Mean Season

“I doubt that would count as house arrest,” Lars said. “It’s not a house. And I don’t think there’s such thing as bed-and-breakfast arrest.” Lars was almost laughing, but Judy looked serious.

“So who do we know in Jefferson County?” Judy asked. “We must know someone. Can we rent an apartment?”

Lars was looking across the table at me.

“You know me,” I said. “And of course, I know a lot of people.”

Judy turned to me, smiling and exasperated. “I don’t suppose there are any house arrest bungalows available in Pinecob, are there?” Now she was laughing. “Or guesthouses?”

I shook my head. I had a thought, bit my lip, then opened my mouth. I figured it was likely a stupid idea, that it wouldn’t work so there was no harm in saying it. Knowing what I know now, maybe I wouldn’t have said it. Knowing what I know now, maybe I would have kept quiet and looked at my shoes instead. But I did say it. And everything that would have otherwise stayed the same started changing. Like experiments with food coloring we did in home economics, making icing in green and blue and red shades. Put a drop of red into water, and the water will never again run clear. You can keep adding more and make it deeper red, or add blue and make purple. You still have choices like that. But to get back to clear water, you have to pour out what you’ve done and start over. And that doesn’t work in life, with its days and geography. You can’t just start over. You can never just start over.

“The thing is, Judge Weintraub is really into families. That’s why he likes house arrest,” I explained. I remember hearing Sandy complaining about this. “I know he’s not related, but Joshua might be able to stay in Vince’s room,” I said. “There’s probably a legal guardianship thing to work out, and you’d have to convince my mother.”

Judy turned to Lars and raised her eyebrows. Lars turned to me and raised his.

“We could argue a long-term relationship, given the fan club,” Lars said.

“Can you imagine?” Judy asked. “Let’s think this through a minute. For starters, J.P. would hate that.” Judy didn’t add to her list. She stopped talking and looked over at me, too.

Joshua Reed appeared then, hair still wet from the shower but clean shaven and clean clothed. Even damp, he really was beautiful. Judy and Lars looked at him, then turned to me.

“You are really fucking lucky,” Lars said.

“Yeah?” Joshua smiled. He seemed surprised. “Hey, that’s great.”

“Leanne here knows your judge,” Lars said.

Chapter 4

Start Slow

What’s crazy is how it all worked out. The court system in the United States—or at least in West Virginia—really does work on precedent. I’d heard that, but this was the first time I’d seen it in action. I’d always liked that about law. The logic of it. Knowing, at least in some small part, what you might expect.

A lot went on, I’ll bet much more than I ever saw, and things fell into place. Lars and Judy hunkered down and sweet-talked the hell out of people. Lars spent a lot of time on his cell phone, and at least as much time cursing about how it hardly worked in Charles Town and Harper’s Ferry. Judy spent a lot of time on the phone, too. She called it “putting out fires” and I guess she did a good job of it. The fence got fixed, and the farmer paid for his inconvenience, and People didn’t get wind of Joshua Reed being arrested—though there was a notice in the Charles Town Register about a J. Polichuk. There was no mention of the cow.

Lars got Joshua’s arraignment pushed up to just a week after his arrest, and in the meantime, found a lawyer from Charleston who had previously clerked for Judge Weintraub. Judy kept me in the loop with phone calls, but Lars was over at the courthouse nearly every day, so on my lunch hour, I’d cross over from the other wing and catch up with how things were going. Joshua mostly stayed back in Harper’s Ferry—Judy had told me that Lars agreed to keep him as a client so long as all Joshua did that week was read and think, and that he showed up whenever and wherever Lars asked, acting polite and looking sober and sorry. Judy said she’d convinced Lars that Joshua was a good long-term investment.

There was one long meeting between the lawyer and Lars and Joshua and Momma and Judge Weintraub and the county prosecutor. It must have gone well because Lars looked relieved when they all poured out of the judge’s chambers. Judge Weintraub waved at me. I didn’t know the judge well, though I’d heard a few stories about him on account of working in the same building—how he’d worked at the state capitol a while, until his wife died and he moved north to Charles Town. Judge Weintraub’s leanings toward family made more sense once I found out that he’d been married, though he’d been a widower some years by the time of Joshua’s plea meeting. After the meeting, while everyone was still shuffling around, the judge asked my mother to come back into in his chambers for a moment. I assumed it had something to do with the temporary legal guardianship she had to take on. Momma had a short stack of forms to sign.

I never found out what Judy said to my mother to get her to agree to allow Joshua Reed to sit out his sentence under our roof. Momma didn’t seem too excited about the idea when I first mentioned it, what with him being a drunk driver and all. She put down her quilting and stared hard at me.

“You know what you’re asking? You really want for me to do this?” Momma asked.

“It was just an idea,” I told her. “I just thought, maybe.”

“You been with that fan club how long now?”

I reminded her that it had been seven years.

“I suppose you think this guy’s worth some trouble,” she said. “I’m not convinced of it, but maybe you know better.”

The next morning, Momma told me that she’d take a call from Judy, and whatever Judy said convinced her to go along. I always figured it had something to do with money.

So it was a week after the arrest that Joshua sat in the courtroom at the arraignment, frowning as Judge Weintraub asked for the plea and the Charleston lawyer said, “guilty.” And after that, it was over. At least, most of the legal part.

