After by Marita Golden

Author:Marita Golden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780385517027
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

They talk mostly when they meet about where they find rare moments of balance: for Carson, working with his hands; for Matthew Frey, writing a novel based on several cases he’s handled. When Carson comes to see him, Frey ushers him into his office, watches Carson sit in the chair across from him, and leans back in his swivel chair, his shock of prematurely white hair thick and tousled, wearing what Carson now knows is his uniform—white tie-less shirt and khakis—and asks him, “How’s work?” When Carson first told Matthew that he built furniture in his spare time, Matthew urged him to develop the hobby into a livelihood, suggested he take pictures of his pieces and put them in an album, urged him to get business cards, have an open house one weekend afternoon to display his furniture for invited friends and potential clients. And he has jovially monitored Carson’s progress, his willingness to turn a hobby into a business.

“I get lost down there sometimes,” Carson tells him this day. “Lose track of time, and even though I often have a blueprint for a cabinet, or a shelf, there’ll always come this moment when all those lines dissolve and I’m sawing and cutting and shaving from pure instinct.”

“I finished the chapter I told you about last time,” Frey announces, raising his arms and threading his fingers behind his head. “And the motive was totally different from what I thought it was.”

He’s written five novels, which various literary agents have rejected, and talks about the novel he’s writing now as a kind of mental Olympics that keeps him up until 2:00 a.m. some nights.

“You said you were going to a writers’ conference in Tennessee?”

“Oh yeah, I was the only man in the class. I’m convinced, women are the superior species.” Frey laughs. “The workshop leader liked what I’d written and we’ve been in touch by e-mail. She said to get back to her when I’m finished.”

“Good luck,” Carson tells him.

“I wanted to see you today to let you know that the grand jury will be impaneled next week. I wanted to talk to you about this even though you won’t testify.”

He’s been waiting for months for this to happen, and now that it has, Carson is unsure what he feels. “I still don’t understand why I can’t tell them what happened.”

“You can’t tell them what happened because I can’t be in the room with you during your testimony. You’d be asked why you didn’t wait for backup, what the procedures are for a stop like the one that night, why you pulled your weapon on Paul Houston.”

Those are the questions he has asked himself two, three thousand times a day. They are the questions he’ll be asked if there is a trial, the questions Internal Affairs will ask. The questions for which, despite the routine prep he undergoes with Matthew for the inevitable Internal Affairs inquiry, he still feels he has no answers. “What do you think will happen?”

“I’m not going to promise or predict,” Matthew tells him with a shrug, as though insulted by the inquiry.

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