Nineteen Minutes Read online

  They waited at the end of the driveway, and just as Peter had dreamed over and over, the yellow bus rose over the crest of the hill. "One more!" his mother called, and she took a picture of Peter with the bus groaning to a stop behind him. "Joey," she instructed, "take care of your brother." Then she kissed Peter on the forehead. "My big boy," she said, and her mouth pinched tight, the way it did when she was trying not to cry.

  Suddenly Peter felt his stomach turn to ice. What if kindergarten was not as great as he'd imagined? What if his teacher looked like the witch on that TV program that gave him nightmares sometimes? What if he forgot which direction the letter E went and everyone made fun of him?

  With hesitation, he climbed the steps of the school bus. The driver wore an army jacket and had two teeth missing in the front. "There's seats in back," he said, and Peter headed down the aisle, looking for Joey.

  His brother was sitting next to a boy Peter didn't know. Joey glanced at him as he walked by, but didn't say anything.

  "Peter!"

  He turned and saw Josie patting the empty seat next to her. She had her dark hair in pigtails and was wearing a skirt, even though she hated skirts. "I saved it for you," Josie said.

  He sat down next to her, feeling better already. He was riding inside a bus. And he was sitting next to his best friend in the whole world. "Cool lunch box," Josie said.

  He held it up, to show her the way that you could make Superman look like he was moving if you wiggled it, and just then a hand reached across the aisle. A boy with ape arms and a backward baseball cap grabbed the lunch box out of Peter's grasp. "Hey, freak," he said, "you want to see Superman fly?"

  Before Peter understood what the older boy was doing, he opened a window and hurled Peter's lunch box out of it. Peter stood up, craning his neck around to see out the rear emergency door. His lunch box burst open on the asphalt. His apple rolled across the dotted yellow line of the road and vanished beneath the tire of an oncoming car.

  "Sit down!" the bus driver yelled.

  Peter sank back into his seat. His face felt cold, but his ears were burning. He could hear the boy and his friends laughing, as loud as if it were happening in his own head. Then he felt Josie's hand slide into his. "I've got peanut butter," she whispered. "We can share."

  *

  Alex sat in the conference room at the jail, across from her newest client, Linus Froom. This morning, at 4:00 a.m., he'd dressed in black, pulled a ski mask over his head, and robbed an Irving gas station convenience store at gunpoint. When the police were called in after Linus ran off, they found a cell phone on the ground. It rang while the detective was sitting at his desk. "Dude," the caller said. "This is my cell phone. Do you have it?" The detective said yes, and asked where he'd lost it. "At the Irving station, man. I was there, like, a half hour ago." The detective suggested that they meet at the corner of Route 10 and Route 25A; he'd bring the cell phone.

  Needless to say, Linus Froom showed up, and was arrested for robbery.

  Alex looked at her client across the scarred table. Her daughter was at this moment having juice and cookies or story time or Advanced Crayoning or whatever else the first day of kindergarten consisted of, and she was stuck in a conference room at the county jail with a criminal too stupid to even be good at his craft. "It says here," Alex said, perusing the police report, "that there was some contention when Detective Chisholm read you your rights?"

  Linus lifted his gaze. He was a kid--only nineteen--with acne and a unibrow. "He thought I was dumb as shit."

  "He said this to you?"

  "He asked me if I could read."

  All cops did; they were supposed to have the perp follow along with the Miranda rights. "And your response, apparently, was, 'Hello, fucko, do I look like a moron?'"

  Linus shrugged. "What was I supposed to say?"

  Alex pinched the bridge of her nose. Her days in the public defender's office were an exhausting blur of moments like this: a great amount of energy and time expended on behalf of someone who--a week, a month, a year later--would wind up sitting across from her again. And yet, what else was she qualified to do? This was the world she had chosen to inhabit.

  Her beeper went off. Glancing at the number, she silenced it. "Linus, I think we're going to have to plead this one out."

  She left Linus in the hands of a detention officer and ducked into the office of a secretary at the jail in order to borrow her phone. "Thank God," Alex said when the person picked up on the other end. "You saved me from jumping out a second-story window at the jail."

  "You forgot, there are bars," Whit Hobart said, laughing. "I used to think maybe they'd been installed not to keep the prisoners in, but to prevent their public defenders from running away when they realize how bad their cases are."

  Whit had been Alex's boss when she'd joined the NH public defender's office, but he had retired nine months ago. A legend in his own right, Whit had become the father she'd never had--one who, unlike her own, had praise for her instead of criticism. She wished Whit were here, now, instead of in some golf community on the seacoast. He'd take her out to lunch and tell her stories that made her realize every public defender had clients--and cases--like Linus. And then he'd somehow leave her with the bill and a renewed drive to get up and fight all over again.

  "What are you doing up?" Alex said. "Early tee time?"

  "Nah, damn gardener woke me with the leaf blower. What am I missing?"

  "Nothing, really. Except the office isn't the same without you. There's a certain . . . energy missing."

  "Energy? You're not becoming some New Age crystal-reading hack, are you, Al?"

  Alex grinned. "No--"

  "Good. Because that's why I'm calling: I've got a job for you."

  "I already have a job. In fact, I have enough work for two jobs."

  "Three district courts in the area are posting a vacancy in the Bar News. You really ought to put your name in, Alex."

  "To be a judge?" She started to laugh. "Whit, what are you smoking these days?"

  "You'd be good at it, Alex. You're a fine decision maker. You're even-tempered. You don't let your emotions get in the way of your work. You have the defense perspective, so you understand the litigants. And you've always been an excellent trial attorney." He hesitated. "Plus, it's not too often that New Hampshire has a Democratic female governor picking a judge."

  "Thanks for the vote of confidence," Alex said, "but I am so not the right person for that job."

  She knew, too, because her father had been a superior court justice. Alex could remember swinging around in his swivel chair, counting paper clips, running her thumbnail along the green felt surface of his spotless blotter to make a hatch-marked grid. She'd pick up the phone and talk to the dial tone. She'd pretend. And then inevitably her father would come in and berate her for disturbing a pencil or a file or--God forbid--himself.

  On her belt, her beeper began to vibrate again. "Listen, I have to get to court. Maybe we can do lunch next week."

  "Judges' hours are regular," Whit added. "What time does Josie get home from school?"

  "Whit--"

  "Think about it," he said, and then he hung up.

  *

  "Peter," his mother sighed, "how could you possibly lose it again?" She skirted around his father, who was pouring himself a cup of coffee, and fished through the dark bowels of the pantry for a brown paper lunch sack.

  Peter hated those sacks. The banana never could quite fit in, and the sandwich always got crushed. But what else was he supposed to do?

  "What did he lose?" his father asked.

  "His lunch box. For the third time this month." His mother began to fill the brown bag--fruit and juice pack on the bottom, sandwich floating on top. She glanced at Peter, who was not eating his breakfast, but vivisecting his paper napkin with a knife. He had, so far, made the letters H and T. "If you procrastinate, you're going to miss the bus."

  "You've got to start being responsible," his father said.