcasm, and of Lee at her side.
“Leading a group therapy session. I’m there two or three times a week. The director’s a good friend.”
Half the city was Roz’s good friend. “How late—I’m sorry, Roz, it’s not very nice to ask you for dinner and then question you, but the woman’s husband was killed on Monday and it would save me having to hunt you down tomorrow to ask these questions. Can you tell me how late you were there?”
“I don’t know. Fairly late.”
“You got home at five after twelve,” Maj offered with mild disapproval.
“So I must have left the shelter about eleven-forty-five. The group session is from seven until about nine, and I stayed on to talk with Emily for maybe an hour before I left. Are you looking for an alibi?”
“Oh, Emily Larsen’s clear,” Kate told her—the literal truth, if skipping over some of the details. “We’re just looking for information, filling in the gaps, you know? Was she with you the whole time, then?”
“Not the whole time, no. When the session ended I had to talk with someone who was needing advice fairly urgently for a friend, a neighbor I think, who’s in an ugly situation—the neighbor’s an Indian girl, from India, I mean, barely more than a child by the sound of it, who was brought here in an arranged marriage—can you believe it? In San Francisco in this day and age? The child’s in-laws disapprove of her, and it’s beginning to escalate into physical abuse. The woman who came to me is worried, and I had to talk to her about the girl’s options, whether or not to just call the police, or to turn it over to Child Protective Services, who would involve the school district and a dozen other agencies. Anyway, I was with her for about half an hour, forty-five minutes, and then I went back to Emily.”
“So you were inside the whole time?” Kate asked, her voice as casual as if she were asking for the cream. Lee was not fooled, however, and shot her partner a hard look. Roz looked slightly uncomfortable, which was a hidden satisfaction to Kate, but she answered readily.
“No, not inside. We were outside in Amanda’s car.”
“Did you see anybody leave after the group session?”
Roz saw where the questions were going, and relaxed a degree. “A couple of people left, sure. Carla Lomax and her secretary, Phoebe, and a woman named Nikki. There might’ve been someone else, I can’t remember.”
“If you think of anyone, let me know. What about Carla Lomax, Emily’s lawyer? Do you know her? I gather she got Emily into the shelter in the first place.”
“We’ve worked together from time to time, but I can’t say I know Carla well. Good woman, very committed.”
Lee sat forward on the sofa and firmly nudged the conversation away from Kate’s professional interest in Emily and James Larsen. “What about that Indian girl? Is there anything you can do about her, unless she’s underage? The Indian community tends to be pretty closed to outsiders, doesn’t it?”
“Even more than the Russians, and I thought
Kate glanced at Lee, to see what she was making of this, and saw a look of wary compassion on her lover’s face.
“And when she has eaten the shit,” Maj added in her slight, precise Scandinavian accent, “she comes home and breaks the furniture in a rage.”
“I do not!” Roz protested.
“Only once,” Maj allowed. “And I hated that chair anyway.”
“God, it must be exhausting,” Lee broke in. “Conflict resolution’s the hardest job in the world.”
“Isn’t it just?” Roz agreed. “You know, more than once when I’ve been sitting in a room with two people, each of whom thinks the other is a monster of depravity, I’ve found myself fantasizing about just cracking their skulls together, or locking the two of them up together until they promised to treat each other like human beings. They wouldn’t even have to agree with each other, just be polite and listen.”
Kate was reminded of the notice that she had read while she was sitting with the phone under her chin, waiting for Carla Lomax to come on the line. “Have any of you seen that flyer somebody’s been putting up on phone poles, suggesting that mothers should be required to insert a poison capsule under their sons’ skin at birth?”
“What?” Lee said, shocked.
“Yeah. The idea is, if the boy gets out of hand as an adult, society could just trigger the capsule and deal with him. Shut him down.” It was not, she realized belatedly, a topic a pregnant woman might be eager to discuss. Maj didn’t wince, exactly, but she seemed to retreat slightly into herself. Lee, of course, caught it and moved to soothe, but before she could knock Kate’s comment out of the air with a remark about the weather, Roz picked up on it.
“God, people are nuts,” she was saying. “We have this friend whose lover left her because the baby she was carrying turned out to be a boy, and she couldn’t take the conflict of raising a male child. I mean, men are half the human race. Who better to change the way they do things than lesbian mothers?”
“Nurture overcoming nature,” Lee said in agreement.
“The irony is painful, isn’t it?” Roz went on. “In developing countries they’re aborting thousands of fetuses every month because they’re girls and amnio followed by abortion is cheaper than coming up with a dowry, while at the same time in the West women are aborting babies because they’re males and they don’t want to deal with the problem of raising a male feminist. I mean, I’m all for the right to choose, but not over something petty. It’s… obscene.”
“Abortion has to be chosen with care,” Lee agreed, uneasily going along with a topic she was interested in but keeping one eye on Maj. “There are always consequences. Sometimes it takes years for them to manifest, but they’re there, and it’s irresponsible to pretend they’re not.”
“You know,” Maj said, going back to Kate’s original remark to show that it did not bother her fragile,
