Epilogue

Vanessa’s prediction that Bob wouldn’t get laid for a month was only off by two days. For a week, Chastity was sure she’d made a terrible mistake. Suddenly people depended on her, and they were all kinds of people. They included winos, homeless people, and petty criminals. But they also included housewives, and small businessmen, and kids whose momentary bad judgment threatened to ruin their futures. Almost every day was a fourteen hour one, and some went longer than that, that first month.

Finally, Vanessa took her aside and said, “You won’t be any good to them if you kill yourself. Take a breath. Slow down. You’re doing fine.”

“I feel like a quack doctor,” moaned Chastity. “I thought I knew the law, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

“Why do they say we practice law?” Vanessa replied. “You’ll never feel like you’re good enough. But you are. I’ve seen your work. You’re good. Just pace yourself. That’s what continuances are for, to give you the time you need to prepare your arguments. Judges understand that, especially when the attorney facing them works in this office. They know how slammed we are.”

Chastity had already appeared in court fifteen times that month. Based on Vanessa’s advice, she’d chosen the cases that could be dealt with quickly. Most of her other clients were just glad they had a lawyer, so delays didn’t bother them. A few cases were time sensitive, such as foreclosures, or arraignments and such, but actual time spent in court on each case was short. Judges moved cases through the system ruthlessly. They were overworked, too.

The second and third months were easier, and by the fourth month Chastity felt like a lawyer. Bob was right about her. She was passionate and besides the passion she felt for her lover and children, there was plenty to spare for seeking justice. She did that with a vengeance.

On the anniversary of her sixth month in the office, she went to Buster’s one night. The first person she handed a card to was Buster, who grinned when he read it.

“How about that,” he said. “Trudy’s become a big shot lawyer.”

“Read the card,” said Chastity. “My name isn’t Trudy.”

“You’ll always be Trudy to me,” he said.

“Can I hand out cards to the girls?”

“Baby, you’re welcome here anytime. What do you charge for a retainer?”

“I don’t have any private clients,” she said.

“My shyster charges me three hundred bucks a month just in case I need him.”

“What kind of legal problems do you have?” she asked.

“Oh, every year the zoning board tries to zone me out of business, and I have contracts with vendors and contractors that need legal scans. That kind of stuff.”

“Hundred bucks a month and if that doesn’t cover what I do, I charge you more.”

“Baby, you’re hired and my old lawyer is fired,” said Buster. “Go hand out your cards.”

Bob made it his mission to support Chastity during those first hectic months on her new job. Secretly, he wasn’t unhappy at all when she was too tired to make love. He was feeling his age while Chastity entered the prime of her sexual life. She was wearing him out, to be truthful. The fact that she came home and collapsed in bed, oblivious to him, didn’t threaten him at all.

And, even though there were frustrations in her new job, he could tell that she derived great satisfaction from the good she was able to do and the people she was able to help. That satisfaction came home with her and her attitude around the house was generally upbeat.

What she missed the most was not having time with her children. Seven or eight months might not seem like a long time in the grand scheme of things, but children grow up a lot in eight months. She missed Lance’s first words, and hearing Brendan’s stories about preschool. In a stroke of what would turn out to be genius, relatively speaking, she first talked Chuck into working at Legal Aid, and together they recruited two more people in their old study group into interning at the Barstow legal aid office. The students performed paralegal duties and learned, sometimes shockingly, how the justice system worked in real life. Even though each one only worked six hours a week, they eased the burden on the three licensed attorneys in the office, doing the grunt work of doing background investigations, finding and deposing witnesses, and obtaining records and documents. They didn’t get paid, but they earned serious street cred for their résumés in the process.

Chuck needed more money, to pursue his dream of marrying Trudy and raising Chima as his son. Because of the reputation of the Barstow Legal Aid office, and Chuck’s work there, he was successful in talking a law firm in Evanston into hiring him as their primary pro bono attorney. He wasn’t paid as much as other attorneys in the office, but it was substantially more than he’d been getting at Legal Aid. Some other firms were skeptical of this new idea, but would later realize the wisdom of it. Chuck’s new employer could now say they were “giving back” to the community and when their office was tapped to provide someone as a public defender, they didn’t have to pull an attorney from other work that made the company money. It also resulted in significant tax benefits for them. Chuck’s father was livid. Charles Sr. had viewed his work at Legal Aid as “sowing some wild oats”, but this pro bono nonsense was ridiculous. He objected strenuously to this new position. Nobody in the legal strata of Barstow felt bad about enjoying the fact that the son of one of the partners at Timkins, Weatherford and Parks had thumbed his nose at his father’s firm by doing what he was doing.

