Before Caitlin could protest, MeeMaw said that she had told Mrs. Street that it would be fine.
“I’ll bet anything that MeeMaw didn’t ask my parents,” Caitlin whispered as they headed to Seth’s car. “They probably would have said no.”
“Your grandmother knows me. Your parents don’t.”
“And that’s all it takes to assess your driving skills?” Caitlin felt that being his friend entitled, even required, her to call him on his cockiness. “Being introduced to you?”
He grinned at her, knowing exactly what she was up to. “Absolutely.”
They stopped by the Dairy Queen so Caitlin could get her training schedule. They bought their supper there, and they drove out to the lake just because they could.
A gang of high school kids was at the public beach. Seth said that he sort of knew them and that it would be weird, so he drove farther around the lake, looking for a weedy, unused-looking driveway. When they found one, he parked on the side of the road. They slipped under the chain that stretched across the drive and skirted around the padlocked cabin to sit on the dock, hoping that the owners wouldn’t appear.
It was still early enough that the sun was shining on the dock, but it was gritty, not exactly what a proud Dairy Queen employee would put food on. Caitlin unthinkingly pulled off her sweatshirt and started to spread it out.
“Cait—”
She looked over at him. His eyes instantly shifted away, and he seemed to flush.
Oh, her sweatshirt. She had taken off her sweatshirt.
Okay, she was going to be cool about this. She spread the shirt out, using it as a tablecloth, and started to unpack the food. “I told you that I’d gained weight. I wasn’t kidding.”
“Yes, but...” He didn’t know what to say.
“My boobs? It’s birth control pills. My parents made me start taking them.”
“Hold up.” Now he was looking at her again. “Birth control? You have a boyfriend? Why didn’t you say something?”
“Because I don’t.” She explained what she hadn’t been able to tell him on the phone.
“So they don’t trust you?”
“I guess I get it.” Caitlin suddenly wanted to defend her parents. “Dylan makes things hard. We have to plan everything around him, especially since he isn’t a military dependent like the rest of us. So I understand that my folks feel that they couldn’t face that again. I just wish that they believed I had enough sense not to let that happen.”
“My folks told me not to do anything stupid with you.”
“They did?” Caitlin really didn’t like that. “Didn’t you tell them that it’s not like that between us, not at all?”
“I did, but they’re super concerned because of who you are.”
“Who I am? What did they mean by that?”
“We’re a factory family, or we used to be, and you, you’re a Thurmont. It’s not just that the Thurmonts belong to the country club, but your grandfather, Doc Thurmont—well, people thought the world of him.”
“My name is McGraw, and the McGraws are south Boston dockworkers.” It was always a bit of a culture shock to visit her father’s family, but they were Caitlin’s only cousins and she liked them a lot. “Now can we talk about something else?”
There was lots to talk about. Street Boards was doing really well; Seth’s dad was looking for more factory space. The Forrests, Seth’s friend Nate’s family, was negotiating to buy a bankrupt ski resort on Mt. Hood in Oregon, the one place in the United States where you could count on snow year-round. They wanted to turn it into a snowboard park. If it all worked out, Seth and his friends were going to live there someday.
Seth also asked her about the move to San Diego, and they talked about what computers they would buy if they had all the money in the world.
It had been light when they arrived, but the sun was sinking behind the tree line. The boats on the lake soon turned their lights on, and a campfire flickered to life at one of the cabins along the shore. The parking lot at the public beach was momentarily flooded with light as people turned on their cars and then pulled out of the lot. Caitlin could see their red taillights flickering through the trees. They would be going into town to catch the late movie, Seth said.
The campfire was shooting red-orange flames, and the people were dark outlines moving around it. Caitlin had been a Girl Scout, and she knew that the fire was bigger than it needed to be, but she liked watching it. Seth was watching it too, and she could feel him next to her, breathing the slow, deep breaths of an athlete.
We’re both growing up. Pretty soon we can stop being kids.
CHAPTER FIVE
Once all the jurors arrived Thursday morning, Kim, the tiny woman with a massive need to be in charge, started passing out copies of her completed snack schedule. She had written each person’s name on top as a way of knowing who had gotten theirs. Caitlin supposed that saved them from having to sign a receipt for the document.
Then Kim reached into her tote for a second handout. “I got this off the internet. It is some definitions of—”
“Whoa,” Seth said just as others were sitting up in alarm. One deputy was moving toward Kim, his hand out for the paper, while the other was lifting up the court phone on the wall by the door.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to do our own research,” said the woman Caitlin was thinking of as Chatty Heather. “Didn’t the judge say—”
“This wasn’t research,” Kim protested. She turned her back toward the deputy. She didn’t want to give up her handouts. “At least not into the case. It’s just defining the terms that they are using. It will be so helpful because I know that Yvette here doesn’t understand anything.”
Yvette looked up, startled.
It wasn’t fair to single out Yvette. None of them understood anything.
The second deputy hung up the phone and said that Kim needed to go speak to the judge.
