Starting with what happened with Travis and his croup last week. Dates. Times of phone calls. What’s been said. Et cetera. Everything you can remember. You also report it to me.”
I nodded.
“I have high hopes for this, Carissa,” she told me. “It’s unconscionable what’s been going on. My gut feeling is that if we don’t have the luck of the draw with which courtroom we land in, it will simply mean your circumstances will take more time to change. But I’ll do everything in my power to deal with this swiftly.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I replied. “Thank you.”
She grinned. “Don’t thank me. I’m getting paid. But regardless, I love my job. But when I get this kind of case, I love my job.”
I was glad about that. I liked her. She seemed nice and bullheaded, and in this instance, both worked for me.
Still.
“Thank you anyway,” I returned.
“My pleasure,” she said then looked to Joker and back to me. “Feel free to use this room to take care of Travis. But I’ve got a few more things to do before I go home. So if you don’t mind, I’ll leave you.”
“Of course not. Please go. And thank you for your time,” I said.
She nodded to me, did the same to Joker and moved out.
I looked to Joker and wheeled my plush leather chair his way.
“She’s amazing,” I whispered excitedly.
“Club’s not gonna retain morons,” he replied, any bite to his words nonexistent since his lips were curled up very slightly.
It might have been a very slight curve, but I’d take it.
I looked down to Travis then to him. “You want me to finish?”
“Got it.”
He certainly did.
“We can finish with the carrots and give him the yummy pears at LD,” I said.
“Right.”
“You’re good at that,” I observed carefully, because I didn’t want to seem to be prying.
I still wanted to know. The man was a biker. As far as I knew he had no children (something, even at this early juncture between us, I would hope he’d already have shared with me). But he was very good with them.
“Long time ago, rented a room in a basement,” he returned easily. “Woman needed the money. She had a man who was a dick. Gone more than he was home. She had kids, one was a baby. She worked. She also jacked down rent if I helped out. I needed her to jack down rent, so I helped out.”
That explained that.
“That was nice,” I noted.
“Her kids were the bomb.”
That was nice too.
“She probably appreciated it,” I told him, though even though I didn’t know her, I still knew there was no probably about it.
“She did. Then she got deep in meth. I was gone by then but, last I heard, her kids were in the system.”
“Oh no,” I whispered.
He juggled Travis, jar, and spoon to scrape the last bits out and muttered, “Way of life.”
“Not life like I know it.”
His head didn’t move but still, his eyes came to me.
“No.”
That one word was low. It was meaningful. I wasn’t sure I got the meaning. I just knew I liked it.
Travis gurgled through the last bite of carrots while Joker ordered, “Almost done. Pack up. Let’s hit the road. I’m fuckin’ starved.”
Ugh!
“You’re almost at a dollar, Joker,” I shared, still feeling hopeful and riding the happy wave of watching Joker feed Travis, but nevertheless annoyed.
“You do know I’m never gonna quit bein’ me,” he remarked, tipping the spoon into the empty jar and lifting Travis’s bib to wipe his mouth.
“You do know that Travis maybe said his first word last night. Since it was Mommy, that made me happy. His second word being the f-word would not do the same.”
His eyes came to mine. Then I made a quiet sound of surprise when his hand shot out and caught me behind the head, something he could do seated since I was bent over Travis’s diaper bag, which I’d dropped into my vacated seat.
After that, he pulled me to him so my mouth was on his.
He gave me a hard, short kiss.
“Bah buh bah!” Travis squealed.
Joker released the pressure on my neck just enough for me to move back an inch.
He looked into my eyes.
His, I couldn’t read. That didn’t mean he wasn’t telling me something. I just didn’t know what it was.
What I did know was that the guard was gone. I wasn’t shut out by steel.
I just didn’t know what to make of it now that I was in.