Chapter 8: The Hearing

The hallway outside Department 12 was full by eight-thirty Monday morning.

Daniel had brought four lawyers and a woman from a public relations firm.

I had brought my mother's church.

They'd come in their Sunday clothes on a Monday.

The deacon. The sisters from the bakery. Stool Nine and his wife, with sandwiches for the whole bench.

Rafael wasn't there.

His lawyer said a man charged with my mother's death couldn't sit in that hallway without sinking me.

He'd texted at seven.

Eat something. Don't let them see you hungry.

My lawyer squeezed my arm.

She was sixty-six and had sung alto next to my mother for forty years.

"Let them talk first," she said. "Then you."

"What if I say the wrong thing?"

"Baby, you've been saying the right thing all week. You just have to say it in a room."

Lily was at the counter with the laundromat lady, learning to wipe stools by feel.

The courtroom was small and wood-paneled and smelled like floor wax.

The judge was a gray-haired woman in a cardigan under her robe.

She did not look like she played golf with anybody.

Daniel sat at the other table with his bandaged hand flat in front of him, where she could see it.

His lead lawyer stood up and buttoned his jacket.

I almost laughed.

"Your Honor, nobody here doubts that Mrs. Chen loved her mother. That's the tragedy of it."

He walked while he talked.

He said I'd run out at eleven o'clock at night and left a blind child alone in a dark house.

He said I'd torn up legal documents in my lawyer's office in a rage.

He said I'd pulled Lily out of her home, her school and her doctors, and moved her above a shuttered restaurant on San Pablo Avenue.

He said I'd used my husband's credit card to pay fifty thousand dollars to free the man accused of killing my own mother.

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