“I don’t see why,” Kim protested. “I was trying to help. Some of them need help.”
The deputy escorted her out, and twenty minutes later Sally, the lead deputy, came back. “Juror Fourteen has been excused. I need to pick up her things.”
“You mean she’s leaving?” one of the younger women gasped.
“The judge takes his cautions to you very seriously,” Sally said.
“It’s like on TV,” April, the redhead, said and laughed nervously. April laughed at everything, and the sound was loud and grating. “On those reality shows where people get voted off, and then they just disappear.”
“That’s right,” Chatty Heather agreed. “That must be so strange to have people be gone like that. I’ve never understood—”
“Well, at least,” Fred the Smoker interrupted her, waving his copy of the snack schedule, “we will have this to remember the bitch by.”
* * * *
The prosecution started calling witnesses, and Caitlin could tell that the first witness really wanted the jurors to understand the issue. She looked at them when she spoke; her shoulders were open, her gestures were generous. She talked slowly and tried to explain each piece of jargon that she used. But then the prosecutor would follow up with a jargon-filled question, and after a while the witness gave up and just answered the questions, her arms now close to her body.
How could anyone become a prosecutor and be this bad at things? If the courtroom worked as things did on TV, all the lawyers at that table were assistant district attorneys. The actual district attorney would have been elected. Caitlin had no idea if she had voted for the current incumbent or not.
What a godawful citizen she was, voting mindlessly, not being a resident of the state where she truly lived. She could not think of a single way to justify herself.
It was now the defense lawyers’ turn with the first witness. Because there were two defendants, two lawyers questioned
the witness separately, and as far as Caitlin could tell, they asked almost the same questions. If there were a difference that was going to let her conclude that one defendant was guilty and the other one not, she wasn’t hearing it.
And Fred was desperate for a cigarette.
At least the snacks in the jury room were great. Marcus, the quiet young African American whom Caitlin assumed was gay, had bought delicate, little, obviously homemade quiches to start the day with, and at the midmorning break he brought out beautifully colored French macarons.
“Did your mother make these? Your wife?” one of the older women asked innocently.
Marcus shook his head. He was a chef and had come to town in September because he had gotten a job at the town’s one very good restaurant.
He had only been in the state ten months, and he had already changed his driver’s license and his voter registration. That’s what grown-ups did.
After the break, having had his morning cigarette, Fred was back to thrusting himself into Caitlin’s space. She knew it had to be deliberate. She wanted to shove him, pinch him, bite him, except that last one felt too unsanitary.
She was usually capable of standing up for herself. But confronting him would only make him worse.
She was now starting to hate the defense lawyers as much as the prosecutors. One of them was always trying to make the witness answer yes or no, when the witness wanted to say, “Yes, that is possible, but highly unlikely.” Then when the witness finally gave up and answered yes, the lawyer would look triumphant as if he had scored some major point.
Do you think that we are idiots?
Apparently they did. Caitlin started to play games with the clock. She would not look, not look, not look, then try to guess how much time had passed. She was always wrong; she always overestimated.
The prosecution was introducing a great many documents as evidence, and Caitlin’s extensive legal training, that is, watching Law and Order reruns, had taught her that the defense would have seen them all ahead of time. Nonetheless, someone from both defense teams felt it necessary to examine each page of the document as if wanting to signal to the jury that the prosecution was not be trusted. It just made Caitlin hate them even more. Of course she hated the prosecutors too, so this wasn’t going to get in the way of her fair and impartial verdict. Fair, impartial, and totally ignorant.
What was an “impairment charge”? Was that something that a normal human being was supposed to know about? She wished she could ask someone.
After lunch, and an hour or so of more testimony, the bailiff handed the judge a note. The judge unfolded it, read it, folded it back up again, and told the jury that they would be taking their afternoon break a little early. As they were filing out, he hurriedly motioned to Sally, and while they were waiting in line to pick up their phones and computers, she asked them to put their internet-enabled devices on airplane mode. One of the older women had to be shown how.
Caitlin kept copies of her current projects not only in the cloud, but also on her hard drive and on a thumb drive. So she was able to work. Having figured out the trajectory of a bullet on a gravity-heavy planet, she could start coding all those changes.
Breaks were only supposed to last fifteen minutes, but the little timer she had on her computer for billing kept clicking, an hour, an hour and fifteen minutes. After two hours she stopped the clock and went with Sally and the other female jurors to the restroom. A male deputy was escorting the men. The hall was completely empty.
But Sally wouldn’t tell them what was going on.
People were getting restless. One of the younger women had had a movie downloaded on her computer so several people were gathered around her small screen trying to watch it together. Fred said that he didn’t care how long the trial lasted. As long as he was making twelve dollars a day, his bitch of an ex-wife couldn’t expect him to pay her anything.
Caitlin went back to work. In another fifteen minutes, she finished with the not-so-speeding bullets. She filled out an invoice and updated her own records. Of course she couldn’t send it to the client yet, but she could do it as soon as she got back to her parents’ house.
