Read Online Winter Birds by Jamie Langston Turner - Free Book Online

ATTORNEY AT LAW . I wonder what kinds of cases Samuel F. Graham specializes in. Would he accept the defense in a murder case? If the defendant were a shiftless thirty-year-old who never called his father except to ask for money, who never visited except to follow up on a phone call, would he believe the claim that the gun had fired accidentally?
    The two wicker rocking chairs on the wide front porch of the lawyer’s office are likely intended as a touch of domestic comfort, of assurance that Samuel F. Graham is just one of the common townsfolk: “Come on up and sit a spell. Tell me your troubles and we’ll talk it over.” People in the South have a great fondness for front porches. Surely no one with rocking chairs on his front porch would fleece you of your life savings. Surely he just wants to help.
    The house next to the lawyer’s office has a discouraged look. Its high-pitched roof gives the effect of an old hat that is too large. The windows appear to have blankets or sheets over them, and rain is pouring from a misaligned gutter at the corner of the house. There are slats missing from one of the shutters, and the shrubs in front of the porch look beaten down, as if a large grazing animal has been tramping through them.
    November can be a changeable month in the Mississippi Delta. Though it is forty-five degrees and raining today, two days ago it was a warm, sunny day in the sixties. On that day there was a great flurry of coming and going across the street as people arrived in shifts to help the family move in. The woman dressed as a man was in and out, doing a man’s work. The man did his share, also.
    At one point the man appeared on the front porch with cups on a tray, and a half dozen other people came out to take a break. The teenage girl was among them, hunched over, looking down into her cup. They sat on boxes and drank whatever was in the cups, then got up and went inside again. Later the man came back out carrying the little girl. He was talking to a man and woman, and when they got in a car and left, he waved good-bye from the front step. He lifted the little girl’s hand to make her wave. All this I watched for an hour while Rachel was at the Department of Motor Vehicles renewing her driver’s license.
    It must have been the woman dressed as a man who came to Rachel’s door on Friday, the one who spoke of a false alarm, whose mother’s name was Veronica. She and the man came again that night for dessert. I didn’t see either of them, but by muting the television I heard much of the conversation.
    They sat at the kitchen table to eat Rachel’s apple cobbler, and they patiently answered Patrick’s questions, which he fired rapidly, interspersing the questions with bits of advice about landscaping, which he knew they were eager to start on considering the former owners’ neglect, and repaving, which he likewise knew they had already thought about since the driveway was so badly cracked. He told them that one of his employees at the office supply store had a brother who did driveways and sidewalks, and he would be glad to give them his name and phone number; in fact, he would look it up and write it down right now while he was thinking about it.
    The man, whose name is Steve, said he worked at the catfish processing plant. Teri, the woman, didn’t work, he said, “except at home, and she does plenty of that.” Teri interjected that it was a full-time job just keeping ahead of Steve’s smelly work clothes. They had two girls, Mindy the teenager and Veronica, who was almost four. Steve volunteered the fact that they had lost a boy, Jody, eleven years ago when he was only a baby.
    I wondered if the mention of the boy’s death and the names Jody and Mindy, so close to Toby and Mandy, suddenly made Rachel feel that there was a noose around her neck. And did she feel that someone had kicked the chair out from under her and left her hanging when Patrick said, “We lost two children ourselves, so we