Sorrow Road (Bell Elkins #5) - Julia Keller Page 0,97
did already—everyone thinks they do—but standing in front of somebody in a black robe, waiting for your entire future to be decided, was a watershed experience. Carla had listened to her mom talk about it, and she’d learned about the court system in her civics class, but the actual feel of it—of watching the little mole on the left side of the judge’s mouth sort of jump as she spoke, of smelling the aftershave on her attorney’s pink shaven jaw, of hearing the brief creak of leather as the deputy standing in the back reclasped his hands and the gun belt shifted on his hip, of realizing that her life was completely up for grabs at this moment—was very different from hearing about it or reading about it. It was like seeing pictures of the circus—and then walking the tightrope. She was scared out of her mind, and she never wanted to be in this kind of place ever again, and she knew exactly where she needed to be.
As they were walking out of the courthouse her father had said, “So, where do you want to go now, young lady?”
Carla’s reply: “I want to go home.”
And here she was.
“You got a car?”
A pesky old woman had climbed down out of the bus right behind her and then followed her onto the concrete pad. She had long, greasy hair with blond highlights that had grown out a long time ago, leaving the gray parts in charge. She was dressed in what looked like an accumulation of knotted-together dishrags, safety-pinned scarves, and ratty overlapping blankets. She smelled like a dirty bathroom.
“No,” Carla said. She hoped Kayleigh would be getting here soon.
“’Cause if you did,” the woman said, arching her scraggly eyebrows, “I was gonna ask you for a ride.”
“Well, I don’t.”
The woman sniffed repeatedly. Either a bad cold or drug habit, Carla thought. Smart money was on the latter.
“Okay, well,” the woman said. “But if you did, that’s what I was gonna do.”
The bus had loaded right back up again with the people who’d been waiting on the pad. Carla didn’t want to inhale that noxious exhaust when the bus left, which it would do within minutes, so she headed for one of the benches.
The old woman followed her.
Leave me alone, Carla thought, but did not say out loud, because some people only got more clingy after that, bolder, as a kind of perversity took hold of them. Doing the opposite of what you asked became a mission. Whereas if you ignored them, you had a fighting chance of seeing them give up and go away.
“I got bit by a cat,” the old woman said. She wriggled her bare right arm out of its nest of materials and stuck it out, underside turned up. An abscess had cracked the scabby white surface and now bloomed like a fierce yellow flower. “Bite got infected. That’s why it looks so bad. Them infections get real dangerous. I was in the hospital in Charleston for a week and a half.”
Carla scooted to the far side of the bench. Come on, Kayleigh. Come on.
The old woman had only bothered her a few times on the ride itself. Once to ask Carla if there was a toilet on the bus. Once to ask if Carla had a tissue. And once more to apologize for the two times she had already interrupted her.
It was not a cat bite. That was obvious. It was a DIY drug portal that had been poked at too many times with a filthy syringe. Carla did not know why the woman had chosen her as the audience for her spontaneous confessions—her fibs, that is—but she had.
Lucky me, Carla thought.
Her one-word, noncommittal answers finally began to wear down the woman, who picked obsessively at the skin around a fingernail and made a few more remarks about the overly aggressive cat. Carla said nothing. Finally the woman left. Carla settled in to enjoy these last few minutes of solitude.
She wanted to think about everything that was ahead of her. One of the most important things was her job, which she was even more excited about, now that she had been away from it for a few days. She couldn’t wait to get back to the interviews. She had called Sally McArdle on Monday, and explained what was going on—although she left out some of the more embarrassing parts. You did not lie to Sally McArdle. And Sally McArdle had said, in a curt voice that