She started chatting with some of the other jurors. One of the older women, Joan, a former third-grade teacher, was a knitter, while the other older woman, Delia, had a crocheting project with her. Norma, a nurse who looked to be in her late fifties, was working on professional course material.
Finally at five o’clock Sally came to get them. “Do we need to put our phones in the bins?” Seth asked. “Can we leave them on the table so we can grab them and go?” Surely the judge was simply going to call them back in, admonish them not to talk about the case, and then dismiss them for the day.
“No,” Sally said. “Please use the bins.”
The observers’ benches were empty, which wasn’t too surprising since there had been no testimony since the first hour after lunch. The lawyers were sitting behind empty tables; they had cleaned up all their papers.
The judge turned to them. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to tell you that a situation has arisen that will require that we sequester you. This means—”
Sequester? Caitlin sat up. Sequester? What? This wasn’t possible. Hadn’t her father said that North Carolina didn’t sequester juries, that it was expensive, that sequestered juries came up with bad verdicts?
They would be moved to a motel, the judge was saying, where they would be housed and fed entirely at the state’s expense.
Was he serious? This couldn’t be happening.
“I know you are going to be asking why we are doing this,” the judge continued, “but that is what we can’t tell you, except to assure you that it had nothing to do with Juror Fourteen being dismissed.”
Juror Fourteen? Oh, right, that had been Kim.
The judge was still talking. “Of course this will be frustrating, and some of you will have some financial hardship.”
“Some hardship?” Dave interrupted. He was the older African American man who drove an interstate truck. “What about bankruptcy?”
The judge ignored that. He acknowledged that they would need their belongings, and deputies had been working all afternoon with their families or colleagues.
“And what about Monday?” one of the women asked. “It’s the Fourth of July and my family always—”
The judge held up his hand, silencing her. “You may take up individual cases with Deputy Burke. Now, Juror Five”—that was Elizabeth—“I am told that you have a food allergy. You will be able to manage, won’t you?”
“No, sir, I will not. I would have to bring all my own food, and that is too much to ask of my family.”
“Can’t we find a food service to accommodate you? Don’t most restaurants have gluten-free dishes these days?”
“There is an issue of cross contamination, sir. And those traces would build up if it was three meals a day. My doctor will provide any documentation that you need.”
The judge did not look happy. “Then I suppose I must excuse you.”
“Thank you, sir.” Elizabeth stood and moved along the railing of the jury box. At the door to the jury room she turned and lifted her hand in farewell to the others. Then she was gone.
Back in the jury room, the jurors pummeled Sally with questions. Shopping for a grandchild’s birthday present...finding a new grain supplier...refilling prescriptions... Sally had no answers.
Caitlin asked about the internet. “If we sign those affidavits again, we can go online, can’t we?”
Sally shook her head. “I’m afraid not.”
“But—” Caitlin broke off. Sally would have no answer.
Caitlin’s rent was due tomorrow, July 1, and her health insurance was due today. Both were on an autopay system. She had money in her account to cover this month’s debits, but not next month’s. The gravity-heavy planet designe
r might take two weeks to pay; then her bank might sit on the money for a few days. If she couldn’t invoice the client immediately, next month’s rent and insurance would roll over to her credit card, which had a Shakespearean interest rate. If she got behind on that credit card, what a nightmare that would be.
Was living in San Francisco worth this stress? Why hadn’t she saved more when she worked in Silicon Valley?
Sally was answering a question from one of the other women. “I know, I know. My husband couldn’t pack for me either, but we will let each of you have a fifteen-minute phone call tonight.”
“What about dinner?” the young rabbity-looking man asked. “My wife and I, we always eat at the same time every night. That’s what I am used to.”
“Oh, grow a pair,” Fred mumbled.
Sally ignored that. “We are having meals delivered to the motel.”
“What motel are we staying at?” someone else asked.
She said that she was not authorized to release that information. “And I am afraid that you will have to leave all your internet-enabled devices with the court.”
“Can’t we just put them on airplane mode like we did this afternoon?” Seth asked.
“I’m sorry.”
“Can our families come pick them up?” Caitlin asked. Her computer was the most valuable thing that she owned, and she was dependent on it for her income. She couldn’t let anything happen to it.
Sally said that she believed that that would be possible, but it was the judge’s decision.
So into plastic bags went phones, computers, MP3 players. Some of the older jurors had books and magazines that they could keep. Delia and Joan had their handicrafts, and Norma had her geriatric wound care text, but all the younger people were left with nothing, nothing to read, nothing to watch, nothing to listen to. At least Caitlin had never indulged in a watch with internet capability. Seth and Marcus had. They weren’t even going to know what time it was.
They filed out of the courthouse through a small side door. A bus was waiting for them. Caitlin made sure that she got to sit next to Seth. It was good to feel his arm against her arm, his thigh against hers.
The Fourth Summer Page 8
