The first is Mr. Diaz downstairs, banging on his radiator at six-fifteen the way he's banged on his radiator every morning since I moved into this building, even though it's June and there's nothing in that radiator to bang at. He told me once it was the principle of the thing. The radiator had given him grief in February, and he'd decided, as a man, that he wasn't going to forget.
The second is the bus letting out its long pneumatic sigh at the stop on the corner, like even the bus is exhausted by the start of a new week.
Mondays in the summer are also—
Nope.
My mind almost had me there.
It's been eighteen years, but my mind just refuses to forget about the worst Monday of my life. I don't even know why that is when my own husband of nine hours forgot he was supposed to spend his wedding night with his bride, and not his...not-bride.
That's all I know of her. She wasn't me.
And that's enough.
I make my coffee. I rinse my cup. I lock my door behind me, two turns of the key the way I've locked it every morning of mycareful little life, and head down the four flights to the street. No elevator in this building, but I look at it as my daily workout, so it's fine.
The L's thirty-five minutes if I make my connection and forty-five if I don't, and either way Mr. Bell will be there before I am because Mr. Bell's been the bailiff in Judge Iverson's courtroom since I was in middle school.
The courthouse on a Monday morning has its own specific flavor of madness. Lawyers with three coffees and one shoelace untied. Defendants who've cried in the bathroom and are pretending they haven't. Family members holding bouquets they shouldn't have brought. I weave through it the way I've weaved through it for twelve years, and even though I've been working here for twelve years, I can still count on one hand the number of people I know by name.
I'm not shy or anything. I'm just...not good with crowds.
They eat up my social battery pretty fast, which is why my best friend Odessa still can't understand why I chose this.
You live in your head, June,she's said to me approximately a hundred times.Why do you also work in a room full of strangers?
To which I've always said:because in this room, I'm the one whose words become the record.
She has yet to find that satisfying, but Odessa lives in Lisbon now, so her opinions arrive on a five-hour delay, and I've learned to outrun them.
"Morning, June." Mr. Bell's already at the bench, polishing the gavel block with the soft cloth he keeps in his breast pocket—asmall ritual nobody's ever asked him to perform, which is why he performs it.
"Morning, Mr. Bell."
I set my stenotype case down and start unspooling the cables, the way I've unspooled them every Monday for twelve years. The machine hums to life under my fingers. The transcript file opens. I am, in this small kingdom, exactly where I belong.
"Here's your coffee, Mr. Bell."
"You're always so kind, June."
"And you're always so nice to say that."
It's a script. We've been running it since my first month here. The day Mr. Bell forgets his line is the day I'll know one of us is dying.
Alan, our clerk, jogs in next, twenty-six years old and chronically nine seconds late, his tie crooked in the specific way of a young man who hasn't yet been loved by a woman who fixes ties. He drops the docket on his desk, mouths‘sorry’at Mr. Bell, and starts laying out the morning's exhibits.
Linda comes in behind him, our deputy, broad-shouldered, a coffee in one hand and a granola bar in the other. She nods at me—she's not a talker before nine—and takes her post by the door.
And then there were four, I find myself thinking, and almost smile. If you’re an Agatha Christie fan, that might sound ominous. But for me, the four of us is the shape of every Monday I’ve known for twelve years, and that’s the kind of shape I like.
The gallery starts filling, and I hear them before I see them: the shuffle of leather soles, the snap of a purse opening, thelow murmur of a wife telling her husband toput the phone away, Chris,and Chris, presumably, putting the phone away. The gallery, technically, though in my head I've called it the bleachers since my first week, because that's exactly what it feels like when a high-profile divorce is on the docket and twelve cousins from both sides of the family arrive ready to root for their team.
Then Elliot walks in.
He’s not the type of man to turn heads, and sometimes he gets teased about it, too, thanks to a Tribune profile that described him as ‘charmingly average.’ But if courthouse gossip is anything to go by, charmingly average is exactly what attracts women by droves.
Anyway...