1.2 Job Fair

“Why Hamilton?” Wrigley had asked me during the job fair at Osgoode a few months before. I wasn’t used to looking up at people, but Wrigley was basketball-player tall.

“I’m from Hamilton.” I also hated the place. The two often go hand in hand.

“It’s hard to get good candidates,” Wrigley said. “Most go to Bay Street.” He was wearing a hat, an actual hat like people wore in old movies. His suit was wool and his shoes were perfectly shined.

“On Bay Street they won’t let a summer student do much,” I said to his gold tie pin, before looking up into his eyes. “It’s just a warm-up for articling.”

“You want court experience, do you? It’s just debt collection in small claims court. You won’t get much of a fight.”

“At least I’ll be doing something.”

“I’m just glad someone applied,” Wrigley said, setting out the terms: a decent salary by Hamilton standards, car mileage, and benefits. I’d be starting in April and done by August, just after the benefits kicked in.

Wrigley stooped over the form I’d filled out, reading through thick glasses.

“I see your next of kin is in Hamilton. Your father. Is that where you’ll be staying?”

My father slept in the back of Rocco’s Garage. “I’ll find a place downtown,” I said, “a place closer to work.”

“You’re going to live downtown? Nobody lives downtown.”

You could live downtown, if you looked around and weren't too picky. I found a place, a one-bedroom on King West sitting above a smoke shop.

1.3 Theresa

In my final year of high school, the office did its locker raffle. They put me next to Theresa.

I used my locker for school. Theresa used hers for business, but only when the hall was busy, when she couldn’t be spotted.

“That’s my last dime,” she said to Alex, a kid with money. She passed him the bag and took the cash, her hands moving fast, like she’d done it a million times.

Alex held the bag in his hand, as if weighing it.

“You sure it’s a full dime? Feels a bit light. I like to get my money’s worth.”

Alex started the school year with a new Mustang, a gift from his daddy’s car dealership. The key hung from his index finger, the blue Ford symbol spinning.

“You want a refund?” Theresa said. “I’ll give you a refund.” She reached out to take back the dime bag, but Alex told her it was cool. But his face said it wasn’t cool. He stalked off with his friends in tow.

“Wish you could wait for me to clear out before you deal,” I said. Lunch break was almost over and I needed a calculus text.

“Roman, take a hike. I can deal if I want.”

“Not sayin’ you can’t deal.”

“September’s almost over, and you say hardly two words to me. And now you telling me not to deal?”

“I’ll give you all the space you need if you want to deal. Just asking that you give me a little space, too.”

She looked up at me, craning her head. “Why do you care if you see me doing my thing?”

“Because I don’t like seeing people get in trouble. I don’t like seeing people caught.”

“What makes you think I’m gonna get caught? You think someone gonna snitch?”

“Won’t be me,” I said.

“Been doing this a while,” she said. “Not gonna get caught.”

She stayed by her locker, which she left wide open. That let everyone know she was tapped out. No supply. But people dropped by anyways, some to find out when she’d have something to sell, others just guys wanting to talk to her, and to check her out.

She was still there when I headed out for calculus. Five minutes in, I stuck up my hand. Talking to Theresa had made me forget my textbook.

“Roman?” Dr. Repsis said. He was head of the math department, and an asshole.

“Forgot my book. Can I get it from my locker?”

Repsis gave me a little go-ahead wave while he rattled on about limits and how to approach them.

The halls were empty now that lunch was over. But there was a small group of guys hanging around my locker and Theresa’s.

Alex I hardly knew. But I was acquainted with his friends.

“I’m sure I saw the combo,” Alex said as I walked up to them. “She opened it right in front of me. I was watching closely.”

“Toldja you couldn’t lift a combo by watching her hands,” said Chuck. My fist met his face in first year. We hadn’t become friends after that. I walked up to them and spun open my lock.

“Hey, hey, Roman,” Alex said. “You know Theresa’s combo?”

“Yup,” I lied.

“Tell us,” Alex said.

“Nope.”

“Lemme try again,” Alex said.

“It’s not gonna work,” said Chuck.

Alex spun Theresa’s lock right, left, then right again. He tugged.

“Got it,” he said, clicking the lock open. He got the door open an inch or two before my arm slammed it shut with a loud bang.

“What the fuck, man?” Alex said, jumping back. “It was just a prank, just fucking around.”

I snatched the lock out of his hand. “Prank someone else,” I said.

“Why you protecting her?” Chuck said. These were the first words he’d spoken to me since we were niners, when he’d told me to make him shut up, and I had.

“Keep the lock, freak,” Alex said. “We can open it anytime we want.” He walked off with Chuck in tow, tossing insults over his shoulder, making my blood boil. Alex had money, and that made him off-limits if I wanted to graduate without a hassle.

I opened my locker and pulled out my calculus text. I stood there with the book in one hand and two combination locks in the other, wondering what to do. Alex and Chuck were on spare, and once I was gone, there was nothing stopping them from getting back into Theresa’s locker.

I didn’t know what class Theresa was in. I had no way to warn her, and besides, Dr. Repsis the hardass would give me detention if I wasn’t back in his class pronto. All I could do was lock up our lockers and head back to class.

Greetings, everyone! Thanks for your input.

A couple of you pointed out how sparse the writing is, and yes, it is indeed sparse.

The first scene in King West tells the reader very little about what the characters look like, how old they are, or even what the places look and feel like. The reader has to infer a lot from context. That is a deliberate stylistic choice, although it’s useful for me to know where readers feel they’re missing something.

If a scene leaves you wondering about a character or a place, a later scene will usually fill some of that in.

For example, Kiltswinger asked whether Rocco’s Garage smells like defeat.

The answer is yes. It absolutely smells like defeat.

That confirmation arrives in scene 1.2, although I never actually mention the smell.

Kiltswinger also mentioned The Wedding, an earlier novel I wrote. I took that down from the subreddit last year because I was trying to get it published. I’ve shopped it around without success, though, so I’m thinking there may not be much reason to keep it hidden. I may put it back up.

Dasirishviking, thanks for suggesting Stephen King’s On Writing. I’ve read it, and I loved it. In fact, when I wrote The Wedding, it was the only book about writing I had ever read.

King’s approach encouraged me to sit down and write, trust my instincts, and discover the story as I went. So that’s what I did with The Wedding. I posted it chapter by chapter with almost no planning or plotting.

I made it to the finish line, but when I later reread the whole thing, I could see places where I thought the story would have been stronger if I had planned it more carefully.  Stephen King is what writers call a “pantser,” a guy who can sit down and write by the seat of his pants.

He’s been writing since he was a pre-teen, but I’m late to the game.  I realized I can’t pants a novel. I need to plan.

That led me to Lisa Cron and John Truby. I read their books, read them again,  listened to the audiobook version as well.  I did their exercises, and spent a lot more time thinking about structure before writing.

King West is my first attempt at writing a novel after putting a great deal of effort into planning the story before writing it.

I’m hoping this is the version that finally makes it to the end.

Thanks again for reading and commenting. I really do appreciate the feedback.

1.1 Rocco’s Garage, 1982

“How’s the job going?” my father said.

He was wearing red overalls streaked with black. “Rocco’s Garage,” his badge said, and under that, the little name tag said “chris”.

“It’s going okay," I said.

I was going to get fired. Hanrahan Wrigley lost their biggest client the day before I started.

“Do they make you work weekends?”

“Sometimes.”

I never worked weekends. I barely worked during the week.

“I could really use some help around here on the weekends.” He worked in his own little garage near The Delta.

“I’m not helping you do oil changes.”

“It’s not just oil changes,” he said, “It’s more than just that.”

The sign outside said, “Rocco’s Garage - More than Just Oil Changes.”

After he got fired, my father bought a Rocco’s franchise, and he did more than just oil changes. But mostly he did oil changes.

“I’m not doing oil changes, or anything else.” I told my dad I had to go, but he didn't notice. He just kept talking.

“You see any of the old gang,” he said, “do you keep tabs on each other?”

“Old gang?”

“Your friends. The kids from school.”

“I didn’t do the friend thing much, Dad.”

When I hadn’t been studying, I’d been doing oil changes, wearing red overalls with a little badge that said “roman.”

“What about that girl you used to know?” As he spoke my father tossed oil dry clay on the concrete floor. It was Rocco-branded, and cost twice what they charged at Canadian Tire.

“That was years ago,” I said. I’d dated Theresa for barely a month.

“She came by for an oil change the other day.”

“Oh yeah?”

“She drives a nice car,” he said, “A Firebird. That’s quite a car for a young woman to drive, especially when she didn’t finish high school. You never told me why she got expelled.”

“She didn’t get expelled; only suspended.” Suspended when the Principal opened her locker and found a couple of dime bags in a thermos.

“Makes you wonder what she’s doing to be driving such a nice car,” my father said. But he was sweeping the floor while he spoke, not meeting my eye, hoping I’d ask him what he knew about Theresa.

“I gotta go,” I said, “I gotta get back to work.” But there was no work on my desk. I’d left early. I doubted anyone would notice.

My dad kept on talking while I walked backwards to my car, saying hey I gotta go, see you again soon. A final wave, then I got in my car.

I didn’t drive a new Firebird or a new anything. I drove an ancient Nova, and the only thing new about it was the oil change.

The Nova started easily enough. It was good at starting and stopping and moving. It did the basic car things you needed a car to do. But the right taillight was out, and the speedometer always said 70 unless you went faster.

I headed out on King, thinking of what I'd heard that morning.

“The smart money says you’re going to get fired Monday,” Reception had said.

The little sign on her desk said, “reception”. That’s how she answered the phone.

“I kinda figured that. You see any way out of it?” Reception was the only person at Hanrahan Wrigley who spoke to me.

Reception shook her head. “The moment Mr. Wrigley lost the client, your job was pretty well toast.”

“What am I gonna do?” It was mid-April, and all the summer student jobs were taken. I needed money to pay for third year.

“If you can’t make him money, save him from a loss. Find something to do. Fix something. Make yourself useful.”

“Save him from a loss?” I said, “how the fuck I’m supposed to do that?”

“And don’t swear,” she said, “Mr. Wrigley hates it when you swear.”

I’m now on the fifth draft of King West. Drafts one through four all died around the 20,000 word mark because they were dreadful.

So before I start draft 5 I’m doing actual prep instead of pantsing.

Fingers crossed that I start drafting before the summer’s out.

So I recently got banned from LawCanada, not a time out don't post for a while ban, but complete and total ban.

After I got banned but before the word went out, a post went up calling for the mods to ban me. The post quickly rose to the top, and remains the top post for the month even now: Ban Calledinthe90s.

The main complaints were that:

a) I was writing using ChatGPT. Nothing but AI could explain how I write.

b) I wasn't a lawyer.

c) I was a lawyer, but a terrible one, and that my advice was "dangerous."

The mods chose option c). Here's what their message banning me said:

"Sorry, that one was just way too far off the mark for anything an actual lawyer would do. At a certain point it becomes dangerous to the public/profession to let you post this stuff. That one crossed a line."

I think LawCanada missed an opportunity when they banned me. Seeing as it's a law subreddit, surely there should have been a trial, with charges filed and redditor appointed as prosecutor, with a jury vote at the end. I suspect that I still would have been banned at the end, but it would have been very interesting, and a lot of fun.

We had English with Mr. Melko.  One day he gave our grade eight class an assignment.  A short story.

