A Theory of Relativity by Jacquelyn Mitchard

Author:Jacquelyn Mitchard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: L*B*
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER twelve

The emotional hurdle for any judge was to avoid getting a swelled head. Ego was a snare Emily Sayward believed made people stupid. It was probably more poised to trip her up, Emily reasoned, here in Trempeauleau County than it would have been in the Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin, because her presence as the word made flesh was so visible. All she had to do was stop for a root beer—or worse yet, a beer beer—on any street from Wausau to Morehouse to Conover to Tall Trees, and she parted the waters. Conversation shushed as if she’d waved a wand, only to close behind her in ripples. “It’s the judge,” she imagined them saying, “the lady judge,” even though she was only one of three. Emily prayed that the attention would have the sole effect of making her more careful and methodical, and she was careful by nature.

What didn’t help was that Emily Sayward was . . . cute. The face and form that gave her so much pleasure in her personal life was an annoyance in her profession. Since she’d left her family-law practice to come here, and especially since her appointment, something about her size compared with the psychic space of her role didn’t fit. Her robes looked like a costume. Her lipstick emphasized her habit of catching her underlip between her teeth as she was thinking hard.

Emily and her husband had come to live in their cabin on stilts, on Hat Lake, three years before, when Jamie, on a whim, applied and somehow won the job of general counsel to Medi-Sun (having an Hispanic mom had not hurt, Emily and Jamie privately believed). It was no robotic corporate stamper’s job. Vitamins and herbals were not the health candy people believed they were; and now that boomers were chugging handfuls of them daily, there were lawsuits of substantial proportions—the woman who chalked up her psychotic episodes to Valerian, the middle-aged man whose hopeful experiments with ManPower had prompted, or so he alleged, a perpetual and painful erection, and the cancer patients who had desperately forsworn their radiation and opened their arms to the health-food store. Disclaimers and directions were invisible to people, apparently. The work had demanded all that Jamie, a skilled and compassionate litigator, had to give, and the salary and stock benefits gave the Saywards more freedom and security to raise their son than they had dreamed of back in One-L, as they’d tried to visualize their futeres over Ramen noodles by candlelight.

Emily began as a county prosecutor. She had put Tom Collins, an unfortunate name for a woebegone drunkard, away for twenty years, revoked his driving privileges for life, and imposed an irrevocable condition of absolute sobriety upon parole. It had been a popular decision. Though Tom Collins was a man with hundreds of distraught and influential friends, the Redmonds’ lives had been erased. Just six weeks after the Collins trial, the conservative governor—no particular chum to Emily’s liberal leanings—had appointed her to fill the deceased Judge Crabtree’s unexpired term.

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