Jane has already caught one break—the trial is starting an hour late today, at eleven instead of ten. The court clerk called her last night to tell her that Judge Horton has a long-scheduled doctor’s appointment of his own.
It is an established fact that Jimmy is better at waiting than Jane is, even if she’d also been a cop, where being as good at waiting as shooting a gun was part of the job description.
But he can’t imagine what the waiting must be like with cancer, going from one test to another.
Jimmy doesn’t listen to the radio while he waits. He doesn’t drive up to the CVS on Main Street and buy a newspaper, as much as he still likes having the paper in his hands. He just sits in the quiet of the front seat and remembers something he read in theTimesthe other day about manifesting, and how if you believe in something hard enough and well enough that you can allow it to come into form.
Jimmy sits here and manifests Jane getting some good news today for a change, manifests like that’s the most important thing he’ll do all day.
Eight o’clock now.
She needs to get on the road soon.
They both do.
The dashboard clock says 8:06 when she comes walking out the door and straight for Jimmy’s car.
He can see right away that she’s crying.
Now Jimmy is the one who can’t wait any longer, gets out of the car, walks toward her.
When he’s right in front of her, he stops and says, “Whatever it is, I’m here.”
She’s crying hard enough, making a complete mess out of her makeup, that she can’t get any words out right away. The tears just keep coming, her chest keeps rising and falling.
So it turns out Jimmy does have to wait a few seconds more.
“It’s bad?” he says.
She gets some air into her.
At last, she shakes her head.
Finally, she says, “It shrunk.”
SEVENTY-SEVEN
I’VE NEVER BEEN ONE of those women who carries a small cosmetics department in my purse. But I know I have enough to get the job done between when I arrive in Mineola and before Katherine Welsh calls her first witness of the morning, a high school friend of Morgan Carson’s.
Norma Banks has just pulled up in her Uber when I’m getting out of my own car.
“What happened?” she says, the bright blue eyes locked on me. “Something bad happened, didn’t it?”
“No, something good,” I say, adding that I’ll tell her when I’m inside, right before the two of us blow past the media rope lines, me only offering a wave of the hand as I tell them all to have a blessed day.
From behind me I hear one of the male reporters call out, “Blessedday? Whoareyou?”
When it’s just Norma and me in the ladies’ room, I tell her about the tumor shrinking and why that matters, how the best I’ve done before this, since the day Sam Wylie sat in the same office and gave me the news about my cancer, was the tumor not getting any bigger.
“Fuckin’ ay,” Norma says.
“You know there’s no victory laps in this game, right?” I ask.
I’m leaning over the sink getting myself as close to themirror as possible, doing the best I can with what I’ve got to work with, like I’m in training to be a makeup artist.
Behind me I see Norma smiling.
“So the shit they gave you in Switzerland that’s been making you feel this shitty since you got back is actually working,” she says. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