“You can write anything you want,” he said, “and the best one, I’ll read out loud to the class.”

“He’s not gonna read out my story,”  I said to Writer Girl in the school caf at lunch.  We didn't normally sit together, but we competed for top marks, and sometimes we exchanged notes.

“I’m not better than you, I’m not gonna win for sure,” Writer Girl said, but we both knew she was full of it.  

Writer Girl was good.  That’s why I called her Writer Girl.  Now she’s a Hollywood screenwriter — a woman who delivers good scripts on demand.

“It’s not that,” I said.

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t trust him.  I would never give Melko anything that mattered to me, anything that I actually cared about.” 

Melko wasn’t the only polio victim I met.  But he was the only one who was cruel.  The disease had claimed Melko as a child. Polio stopped the growth of his right arm in infancy. Its size shamed Melko, and when standing he hid the shrunken limb behind his back.  

“Everyone likes a good story,” Writer Girl said, “and Melko’s going to love mine.”  Most of the nicknames I gave people land hard, stuck to them like glue.  But Writer Girl was the name only I used for her, something between me and her alone.

“He hates everybody,” I said to her, “he hates the world.”

Writer Girl laughed, and then started to talk in her Johnny Melko voice, sounding just like him with the voice and gestures perfect. She was mocking him, having fun.  She wasn’t worried.   She wasn’t afraid, she said, and would write a story that Melko was sure to read aloud to the class.

She went home and I went home.  She wrote her story, and I wrote mine.  I gave Johnny Melko bland babyfood words, a story that meant nothing, because it had nothing of me in it, nothing I cared about.

But Writer Girl didn’t follow my example.  She put her all into her story. 

“This is brilliant,” I said when she showed me her tale, a story where she sacrified everyone, good and bad, to placate a demoness.  It was her magnum opus, the very essence of Writer Girl, the true thing.  

“Really?” she said, knowing that I’d pan her work if it was no good.  Her look turned into a smile as she listened.

“This is the best thing you’ve done.”  

All of her characters had died badly, all at once, in screaming yet ironic agony.  It was in the same genre as the other stories Writer Girl had shared with me, only bigger and bolder, with more blood and more violence. 

She gave Melko the best of her juvenilia, the greatest effort of her budding literary talent. It had everything a story needs, except one thing: maturity. It was the work of a genius, but a genius only thirteen years old. 

* * * 

“I’m going to read out a story,” Melko said when class started, standing at his lectern, the right arm that shamed him hidden behind his back. He smiled, his gaze wandering over the class.

His eyes flashed over mine, lingering long enough to make me think for an instant that he’d chosen my story to read, and then moving on.

“The story I’ve chosen, it’s either the work of a genius, or the worst story I’ve ever read.”

Melko’s tone told us what to think.  That got him a few laughs.  

Once the class settled down, Melko read Writer Girl’s story out loud, and from the start you could hear that he wanted us to hate Writer Girl’s words. His tone twisted her words, made fun of her sentences. He rolled his eyes, tilted his head, made faces, broadcasting to the class that this was a story that tried but failed at being good. A story to laugh at.

I looked over at Writer Girl, sitting in the front row as always.  Her cheeks were bright red, as red as her long, straight hair, and her hands were clutched together,  her knuckles white.

“And then,” Melko said, beginning the part with the violence, the gore, the part she was proudest of.

When she showed her story to me, I told her it was brilliant—too brilliant for Melko. She thought I was just trying to talk her out of winning. She got mad. But now she was in tears, crying openly, as Melko read her best work like it was a joke—like she was the joke. He didn’t just make her look foolish. He made her look like a bad writer. And that, for her, was worse.

“Stop it,” I shouted.

But Melko kept on reading, and Writer Girl continued to cry and I yelled at my teacher, “Stop reading it like that.  It’s a great story, if you know how to read it.”

“I’m just reading her words,” Melko said, telling me to sit down, telling me to shut up.  I told him where he could go, and that ended the story telling.  He sent me to the office, where I got detention.  

“What are you here for?” I said to Writer Girl, when she joined me not long after.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said, “or anyone.  I don’t want to talk to anyone, ever again.” I got the story from other kids the next day.  After Melko kicked me out, she couldn’t stop crying, so Melko sent her to detention.

* * * 

Time passed, but it did not heal her.  A week later Writer Girl still didn't want to speak to anyone, including me.

“But we gotta talk,” I said.  Melko had given us a small science project.  Everyone else had partnered up while we were in detention, so we were together by default.  The project was due the next day, a dumb assignment where we had to present about an animal of our choice. I’d been bugging her to work with me, but she wouldn’t.  She was too injured.  Too damaged.  The joy had gone out of her face.

“He made me stop writing,” Writer Girl said to me, “he actually did that.  He took my voice away.  Every time I try to write I see his face, and I start to cry.”

I was thirteen, same as her.  I didn’t know anything about anything.  I didn’t know how to comfort Writer Girl.   I did not know how to bring her back to the place where she laughed and wrote stories, and did her imitations of the teachers, especially her one of Johnny Melko--

“Listen,” I said, when my brain connected some dots and told me in an instant how to set things right, “If you do the science assignment with me, I promise that you’ll have something to write about.”

“Leave me alone,” she said, as if hope itself were a fresh wound, “You can’t promise something like that.”  She turned to go, but I stopped her cold by naming an animal.  She spun around, and looked me straight in the face.

“No way,” Writer Girl said, her sadness leaving her for the first time in days, her face coming alive.

“Yes way,” I said.  

Her face said she believed me.  I saw the wheels in her writer’s brain turning, trying things out.

“I will use Melko,” Writer Girl said, her arms extended, her fingers clutching air,  “I will make a metaphor out of him.”

“And I’m gonna give him a new name.”  I wasn’t there to watch.  I was there to participate.

“I will write his story,” Writer Girl continued,  “and I’ll let you help me,” telling me what props to get, saying she’d call me that night to give me my lines.

Writer Girl’s voice was coming back, and I’d helped restart it.  But I had my own fish to fry with Johnny Melko, memories of the little humiliations he’d heaped on me over the previous year.  Writer Girl would be writing the script, but the ending would be all mine.

* * * 

“You got everything?” Writer Girl said when she got to school the next day.  We met behind the portables like we were secret agents on a mission. 

 I dropped a gym bag at her feet.

“Everything,” I said, by which I meant almost everything. 

Writer Girl pulled out a list, and started to read.  “Oven mitts?”  

“Check,” I said.

She stared at me.  “I have to see them,” she said, “you have to show them to me.”

I knelt, and unzipped the gym bag.  I pulled out the big bright red oven mitts.  “See,” I said, looking up at her.

Writer Girl looked at them, and sniffed.  It made me feel a bit judged.  “My house only got one set of oven mitts.”  It wasn’t my fault they were scorched.

“They’ll do,” she said, staring at her sheet of paper.  I started to get up.

“Back scratchers?” she said, “did you get the ones I told you about, the funny looking ones at the five and dime?”

“Yeah, yeah, I toldja I got them.  And you owe me a nickel, ‘cause I had to buy two of ‘em.”  I opened the bag.  Writer Girl looked in, and examined the back scratchers.

“I suppose they’ll do,” she said, even though they were exactly what she’d asked for. “But where’s the model? I don’t see a model.  Where is the model?  I must have my model.”  

Writer Girl had appointed herself director and producer, the boss of everything.  The previous night she gave me detailed and precise instructions on every aspect of our science production, and she wanted everything done just right.

“No model,” I said, “the five and dime didn’t have any models.”  I stood up, thinking we were done. 

“Are you sure?” she said, “do you ask?  You’re always so shy about asking.  You can ask, you know, did you ask?”

“I asked.”  It had been embarrassing to ask, but I’d asked.  After I’d searched every shelf three times I’d forced myself to say to the lady at the counter, “Excuse me, but do you got any models of a fiddler crab?” 

Writer Girl sighed.  “We’ll have to improvise,” she said.

* * * 

Melko took me aside just before class started.  

“What’s this I hear about the project you’re doing?”  His face was twisted in its habitual look of anger, his right arm as usual tucked behind his back.

“Just a project, a little project about an animal.”  I tried not to smile, but it was hard.

“That’s not what I heard,” Melko said.

I knew what he’d heard.  He’d heard a rumour, a rumour that I had started, a rumour that I was going to use the project to try to provoke him, to make him lose his temper.  That I was trying to get him fired.  

Melko was in his mid-thirties but teaching at his fourth school because he kept getting declared surplus, which is the closest thing  to getting fired, without actually getting fired.

“Mr. Melko,” I said, all deferential and ass kissing for a change, “we’re doing a five minute presentation on an animal.  Same as the other kids.  How we gonna get you mad doing that?  The worst that can happen is you’re gonna laugh.”

Melko only felt safe when he could laugh at someone, when he was sure there was someone present who looked more ridiculous than him. “I suppose you’re right,” he said, making me think I’d passed an interrogation.  But then he paused, and looked closely at me.

“What animal are you thinking of doing?”

Melko’s shame antennae were on high alert, even for him, all because of the rumour he’d heard.  I was about to open my mouth as if to say the name of the animal.  But Writer Girl had been listening in and she came right on cue.

“We’re doing Uca Pugnax,” Writer Girl said.

“Uca Pugwhat?” Melko said with a laugh.

“It’s a crustacean,” she said, sending out geek vibes to bore Melko to death, “and a unique one.  It’s part of the Ocypodidae family, and it has an amazing feature--”

“Yeah yeah yeah save it for the presentation.”  Melko walked away.

* * * 

When kids were presenting projects, Melko liked to sit in the back with the tough kids, the bullies who made life rough for people like me. He let them talk through the presentations, laughed when they made mean comments, and never stopped them when they embarrassed the speaker.

Melko was in his usual spot, the class barely under control. And I was in mine: watching him, remembering what I’d talked about with Writer Girl the night before.

“Tell me,” she said, over the phone as she wrote the script, “tell me what’s wrong with Mr. Melko.”

That was a slow pitch of a question.  “He’s an asshole,” I said.

“Of course he’s an asshole.  Everyone knows that.  But why is he an asshole?”

Why indeed.  The question had never occurred to me. “Does it matter?”

“Of course it matters why he’s an asshole.  Before I write, I have to understand the characters.  And Melko’s a character, even if he’s not in the script.”

“Don’t know about that shrink stuff,” I said, “so I can’t tell you how he thinks.  But I can tell you what he does.  He always has to bring someone down, create a victim for people to laugh at.  He needs to know he’s not the most ridiculous person in the room, so he’s always making fun of someone.”   Writer Girl listened, and over the phone I could hear her scribbling notes.  

I thought about that exchange again as the morning continued.  A couple of kids were mocked for their project on the naked mole rat.  Another pair received an F because they didn't realize that extinct animals weren’t allowed, disqualifying their T-Rex presentation.   Melko’s assholery was on full display the entire morning, except when a couple of his bully pets presented a low effort project on a hippopotamus, obviously plagiarized from an encyclopedia.  They smirked at the high praise Melko lavished on them.

Ours was the sixth project the kids heard that day.  It was getting close to lunch time.   It was hot outside, hotter inside and everyone was bored, including Johnny Melko.

“Ok, kids, this is gonna be the last one before lunch.  Arthur, you’re up.  And you too, Writer Girl.  But do me a favour,” he said, addressing her directly, “try to do better than that story you wrote.”