Charles Sr. might have been upset by what he viewed as his son’s abandonment of the opportunity he had to join Timkins, Weatherford and Parks, but that was nothing, compared to his reaction when his son introduced an obviously long-in-the-tooth, white woman to the family and said he was going to marry her. Charles Sr sat down heavily and asked for a drink. His third wife, Loretta, her own eyes round as saucers, jumped to pour him three fingers of bourbon, which he tossed off like it was water. He coughed, cleared his throat, and bellowed, “I won’t allow it!”

“You have no vote,” said Chuck. “I have a job and I don’t need your money or influence. We’re getting married. I felt it was polite to let you know what’s happening, but I’m not here to get your approval.”

“Who is she?” gasped Loretta. She’d been married to Charles Sr for six years, plenty long enough to understand how the politics of law work, and how this sordid information might affect their fortunes.

Trudy spoke for herself.

“My name is Trudy Peters. I’m forty-two and was married, but divorced seven years ago. I spent five years since then working for various NGOs in Africa. I have one child, conceived in Africa, and I’m the manager of the 5th street Taco Bell. What else would you like to know?”

She sounded sure of herself, but she was internally terrified. Chuck had coached her on what to say, and warned her that the reaction would most likely not be positive.

His step-sister spoke, then. Her name was Shanice and she was four years younger than him. Her mother was wife number two. She was, not surprisingly, taking pre law classes.

“Can I be a bridesmaid? My friends would just shit if I was a bridesmaid at a wedding where my very black brother married a lily-white woman.”

“Don’t be racist,” said Chuck. “We complain about white people being racist, so we shouldn’t be racist, too.”

“She’s old enough to be your mother, dude,” snorted his brother, who was two years younger and not going to college for anything.

“I already have a mother,” said Chuck, “who divorced my father, by the way, so being divorced is no big deal. Anyway, I thought you should know. When we’re married you’ll have a grandson, or maybe step-grandson. I don’t know. I’m going to adopt him and he’ll call me Daddy. I think of him as mine already. Bye bye.”

He turned to leave, Trudy at his elbow.

“Wait!” shouted Loretta. “How will we contact you?” One of her jobs was to maintain the list of family contacts. She was too rattled to think that this was one contact she might be able to leave out of the book. Her husband disabused her of that notion loudly.

“We will not contact him!“ thundered Charles Sr., who had managed to refill his glass by himself. He was sipping, now, rather than gulping.

“Oh,” sighed his wife.

“Tell me more about my nephew, or step nephew or whatever he’s going to be,” snickered Shanice, who enjoyed watching her father freak out.

Trudy answered before Chuck could squeeze her elbow and warn her not to play Shanice’s game.

“He’s two and a half,” said Trudy. “His name is Chima and he’s a mixed race baby.”

“I guess what they say is true. Once they’ve had black, they won’t go back,” drawled Shanice.

“Shanice, you’ve obviously been sleeping around like a slut,” said Chuck. “You’re turning into a cunt.”

He turned and led his fiancé out, leaving his family’s screams behind. He put a shaken Trudy into the car and drove away.

They had an appointment with a realtor to look at some houses in Evanston later that day.

A page or so back, it was noted that Chastity’s stroke of genius (getting law students to clerk for the legal aid office) didn’t pay off until Chuck got his job. The fact that Chuck had parlayed his degree and experience into a full time job with a respected law firm was a shot in the arm to the Barstow Legal Aid office. Suddenly more Nathan Boone students wanted to intern at the office. The next year Vanessa and Chastity had six interns and another attorney joined them, to replace Chuck. His name was Sydney Hollister and he was tired of being the low man on the totem pole and (probably) token Black in the firm he had worked at for four years. When it became clear that suggestions he could become a partner some day were bullshit, he went looking for something to expend his passion on.

There was a little friction, at first. Sydney was a card-carrying member of the BLM movement. He had been unable to lobby for the group as a member of his previous firm, but now he was free to soar. He wasn’t excited about working with two white women. That didn’t last long. Two of his new clients (both also black) bluntly told him they didn’t give a shit that he was black; they wanted their old lawyer to continue with their case. Even those who lost their cases praised Vanessa and Chastity for their efforts.