As Judy predicted, Joshua wasn’t too excited about spending ninety days in Pinecob, even if he’d be allowed to commute to the movie set once production started. But I got the impression that whatever Lars and Judy had on him, it was enough to make him simmer down and sit tight. Lars kept pointing out how lucky Joshua was, though I didn’t get the impression that he saw himself as lucky to live with me and Momma and Beau Ray, even when the other choice was the Jefferson County jail.

“Fuck that,” Joshua Reed said that morning in the Harper’s Ferry hotel, after he’d come back to the table by the breakfast buffet and Lars mentioned the house arrest idea. “You can’t be serious.” He looked at Lars, then Judy, then back to Lars. “There’s got to be another way. Can’t we—I mean, I—just pay a really big fine? Or, I don’t know, talk to high-school kids?”

Lars and Judy had shrugged. As it turned out, Judge Weintraub didn’t think that fining rich people was an effective deterrent (although he did slap Joshua with a $5,000 fine and the cost of the repaired fence and the cow’s vet visit). Judge William Weintraub believed in families and he believed in house arrest for ninety days for Joshua’s sort of a DUI. The terms of Joshua’s sentence were this: He would have to wear an ankle sensor so that the county police would know where he was at all times. He wasn’t allowed to leave the house without police supervision, except to go to required alcohol counseling classes, which in Pinecob meant AA twice a week over at Potomac Springs Senior High. And he lost his license for a year.

“Fuck me,” Joshua had said, leaving the courthouse after all the plea bargaining was done. “This is going to give me a rash.”

I think he meant the ankle sensor.

“Three months in fucking Pinecob. It’s a fucking bad dream.”

By the time Momma got back from the Y with Beau Ray—that first afternoon with Joshua Reed in the house— Lars and Judy were on their way to the airport, and Joshua was tucked behind the closed door to Vince’s old bedroom. I asked Beau Ray to keep extra quiet that afternoon. I thought Joshua might be sleeping, although I didn’t know. I could have walked in easy enough. There was no lock on the door to Vince’s room. Except for the bathrooms, there were no locks on any of the inside doors in our house. Dad hadn’t believed in them, and after he died—well, it would have felt disloyal to make an addition like that. The Gitlin family rule was that closed doors were as good as locked, so you were supposed to assume that the person who’d done the closing didn’t want to be barged in on. You were supposed to knock before walking in. Although, logically, I knew that he had to eat, part of me wondered if we would ever see Joshua Reed again.

“Leanne,” Momma said, “you come over here and help your brother put to right his playing cards.”

I’d been in the living room, comparing our own setup against the picture of Joshua’s “artist’s cottage” from the home decor magazine Judy’s assistant had sent me. The quilt that Momma had laid over the long couch hadn’t been cleaned in a while, so I’d hauled it out to soak in the laundry tub and replaced it with one I thought was prettier, made mostly of blue shirting. But even that didn’t look like something you might see in a magazine.

Don’t get me wrong, our house was fine and it’s not like we didn’t have room enough. Momma and Dad had moved in back when Tommy was a toddler and Susan, just a baby. So I’d been conceived there, and before me, Vince and before Vince, Beau Ray. Growing up, Dad was always the one with big plans—tearing out a wall to expand a room, adding another bedroom out back. But most of those plans never materialized. And after Dad died, Momma wouldn’t talk of renovations. As the seasons passed, that meant that the kitchen floors sagged a bit along one edge, and the basement tended to smell a little swampy. Ours just wasn’t a home decor house.

Beau Ray had rushed off to his room upon returning from “Move Your Body, Move Your Mind.” Even though I knew that extended periods of quiet were usually followed by the discovery of some sort of chaos—like the time he’d dunked all of his clothes in the bathtub or cut his hair in jagged layers or tried to repair an old model plane but only succeeded in pasting it to his arm with superglue—I hadn’t felt like checking in on him. Transitions home from the Y tended to be difficult, but that day had also been Raoul’s last before moving back to Mexico to be with his family. Raoul was a physical therapist’s assistant, and Beau Ray had worked with him for the previous two years. There had been a going-away party the week before, but there’s nothing like the very last day you’re going to see someone to make the loss hit home.

“Leanne, didn’t you hear me? I’m talking right at you,” Momma said. She sounded mad. “Beau Ray’s done mixed up all his playing cards, plus the ones from the game chest. I don’t know, just fix it!”

“Yes, Momma,” I told her, and I put the artist’s cottage picture inside the pages of the fancy Bible that Susan had given us the year before.

Beau Ray’s room was a mess of playing cards.

“Beau Ray,” I said to get his attention. I could see how Momma had probably taken one look and called for me. There were cards strewn across his bed, across the rug, across the dresser, everywhere. If there’d been anyone else to ask, I’d have kept passing the buck.

Beau Ray was squatting in the doorway of his closet, pretending to play solitaire. Sometimes, even though years had passed, I’d have these split-second moments when I’d forget all that had happened, that Beau Ray wasn’t exactly Beau Ray anymore, that there was a new person in our midst.

“What’s with all the cards?” I asked him.

He looked up at me, confused, and it all came back.

“Playing solidtare,” he said.

“Solitaire,” I told him. “But what about all these?”

“Playing twenty-eight pickup,” he said.

From the door, I could see that he’d mixed at least four different decks, four different designs including one from my room that had roses on the backs and gold around the edges. I don’t put too much stock in playing cards, but Vince had given me the rose deck when I was twelve, so they were not something I wanted to see torn up or stepped on.