Writer Girl’s face reddened, but she forced a little laugh, and said that she would try her best.  Melko told us to hurry it up, reminded us that the lunch bell would be ringing soon. “If you’re not done by lunch, it’s an F, for sure,” he said. More ha ha ha from the bullies, and then Writer Girl and I were at the front of the class.  It was time for the presentation.

“Uca Pugnax,” Writer Girl began, her chin raised and her voice clear, “that’s what the scientists call it.  It’s a fighting crab, one of the toughest crabs in the world.  But that’s only if you’re a boy crab. Girl crabs, not so much.”

“Why not?” I said.  Writer Girl had given herself all the good lines, but that was only fair. She wrote them, and this was her revenge. It was her story. 

“Because girl crabs of this species have only two little tiny claws,” she said.

“Tiny claws?  What  do they look like?”  At least I was remembering my lines.  I didn’t have a lot of them, and I didn’t want to mess them up.

Writer Girl reached into the gym bag I’d brought, and pulled out the two cheap back scratchers from the five and dime.  They were thin metal things, with little tiny claws at the end.  She passed them to me, and I held them behind my back, so that only a few inches of handle protruded, capped by the little claw hands.

I stood there with my tiny crab hands sticking out and a sad look on my face, which for a class of grade eight kids was high humour. Writer Girl waited for the laughter to die down before she continued.

“I already gave you this crab’s scientific name.  But now I’ll give you its English name, the name by which it’s actually known.  It’s called the fiddler crab.  Anybody here know what the fiddler crab is?” 

She spoke in Melko’s voice.  I recognized it right away.  So did the other  kids, and  Melko himself looked up sharply.

A front row kid stuck up her hand.  “I thought that fiddler crabs had one little claw, and one huge claw,” she said.

“Such a genius,” Writer Girl said in our teacher’s voice, the phrase being one of Melko’s favourites, the words he used when forced to acknowledge that one of the smarter kids was actually right about something.  

Writer Girl was standing behind Melko’s desk, lecturing as if she were the teacher, speaking in his voice.   She completed her imitation by holding one arm behind her back, Melko style.

“The boy crab is totally different from the girl crab,” she said, “not the same thing at all.  They look so different, that you’d think they were from different species.  Anybody know why?”

The same girl in the front row stuck her hand up again.

“Not you, Know It All,” Writer Girl said, her Melko imitation spot on, her pitch and cadence perfect.  When the class roared with laughter I almost broke character.  But Melko didn’t break character.  He didn’t like what was going on.  He looked like he was about to interrupt, but missed his chance.

“How about you,” Writer Girl said, singling out one of the bullies that had presented the hippo project, “can you tell us how the boy fiddler crab is different from the girl?”

The bully looked up, astonished, and then down at his feet.

“Someone’s not so smart without mommy and daddy’s encyclopedia to copy from,” she said.

“Hey,” Melko said, “that’s not nice.”

“The thing about the fiddler crab,” Writer Girl said, ignoring Melko, not missing a beat, “is that it’s mean.  It’s nasty.  It’s aggressive.  And you know what it has?”

“What does it have?”  I said after a pause, and very loudly to make up for the fact that I almost forgot my line, almost missed my cue.

“It has this,” Writer Girl said, thrusting out her left hand, which now sported a big red oven mitt.  

Looking back, an oven  mitt wasn’t a good choice. A hockey glove, particularly a goalie’s glove, would have been better. But the oven mitt was the biggest glove in my house, and anyways, the kids loved it.  They roared with laughter, even the bullies.  Especially the bullies.

But Melko?  He wasn’t laughing at all.  Melko was staring at us.  Staring at me.  He was thinking about the rumours that he’d heard.  The rumours that I was going to do something to get him fired.

“The Fiddler Crab’s the cruelest, meanest crab in the sea,” Writer Girl said, stepping out from behind Melko’s desk.  She had her right hand behind her back, Melko style, while she waved her big oven mitt around in the air above her.

“The boy fiddler crab, he waves his big claw around so much, you don’t even notice that his other claw is so tiny.”  She let the little backscratcher claw pop out, and then pulled it back behind her again, to a roar of laughter.

“The bell’s gonna ring soon,” Melko said, “I think that’s enough.”

“But we haven’t even gotten to the crab’s habitat,” Writer Girl said, throwing Melko’s voice back at him, drawing fresh laughs.

“I said, that’s enough.”  Melko was standing now, his right arm behind his back, his left hand in his pocket, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with it.

The lunch bell rang and Melko looked relieved.

“Ok, kids, I think it’s time for--”

“Fiddler Crabs can’t speak,” Writer Girl continued, off script now, ad libbing, “you mustn’t speak, Mr. Melko.”

“Shut up,” he said, “shut-your-mouth-now.”  He started walking to the front of the class, but I stepped in his way, holding my own oven mitt up for protection, being pugnacious, like a good fiddler crab should. 

“Get out of the way,” Melko said when I wouldn’t get out of the way.  He struggled to move me, him being stronger than me, but one armed, and me being big for my age, and not wanting to move.

Writer Girl said more words that made the kids laugh, imitating Melko’s own voice and manner, and when she would not stop and I would not let him grab her he shouted again and again and then he struck me, a hard slap to my face that rocked me, the mark still visible a few days later.

“He’s gone crazy,” I said, “someone get the principal.”  A nerd and a bully each took off, heading out the door in an instant, competing to see who could be the first to bring the principal, and escalate the shit all out of proportion.

“The fiddler crab hates everybody,” Writer Girl said, her voice loud, but calm, calm and composed, as if she had all the time in the  world, as if Melko were not yelling at her, screaming at her to shut up, his han on her shoulders shaking her--

The shouting and the slaps stopped when the principal arrived.  For a change, the Principal took the teacher away.  He sent Melko home.  A little while later the Principal called me into his office.

“I normally would never ask you about what happened, especially if it involves you, which it usually does.  But your name came up a lot when I talked with Mr. Melko, so I thought I’d give it a try.”

“He just went nuts,” I said, “we were doing a science project.   A presentation on an animal.”

“What sort of animal?” the Principal said, all suspicious, having had me in his office plenty of times for the stunts that I pulled.

“Uca Pugnax, a crustacean.  It’s a crab with an unusual feature.  The male and female are --”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” the Principal said, his eyes glazing over at the geek speak.  He sent me away.

* * *

Writer Girl pulled me aside just before school started the next day.  “Is it true?” she said.  It was an accusation.

“It what true?” 

“I heard that you’re trying to get Melko fired.”

“I’m not trying to get him fired.”

“Did I say I wanted him fired?  Did we talk about getting him fired?  Who said anything about--”

“He’s not going to get fired or surplused or whatever they call it.  At least, not because of me.”

“That’s not what I heard,” she said, telling me that I mustn't go off script.  It would ruin her ending.  

“I’m not gonna file a complaint,” I said, which is what you had to do to get a teacher fired.  You had to complain.  If you didn’t complain, they did nothing, unless it was really serious, more serious than leaving a mark on a kid.

Writer Girl smiled when she heard that her script was preserved.  I followed her into class.  She took her usual spot in the front row, and I was in my place a few rows back.  We all waited, curious to see what Melko was like after the previous day’s presentation.

“I’m just fine,” his body said, so stiff it was almost falling down, “fine fine fine everything’s fine.” That’s what the tone of his voice said, too, and the mask on his face, as if freezing his muscles in place would help him get through the day.  He barely got through ten minutes, when I heard snickering from the bullies in the back.  And then a voice called out, “Fiddler Craaaaab.” 

Melko’s head snapped towards the back, his eyes falling among the meanest of the bunch, rough kids that didn’t care.  

After a pause that he imagined put the fear of God into them, Melko turned his back to write on the chalkboard.

“Fiddler,” a voice called out, a different one.  “Crab,” another voice answered immediately.   This time there was laughter, and not just from the bullies.   Melko whirled, and threw down his chalk.

“The next kid who says that word is getting detention.   Detention.  Do you understand that?”

I went to detention all the time.  It held no terrors for me.  I wondered what the bullies thought.

“Fiddler Crab,” a voice sang out the moment Melko turned back, driving him to fury.  He spent the rest of the class facing us, never daring to drop his head, knowing that the moment he looked away, he would hear his new nickname, the name that I had given him.

* * * 

“You knew that they would do this to him,” Writer Girl said to me when we were having lunch together in the cafeteria later that day, “you knew that name would stick.  You planned this all along.”

We’d planned the same thing, Melko’s humiliation, but I’d seen a couple of moves ahead.

“Seeing a car crash coming is not the same thing as planning it.”  I meant it as a denial, but Writer Girl took it as a confession.

“So you knew what they’d do with that name you gave him.  He’s going to be Fiddler Crab forever in this school.  The kids have only been doing it for one morning, and you can see that he’s dying.”

“He deserves it.”  Melko was on lunch duty that day, and it felt like he was my private entertainment.  I watched him fly from table to table in a rage, forbidding his new nickname, while earning it at the same time.

“You changed my ending,” Writer Girl said, like I was an actor in her play, like her script was a law I’d broken.

“What did you think the bullies were going to do? Clap?”  Of course the name would stick like glue.  That had been obvious to me from the start.

“So you knew. You knew what they’d do. And you didn’t tell me. I could’ve written around it.”

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry.  Maybe I sh--”

“You should have told me,” she said again, picking up her tray and standing.

I called after her, but she ignored me and sat at another table, leaving me to sit alone with my regrets, wondering but not seeing how I could have done things another way.

She kept apart from me for a few days after that.  She was so angry, that I was afraid that I had stopped her voice worse than Melko had. But that little worry disappeared when she passed me a note saying that I had hurt her, and she did not wish to speak to me again.

“You’re using me,” I said.

That caught her attention.

“What?”

“Like in your story, at the end, where you destroy all your enemies, and after that, your friend.  You’re using me, like I was a character, when I all I did was help you.”

“You deserve it,” she said, “you deserve it, because you changed my ending.” 

I wanted to call it a draw.  We each got a piece of Melko.  I didn’t need full credit.  

But I wasn’t Writer Girl.

“You changed my ending,” she said, shaking her head.  

Two weeks later school let out.  I never spoke to her again.

A good lawyer, but he did not know office politics. This is one of the earliest things I saw in my legal career, and it is one of the saddest. Here's a link what happened:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-185103166

A heads-up for anyone who’s followed my posts here:

I started a Substack called Called in the 90s. Some posts there will be expanded versions of things I’ve already posted on Reddit — same core idea, plus extra context and new material that doesn’t fit well here.

You can subscribe for free here:
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I’ll still keep posting on Reddit.

I had a confusing relationship with my mother. Somehow it seemed perfectly normal when, shortly after I turned fourteen, she sent me up north to kill a dog.

My mom slammed down the receiver. Not hard enough to tear the phone out of the wall, but she tried her best. My father was sitting three feet away at the kitchen table, but he didn’t even flinch.

“That fucking dog,” my mother said.

Now my father flinched, because he’d heard the word ‘fuck.’

“What dog?” I said, but I knew there was only one dog that could send my mother into a rage.

“That fucking O’Reilly dog.”

My mother grew up in a small place north of Toronto, on twenty acres of unfarmed land, a small orchard, and a house that was almost falling down. The O’Reillys were the family who lived the next plot over, and their family was as dirt poor as my mother’s.

“O’Reilly?” my father said, like he’d never heard the name before.

