“A hastening,” he had said. He has never been a very good liar, and I love this about him, though these days it concerns me. Sometimes, when I am there walking the old neighborhood, I see his car pull into the driveway, and then I follow his steps into the house.

Shelley

The jury will return later today, and she is still wandering Food Lion, waiting for the judge to call. The manager has asked her twice if she needs help, and so now she has a cart and is slowly filling it and then putting things back to kill time. She is ready. She wants to hear the verdict. She wants to see that awful man’s face and hear the news she is hoping will come. All rise for the judge. All rise for the judge, and in her mind, she can see the whole room, the dark wood and the brass rail, the dirty windows and the cobwebs she has been studying for several weeks now. Guilty. People from all over the community will be there—the grand finale of this long-running show. And the judge will probably be so relieved to have it all end; this case has aged her there in her expensive burgundy pumps and those gold knot earrings she wears every day, but that is the last thing that Shelley would ever say—even to Marva—for fear of getting in trouble, and it reminds her again how alone she is.

The surgeon who repaired Harvey’s lip was very kind, and she’d stared at his clean, agile brown hands as he spoke and explained everything to her. All during the trial, she has had to remind herself of this so she won’t throw out the whole of a profession based on one rotten egg. It isn’t fair to judge that way even though it is so easy to look at a whole group and point to the one they resemble or remind you of. But people could do that to her, too, and it wouldn’t be fair. People could do that to Jason or to Harvey. People did it to that young girl who got murdered, seeing only the mess of her life, a needle in her arm, and not the love she felt for her young son, not all that she had endured that had led her to such a dark and frightening place. And did she hear Brent say “harelip,” or did she imagine that, too? “No one says that anymore,” she told him. “No one is perfect.”