Page 46 of Courtroom Drama
I press my hand to my chest as I shake with laughter. “I wish I could have seen that,” I say, wiping a tear from the outer corner of my eye. He watches me closely as my laughter calms. I observe Damon’s attentiveness, his fingers still curled around his glass. He’s always done this, watched me laugh rather than participate himself.
At fourteen, Damon and I found a hamster statue on a table of ceramic knickknacks marked for fifty cents each at a neighbor’s estate sale. Though I still don’t particularly know the difference between an estate sale and a standard garage sale, this event was most certainly the latter, with tables full of folded holiday sweaters and washed-thin tees, scraped-up toys and tattered paperbacks. Damon picked up the statue and tapped me on the shoulder with it, and when I turned to find it staring at me, I screamed—an embarrassingly loud reaction that caused Damon to bend forward, hands on his knees, laughing. He bought the hamster (gave the woman manning the till a dollar and told her to keep the change), then proceeded to torture me with it for the next two years. We often debated whether it was a hamster, gerbil, or guinea pig and the minimal differences between the three. Ultimately, we settled on hamster, though we couldn’t be sure. It became a thing between us, hiding the hamster/gerbil/guinea pig where the other would unsuspectingly find it.
He leans forward. “D’you remember—”
“The bucket,” we say in unison.
“I think I actually peed my pants on that one,” I confess. It’s vividly still in my mind, Damon texting me to come outside. When I opened the front door, I was met with the orange ceramic hamster statue—one leg broken off from when it fell from Damon’s back fence (my placement)—swinging from a turned bucket above the doorframe, string tied to it so it fell to dangle in front of me, face-to-face.
Damon rolled in the grass, cackling until his stomach ached.
In this moment, this memory, we are our younger selves again. Hopeful and staunchly resilient. Mercifully unaware.
My laughter calms, and we both go quiet.
“I still have it,” he says.
I lean in. “You still have Prince Hamsterdinck?”
“I had forgotten his name,” he admits.
“How could you forget? Kara named him,” I say. We got her hooked onThe Princess Brideearly, always fast-forwarding through the gory fight scene at the end.
He crosses his arms and runs a hand down the side of his face. “That’s right,” he says thoughtfully.
Cam and Tamra across the table burst into laughter and it draws our attention. It reminds me where we are. That, should someone overhear our exchange, they’d learn that our history runs far deeper than we’ve let on.
“Did you ever want to do something besides being a mediator?” he asks, as if he can sense the anxiety brewing within me and needs to defuse it.
I try to think of my childhood dreams, what I might have shared with him when we were younger. I lean forward. “Well, no young adult says,I want to be a mediator when I grow up,” I say.
“Same for transportation engineer,” he muses.
“Right?”
He flexes his jaw, seemingly deciding whether to voice a thought his tongue is wrestling with.
“Did you? Have something you wanted to be?” I recall him having an ever-changing list when we were young, everything from firefighter to veterinarian to professional motocross racer.
He rubs at his jaw. “For a while I thought I might teach. History.”
I think of a teenage Damon sprawled on my living room floor, reading nonfiction—comparative studies on the pyramids in Egypt or logistics and supply chain strategies from World War I—wondering how he could find these types of books enjoyable. Then I picture him in front of a classroom, dress shirt rolled to his elbows, wide stance, slapping a yardstick against his open palm. I shift in my seat.
“Why didn’t you go that route?” I ask.
“After Kara, it just didn’t seem to fit anymore.”
I’m immediately hit with a pang of embarrassment for turning his onetime dream into the start of a sexual fantasy.
“I thought I’d travel, maybe end up living in another country.”
“Why didn’t you?” I ask, but intuitively, I know. He couldn’t leave his parents. I don’t make him say it. Instead, I ask, “Do you ever think about blowing it all up and starting over? About starting a teaching career?”
He shakes his head, once. “No. I’m where I’m supposed to be.”
“I am, too,” I say, reflecting on my life, my career in particular, in these terms for perhaps the first time. “It’s disheartening at times, seeing people reach a point of so much hurt they can’t imagine arriving at any common ground. But helping them find it, proving that you can come back from a seemingly unsalvageable situation, there’s a high I feel each time.”
“You make it sound like a divorce proceeding.”