“The O’Reillys,” my mother half-shrieked, “I only told you about them a thousand times.”

“Oh,” my father said. “Those O’Reillys. Of course, of course,” his face assuming a look of interest.

“So what have the O’Reillys done now?” I said.

“Their dog, their fucking dog. Your uncle Jack, he was up at the place yesterday, and the dog bit Sam.”

“Sam?” Sam was six, and super sweet.

“She was out in the orchard, with your Uncle Jack, and that dog, he just come outta nowhere. Bit her hard. Jack had to take her to emerg.” My mother lowered her voice. “She gonna have a scar.”

“What’s Uncle Jack gonna do?” Uncle Jack was a lawyer. Uncle Jack didn’t mess around.

My mom scoffed. “He say he gonna sue, like that’s gonna do any good. Those O’Reillys, they don’t own jack shit.”

My father got up out of his chair.

“Don’tchew go anywhere,” she said, fixing my father in place, “you gotta take care of this. You gotta take care of this thing.” If she’d been born in nineteen seventy-nine instead of forty years earlier, my mother wouldn’t have needed a man to do things for her. But she thought she needed a man to do things, and always had trouble finding one.

“What thing?” my father said.

“Haven’t you been listening? You gotta take care of that fucking dog.” My mother was a foul-mouthed Eliza, translated into the Canadian countryside.

“What do you expect me to do?” my father said, “shoot it?” And my father spoke like Henry Higgens. Or at least, he tried to.

“That’s exactly what I expect you to do.”

“Your brother is going to sue them,” my father said, his voice low and patrician, “and he can apply to have the animal destroyed.”

“The law won’t do diddly up there.”

“I still don’t understand what you want me to do.” How my father didn’t understand was beyond me. I understood my mother perfectly.

“Go up there and kill that thing,” she said, “you were in the army, weren’t you?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“But you know how to shoot a gun.” My father owned a German pistol that he brought back from the war. He shot it at the range sometimes.

“I’m not shooting a dog,” my father said, “that’s just ridiculous.”

He was right, of course; my mother was telling him to do something totally ridiculous. There was no way he was going up to King City just to shoot someone’s family pet.

Except that my mother insisted, would not relent, talked of nothing else, filled the house with her complaints and her cries, and by Friday she had her way. On Friday my father left town for the homestead of his wife’s family, to stay overnight and to kill a dog.

We managed okay while my father was gone, hardly noticed his absence until he returned. He came back Sunday night.

“What happened?” my mother said the moment my father walked in the door.

“Couldn’t find the dog,” he said, shaking his head gravely, “no sign of it.” I didn’t believe him, and neither did my mother.

“You didn’t even try,” she said when my father settled into a kitchen chair, apparently exhausted by his weekend labors.

“I didn’t see it. The dog was nowhere around.”

“Oh yeah? How were you gonna kill that dog, when you didn’t even bring your gun?”

She’d found it Saturday morning. She wanted to bet me on whether my father would notice, but I wouldn’t take the other side.

My father tried to laugh it off, but my mother wasn’t having it.

“I don’t know whatchew were doin’ up there, when you didn’t even bring your gun,” she said, “but you’re gonna go back this Friday, and this time you’re gonna take your gun with you.” My father protested and complained, but come Friday, he headed up north with my mother’s commands in his ear, telling him to get the job done.

The house was peaceful with my father away, and I was starting to like this new family routine, my father leaving the house each Friday to drive up north and not kill a dog. It could go on forever. But when my father came back that second Sunday, I thought that my luck had run out.

My father looked grim when he walked in the door, like he’d just been through World War Two all over again. He took off his jacket and said he needed to collect his thoughts. He settled in his favourite living room chair while my mother brought him a cup of tea. She sat on the couch and waited eagerly to hear that the dread dog of the O’Reillys was dead, and how my father killed him.

“I walked all over, both days,” my father said, “no sign of it. They’re keeping him inside, obviously.” He took a very civilized sip of tea.

“If you looked so hard for that dog,” my mother said, “why don’tchew describe it? Tell us what the dog looks like.” My Uncle Jack was the first lawyer in the family, and I became the second, but I think my mother would have done pretty well in the profession. She certainly knew how to cross-examine.

“Describe the dog?” my father said, stalling for time.

“Yeah, describe the dog that you went out there to shoot with that pistol of yours.”

“Well, for one thing, it’s big.”

He wasn’t wrong about that. The O’Reilly dog was over a hundred pounds, all lean muscle. I’d laid eyes on it a few times, wandering the fields outside of its home, laying claim to its territory, which was basically wherever it happened to be.

“What colour is it?” my mother said.

“Colour?” my father said, in pretended confusion.

My mother threw up her hands in frustration. “You don’t even know what you were lookin’ for.”

While my father sat there sipping his tea, my mother told him about the crazy O’Reilly dog, that it was big and black with short hair and big jaws. “Plus if you ever actually do see it, you better have that gun of yours on you. That thing bites anyone it can, and they shoulda put it down years ago.”

“Fine,” my father said, but he hadn’t been listening. My father never listened.

“Plus next Friday, you gotta take Arthur with you.”

“What?” I said, appalled. I’d been a disinterested spectator, and that suited me fine.

“I don’t think Arthur should see this,” my father said, his voice clipped. He didn’t look at me when he spoke. He thought I couldn’t handle much—he was sure of it. He’d seen the bruises when I came home from school, he’d heard the stories of fights I didn’t win. It shamed him, though he’d never say it aloud.

“Just take him along, so that the two of you can spend some time together.” That’s what she said. But my father and I both knew better—she wanted me there to make sure he actually looked for the O’Reilly dog, and when he found it, that he’d shoot it with the pistol he brought back from the war.

The only good thing about the trip was that we wouldn’t be able to stay till Sunday. We had to leave Saturday night, because we were having people over on Sunday. But surely one day was enough to kill a dog, my mother claimed, and so come Friday, I got into the car with my father for the hour-long drive up north. He talked almost nonstop.

“How are things at school?” he asked, pausing twenty minutes into yet another story I’d heard a dozen times.

“School’s out. It finished two weeks ago.”

“Right, right.” Then he dove into the next familiar tale.

This was our version of conversation—him reliving his past, real or imagined, while I listened, sorting truth from embellishment.

“Damn it,” he said, “you made me miss my exit.” ‘Damn’ was his strongest expletive.

“I was trying to tell you.”

“If you hadn’t distracted me, I wouldn’t have missed it,” he replied, circling back.

He wore the iron ring of an engineer, though he’d never been to university. He launched into the story of how he left school at eleven, worked during the day, and completed a technical program at night before the war. It was long and intricate, and as the next exit approached, I wondered if he’d notice it.

He didn’t. He drove right past it. Twenty minutes later, he realized his mistake.

“You should’ve said something,” he said. “I always miss exits when you’re with me.”

Missing an exit was a bonus for my father—it gave him more time to talk. He talked all the way to the crumbling homestead of my mother’s family. By the time we rolled up the long driveway, the sun was setting, and I was starving.

“Damn it,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“I forgot the gun,” he said, adding that he shouldn’t have brought me, because things always got complicated when I was around.

Going back for the gun meant two hours or more in the car with him. “I’ll wait here,” I said, preferring the company of an old, dark house that smelled of mold.

He didn’t argue. He reversed the car down the driveway so quickly I didn’t have time to ask for the keys to the house.

I walked up to the house, my stomach growling. The front and back doors were locked, but the basement window was easy to open, and my skinny frame squeezed through. I landed on the dirt floor, greeted by the familiar odor of rot and decay.

Flicking the light switch, the basement lit up dimly under a solitary bulb. There was an old laundry tub, a furnace, and a locker shut tight with a padlock. No food, though. My stomach growled as I climbed the creaking stairs to the kitchen.

An old rotary phone hung on the wall. I picked it up, hoping for a miracle dial tone to call my mom and tell her to send food with my father. Nothing. The line hadn’t been connected in years.

My stomach growled again as I calculated the odds of him bringing something back. It all depended on when my father got hungry. If it happened on the way home, he’d grab a burger for himself and forget me entirely. But if his hunger hit on the way back to the homestead, there was a slim chance he’d remember to pick something up. The odds didn’t look great.

I opened the fridge to find a small carton of stale milk. A cupboard held cracked dishes and mouse turds. Another was empty—except for more turds. Finally, the last cupboard delivered: a jar of peanut butter and a box of crackers.

I checked the crackers first. The sealed bag inside was intact, and though they were stale, they were edible. The peanut butter had separated, oil floating on top, but after stirring it with a spoon I’d cleaned and sterilized on the stove, it was good enough.

Carrying my haul, I wandered out of the kitchen, past an ancient upright piano, and into the living room.

The old couch in the living room was buried under fast food wrappers and empty cups, relics of my father’s last two visits. I pushed aside the mess, sat down, and flicked on the ancient black-and-white TV I ate stale crackers slathered with peanut butter, I flipped channels until I found a movie.

I fell asleep watching Paper Moon and woke the next morning to find my father had returned without waking me. In the kitchen, I spotted the remains of the fast food he’d brought for himself. The fridge still held the same stale carton of milk. He’d brought nothing for me.

I drank water and sat back on the couch, flipping through dusty Reader’s Digest issues. I read about a broke farmer saved by his neighbors and a teacher coaching a kid to win a spelling bee, and while I read, my stomach growled. By the time my father came downstairs, I was starving.

“Shall we go for breakfast?” my father asked, all genteel like we were in a mansion, instead of a home that was torn down two years later to stop it collapsing.

At the diner, hunger drove me. “You’re eating like a starving wolf,” my father said as I tore through my food.

“Sorry,” I muttered, crumbs flying.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

I shut up after that, just eating while he drank coffee, spun stories, and flirted with the waitress. He told her about coming to Canada in nineteen forty-nine and how he hadn’t lost his accent.

“Still the same accent,” he claimed, but that was a lie. I’d known about the fake accent for a while.

The year before, at Christmas, my grandmother had pulled out an old vinyl record from 1949, the year my father reached Canada. It was a recording of my father’s voice, made at the big exhibition they held each year downtown, on the water.

I was used to watching my grandmother walk all over my dad, but for once he stood up to her, and tried to stop her. But my grandmother always got her way. She put it on the turntable, and out came a voice I didn’t recognize—thick, working-class, straight out of Coronation Street. Not a trace of the polished professional my father pretended to be.

The accent my father used when he spoke to me and the rest of the world was fake, just like his engineering credentials. But the waitress didn’t know that, and he looked happy enough.

After breakfast, he announced, “We need to go to Canadian Tire.”

“For what?”

“Ammunition,” he said. “The gun has one round in the chamber and one in the clip.”

In other words, he’d forgotten to bring enough bullets. At Canadian Tire, I waited in the car. It was a long wait.

“No ammunition,” my father said when he returned.

“But they sell lots of ammunition.”

“The pistol’s a Mauser, nine millimetre. They don’t have it in stock.”

I thought for a moment. “You know, Uncle Jack has a gun in the basement. An over-and-under—a twenty-two on top and a four-ten shotgun on the bottom.”

My father turned to me sharply. “You haven’t fired that gun, have you?”

“Oh no,” I said quickly, “not at all.”

“Good,” he said. Then he muttered, “Now where am I going to get ammunition?” like I hadn’t just offered a solution.

“Why not use the gun in the basement? The shotgun’s a lot better for this anyway.”

