The lawyer’s oak-paneled waiting room smells like leather chairs, musty paper, and cigarette smoke on clothes from whoever was here last. Dotting the walls are paintings of golfers and hunting dogs with various fowl in their mouths. Generic waiting-room magazines (Sports Illustrated, Time, Southern Living, etc.) sit on an end table, but none of us are reading. On the whole, it’s a fairly shitty way to spend the last afternoon before school starts, but I seem to be in the “fairly shitty way” business lately.
I sit between my mom and dad. My dad shifts in his seat and keeps crossing and uncrossing his legs. My legs bounce while I rest my elbows on my knees and stare at the weathered hardwood floor. My mom lightly rubs my back. Her touch calms me a little. Thank goodness Georgia is at work. She’d be riled up and riling me up right now. The only sound in the room is the clicking of the receptionist’s perfectly manicured fingernails on her phone screen as she texts.
“Lawyers, bruh,” Mars says, pulling up the seat across from me.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Naw, for real, though, dude. I would know.”
“Your dad.”
“And my brother. Don’t forget my brother too. Just like my dad. Man, they would team up on me, lawyer my ass in the most mundane circumstances you can imagine.”
“Like?”
“Oh. We’re playing a board game and my dad’s like, to my brother, ‘Marcus, you cannot make that move,’ and my brother’s like, ‘Yes, I can, because if you examine the structure of the rules generally, they express the implicit intention that I should be able to make this move,’ and my dad’s like ‘Blah blah, but if you go beyond the text of the rules as written, blah blah, I don’t even know.’ ”
“Let me guess: whichever one of them won the argument, you lost.”
“Ding ding.”
“So here I am, sitting in a lawyer’s office, waiting for him to tell me how he’s going to argue with another lawyer to try to save my dumb ass. And whichever one of them wins, I’m going to lose. To some extent.”
“Correct.”
“One of them might win, but I’ll lose.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“You’re a real help, dude.”
“I try.”
“This sucks.”
“I know.” Mars gives me that lopsided smile of his and adjusts his glasses.
“We maybe should have gotten together and tried to avoid this mess.”
“I’m already avoiding it.”
“Good point. So how you doing, man? Everything good where you are right now?”
But he’s already gone.
A door opens at the end of a short hall, and a guy who resembles an anthropomorphic coyote, with icy blue eyes and facial tattoos, swaggers out. He looks like an outlaw. A tall, portly man with shaggy, longish white hair, wearing a gray pinstripe three-piece suit, follows him.
“Mr. Krantz? Carver Briggs is here,” the receptionist says to the white-haired man.
Mr. Krantz comes around the receptionist’s desk, hand extended. We stand as he shakes our hands.
“Folks, Jim Krantz. Call me Jimmy. Pleasure. This way.” He has a syrupy drawl.
We enter a small conference room with a round mahogany table, bookshelves full of green and tan law books with gilt lettering, more leather chairs, green-shaded lamps, and more hunting and golf pictures.
“Sit, sit.” Mr. Krantz gestures. He pulls out a chair, sits with a grunt, whips a pair of reading glasses onto his nose, and pulls out a legal pad and an expensive-looking gold pen. “All right, folks. Tell me what seems to be the matter.”
I sit there, mute. My dad clears his throat and tells Mr. Krantz about the Accident and Judge Edwards’s call for the DA to open an investigation. Mr. Krantz grunts and takes notes. Then he leans back in his chair and nods at me. “Okay, son. Tell me about this accident. What was your role, if any? I remember reading about it in the paper just after it happened, but I don’t recall that they said exactly what caused it. Something about texting?”
My legs start bouncing again. I hiccup acid, clear my throat, and take a deep breath. “I was at work. Um. I was supposed to hang out with my friends, Blake, Mars, and Eli. They were coming from Opry Mills Mall, where they’d gone to an IMAX movie. They were going to swing by my work and we were going to go to the park and hang out. So I texted Mars, ‘Where are you guys? Text me back.’ That’s all it said.”
Mr. Krantz doesn’t look up from his note-taking. “Who was driving?”
“Mars. Edwards.”
“That’s Fred Edwards’s son?”
“Right.”
“Did Mars text you back?”
“No, but there was a half-finished text to me on his phone when they, um. When—”
“Okay, I gotcha,” Mr. Krantz says softly, looking up from his pad. “Now Carver, everything we talk about in here is strictly protected by attorney-client privilege, which means nobody can force you to tell them what we discuss. That goes for your parents too, because they’re necessary parties to your defense. And that privilege exists so that we can be completely open and honest with each other, so I can best defend you if it comes to that, all right?”
I nod.
“So I need to ask: were you aware, when you texted Mars, that he’d probably text you back?”
I feel like I do that moment right before I’m about to slip on ice. I try to blink away the tears welling up in my eyes, but some spill. “Yes.”
“Were you aware Mars was driving at the time?”
“Pretty sure,” I whisper. It hurts to say this in front of my parents. I know I’m letting them down.
“Why text Mars and not one of your other friends in the car?”
“Um.” I’m crumbling.
“If you need a minute.”
“Um. Because Mars always answered texts the quickest. Even if he was driving. I was being impatient. I wasn’t thinking.” A tear splats on the green carpet of the conference room and slowly expands. My mom rubs the nape of my neck.
“Okay,” Mr. Krantz says softly, and leans back in his chair. He sets down his pen, pulls off his glasses, and chews on one of the earpieces for a moment, apparently deep in thought, allowing me to pull myself together. Or at least try.
“It’s obvious he didn’t intend to hurt anyone,” my mom says. “This is ridiculous.”
“Well,” Mr. Krantz says, still chewing on his glasses. “Yes and no.” He rises, walks to a bookshelf, and pulls down a green volume. He puts his glasses on and leafs through it quickly. He sits.
