House Rules: A Novel Read online

  Then I ran down the stairs to the parking lot, punching my fist in the air.

  I have a hundred percent success rate in my litigation.

  So what if I’ve only had one case?

  Contrary to popular belief, the ink is not still drying on my bar certificate.

  That’s pizza sauce.

  But it was an honest accident. I mean, since my office is above the town pizza joint, and Mama Spatakopoulous routinely blocks my ascension on the staircase to thrust a plate of spaghetti or a mushroom-and-onion pie into my hands, it would be downright rude to turn her down. Coupled with that is the fact that I can’t really afford to eat, and turning away free food would be stupid. Granted, it was dumb of me to grab a makeshift napkin from a stack of papers on my desk, but the odds of it being my bar certificate (as opposed to my recent Chinese take-out order) had been pretty slim.

  If any new clients ask to see my bar certificate, I’m just going to tell them it’s being framed.

  Sure enough, as I am headed back inside, Mama S. meets me with a calzone. “You gotta wear a hat, Oliver.”

  My hair is still dripping wet from my shower at the high school locker room. Ice has started to form. “You’ll take care of me when I have pneumonia, won’t you?” I tease.

  She laughs and pushes the box at me. As I jog up the stairs, Thor starts barking his head off. I open the door just a crack, so that he doesn’t come flying out. “Relax,” I say. “I was only gone for fifteen minutes.”

  He launches all twelve pounds of himself at me.

  Thor’s a miniature poodle. He doesn’t like to be called a poodle within hearing distance—he’ll growl, and can you blame him? What guy dog wants to be a poodle? They should only come in female denominations, if you ask me.

  I do the best I can for him. I gave him the name of a mighty warrior. I let his hair grow out, but instead of making him look less effeminate, it only makes him look more like a mop head.

  I pick him up and tuck him into my arm like a football, and then I notice that there are feathers all over my office. “Oh, crap,” I say. “What’d you do, Thor?”

  Setting him down, I survey the damage. “Great. Thank you, mighty guard dog, for protecting me from my own damn pillow.” I drag the vacuum out of the closet and start to suck up the debris. It’s my own fault, I know, for not putting away my bedding before running my errand. My office is currently also doubling as my living quarters. Not permanently, of course, but do you know how expensive it is to pay rent on a law office and an apartment? Plus, being in town, I can walk to the high school every day—and the janitor there has been very cool about letting me use the locker room as my own personal shower. I gave him some free advice about his divorce, and this is his thanks.

  Usually, I fold up my blanket and tuck it with my pillow in the closet. I hide my little thirteen-inch TV inside a cavernously empty filing cabinet. That way, if a client comes in to retain my services, they won’t get the vibe that I’m hideously unsuccessful.

  I’m just new in town, that’s all. Which is why I spend more time organizing the paper clips on my desk than actually doing any legal work.

  I graduated with honors from the University of Vermont seven years ago with a degree in English. Here’s a little nugget of wisdom for you, just in case you’re interested: You can’t practice English in the real world. What skills did I have, honestly? I could outread anyone in a quick draw? I could write a totally smoking analytical essay about the homoerotic overtones of Shakespeare’s sonnets?

  Yeah, that and $1.50 will get you a cup of coffee.

  So I decided that I needed to stop living in the theoretical and start experiencing the physical. I answered a classified ad I’d found in the Burlington Free Press to be a farrier’s apprentice. I traveled around the countryside and learned to spot what was normal gait for a horse and what wasn’t. I studied how to trim a donkey’s hoof and how to shape a horseshoe around an anvil, nail it into place, file it down, and watch the animal take off again.

  I liked being a farrier. I liked the feel of fifteen hundred pounds of horse pressed up against my shoulder as I bent the leg to examine the hoof. But after four years I got restless. I decided to go to law school, for the same reason everyone else goes to law school: because I had no idea what else to do.

  I’ll be a good lawyer. Maybe even a great one. But here I am, at twenty-eight, and my secret fear is that I’m going to be just another guy who spends his whole life making money by doing something he’s never really loved

  to do.

  I have just put the vacuum back in the closet when there is a tentative knock at the door. A man stands there in Carhartt coveralls, feeding the seam of a black wool cap through his hands. He reeks of smoke.

  “Can I help you?” I ask.

  “I’m looking for the lawyer?”

  “That’s me.” On the couch, Thor begins to growl. I shoot him a dirty glance. If he starts scaring away my potential clients, he’ll be homeless.

  “Really?” the man says, peering at me. “You don’t look old enough to be a lawyer.”

  “I’m twenty-eight,” I say. “Wanna see my driver’s license?”

  “No, no,” the man says. “I, uh, I got a problem.”

  I usher him into the office, closing the door behind him. “Why don’t you have a seat, Mr. …”

  “Esch,” he says, settling down. “Homer Esch. I was out in my backyard this morning burning brush and the fire got out of control.” He looks up at me as I sit down at my desk. “It kind of burned down my neighbor’s house.”

  “Kind of? Or did?”

  “Did.” He juts out his jaw. “I had a burn permit, though.”

  “Great.” I write that down on a legal pad: LICENSED TO BURN. “Were there any casualties?”

  “No. They don’t live there no more. They built another house across the field. This was just a shed, pretty much. My neighbor swears he’s suing me for every penny he put into that place. That’s why I came to you. You’re the first lawyer I found who’s open on a Sunday.”

  “Right. Well. I may have to do a little research before I can take your case,” I say, but I’m thinking: He burned the guy’s house down. There’s no way to win this one.

  Esch takes a photograph out of the inner pocket of his coveralls and pushes it across the table. “You can see the place in the background here, behind my wife. My neighbor says it’s twenty-five thousand dollars I’ll have to pay out.”

  I glance at the photo. Calling this place a shed is generous. Me, I’d have said shack. “Mr. Esch,” I say, “I think we can definitely get that down to fifteen.”

  Jacob

  Here are all the reasons I hate Mark, the boyfriend Jess has had since last September.

  1. He makes her cry sometimes.

  2. Once, I saw bruises on her side, and I think he’s the one who gave them to her.

  3. He always wears a big orange Bengals sweatshirt.

  4. He calls me Chief, when I have explained multiple times that my name is Jacob.

  5. He thinks I am retarded, even though the diagnosis of mental retardation is reserved for people who score lower than 70 on an IQ test, and I myself have scored 162. In my opinion, the very fact that Mark doesn’t know this diagnostic criterion suggests that he’s a lot closer to actual retardation than I am.

  6. Last month I saw Mark in CVS with some other guys when Jess was not around. I said hello, but he pretended that he did not know me. When I told Jess and she confronted him, he denied it. Which means that he is both a hypocrite and a liar.

  I was not expecting him to be at today’s lesson, and for that reason I start to feel out of control right away, even though being with Jess usually calms me down. The best way I can describe it is like being in the path of a flash flood. You might be able to sense that a catastrophe is imminent; you might feel the faintest mist on your face. But even when you see that wall of water rushing toward you, you know you are powerless to budge an inch.

  “