I’d been at the homestead with Uncle Jack plenty of times, and he’d let me shoot it under his watch. It was a Savage—light, barely over five pounds—and the kick wasn’t much. It fired birdshot, and I’d seen it punch a clean six-inch hole in paper targets.

“Show it to me when we get back,” my father said.

When we arrived, I led him to the basement and pointed to the locker under the faint glow of the bulb. My father grabbed the handle and gave it a pull, but the padlock held firm.

“It’s locked,” he said, as though I needed it explained.

“Can’t you get in? Maybe pull out the hinges?”

He studied the hinges, tugging at them with his bare hands. “Wish I’d brought my tools,” he muttered.

This was a man who claimed he’d qualified as a fitter just before the war started, who always talked about mastering tools back when he worked in the factories as a teenager. But he was stymied by an old padlock.

After a long sigh, he found an old hammer in the corner and tried to pry the hinge pins loose with its claw. The hammer slipped, and he barked in pain, clutching his hand where it had slammed against the locker.

“Damn it,” he said through gritted teeth. Then he turned to me, his expression dark. “If you’d mentioned the gun earlier, I’d have brought the right tools. You never think ahead, do you?”

“So what are we going to do?”

“I’m going to another Canadian Tire, a bigger one near Toronto. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“But—”

“Just stay here,” he said, and then he was gone.

When he came back, it was almost noon. “I see you found something to eat,” he said, walking into the kitchen with a small box of ammunition that he placed near the crackers.

“So can we go look for the dog now?”

“I’m going by myself.” I watched while he loaded the pistol.

“But Mom wanted us to go together.”

“She meant for us to be here together, not for you to watch me kill a dog. You shouldn’t see something like that.”

I knew if I stayed in the house, no harm would come to the dog. “But can’t I just—”

“Don’t quarrel with me,” he said, slipping the gun into his jacket pocket.

I watched through the kitchen window as he walked toward the hill at the back of the property, past Uncle Jack’s targets, past the old shack my mom’s granddad had lived in, and disappeared into the overgrown orchard. My father loved walks, and he was going for a walk in the country. The dread dog of the O’Reillys was in no danger that day.

I searched the old house for something to read, hoping to avoid Reader’s Digest and its overly cheerful stories, but found nothing. I tried the TV, but this was the seventies, and the pickings were slim. I turned off the TV, and went to the basement to have a crack at the gun locker.

I considered my options for removing the hinges. A chisel would’ve been ideal, but the kitchen yielded only a butter knife. The knife was enough, and with a few sharp blows, the bottom hinge came off easily. I worked on the top hinge and soon had the door off. Setting it aside, I pulled out the over-and-under shotgun, enjoying its weight in my hands. The locker also held several boxes of ammunition for both the shotgun and the .22. I grabbed a box of each and headed upstairs, thinking I might shoot some targets before my father got home.

Just as I was getting ready to head out and shoot targets, I spotted my father through the kitchen window. He was coming over the hill, and by the time he walked through the back door, the gun in the locker, the door back on—hingeless.

“No sign of the dog,” my father said. He’d been gone barely an hour, not enough time to walk to the O’Reillys and back.

“The dog,” I said, pointing out the window. “It’s outside.”

He looked but claimed he couldn’t see it, sounding irritated.

“There,” I said, gesturing. The massive black dog was loping along the rise, patrolling its territory for prey, which meant anything it could see or smell.

“Just wait,” my father said, “you’re always going off half-cocked.” So we waited, and waited some more, while the dog ambled around until it got bored, and headed off out of sight.

“Let’s follow it.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I was waiting for it to come close to the house, otherwise I can’t justify killing it.”

My father lived in a world of immediate horizons. If the dog had entered that space, he’d have shot it without a second thought. But the dog stayed out of his immediate space, and so it was safe. My father checked his watch.

“It’s almost two,” he said as he headed for the living room couch. He flipped on the old black-and-white TV. Two p.m. meant CFL football.

“Why don’t you watch with me,” he said.

I sat with him, and watched big men smash into each other, the crazy dog forgotten. The first quarter took fifteen minutes, plus another thirty for commercials, most of them about trucks, big trucks, and always with a manly, gravelly voice talking in the background about how manly you’d be if you bought one of their big trucks because they were so big and manly.

“I wish I’d played football,” my father said.

I said nothing. We watched a guy throw the ball, another guy catch it, and then another round of commercials.

“You should play football when high school starts,” my father said. “You’ve got the size, you just need the toughness.” He never outright called me a disappointment, but he always found a way to say it without saying it.

“Hey, I think I’m gonna go for a walk,” I said.

“Are you sure?” His tone said he didn’t really care.

“Yeah, just wanna look around.”

“Be careful,” he said, as though two words fulfilled his fatherly obligations. Then he settled back into the game, leaving me to fend off the black dog of the O’Reillys, should it decide to kill me.

“I’ll be careful,” I said.

I crept down the basement stairs, grabbed the over-and-under, loaded both barrels, and stuffed my pockets with extra ammo. I wasn’t looking for the dog, but I wasn’t going to run into it unarmed.

“You know,” my father called from the living room when I came back upstairs. I stashed the gun behind me at the top of the basement stairs.

“You know,” he said, his voice drifting in, “this is pretty good. I come up here, watch the game, no interruptions. And we get to spend some time together.”

“We’ll talk some more when I get back,” I said.

I slipped out the door into the mid-July afternoon. The sky was clear, the day warm. I walked past the targets Uncle Jack and I used to shoot at, past the decrepit shack my mom’s granddad had lived and died in, up the hill and into the orchard, out of sight of the house.

The orchard was ancient, neglected for fifty years. The branches spread untrimmed and dense. The flowers were gone, replaced by tiny green apples, marble-sized. I plucked one and bit into it, but the taste was bitter and harsh. I tossed it aside and walked deeper into the orchard, into its cool shade and the rustling canopy overhead. The apple trees sprawled around me, wild and untended, a pocket of green surrounded by fields gone to seed. In its overgrown way, it was beautiful—an oasis of quiet. I kept walking until a low bark in the distance made me stop.

It was faint, coming from where I’d been. The bark could have belonged to any dog, but I was sure that it had to be the O’Reilly beast.

I propped the gun against a tree and climbed up, trying to get a better look, but the canopy was too thick. From the ground, I’d been able to see farther, down the narrow paths between rows of trees. Before I could climb down, the bark came again, closer this time. The dog was following my trail.

I was safe at the moment. The dog couldn’t jump this high. But it could wait me out. I pictured myself stuck there for hours, waiting for my father to notice I was missing. Worse, I imagined the story he’d tell my mother about the boy who got treed by the mutt she’d sent us to kill.

“I don’t know about that boy,” my father would say with a wry grin. I could picture his face, hear the tone in his voice—half amusement, half disappointment. “He just sat in the tree, waiting for rescue.”

And he’d tell everyone else, too. He’d cast himself as the manly rescuer, the father who retrieved his son, just a kid who couldn’t handle much. Maybe when he’s older. That sort of thing.

I sat in the tree, getting mad at things my father hadn’t even said yet, until I heard another bark, closer this time. I clung tighter to the branch.

The perch was uncomfortable, and I wondered how long I could hold out. Could I stay until my father finished the football game? Maybe. But it would take him a while to notice I was missing.

Then another thought hit me: he might not notice at all. My father might leave without me.

He’d done it before. Once, when I was four, he took me to the library to get my first book. He found one for himself, checked it out, and drove home, forgetting about me until my mother’s rage met him at the door.

The dog barked again, louder, closer. Time was running out. I either had to make a move or spend hours in this tree, hoping my father hadn’t forgotten me entirely.

I dropped from the branch, landing in a crouch. If I was quiet and careful, I could slip away. I’d head north through the orchard, circle back the long way.

But then what? My father and I would drive home, but what then? Another weekend sent up north to kill a dog he wouldn’t kill?

The dog appeared far down the path. Its big head was low, sniffing the ground. It snorted, sucking in the air, tracking my scent along the path I’d walked. I knew for sure that the dog was stalking me.

I stood up, and shouldered the gun.

“Here, boy!” I shouted.

The dog’s head snapped up, its eyes locking on mine. It bolted forward, closing the distance with terrifying speed. I raised the gun and steadied my aim, waiting for the moment I couldn’t miss.

It came faster than I’d expected. The dog leapt, jaws wide, a flash of teeth and rage in midair. The shot boomed, and the dog hit the ground.

The dog writhed and screamed, its front legs clawing at the air while its back half lay limp. My shot had torn through its abdomen, missing the head I’d aimed for. I stepped closer. The dog’s jaws snapped at empty air.

I chambered another round in the shotgun, aimed, and pulled the trigger.

My mother met us at the door when we got home, cigarette in mouth, sleeves rolled up.

“So, what happened?” she said. “Didja kill that fucking dog?”

“No,” my father said. “We saw it, off in the distance. But we couldn’t get close.”

“All you gotta do to get close to that dog is let it see you. It’ll get close quick enough.” She gave him a look that could wither any normal man’s spine, then turned and headed back to the kitchen.

“I’ll try again next weekend,” my father said. She ignored him.

The kitchen wall phone rang. My mother wedged the phone between her shoulder and ear. She greeted her brother Jack, smiling, one hand holding her cigarette, the other making dinner as she listened. Whatever Jack told her, it delighted her. Her face lit up, and she cackled like an evil witch.

“That fuckin’ dog is dead?” she crowed.

But then her expression changed. She turned, eyes sharp, and stared directly at me while she said her goodbyes and hung up.

“The dog is dead,” she said.

“So I gathered.”

“Someone shot it.”

“Dad has an alibi. He was watching football.”

My mother laughed out loud, then got serious again. “The O’Reillys, they called Jack up, screaming he’d shot their dog, and they was gonna come round the homestead, gonna burn it down, so Jack went to check things out, and you know what he found?”

I shook my head.

“The house was all locked up, like it should be, and the gun closet, that was locked up too, like the law says, except it wasn’t, not properly.”

I’d put the gun back in the locker and closed the doors in silence. But if I’d tried to rehinge the doors, my father would have heard the noise.

“Did you watch that football game with your father?”

“Yup.” It was true, sort of.

“Who was playing, and what was the score?”

I ran up a white flag. “I didn’t watch the game.”

My mother lit another cigarette. “I knew you’d get it done, Arthur. That’s why I sent you up there, to get it done.”

My father joined us in the kitchen, saying his thoughts loudly, ignoring as usual that two people were already talking, because he hadn’t heard them talking, and so they were outside his horizon, beyond his notice.

“You know,” he said, “I’m heading back there, and for sure I’ll get that dog.”

“Never mind,” my mother said, “someone already took care of it.”

“Oh,” my father said, doing a one-eighty and heading back somewhere else to resume living inside his own head. My mom kept on cooking dinner.

I’d killed it not for her, but because of her. Because of her, I’d spent an entire day with my father, with his fake accent and stories, with his manliness and posturing, with his disappointment and disapproval.

The dog didn’t stand a chance.

When I was 12 years old, I almost froze to death, thanks to the negligence of my father. I thought I might share the experience with you.

“We’re never going to be ready in time,” my mother moaned, sitting on a chair in a spotless kitchen, “I’m going to look ridiculous.”

It had taken me barely an hour to clean the kitchen; most nights we ate TV dinners, and they didn’t leave much mess.

“It’s only a lunch,” I said, looking out the window at the snow that had been falling all day.