“Folks, I won’t sugarcoat. Under Tennessee law, there’s an offense called criminally negligent homicide. Used to be called involuntary manslaughter. Criminally negligent homicide happens when someone takes ‘a substantial and unjustifiable risk’ and ‘the failure to perceive it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care that an ordinary person would exercise under all the circumstances as viewed from the person’s standpoint.’ ”
I don’t fully comprehend what he’s saying, but I understand what “unjustifiable risk” and “gross deviation” mean. A purple spasm twists my stomach.
“Can you translate?” my dad asks, rubbing his forehead. “I’m a damned college English professor and you lost me.”
Mr. Krantz whips off his glasses again. “Means if you got a pretty good idea that you’re doing something that could get someone killed, and you go ahead and do it, you’re on the hook even though in your heart you never intended to kill anyone. This is sort of the hot new thing in prosecution. Up in Massachusetts, they tried to pin manslaughter on a girl who encouraged her friend by text message to commit suicide. Similar idea here.”
My insides are trying to crawl down my leg. An almost aggressive silence hangs in the room like a plume of nerve gas.
“So it’s not ridiculous. And the state’s best bet to prove it will be to wrangle Carver into saying exactly what he told me. But he doesn’t ever need to do that, because the Fifth Amendment protects against self-incrimination.” Mr. Krantz eyes me with a hopeful glimmer. “You haven’t told anyone what you told me, have you?”
I shake my head. “Not exactly.”
Mr. Krantz raises an eyebrow.
“After Blake’s funeral, a reporter tried to talk to me. Said Judge Edwards referred him to me.”
“And you told him…”
“That I didn’t really know what happened. That I was texting with Mars the afternoon of the accident.”
Mr. Krantz chews on the end of his glasses and chuckles ruefully. “Edwards. That crafty son of a bitch. He knew he might get you to voluntarily incriminate yourself, and because a reporter isn’t law enforcement, it would come into evidence at trial. Anybody else?”
“No.”
“You got a girlfriend?”
“Uh…no. I mean. No. I have a friend who’s a girl. She’s just a friend, though.”
“Don’t tell her anything.”
“Okay.”
“What are the chances the DA won’t file charges at all?” my dad asks.
Mr. Krantz blows out, his cheeks puffing. “That Judge Edwards can be a scary character.”
“We noticed,” my mom says.
“There’s some delicate stuff going on here politically. The DA, Karen Walker, is up for reelection next year. She needs Davidson County’s black vote to win. Edwards holds tremendous sway with that voting bloc. Plus Walker’s people are in front of Edwards day in and day out. So politically, this issue is two for the price of one. She makes it into Edwards’s good graces, and with it comes the black vote and she can grandstand about the perils of teen texting. Maybe even garner national attention. Sets herself up for a senate or gubernatorial race someday. She’s a winner the minute she indicts, even if she tries Carver and loses. And there’s an old saying that a good DA can indict a ham sandwich.”
“That is some bullshit,” my dad says in a low, trembling voice. I’ve never heard him use that tone before. It makes me afraid, hearing him afraid.
“Yup,” Mr. Krantz says.
“What do we do now?” my mom asks.
Mr. Krantz leans forward with his elbows on the table, hands clasped in front of him. “We wait. See what the DA does. Meanwhile, Carver, you do not talk to anyone about this without me present, understood? The cops ask you your favorite color? I don’t want you answering until I’m sitting next to you.”
“Okay.”
“And in the meantime, Carver lives under this cloud,” my dad says.
“Pretty much,” Mr. Krantz says. “It’s a shit show, no doubt.”
“Is there any good news?” my mom asks.
Mr. Krantz reclines and clasps his hands behind his head, sucking at a tooth. “Carver wasn’t in that car.”
We wrap up our meeting and leave. Dad walks on my right side, Mom on my left. I’m hanging my head. “I’m sorry, Mom and Dad.”
My dad puts his arm around me. “You have nothing to apologize for. You did not intentionally hurt anyone.”
“Accidents happen,” my mom says. “Even terrible ones.”
“This must be costing a ton,” I say.
“Don’t worry about that,” my dad says.
“How much will this cost?”
“It doesn’t matter,” my mom says.
“It matters to me.”
“You have enough to worry about,” my dad says, removing his arm from my shoulder and rubbing the back of my head.
I was just curious, but now I need to know. “I got us into this mess. I think I’m entitled to know.”
My dad dodges my eyes. “Look. Keep your mind on school, get good grades, stay on top of scholarship applications. That’s how you can help.”
I stop walking. My parents make it a few steps farther before turning back to me. “How much?” I ask quietly. With my face, I try to tell them I’m not taking another step until I get an answer.
My dad looks at my mom. She gives him an ambivalent “if you must” nod. He wipes his hand down his face. “When all is said and done, hundred, hundred fifty is what they told me.”
Something bright and hot detonates in my mind. “Thousand?!”
“That’s if it goes to trial and we lose and need to appeal,” my mom says.
I close my eyes, dizzied. “But still.”
“We’ll borrow against the house if we need to,” my dad says.
“We could lose our house?!”
“Let’s cross one bridge at a time here,” my dad says.
“Don’t think that way,” my mom says. “We need to think positively.”
How’s this: I am positively fucked.
I flop on my bed and text Jesmyn. Well, that sucked gray, smelly rhino ass.
After a few minutes, she texts me a frowny face followed by Big hugs. Want to talk about it?
Basically, they could charge me with negligent murder.
Seriously????? Shit.
Yeah. Oh, and this will cost a bazillion dollars, so my family’s going to end up homeless, too.
If I were there I’d give you a huge hug.
I would gladly accept said hug.
Tomorrow morning. When I come to pick you up.
Deal.