The light breeze hits me when I push open the front door. Uncle Ernie and Raul are at the kitchen table. Ma sits across from them, and the room has the particular quality of a conversation that paused when it heard the door.
I set the donut box on the table. Watch their faces do the thing faces do around free donuts.
"I got the job. Part time, but it's something."
"I'm so proud of you, baby." Ma is up before I finish the sentence, kissing my forehead the way she has since I was small.
Ernie reaches for the box. "I haven't had one of these in ten years."
Raul catches my eye from across the table. "Nothing crazy today," he says, answering the question before I ask it. "Just running errands."
"Car turn out okay?"
"Wasn't a bad fix. Just needed some TLC." He leans back, satisfied. Raul has treated that 2017 Cadillac XT5 like his firstborn since he drove it off the lot eight years ago. "Thought I was going to have to part ways with her, but we've got a lot of years left."
I look at my mother. Her eyes are red at the edges, the kind that comes after crying rather than before. "You working tonight, Ma?"
"No. Hours got cut again." She straightens slightly, habit, always trying to look less worn down than she is. "They're giving me a hard time about needing to sit during the shift. My doctor has to write another note, but he can't get it to me until tomorrow."
I don't push. I know the map of this conversation and where every road leads. She's already in pain, already stressed about money, and me pulling at it won't help anything. We can talk numbers later, when I have some of my own to bring to the table.
Ernie stands and pulls my mother into a hug. "Okay, Val. Take care of yourself."
She nods and waves them off, eyes still watering at the corners. The door closes. The house goes quiet.
"You okay, Ma?"
"Sí." A beat. "Ay, I'm so proud of you. I really want you to know that."
"Thanks, Ma." I hold her gaze. "I'm doing this for us. I start next week."
She hugs me, and I feel her try to sit straighter as she does it. Feel her work to hold the tremor out of her hands as her arms come around me.
She almost manages it.
I don't say anything. I just hold on a little longer.
CHAPTER 6
HARVEE
Not guilty.
I sit with those two words while the air in the courtroom seems to drop ten degrees. Around me, grown men are crying. The sound of it is awful in a room with this much marble and wood, nowhere for grief to go but up and back down again.
Clark Turner convinced the jury that Cassandra Pistocco must have abused her medication. Taken more than prescribed. The autopsy contradicted him and he dismantled it anyway, piece by piece, until it meant nothing. He built a different woman in front of that jury instead. A successful real estate agent. Financial means. A certain kind of lifestyle. The implication left to breathe on its own, doing its quiet, poisonous work.
He almost convinced me. That's the part I can't shake.
But I watched the jury's faces when they came back in. I know what I saw.
Cassandra Pistocco. Dead at thirty-two from kidney failure caused by her prescribed medication. No prior history of kidney disease. No window for intervention, no time for treatment. She leaves behind her husband Mario, her father Zachary, and two little boys — Jensen, six, and Drew, four — whose feet didn'treach the floor when they sat in that front row and waited to find out what a jury thought their mother's life was worth.
Hands are being shaken across the aisle now. Smiles passing between people who should know better. The courtroom empties around me and I stay in my seat a moment longer than I need to, watching Zachary Bast move through the room with the particular stillness of a man who has just had something confirmed that he already knew.
He'll go back to running the real estate company alone now. Mourn his daughter while keeping the whole thing from falling apart. I don't know how a person does that. I don't know how any of them do any of this.
My grandmother had a phrase for days like this. A slice of dick pie, served cold. I finally understand exactly what she meant.