Mean Season (4 page)

I nodded.

“Leanne Gitlin,” Joshua Reed said, looking down at me. “If it isn't my number one fan.” He spoke with an exaggerated drawl, so that “fan” sounded like “fie-un.”

“J.P.,” Judy snapped.

“I'm practicing my Josiah accent,” Joshua said.

“You'll be lucky if we can keep you in the picture,” Lars hissed. “There are lots of pretty boys willing to play Josiah, and a call to the director says one of them's going to get that chance.”

Joshua's face froze into an expression I couldn't read. For the first time, he looked something less than cocky, maybe even a little scared. He glanced back at me and nodded a more polite good morning.

“Dude, so what do you want me to do?” he asked Lars, almost quietly.

“Go to your room. Take a shower. Get dressed. Then come back down here, and we'll discuss this. You reek.”

Joshua nodded and walked off. Lars shook his head and took a seat at our table.

“So what does it look like?” Judy asked.

Lars shook his head again. “Oh, it looks great. Just great,” Lars said, and Judy winced. “He took a breathalyzer like he shouldn't have—he should have waited, of course—and it came through as intoxicated, and with state reciprocity in effect, we obviously can't plead first offense.”

Judy nodded. This was the first I'd heard of any legal trouble Joshua'd gotten into. I looked at the two of them and wondered how much else they had kept quiet.

“So now it's pretty much a matter of mandatory sentences and precedents. Thank God he didn't hurt that cow. I know people all through Virginia, but not here. Why
couldn't he have stayed in Virginia? Fuck, we'd be better off if he'd driven into the Potomac.”

“Lars!” Judy said.

“I know. I don't mean it. Leanne, you know I don't mean it.”

“How far did he get?” I asked. “I mean, in West Virginia. What county?”

“Jefferson, apparently,” Lars said. “I don't even know where that is. The driver took me.”

“That's Charles Town,” I said. “That's my county.”

Lars looked at me. Judy looked at me.

“You know, I work at the county clerk's office. Same building as the courthouse,” I told them.

“She works at the courthouse!” Judy said, suddenly excited.

“Not exactly. But in the same building. All the same, I probably know the judge on the case,” I continued. “There aren't too many.”

“Oh my God, she knows…I mean, you know the judge?” Judy asked.

“I might. I probably do. At least I could find out who it is. You want me to call and find out?”

Lars handed me his cell phone without another word. I took it and stared at it. No one I knew had a cell phone, and I wasn't sure how they worked. Judy took the phone from my hand and asked me for the number, plugging it in as I told her. She pressed a button and handed back the phone. I heard the ringing tone.

Mr. Bellevue, my boss, answered.

“Hey, Mr. Bellevue, it's Leanne,” I said.

“We want to keep this out of the papers,” Lars whispered to me.

I nodded. “Something's come up,” I said to Mr. Bellevue, and told him the story.

I knew that Mr. Bellevue would help if he could, on account of being such a big movie fan. Also I was pretty cer
tain that he was gay, although I'd never asked, and Joshua Reed had a substantial following in that community. Mr. Bellevue listened and sighed a little, and seemed happy to hear that the cow was okay, and then he put me on hold to go find out which judge had been assigned to Joshua's arraignment.

“Your fella's a lucky boy,” Mr. Bellevue said when he got back on the phone. “It's Weintraub.”

“He was Charlie's, right? That is good news,” I said. I asked Mr. Bellevue to please keep all this to himself, but I wasn't too worried. I knew that he respected privacy, at least the serious kind. And I promised to give him details when I got there in the afternoon. I handed the phone back to Judy to hang up.

“So?” Lars and Judy were looking at me.

“Yeah, when you paid and asked for the first available court date, that's good—you got Judge Weintraub. People say he's pretty progressive and also a nice guy. But what's cool is that, Sandy, my best friend since third grade? Her brother Charlie got pulled over about a year ago, second offense, drunk driving. Is it Joshua's second offense?”

Lars and Judy exchanged glances. Lars nodded.

“Because second is usually jail but third always is,” I told them, although I got the impression that they already knew something about drunk driving sentences. “Anyway, Charlie lost his license of course, for a long time, but instead of jail he got house arrest, at home, for I think it was ninety days. Weintraub's really into families helping each other through hard times. It drove Sandy crazy to have him there. Charlie, not the judge. I mean, they let him go to work, but then he had to come right home. So you might be able to argue some sort of precedent. You know, if you were willing to plead guilty. That's the thing, Charlie pled guilty. Pled? Pleaded? You get what I mean.”

