“It’s not worth fighting you for, D’Angelo.” He turns to Prank’s companion. ‘“Hinkie,” he says loudly, “how was your AIDS test?”
Tunkie Southerland is said to be so shy it’s rumored he doesn’t know whether or not he has been circumcised. A tall, clumsy man who wears bifocals even though he is at least a decade younger than the rest of us, he pulls his neck inside his collar like a turtle.
“Lay off the Tunk,” I tell Clan, who is looking around to see if anyone is laughing, “or he won’t write your next brief for you.” Tunkie (God only knows how he got his nickname-he won’t say) is the only lawyer I know personally who has had a case at the United States Supreme Court. At least he ghosted the brief. He writes beautifully, but watching him greet a client in the lobby is painful. If the client is a woman, Tunkie’s eyes actually begin to water. Why some people feel they have to become lawyers I’ll never understand.
“How’s your big case going?” he asks, changing the subject as he sits down next to me. Despite his timid demeanor, Tunkie dresses well. He is wearing a blue banker’s-stripe broadcloth shirt and a burgundy tie. If he is as timid as he seems, I wonder how he can bear to look in the mirror long enough to get his knot so straight.
Clan, who is gulping his lunch down with coffee still too hot for me to do more than sip, answers for me.
“Which one? He’s got two now.”
I let Clan explain and watch Tunkie’s face go crimson as Clan announces my newest client is eighty-four and was caught having sex in a closet.
“If I can get it up when I’m that age,” Clan finishes loudly, “I’ll go down to the middle of Main Street and let Tunkie sell tickets to it.” We all laugh, and even Tunkie smiles at such a ludicrous thought.
“How’s your murder case coming?” Prank asks, after Clan quits hooting at himself.
“Accidental death,” I say, wincing at my memories of my conversation with Yettie Lindsey yesterday. Instead of immediately confronting Andy with what she told me, I called Rainey at the state hospital and asked her to plug herself into the social-worker gossip line. She knows Yettie only on sight, but the state is too small not to find mutual friends or enemies in common.
“Sure it was,” Tunkie says, carefully spreading the cloth napkin that held his silverware onto his lap.
“The mother probably wanted her kid put out of her misery and paid this black dude to electrocute her.”
Improbably, Frank tries to rescue me.
“It’d be a lot easier just to forget you ever had a child like that.”
Clan wags his finger at all of us.
“A man might try to forget,” he says, “but a mother can’t. Too much guilt. At the age of seventy, my mother still called every week to tell me what to do.”
I say, laughing, “For good reason.” We talk generally about why people do things and decide no one has a clue.
Maybe it is as simple as, the principle of behavior modification:
we do what reinforces us. But if that’s true, what was the stimulus that led a black social worker to spill her guts to a white lawyer she didn’t know from a hole in the ground?
Unrequited love? A bad evaluation? If anybody can find out, Rainey can. Odd how she is willing to do anything for me except make love. A lot of the women I’ve known since Rosa’s death have been just the opposite.
Rosewood Convalescent Center is like other nursing homes I’ve visited-a prison disguised as a rest home for the elderly and infirm. While they think they are being watched, the employees, who are in mufti, wear cheery expressions, at least until they find out who I am. Still, there is no hiding the guard post-the nurse’s station that sits strategically at the midway point of the entrance to the building. Two wings form forty-five-degree angles from this central point, and I would bet the lunch Clan graciously paid for that it takes a key to get out the back door.
After being required to show my Blackwell County Bar Association card to the assistant administrator, an anxious young woman who seems to regard my card as a confession that I am a convicted rapist (“This man claims to be her attorney”), and to the administrator, a man, whom I mentally dub Smiling Jack because of the frozen sneer he wears during our conversation, I am silently led by an aide to Room 142, which we reach after a series of turns that leave me completely lost. It must be nap time or perhaps time for their favorite soap, because we come upon only one resident, a trembling old man in bathrobe and slippers pushing a walker who seems as much at sea about where he is going as I am.
The aide, who appears to be a high school kid, knocks as she opens the door, and if my client is again having sex, we will be sure to catch her at it. Instead, we come upon two people, one woman curled up in a fetal position in the far bed nearer the window, and another woman sitting at a desk next to a dresser. It will be just my luck if Mrs. Gentry is the old lady who looks as if she is in a coma, but the aide points out my client in the metal folding chair as if she is identifying her in a police lineup.
“That’s her.”
The aide leaves, and I awkwardly introduce myself. Mrs.
Gentry turns in her chair, and I am pleasantly surprised by her healthy appearance. Though her skin is somewhat discolored by liver spots, she has a strong, masculine face that reminds me of an aunt who is now dead. Her hair, more gray than white, is thinning, but it is combed and pulled neatly into a bun at the back of her head. She is wearing turquoise trousers and a beige smock that covers a heavy but not obese body. Holding a pen in her left hand, she waits patiently until I am finished with my lie that Clan has to be out of town, and then asks if her hearing has been canceled for Tuesday. Her voice, I note, has an old woman’s cracked quality, but is strong. I tell her that so far as I know it is still set, and that I need to talk to her in private.
With a right hand almost as big as my own, Mrs. Gentry gestures dismissively toward her roommate, and says dryly, “We can’t get much more private than this. Eloise can’t hear.”
I glance at Eloise, who doesn’t even appear to be breathing and then back at Mrs. Gentry and smile. Though I get into trouble occasionally, I tend to make snap judgments about my clients, and I decide I like this old, mannish-looking woman. I may not be able to help her, but I’ve got a little time to give it a shot. I need to stop obsessing about Andy’s case for a while and get some perspective. After all, it is still more than a month off.
“The judge will want to know why you want out,” I say, as I drag over the other chair in the room.
“What will you tell him?”
Mrs. Gentry stares at me as if she hasn’t made up her mind whether I have any sense or not. I begin to be aware that she hums constantly under her breath when she is not speaking. Finally, she begins, sending forth her words in a torrent.
“I never wanted to be in here in the first place. For six months, I was horribly sick and almost died. Gall-bladder problem they probably didn’t diagnose right at first and lots of infection.
They had to take it out, and most of my pancreas, too.
I’m on oral insulin, but that’s all except vitamins. I’m still a little weak but I don’t need to be in here. My son got tired of waiting for me to die, and by now he’s probably wasted half of my money. Tbmmy thinks he’s a businessman-wants to sell Arkansas rice to the Japanese. Who doesn’t? Now I can’t even get a drink of water without having to ask six people if it’s okay. Would you want to live like this?” she asks and immediately begins to hum again.
“No, ma’am,” I say, and scan the room. The walls are a dull mustard color, and there is a smell of urine and disinfectant coming from her roommate’s bed. What in the world could be more depressing?
“Can you take care of yourself?”
She folds her arms across her chest and clears her throat.
“I don’t want to take care of myself. I was in one of those retirement places-decent food, alcohol, somebody to play bridge with, my own apartment, even some privacy, dam it.” Suddenly, tears come to her eyes.