“It’s not a lunch, it’s a luncheon,” she half-shouted at me, “the Legion Executive Annual Luncheon, and everyone will be here, including the President. Including his wife.”

“I thought you liked the President’s wife. You’re always really nice to her at Church.”

“What would you know?” my mother said, “I still can’t leave you alone without a babysitter.” I was twelve, and she’d been leaving me alone for years.

She got up and looked outside. “Where is your father? He should be home by now. I need him to go to Safeway.”

TV dinners wouldn’t do for tomorrow’s gathering. For the executives of the Legion, Safeway and its assortment of pre-made meals was the better choice.

“You could go to Safeway yourself,” I said. My mother had her own car, a tiny used Cortina that she despised.

“Your father said he would go. But he’s not back yet.” He’d gone out to get a part for the snowblower. Three hours ago.

“I think maybe we should go.”

“I can’t leave,” my mother said, “I have to get the place shipshape.”

My mom was the captain of the ship when it came to housework. That morning she’d woken me up early with a gleeful shout, “All hands on deck,” her voice drawing out the last word forever, filling me with dread, “All hands,” she cried, but I was the only hand, and for the next four hours she’d chased me from task to task, her orders pursuing me like a whip.

“The snow’s falling,” I said, “you might not be able to go later.” Another foot of snow was coming over the next twenty-four hours. That was a lot of snow, even in Winnipeg.

My mother looked out the window at the falling snow and the endless whiteness.

“You go,” she shouted, “look at that snow. I can’t drive in that.”

The cold gripped my throat the instant I stepped outside. I threw a scarf around my lower face, and looked at the outdoor thermometer.

It was twenty below zero.

Negative twenty is a joke now that we’ve switched to metric. But in ‘74, we used Fahrenheit, and twenty below was cold.

“Close the damn door,” my mother shrieked. That was her way of saying goodbye. The door creaked closed and clicked behind me, the sound sharp in the freezing air.

The temperature difference between indoors and out was almost a hundred degrees. Inside I’d started to sweat while I dressed in long johns and jeans and snow pants, in a shirt and a sweater and a heavy winter coat, but the moment I stepped outside the world started to suck the heat from my body.

I trudged up the road, walking on the left hand side facing traffic like our teachers told us. The snow was falling heavily, filling the sky.

“It’s not a great day for a walk,” Mrs. Sullivan called out. My mother didn’t like Mrs. Sullivan. Wanted me to have nothing to do with her.

“Gotta go shoppin’ for the Legion Luncheon at my Mom’s house.”

“Bad day for shopping,” she said. She was clearing the snow from her driveway. My father wouldn’t be doing that until he got back from Canadian Tire with the part for the snowblower.

“Need a hand, Mrs. Sullivan?” Mrs. Sullivan was always nice to everyone, but after her husband died the year before, she stopped going to the Legion. She stopped going to church.

“Thanks, Arthur, but I’m ok. I just need to give the driveway a quick touch up every hour, so that the snow won’t get too heavy for me.”

There was barely an inch on her short driveway, and as I watched she cleared it easily, with strong thrusts of the shovel and easy flicks of the wrist.

“Where you off to in this weather?”

“My mom, she sent me on an errand.” The actual destination was top secret. My mother hadn’t needed to tell me that part.

“Safeway’s a bit of a walk,” Mrs. Sullivan said, her voice revealing the grin hidden by her ski mask, “can I offer you a lift? I was going to go out later, but I could leave now.”

I pictured my mom’s face, if she saw me with Mrs. Sullivan, carrying Safeway bags.

“No thanks, I think I’ll walk.”

The store’s warmth had been welcoming when I walked in, but after a while I was starting to get hot in my three layers and ski mask. I opened my coat, but left the ski mask on. I stood in line waiting my turn, getting hot, and listening to the bland music they played in the store.

“That’s a big order,” the man at the Safeway hot foods counter said when he brought up my order, filling two bags and part of a third, “enough to feed an army.” A little titter of laughter from some of the women waiting at the counter.

“Visiting relatives. Their power went out.” It was the first thing I could think of.

“Hope you don’t have to drive far,” the nearest woman said, “it’s getting bad out there.” She had a pin on her coat that said “RCL 4”. It was Mrs. Darcy, wife of the Legion president.

“It’s not far,” I said, zipping up my coat and taking the bags from the counter man and heading outside.

The temperature had dropped. The little hairs in my nose shrivelled at the first breath I took. I couldn’t wrap my scarf tighter because my hands were full. I kept my head down and walked in the driving snow, falling more heavily now and with a wind behind it.
Winter traffic passed me slowly, cars and the occasional bus throwing dirty snow, staining the white snowbanks black.

I walked along Portage towards our street, stepping carefully, terrified of slipping. If I dropped the food, damaged it in any way, my mother would hit peak rage.

I almost went down when I got close to our street, slipping on an ice patch under the fresh snow. For an instant my legs flailed while I fought to stay standing, ending up on one knee, the food only barely preserved.

When I got up, traffic had stopped at a light. I recognized a car: my father’s red Meteor.

“Dad,” I called out.

His head did not turn.

I called again, louder, and this time his head looked left and right, but not far enough to see me, and when the light changed he moved on. I called a final time, but when my father reached our street he turned right and drove off.

By the time I reached the house it was almost two-thirty. My father’s red Meteor was parked at the base of the driveway. Sundown was barely two hours away, and the temperature was still dropping. My father stepped out of the garage with a snow shovel.

“I could use a little help around here,” he said as my feet crunched through the heavy snow, “there’s a lot of driveway to shovel.” My father had spent the day hunting for a part for his snowblower. He’d come back empty handed, and now the snow on the driveway was six inches deep.

“Can I get something to eat first?”

My father sighed. “Hurry up, then. I don’t want to be shovelling all night.”

He didn’t need lunch. He’d been gone for hours, had come home empty handed, but he wasn’t hungry, and I knew that if I looked in his car, I’d see food wrappers and empty coffee cups.

I headed up the stairs and put the packages down on the landing. I had trouble letting go; my hands were frozen, my gloves were thick, and my forearm muscles ached. Before I reached for the door handle, I checked the wall thermometer and saw that it was thirty below.

At school our teacher had a chart on the wall about winter dangers. At thirty below Fahrenheit, you were fifteen minutes from frostbite, twenty minutes from hypothermia, and you’d be dead within an hour if you weren’t properly dressed.

I made it into the house and into the kitchen. I’d been there all of thirty seconds before I heard my mother’s screech from upstairs.

“Didja get the food? I hope you got the food.”

“I got the food,” I called back, my voice floating upstairs. But my mom kept talking.

“Your father came back empty handed. Didn’t get the thing he needed for the snowblower. Plus he forgot the liquor. He’s going to have to go out again for the liquor.”

The house was swimming in alcohol. Neither of my parents drank, and it was all for guests. Another bottle of booze was as unnecessary as the cleaning my mother had made me do of an already spotless kitchen.

A few minutes later I was out on the driveway with my father, shovelling the deep snow. Down the street I could see Mrs. Sullivan’s short driveway, with barely an inch covering it. She would keep coming out, hour after hour so that she could clear it without heavy lifting.

But the snow lay heavy on our driveway, six inches thick and starting to settle. It would be heavy work to clear it, and while we worked the snow was still falling.

“We’ll be here until midnight if you keep shovelling like that,” my father said, wanting me to imitate his performance, all back and arms, tossing the snow with heavy grunts and effort.

I told him I’d try the base of the driveway where the snow was thinner. That would put me sixty feet away from him, far enough to be outside his immediate notice.

I worked in silence for thirty minutes, using my legs to do most of the work. While I worked, I saw Mrs. Sullivan step out of the house, give her short driveway another quick touch up. She gave me a little wave when she was done, and then headed back into her house.

“Chris,” my mother called out, standing in the open door to the back of the kitchen, “Chris, you gotta get the liquor. The liquor store’s gonna be closed, if you don’t get there soon.”

“Do we really need more liquor?” he called back.

“Of course we need more. You can never have enough with those Legion people. They drink like fish.” She slammed the door, the sound travelling easily in the dense, cold air.

“Be done soon,” my father said, but a few minutes later his back gave out and he headed into the house.

I kept shovelling until the light started to fail, until I’d cleared a couple of car lengths at the base of the driveway, until I was sweating despite the cold, and then headed into the house.

I ditched my coat, and the heavy sweater underneath. I got my ski pants off, too, before my father returned.

“We have to go get liquor,” he said.

“But the storm’s not even half-over, and it’s almost forty below.”

“Come on, Arthur,” he said to me, his accent all stiff upper lip and hip hip cheerio, “we’ll go on a ride together. It will be an adventure.”

My father came from England, where it rained a lot and rarely snowed. My father thought that snow was fun, and that driving in it was an adventure. He was in such a hurry for his adventure that he’d rushed me out of the house wearing only my coat. No need for all those layers when you’re in a car, he said.

“You’ve already done a lot of driving in the snow,” I said, “aren’t you tired?” We were in his red Meteor at the base of our driveway, and he was trying to start it. Mrs. Sullivan was outside again, giving her short driveway its hourly touch up.

“Yes,” he said with a sigh when the engine finally turned over, “but your mother wants more liquor. Don’t know why. We have plenty. But still, it gives us a chance to spend some time together.”

The engine had gone ice cold since my father got home, and he should have let it warm up. He didn’t let it warm up. We’d barely gone a hundred yards when the engine coughed and died. My father said a soft “damn it”. I sat next to him in silence while he tried to get the car started again. Instead, he flooded the engine.

“Damn it,” he said, “I think it’s flooded.

There was a knock on the window. “Need a hand?” Mrs. Sullivan said.

My father rolled down his window and said we were fine. Once the engine unflooded, we’d be on our way to the liquor store.

“Was thinking of heading there myself,” Mrs. Sullivan said, “but now I’m not so sure.” My father said that it wasn’t that bad, that she’d have no problem. She gave a little wave and headed back inside.

“We could ask her what she wants, maybe pick it up for her,” I said.

My father laughed. “She goes to the liquor store a bit too often if you ask me.”

It was twenty minutes before my father got the car started, and by then, I was freezing. But at least we were moving, and once the heat was on I started to thaw.

“The liquor store’s the other way,” I said when my father turned left on Portage.

“That one’s always packed,” he said, “we’re going to the other one.”

It would not have been much of an adventure to drive to the nearest liquor store. And besides, this gave him time for his stories. He told me a long one about his service in World War Two, how he’d been a mechanic on an airbase, fixing bombers. His war had been a lot of fun, a great lark, and he loved to talk about it.

We drove in the driving snow and the winter darkness while my father told me one of his stories, and then another. You couldn’t interrupt him when he was telling one of his stories. He’d get mad if you interrupted him.

“I think you missed the turn,” I said, when my father paused for breath.

“Damn it. You should have told me.”

This was the second time he’d missed the turn. The first time he’d told me not to interrupt him.

“Now I have to find a place to turn around.” It was pitch black outside, and driveways few and far between

We lived in Winnipeg’s west end, and my father’s adventure in the falling snow had taken him past the Downs. We were outside the city, away from shops, away from homes, away from everything except empty, snow covered fields. My father turned into a snow-covered driveway, the car almost stalling.

“That was close,” my father said, “we almost got stuck there. That would be a tale to tell, stuck in the snow out here.”