“But what are we going to do about the movie? I know
you're pissed, sweetheart, but I really want him to be in this movie,” Judy said to Lars. “It'll be good for all of us. We can't have him sitting at home in California.”

“He couldn't do that,” I told her. “Whatever punishment he gets will have to be in West Virginia. Probably Jefferson County. I remember that from my class on jurisdiction,” I said.

Lars smiled at me. “You'll make a good lawyer,” he said. He turned to Judy. “Leanne's right. Whatever happens, it's bound to happen in Jefferson County.”

“What are you suggesting?” Judy said. “That we stick him in a hotel for three months?”

“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.

Start Slow

W
hat'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.

“Looks like two hundred and eight pickup,” I said, doing the math.

“Two hundred eight pickup,” Beau Ray said. He threw his solitaire pile into the air. On the outside, it looked celebratory, the cards fluttering around him like petals and whirligigs. But he didn't look happy.

“Momma says we've got to clean this up. Help me get the cards into a big pile, okay?”

Beau Ray nodded but didn't move. I started gathering the cards into one pile and finally he shrugged, then helped a lit
tle. I told him that I wanted him to ask before he took the deck of rose cards, and even though I was trying not to sound mad about it, Beau Ray started to rock back and forth as he did when he sought to comfort himself.

“Beau Ray, it's okay,” I said. “I'm not yelling at you. It's just that they belong in my room—like this is your room and your cards live here, right?”

He nodded, but I knew that we'd be having the same conversation again about something else, some other thing he found and would take or break or both. I'd learned not to become too attached to things since Beau Ray's fall. Nothing lasted.

Beau Ray was a good guy—at least, he meant to be. That he'd always been mellow, even back when he was functioning at normal levels, was a saving grace. I'd heard stories of people, brain-injured like him, full of adult-sized rage but without the ability to put it anywhere. So my brother marked Raoul's departure by throwing four packs of playing cards in the air. That wasn't so bad.

Maybe an hour later, I was in my room replacing the rose-backed cards in my desk drawer when Joshua opened Vince's door. He stood in the doorway, stock-still for a moment, staring across the hall into my room. He looked both sleepy and mad, like a toddler roused too early from a nap. His dark hair curled out in different directions. Then he shuffled across the hall and stood at my bedroom door, frowning out my window toward the yard below and the street beyond. He looked down at his left ankle, where the gray plastic sensor with a locked band hung. He shook his left foot, and I could hear the plastic rattle and thud against his skin.

“So it's not a bad dream,” he said. “Fuck.”

“You awake?” I asked him and then cringed to myself. It was a stupid question, given that he was standing before me, his eyes open. “You want to see the rest of the house now?”

Joshua shrugged. “I guess. Whatever. Why the fuck not?”

He hated us, I thought, if he could be goaded to feel anything at all. At least, he acted like he hated us, and as Judy had pointed out, Joshua Reed was a fine actor.

“Great. I'll give you the grand tour,” I told him.

I thought about what Judy had told me to do—or rather, how she'd told me to act. But still I heard myself being nice to him before I knew if I wanted to be, before I'd even thought about what I wanted. No one ever noticed, I don't think—that I tended to be nice as pie even when I didn't mean it. But it was a quirk that bugged me, and I realized that if I were going to be aloof to Joshua, I'd have to become a better actress. I'd have to practice.

He'd already seen most of the upstairs, what there was to it. He'd seen his room, and mine, and the hall bathroom. Besides that, there was Momma's bedroom and Susan's old bedroom, which had years back been converted into the sewing room where Momma did all her machine piecing. I pointed out both rooms on the way downstairs, but Joshua didn't seem to care. There was a lot of shrugging.

Downstairs, Beau Ray sat on the couch watching
This Old House
on television. He had quieted down and for that, Momma had given him a slice of cake. Momma sat beside him, stacking fabric squares. She nodded up at us.

“Joshua, this is my brother Beau Ray. Beau Ray, say hello,” I said.

Beau Ray didn't look up.

“Beau Ray, it's polite to say hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he said but still didn't look up.

A streak of chocolate icing colored his face, across his mouth and cheek. I usually wouldn't have cared about something like that, but I remember being a little embarrassed just then.