She had been free to choose otherwise, and that is worth remembering about that morning. The court calendar offered her an early telephone conference she could have taken, and in her study, in a folder she had carried home the night before, a sentencing memorandum waited with a young man's whole future folded inside it. Judges learn to recognize the mornings that will cost them something, and Naomi Greer, who had been a judge longer than Ryan Holt had been an officer, knew the folder would take whatever she gave it and ask for more. She gave it nothing before breakfast. She put the kettle on, she did not turn on the radio, and she chose the roses, because the work of judgment would have the whole of her day, and the whole of her week, and the garden asked only for the first hour, and asked politely.
The case she was not thinking about concerned a young man who had made one catastrophic decision and several foolish ones, and whose sentencing she would hear on Friday. She would think about him on Friday with everything she had. That was the appointment, and keeping appointments was the architecture of her fairness. To rehearse mercy among the roses would be to decide him early, in a garden, without his lawyer present, and she had not spent thirty years building a mind like a courtroom in order to hold hearings among the flowers. So the young man stayed in the folder, and the folder stayed in the study, and Naomi Greer went out into the Laurelhurst morning with a hose in her hand and a clear conscience about the order of things. It was the same discipline, exactly, that she would use an hour later on that same lawn: one thing at a time, each in its turn, nothing hurried into cruelty by being handled out of sequence.
Among the roses there was one she tended with a mercy her neighbors found excessive. It was a yellow rose her husband had planted the year they bought the house, from a nursery slip he had chosen with more hope than knowledge, and it had never once bloomed the way the catalog promised. It produced leaves bravely and flowers reluctantly, small pale things that seemed embarrassed by themselves, and every few years some well meaning visitor suggested she dig it up and plant something that performed. She never did. She fed it. She pruned it with unusual gentleness. She checked its stems for sickness the way she checked her own conscience, thoroughly and without flinching, and she watered it first, before the showier bushes, on the principle that the struggling thing gets the first drink. Struggling, she had told Aaron once, when he asked why she kept it, is not the same as failing, and a garden, like a courtroom, is judged by how it treats the case that will never make it look good.
The ritual itself was plain, and she loved its plainness. Gloves from the hook by the door. The hose uncoiled in its familiar loops. Water before the sun was high enough to burn the leaves, because tenderness has a schedule too. She moved along the fence at the pace the work set, neither fast nor slow, and the street was quiet except for birds and the far off sound of a garbage truck two blocks over, and her mind did the thing a lifetime had trained it to do in quiet. It settled. Her father, a man who kept his voice low in a loud world, had taught her young that a polite question, asked calmly and remembered exactly, was a form of strength that never needed to announce itself. She had built a career out of that lesson. She had built a self out of it. The composure people remarked on was not luck. It was practice, laid down day by day like the mulch in these beds, until holding steady was simply what the ground of her did under pressure.
So when the cruiser slowed at the curb in front of 422 Ashbury Lane, Naomi Greer did not startle, and she did not turn at once. She finished the rose she was watering, because the rose had been first and the car could wait its turn like everything else in a well ordered morning. The water ran clear over the roots. She counted nothing. She braced for nothing. She was the sum of sixty some years of mornings exactly like this one, and every one of them had been a rehearsal, though she could not have known it, for the morning a man would test whether the calm was a costume or a constitution. She kept one hand resting on the hose, straightened slowly, and turned to face the street.
Chapter Twenty One
The Hearing Where Nobody Laughed
The hearing room sat on the third floor of the municipal building, a long plain room with tall windows and a smell of old paper and floor polish. Three flags stood in the corner. A long table faced two smaller ones, and chairs that made every man sit up straighter than he meant to. On the wall behind the panel hung the seal of the city, gold and blue, patient as furniture.