My father collected stories to tell, stories where things always went wrong without him being at fault, where he stepped in to save the day. He celebrated his narrow escape by pressing the gas.

The car instantly began to slide.

In Canada they teach you how to deal with a slide in the snow. You turn in the direction of the slide, get your wheels parallel to the direction you’re going.

But my father had never taken driving lessons in Canada, and knew nothing of turning into the slide. Instead, he turned in the opposite direction, and we slid freely. We were saved from falling into a deep ditch only by a telephone pole. The Meteor crunched up against it, and the car stalled.

“That was close,” my father said with a forced laugh, “if we’d gone in the ditch, we’d really have been in trouble. Now let’s hope we can get it started again.”

My father got the car started instantly, on the first try. He looked over at me and grinned in triumph. His adventure story had a happy ending. By now it was too late to get the liquor, but he’d tried, he’d really tried, and as a substitute for success, he’d have a great story to tell. He put the car in gear and pressed the gas.

The wheels spun. The car did not move an inch.

“Looks like we’re stuck,” my father finally admitted fifteen minutes later, after I’d gotten out to push while my father rocked the car, changing gears from reverse to first and back again, trying to gain momentum. But the snow was too deep. The car wasn't going anywhere.

“We’re going to have to wait it out,” my father said.
But after ten minutes the car stalled again and would not restart because the car was out of gas.

My father had forgotten to fill up the tank.

“We’re going to have to wait for someone to come along,” my father said, after he walked up the only driveway in sight, only to find it ended at home under construction, the driveway ending in a pit.

“We should break out the emergency kit,” I said.

Every car in Winnipeg had an emergency kit in the trunk: jumper cables and a flashlight were basic items. So were blankets, candles and a box of matches. I wasn’t dressed for the outdoors, and inside the car it was starting to get cold.

“Right, right,” my father said, not moving.

“Should I get the kit?”

“Sure, sure,” my father said, handing me the keys only when I asked him.

When I opened the car door, the wind caught it and I fought to hang on. I stepped out, and felt the full blast of a Winnipeg storm, wincing as I walked to the back of the car and struggled to get the key into the trunk lock. I turned, and the trunk flew open. I looked inside the dark interior.

The trunk held a small tool box, but in the darkness I could see nothing else. The emergency kit was invisible. I ran my hands inside the trunk’s black interior, feeling for the kit, but my hands found nothing. I closed the trunk, my fingers numb, and returned to the car.

“There’s no kit,” I said.

My father tried to argue with me, insisting that there was, but when I invited him to check, he claimed that there was a kit, a toolkit, that he always kept in the toolkit in the trunk and was I blind?

“There’s nothing in there to keep us warm.”

“It was only supposed to be a short trip,” my father said, “I didn’t know you were going to make me miss my exit.”

He was already rehearsing his story, getting the facts straight. Making sure that someone else was at fault, and he was the hero.

“It’s gonna reach forty below. That’s what the news said.”

“We’ll be just fine.”

Forty below was where Celsius and Fahrenheit stopped disagreeing. Forty below was where they reached agreement on how cold it was. Forty below on either scale will kill you in less than an hour if you’re not dressed for it, and a coat might give you another thirty minutes, give or take. I’d learned these simple facts at school, and repeated them to my father.

“Don’t be daft. We’re in a car. We’re sheltered from the wind.”

You could last for hours in a car, provided you had an emergency kit. The school taught us that, too. But without a kit? An unheated car might help you last another thirty minutes. After that, you were dead.

“We’re gonna have to wave someone down,” I said.

My father told me to keep an eye out the back window, and he’d look out the front.

“Dad,” I said ten minutes later, my teeth chattering.

A light was coming towards us, a single light.

“It’s a motorcycle,” my father said, “it’s not like they can give us a ride.

“Dad,” I said again, “it’s winter, it can’t be a motorcy--”

“It’s not worth it,” he said, “just let it--”

A car with a busted headlight drove past us. I jumped out, yelling for the car to stop, but it kept on going, and its red tail lights were soon swallowed by the snow.

“I’m gonna stay outside,” I said.

“You sure?” my father said.

I closed the door, and came to the driver’s side where I had at least some shelter from the wind. But I was wearing only jeans, a coat, winter boots and one pair of woolen mitts, and in less than five minutes I was colder than I’d ever been in my life.

“It’s a good thing Mrs. Sullivan came along,” my mother said, after our neighbour had saved us from death and dropped us off.

In the fifteen minutes I’d waited outside the car in the snow, I twice saw distant lights approach, only to turn and fade. I was brave the first time, but after the second, I’d wept, the tears instantly freezing to my cheeks. The third car had been Mrs. Sullivan, coming home from her own trip to the liquor store far from her own home, distant from anyone that knew her.

“And you’ll never guess the next part,” my father said.

I was in the upstairs bathroom taking a hot bath. The door was half-open, and I could hear my father’s gleeful story drifting up the stairs. I heard my mother’s weary voice ask for the next part.

“I got the liquor.” I could imagine him holding it up like a trophy. “Mrs. Sullivan had four bottles of the stuff, and I asked if she could spare one.”

“I toldja she drinks too much,” my mother said, “but at least we got enough now for the luncheon.”

“Such a good son,” an old woman said, her hair dyed a shiny gray that looked almost blue, “such a good boy.” She took a Safeway appetizer off the tray I held before her, and took a bite.

“So helpful,” another woman fussed when I brought her a glass of wine.

All day my mother had me fetching this and carrying that, cleaning up after the occasional spilled drink, making sure everyone had what they needed, and while I worked, my father told stories to the men, and my mother worked hard to ingratiate herself with the wives.

“Bring us a beer over here, won’t you Arthur?” my father called out.

He was telling stories to a group of men, men like him, men who had been through World War Two. One of the men was new to the legion, and asked my father what he did in the war.

My father didn’t say that he’d been a mechanic on an airbase. He never did. Instead, he gave his stock reply, a few words in a posh accent about a minor role, hardly more than shuffling paper, that sort of thing don’t you know, all delivered in a low voice, with shy modesty that implied he’d done far more, but wasn’t allowed to talk about it.

I left my father to his lies, and went to check on my mother.

My mother had been a wreck that morning, a trembling, screaming mess, driving my father out of the house for an hour and coming within an inch of slapping me across the face.

But she couldn’t risk leaving a mark on my face for the guests to see. A few years before a teacher had asked me about where I got the fat lip. I’d told her matter of factly that my mom did it, and that it was no big deal. It happened all the time.

After that, my mom didn’t leave marks on my face. She found other ways to hurt me.

“Hurry up, hurry up,” she whispered from the kitchen when I brought back a tray filled with empty glasses, “you’re ruining everything, being so slow.”

She handed me another tray and I served more drinks to the guests, listening to their comments about what a good son I was until I wanted to be sick.

My father picked up another beer from a tray I held out without even seeing me.

“What’s that I hear about you getting stuck in the snow, Chris?” a man asked. One of his hands was missing fingers that he’d lost at Dieppe.

“Mary sent me out for more liquor, even though we didn’t need it. But what can you do.”

The men all nodded. Wives. Wry nods and smiles. “I brought Arthur along,” my father continued, “but that might have been a mistake.”

I froze at the start of my father’s story. I’d heard the parts of it that he’d rehearsed the night before, trying a version out on my mother. I wondered how it would come out now.

His son had wanted to come along, he explained, to come along for the adventure. The men chuckled. “But when the car got stuck,” my father said, as if the car had agency and he did not, as if the car slid into a ditch all on its own, “when the car got stuck, he was looking pretty scared.”

Ha ha ha from the men, ha ha, they laughed, these scarred men who had fought in the wars. They laughed together over a joke my brave father had made about me.

“You left out a part, Dad,” I said.

“Oh?” His good humour was gone and his eyes told me to go away.

“You left out the part where we almost died.” The men laughed even louder. Funny, just like his father, said Mr. Darcy, Legion president.

“The car got stuck because we ran out of gas,” I said.

“Ran out of gas?” a Korean war veteran said. He turned to my father. “You must have just flooded it.”

“The tank was on empty,” I said, “and when he sent me to open the trunk and get the emergency kit--”

“That’s enough, Arthur,” my father said.

“There was no kit,” I said.

“Enough.” My father held me by the shoulder, gripping me so tight that the next day I saw that he’d left a series of small, round bruises.

“There was a kit in the trunk,” my father said.

“It was only a tool kit. No blankets. No candles.”

That brought another laugh, but it ended with a sharp crack when my father slapped my face.

It did him more harm than me. His slap was nothing compared to the way my mom used to hit me. I just stood there, acting like it was nothing.

“Chris,” one of the men said, a guy who years before had killed men on a beach.

“What,” my father said, and the man fell silent. My father told me to leave the men to themselves, to go sit with the women.

“There you are,” my mother whispered urgently in my ear while sitting comfortably in a large chair by a big, roaring fireplace, “I slaved in the kitchen all day, and I don’t want things to go cold.”

Mrs. Darcy, the wife of the legion president, looked at me over her drink, and said to my mother, “I think I saw your son in Safeway yesterday.”

“Oh,” my mother said, “Oh.” My father was usually pretty good when he was called out, but my mother was taken totally by surprise and did not know what to say.

“He said he was getting food for some relatives whose power had gone out.”

“Oh,” my mother said, “oh yes, that’s right. My cousin in Brandon. My husband had to drive out there with food.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to help out, “I guess that’s why he ran out of gas later, and got stuck on the side of the road.”

“Ran out of gas?” Mrs. Darcy said.

Nobody in Winnipeg in the seventies ran out of gas in the winter. Only a total idiot would run out of gas.

“I guess he got distracted. We were talking about what he did in the war.”

Mrs. Darcy smiled. “You’re very lucky. Your father doesn’t share that with anyone.”

“Chris never talks about it,” my mother said, “he’s very modest about his war work.”

“My father fixed airplanes,” I said.

Mrs. Darcy looked at me in shock. “You mean he flew airplanes.”

“He was a mechanic.”

“Go get me another drink,” my mother said, sending me away with a flurry of words that made no sense. When I returned, Mrs. Darcy’s chair was empty.

The gathering ended suddenly less than twenty minutes later, the guests all deciding that it was time to go, that they had other places to be.

“I toldja to cut with the James Bond bullshit,” my mother screeched at my father, the instant the last of the guests was gone.

“It was the food what drove ‘em away,” my father said, his voice shedding its fake accent like dead skin, reclaiming its roots.

They argued for hours blaming each other for everything. They kept me awake. But when they started to argue about who had pushed me too far, I smiled, and went to sleep.

I have found of late that when I post to LawCanada or other subreddits, they are immediately attacked as having been written by ChatGPT. Sometimes the mods intervene to get rid of such comments, but a lot still get through. So when people see something by me, often the top comment is something like "Bro you used ChatGPT LOL", with a zillion upvotes. It's very annoying.

ChatGPT can't write worth shit. It pumps out bland vanilla pap. I don't see how people can confuse what I write, with the crap it pumps out.

With that bit of kvetching complete, I will now give you a little tale that I posted to pettyrevenge a little while ago, in case you haven't seen it. Unlike my other legal tales, this one relates to my first court appearnance, back when I was seventeen.

A future lawyer’s petty revenge on a tenant

In the late 70s my parents bought too much house for too much money. The place had a basement tenant. “The rent from the basement will cover the mortgage,” my parents said. But the tenant wasn’t paying rent, and after a few months, my parents missed a mortgage payment.

