A Good Mother by Lara Bazelon

Author:Lara Bazelon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2021-02-24T21:19:44+00:00

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

11:15 a.m.

United States District Court

for the Central District of California

Twenty minutes. It is all Abby is allowed. And it’s a gift from Dars, who had called a recess to take what he made clear was an important judicial phone call.

Twenty minutes to try to get to the bottom of something she should have known months ago. Abby could have killed Luz, but now the person she wants to kill is Will. As soon as he shuts the door to the witness room, before either Abby or Luz has a chance to sit down, the words are out of his mouth.

“Did you sleep with him? Did you?” He is staring at Luz, his face drained of color. Luz, who is putting her phone back in her purse after texting Maria Elena to bring over Cristina, looks up, startled.

As if that were the most important fact—or even a helpful one. Thank God the room—windowless and big enough only for a table and a few chairs—is soundproof. Abby wants to slap Will across the face. “You need to leave,” she says, as calmly as she can manage. “Right now.”

He starts to say something, and she holds up her breast pump. “I have to do this.”

“No, you don’t.”

Abby ignores him and focuses on getting set up. She places the machine on the table, plugs the electrical cord into an outlet, and connects the tubes to the suction cups. She turns to face him as she removes her jacket. “I am going to take off my shirt and bra,” she says. Some men in Abby’s office would have told her to turn around and face the wall—no fucking way were they going anywhere. But not Will. Whatever it is he has done, he remains Will: too modest, prudish even, to fathom staying in a room where his cocounsel’s breasts would be exposed. He turns and walks out without a word, leaving Abby and Luz alone.

Abby undresses from the waist up and hooks up the breast pump. Almost immediately, there’s a knock on the door behind her and Abby motions to Luz to get it. Behind her, she hears a few muffled words in Spanish, inhales the baby shampoo smell of Cristina. It makes her long for Cal. If only she’d known about this break, she could have asked Nic to bring him. She wishes she was holding him right now. Because she loves that time with him and because she has come to believe that Cal is like her secret weapon. The power that comes with the knowledge that she could create and sustain his life pulses through her when she is with him. It makes her feel invincible. Which is not at all the way she feels now.

Instead, Abby is in a baby-feeding face-off with her client—the Good Mom/Bad Mom tableau so bizarre and grotesque she wants to laugh hysterically, but it’s not funny. Instead, Abby forces herself to wait until Cristina latches on, then says to Luz, “I thought I told you never to lie to me again.

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