Andre stared straight ahead. Jesse put a hand on his brother's arm — steady, the way their father used to — and said nothing at all.
Chapter 18: A Recess Conversation
At the noon recess, the bailiff touched Jesse's shoulder.
"Judge wants to see you in chambers, son. Just you."
Andre frowned. "Is that allowed?"
"It is his courtroom," Jesse said. He straightened his father's tie in the corridor mirror and followed the bailiff past the clerk's office, into the quiet back hallway where the air smelled of old paper and lemon oil.
Judge Raymond Pruitt's chambers were smaller than Jesse expected. The walls were lined with law books, and on the desk stood a single framed photograph: a young woman in a graduation gown, laughing. Pruitt was standing at the window, his robe hung over the back of his chair, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow. Without the robe he looked older, and smaller, and entirely human.
"Sit down, Jesse."
Jesse sat. He kept his hands folded, the way his mother had taught him.
Pruitt did not sit. He looked out at the courthouse square, where the January light lay thin across the bare trees.
"I am going to tell you something off the record," he said, "and I am going to ask you to hear it as one man speaking to another, not as a judge to counsel. Can you do that?"
"Yes, sir."
"This Rucker lead your investigator is chasing." Pruitt turned. "Eddie Rucker. I have seen his file. He is not a drifter who got lucky. He runs with rough people over in Cedar County — men who have put people in the hospital for knowing too much. If you keep pulling this thread, you need to be careful. Your mother needs you vertical. I mean that, Jesse. These men do not write letters to the editor."
Jesse was quiet. "Thank you for telling me, Judge."
"I am not finished." Pruitt came around the desk and sat in the chair beside Jesse, not behind the desk. "At the arraignment, in October, I laughed at you."
Jesse said nothing.
"A seventeen-year-old boy standing up in my courtroom, asking to represent his brother in an armed robbery trial, wearing a suit three sizes too big. I laughed. The whole courtroom laughed." Pruitt's voice dropped. "I have been ashamed of it every day since."
"Judge—"
"Let me finish. I knew your father, Jesse. Daniel Cole."
Jesse's breath caught. No one had spoken his father's name in that courthouse.
"Did you know that?" Pruitt asked.
"No, sir."
"Twenty years ago, maybe more. I was a young circuit judge, and your father was a legal-aid paralegal. He could not appear in my court — but the housing authority hearing room downstairs, a paralegal could speak there." Pruitt smiled, a real smile, worn at the edges. "He argued a case for a widow facing eviction. Mrs. Abernathy — no, that is my clerk. Mrs. Ledbetter. He had no law degree. He had a library card and a memory like a steel trap and he dismantled that landlord's attorney piece by piece. The widow kept her apartment. I have never forgotten the look on her face. I sat in the back and watched. When it was over I told him he should have been a lawyer."
Jesse's throat tightened. "What did he say?"
"He said, 'Somebody has to do the reading, Judge.'" Pruitt looked at his hands. "Your father is the reason I never laugh at a pro se litigant anymore. Or — I had forgotten that, until this week. Watching you, I remembered."
The radiator ticked in the corner. Outside, a car door slammed on the square.
"Judge Pruitt," Jesse said carefully, "why are you telling me this?"
"Because you should know that the man who laughed at you in October is not the man sitting here. And because —" Pruitt stood, suddenly brisk, the judge again. "Because when this trial is over, whatever happens, I want you to consider something. There are scholarships. There are people who would help a boy like you get to law school. I would be one of them."
"I will think about it, sir," Jesse said. "After."
Jesse stood too. His father's suit hung from his shoulders like a flag from a pole.
"Thank you, sir," he said. "That means more than I can say. But right now I have a brother to get home."
Pruitt nodded. For a moment his hand rested on Jesse's shoulder — heavy, warm, brief.
"Then go get him, counselor."
In the corridor, Theo was waiting with two sandwiches from the vending machine. He took one look at Jesse's face and did not ask a single question. He just handed over the sandwich and walked beside him back toward the courtroom, and Jesse felt, for the first time in months, that the weight on his shoulders had shifted — not lifted, but shared. and in his notebook, under that day's date, he wrote: the judge cried a little, I think, but do not tell anyone.