An older man raised his hand and got up. He turned to Stefan. “What about you? You paid your ‘debt to society.’” The sneering quotation marks hung invisible and heavy in the air. “Do you feel like you should go on and just have a jolly life now?”

“No,” Stefan said. “I don’t. But even people like me have families, my grandparents and my parents who need me too. I’m all they have, and maybe I don’t deserve for them to love me, but I want to try to deserve it.”

When we finished, there was a sprinkling of applause, then a great boom of applause. I could see Jep in the back, making the clasped-fists signs of congratulation, and then gesturing to let us know he would go to get the car.

We walked out through the lobby, where several people stopped us to murmur approval for the talk and for our grace under the pressure of the protest. As we neared the door, I heard someone behind me, “Wait, dear, just a moment!”

A small, elderly woman was quickly bearing down on us, using her cane to propel her along. It was only when she got so close that I could study the way she moved that I realized, too late, she doesn’t really need that cane...but by then she had slugged me, a strong right to the jaw that knocked me to the carpet on my rear end. Stefan jumped to help me, while one security guard and then another pinned the woman’s arms behind her back. “Why don’t you kill yourself?” she screamed as they dragged her away.

Then it was a few minutes of first aid from a nurse practitioner who’d been in the audience, followed by an ambulance ride to the closest emergency room, with Jep and Stefan following behind, where I got stitches and painkillers. We decided to forgo the hotel stay that night so it was not until nearly midnight that we were finally home, and I let Jep tuck me in, and bring me hot milk with honey and cinnamon.

The next morning, I played back the voice mail on the answering machine, for some reason on speaker. There were a few random remarks about the attack on me at the speech, which had been mentioned on the news, one from a personal injury lawyer offering to sue the assailant. At the last message, Stefan and I froze, as if a tiger had just walked into the room. “Thea, this is Jill McCormack. I need to speak with you. Please give me a call as soon as you can.”

12

“Ouch,” Jep said that night when he inspected my luridly swollen lip. “Theaitsa, that little old lady packed a punch.”

“She wasn’t even old,” I said.