A Slight Smile Is Very Charming on a Stone Face novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Drawing
The evening news shows a courtroom sketch of Lin smiling, which no one has ever seen, and her boss summons her; at the courthouse the artist says he drew it before she did it.
The first time my face was on the news, it was smiling.
I have never smiled in public in my life.
I was standing at my kitchen counter on Tuesday night with a piece of toast, watching the six o'clock news.
The anchor said the arson trial downtown had its third day of testimony.
Then a drawing filled the screen.
It was a courtroom sketch in soft charcoal and a little color.
A woman sat in the witness box with her hands folded on the rail.
She wore a navy blazer and a company lanyard, and her pale hair stopped at her jaw.
She was looking at the defense lawyer, and she was smiling.
It was a small smile.
One corner of her mouth had lifted, just a little, and her eyes were warm.
I put the toast down.
The woman in the drawing was me.
I had testified that afternoon for the state, because I am the claims adjuster who denied the defendant's insurance claim.
He was the man accused of burning down his own shop for the money.
I had spent two hours on the stand answering questions in the flat voice I always use.
I did not remember smiling at anyone.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
It was Joan Kowal, who sits two desks away from me at Lakeshore Mutual.
"Is that you?" she wrote. "Please tell me it's you."
I typed, "It's a drawing."
She wrote back, "Lin, I have worked beside you for six years. I have never seen that."
Neither had I.
My own mother had died before I could remember her face, and all the photos of me show the same expression.
Calm, people say, when they are being kind.
Cold, when they are not.
A man I dated once told me I looked like a woman reading a parking ticket at a wedding.
I looked at the drawing again until the anchor moved on to the weather.
The woman in it did not look cold.
She looked like someone who had just heard something funny and was trying not to let it show.
That was the part that bothered me.
Because she was trying, and I could not remember trying.
The email came at seven the next morning.
It was from Gordon Bressler, the regional manager, and the subject line said, "See me. Re: courthouse coverage."
I rode the elevator to the ninth floor with my coffee going cold in my hand.
Bressler was standing at his window with a tablet, and he did not turn around right away.
He is forty-nine and tidy, with a grin he can switch on.
It was off.
"A man lost his whole shop," he said. "And my adjuster sat on the stand grinning at his lawyer."
"I wasn't grinning."
He turned the tablet around.
The sketch was already on the station's website, with a caption that read, "Insurer's witness appears amused."
"Lakeshore Mutual has been getting calls since six," he said. "You are up for the senior desk, Lin."
"I know."
"Then I need you to explain your face."
I looked at the screen, and for a moment I could not say anything at all.
I have been asked to explain my face since I was seven years old.
I never have a good answer.
"I'll find out who drew it," I said.
"You do that."
The courthouse is ten minutes from our building if the bridge is not up.
I walked it in nine.
The trial was in a courtroom on the fourth floor, and I knew where the press sat because the bailiff had pointed to them yesterday.
A man was alone on the front bench of the gallery with a flat sketchbook on his knee.
He was solid and not tall, with buzzed red-brown hair and a short beard.
His fingers were grey with charcoal, and he was drawing the empty witness box.
I stopped in front of him and held out my phone with the drawing on it.
"Did you draw this?"
He looked at the phone.
Then he looked up at me, and he looked for a long time.
Not at my clothes or at my hair, but at my face, slowly.
I am not used to that.
Most people look at my face for half a second and decide.
"Yes," he said. "That's mine."
"I didn't smile."
"No," he said.
I felt something in my chest go still.
He closed the sketchbook over his finger.
"Not yet," Tobias Rudd said. "You hadn't smiled yet when I drew it."
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