The Language of Hoofbeats by Catherine Ryan Hyde

Author:Catherine Ryan Hyde [Hyde, Catherine Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781477824689
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2014-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

There was some legal stuff I can’t recount exactly. I sat there and listened to every word, but it didn’t really add up to something coherent to me. Maybe my brain was too busy, or maybe you have to know the legal system, or both.

Then the woman in drab went on for several minutes about the various factors in their eventual decision, such as prison behavioral violations, or lack of same, character witnesses, petitions of support from the community, or testimony from victims or family members of victims.

I thought, What victims? Drugs being something of a victimless crime.

Of course, if it had been a simple drug charge, she wouldn’t have been serving fifteen to life.

I remembered the account we’d read of the trial. One of the arresting officers had sworn that Gabriela’s late brother, Luis—Mando’s uncle—took a shot at him. Which seemed like a perfectly ridiculous claim in light of the fact that no weapon was ever found in the home. Gabriela claimed it was nothing but a sheet pan knocked off the top of the stove during all the panic of the arrest.

I wondered why that policeman hadn’t bothered to come to the hearing if he honestly felt he’d been shot at.

I wanted to ask out loud why the arresting officers hadn’t bothered to attend, but I figured I wasn’t supposed to say anything. And I worried that breaking the rules might only hurt our case.

While I was trying to take all this in, my brain going miles a minute, Mando’s mother began to speak. I’d missed the question she was answering. But, in context, it seemed they’d asked her if she was either remorseful or rehabilitated. Or both.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” she said in her heavily accented English. Armando had no accent, but he’d been attending school in the US since he was seven. “Everybody wants me to say I’m sorry for what I did, but I didn’t do anything. I lost my job. In the slow season. The restaurant where I worked just laid people off when the tourists went away. You never knew who or when. I couldn’t find another job, and I couldn’t pay rent, so that’s why we moved in with Luis.”

Now all three of these people, who hadn’t bothered to look up from their paperwork earlier, were staring right into her face. I could tell it unnerved her, even though I was only seeing her from behind.

The bright-red woman said, “You moved your ten-year-old son into a house where methamphetamine was being made. You don’t think that’s doing anything wrong?”

“Not made,” the man said. “Sold. It wasn’t a meth lab.”

“Fine. Whatever. Sold. You didn’t think that was endangering your son?”

“But I didn’t know. Luis was not a drug dealer. He was a mechanic. He was my little brother. I loved him. He lost his mechanic job a year before I lost mine. I guess that’s when maybe he started selling drugs, but he never told me. He knew I’d be ashamed of him if he told me that, so maybe he didn’t say.

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