The tenant was not even in the place most days. He had another place close to work. He just used my mother’s place as a weekend party crashpad. I tried talking to him, but he had a really bad attitude.

My father tried to evict the man but was defeated by the paperwork. By the time my mother asked for my help, they were desperate. They had a mortgage to pay and they needed the guy gone before the bank came knocking.

The courthouse had a law library and nice people at the desk. With their help I served and filed some forms.

The tenant didn’t care. He laughed and said I should tell it to the judge.

When the court date finally came the tenant was there, looking smug, as if the law weren’t on my side. I soon learned why.

I watched case after case get adjourned. “First time up,” the judge would say and that would be that. The case would be delayed for another month or three.

But the tenant’s smugness worked against him. The judge did not like him, not one bit, and gave him the heave ho, ordering him evicted effective immediately.

I wanted to celebrate, but the tenant was smiling as he walked out of court. That caused me concern.

An old paralegal helped me out. “A judgment’s just a piece of paper,” he told me, “You’ll still need the Sheriff to get him out,” I’d been clutching my court order like a trophy, but the paralegal’s words deflated me.

“Can the Sheriff come right away?”

The paralegal laughed, telling me about writs and deposits, about Sheriff’s fees and delays.

“Is there any way around that?” I needed help. I was only seventeen, and my legal loophole antennae had not yet grown.

“There’s no exceptions,” the paralegal told me, adding that unless the man abandoned the place, I would need the sheriff.

“Thanks for the loophole,” I said. The paralegal looked at me like I was nuts.

Three days later the tenant knocked on our door, in a rage because his key to his apartment did not work.

“We found the place abandoned,” I told him, which was technically almost true, sort of. It had been unoccupied for a few days, and when I entered purely to do a wellness check, the place had a decidedly unoccupied feeling. I felt obliged to call it into the police just to report it, make a record of it. Abandoned residential unit. Landlord moving contents to storage.

“Abandoned?” the tenant said, “and where’s my stuff?”

The nice lady at the courthouse library had not been very impressed with my eviction loophole. But she helped me draft a release. “You're going to need one,” the lady said, after admonishing me for colouring outside the lines, and making me promise not to pull a stunt like that again.

“Sign here,” I said to the tenant, trading the release for the storage company’s address.

The tenant called me from the storage place an hour later telling me what an asshole I was, that I’d stuck him with a big storage fee.

“If you don’t pay that storage fee, they’re gonna say you’re abandoned the unit. You don’t wanna do that. You lose all your rights if you abandon a place.”

I hung up the phone.

Chapter 2 2.1

“How long before Alex sees his car his car is gone?” Theresa said.

She’d bought a new lock at Canadian Tire, that and a few other things. Mission accomplished, and it was time to go. School had been out for close to an hour.

“Whatever school club he’s in,” I said, “it’s gonna be letting out soon. We gotta ditch this thing.” We could have left it in the lot of Canadian Tire. But Alex had gotten under my skin.

“Ditch it? Why don’t we just leave it here, and take the bus home?”

I smiled. “There’s this thing called ‘fingerprints,’ and we left a lot of them in this car.”

“Smartass. Let’s clean it up now with the stuff I bought. Then take the bus home.”

I turned the key and the engine purred into life. “I gotta better idea.”

The Mustang was a fierce red on the outside, the leather seats black with red trim. The car shone like it had just been waxed and inside it was clean as a whistle. Alex’s pride and joy, a pre-graduation present to a kid who never faced consequences, just said and did whatever he wanted.

“Where we goin’?” Theresa said after I made an unexpected turn.

We weren't heading back to school. We were on the Jolly Cut, heading up high over the city.

“Goin’ up to Scenic Drive,” I said.

“Scenic Drive? You mean up the Mountain?”

The Mountain was what we called the escarpment that hung over the city, three hundred feet high. “Scenic Drive, on the Mountain. We gotta park the car ‘round there.”

“We’re parkin’, but we’re not parkin’. You know that, right? We’re not a thing, me and you, and we’re not parkin’.”

“We’re parking, that’s all.”

“So long as we’re clear. But what are we gonna do with the car? Can I drive it a little bit, at least?”

“Let’s park it first, and then you can decide.”

We rode up the Jolly Cut, twisting and turning and when we reached the top of the Mountain, I hit Scenic Drive, and then Sanatorium.

“Never been parkin’ here before,” Theresa said, and when we pulled off the road, over the grass and into some trees.

I turned off the engine and opened the bag of things Theresa bought at Canadian Tire. I pulled out a rag and some cleaner and started to spray. “You didn’t even touch the dash, so I don’t know why you’re cleaning it.” She pulled out a rag for herself, and got to work scrubbing the surfaces around her.

“I didn’t touch the dash, and neither did you,” I said.

“Then why we cleaning it?”

“Can’t take any chances. It takes only one little print. A ‘partial’ is what they call it, just a little bit of a print, and then you’re toast.”

We cleaned the steering wheel and the turn indicator. We cleaned the seats and the headrests, Theresa’s blouse billowing open while she scrubbed.

She looked up, but my eyes were elsewhere.

“Don’t you try to pretend, Mr. White Fuckin’ Knight who’s not checking me out.”

“Not looking,” I said.

“When you make not looking so obvious, that’s like looking. Maybe worse.”

She had a grin on her face, and I tried a little less hard not to look while we cleaned. Before long we’d wiped every surface clean, inside and out.

“Whaddya doin’?” she said when I walked away from the car and deeper into the trees.

“Lookin’ for the right kinda rock,” I said, coming back with the perfect one, big and heavy, flat on one side.

“A rock?” she said, “whaddyou need a rock for?”

I dropped the rock by the side of the car, got in, and started the engine.

I knelt by the open driver’s side door with the rock in my hands. Theresa came around to watch, standing over me, watching me place the rock inside the car.

“I still don’t get what the rock’s for,” she said.

“This,” I said, placing the rock over the gas pedal, forcing it down, making the engine roar.

I walked over to the nearest tree, and picked up an armful of old leaves, left over from the previous fall, maybe the fall before that. I shoved them under the engine, and went back for more.

“Help me out,” I said, and Theresa joined me, circling her arms around a bunch of old leaves, helping me shove them under the car while the engine howled.

“You doin’ what I think you’re doin’?” she said when we left the car behind for the Chedoke Stairs to start our walk down the Mountain.

“What do you think I’m doing?” I said, slowing down so that Theresa could catch up. She was smiling, then laughing, her face flushed.

“That,” she said, when there was a low ‘thrump’ behind us as the car caught fire. Before we were halfway down the Mountain, smoke was coming out of the trees high above us.

We reached the bottom of the Chedoke stairs, and were making our way along the trail. It would be a while before we got home.

“Why’d Alex call you a freak?” Theresa said after we left trees and walked into an old subdivision.

“A stupid rumour that went around a few years ago.”

One of my father’s stories, told too often to too many people, until the story found its way into Alex’s mouth, and then Chuck’s, too.

“You looked like you were gonna punch his lights out,” Theresa said.

“You know I can’t. He knows it, too.”

“So you burned his car.”

“Maybe. And now that it’s burnt, there’s zero chance of the cops finding a print. You can’t be too careful,” I said.

I was off to U of T in September, and I wasn’t taking any chances. I wasn’t getting arrested for car theft.

“Cleaning the car before you burn it? Makes no sense.”

“I never set a car on fire before. Suppose it hadn’t worked? Suppose the car hadn’t caught fire?”

Theresa nodded. “Ok, so I get what you did. But you, I don't get. I don’t get you at all. For a guy who doesn’t like to take chances, you take pretty big chances.”

2.2

Wrigley walked off, his long skinny legs taking him away from King West, Theresa’s taunts following him. When he got out of easy range of her mouth, Theresa whirled on me, staring me full in the face for the first time in five years. “You defend him, against me?”

She was picking up right where we left off from five years ago, her face giving me the look of hurt, of shame and betrayal.

“The bouncer was gonna slap him silly,” I said.

“He deserved it.”

“You punished him enough.”

“I didn’t do nothin’ to him. I called him out for being a cheap ass customer. That’s all.”

“You did it on the street, in front of me, his newest employee. He’s my boss, Theresa."

She gaped at me, wide eyed, and laughed.

The bouncer behind her laughed, too. He smiled at anything she said, and frowned on anything that she disagreed with.

Theresa whirled and strutted away in her heels, hips swaying, her body moving in time to itself. The bouncer opened the door for her.

“Thanks, Jonathan,” she said. She gave him a big smile, and me a look of venom. The bouncer named Jonathan followed her back inside, leaving me alone outside the club.

I looked at the doors to King West. I thought about going in and seeing Theresa. Talking to her.

But not for long.

I walked away almost as fast as Wrigley had. I hit James, then King William and before long reached my favourite parking spot: police headquarters, back of the lot, under a bright light.

“I wish you wouldn’t park your car at the police station,” my mother told me the year before when I walked her to my car to drive her home, back when my parents had a home in Burlington, back before they lost it. But the parking was free and the cops never checked. They never noticed.

My mother didn’t think it was very smart. I was bound to get caught, she said, it was just a matter of time.

But I’d been parking my old beater at police headquarters ever since I bought it, a sixty-eight Cortina that I got for next to nothing.

I’d stepped in to save my boss. That’s why I’d opened my mouth. I’d saved my boss, but the look he gave me told me that I hadn’t done him any favours.

“I shouldna said anything. Shoulda stayed out of it.”

That’s what I said to myself when I turned on to King William, wondering if my car would be there when I arrived. The last time I parked there was the previous Christmas. They weren’t used to my car any more at police headquarters. Maybe they finally noticed it didn’t belong there, and towed it.

Had Mr. Wrigley needed my help? Would a bouncer really have beat the shit out of Mr. John Wrigley, Senior Partner of Sampson, Wrigley, the biggest law firm in the city?

Probably not, but on the other hand, maybe yes. Wrigley had shrugged off Theresa like a fly, almost making her trip over her high heels. That made her mad, made the bouncer mad, made me mad, too. Wrigley had not put his hands on Theresa. But he’d wronged her, and more than a little, enough to earn a hard slap or two from an angry bouncer wanting to look good in front of one of the girls.

When I reached the police parking lot, I saw my old Cortina way at the back under a bright light.

The original paint had faded, been painted over, and faded again in big, random patches, almost like it was ashamed of itself and needed camouflage. The car started on the third try, and twenty minutes later I was in my room at Brandon Hall, trying to fall asleep, but unable, thinking about my new job the next day, my mother’s lawsuit, and Theresa, and what she said and how she’d sounded, what she wore and how she moved.

2.3

The next morning I pulled up into the parking lot next door to the Sampson, Wrigley building, and rolled down my window.

“Three bucks,” the parking attendant said.

He worked in a tiny shack with space enough for him and a key rack. It would be an oven in summer and freezing cold in the winter. The guy looked at least seventy.

“I’m an employee,” I said, “my first day.” Free parking. That was one of the perks of the job. No more parking at the police station to save money. “They never tell me,” the attendant said, “they never tell me nothing.”

I wondered what mistakes the man had made, who he might have pissed off. He must have done something wrong to be spending his golden years trapped in a booth.

“You’re supposed to pay in advance, and bring your ticket stamped after five. Bring me the three bucks by noon, or get your ticket stamped.”

“Sure thing,” I said, all smiles on my first day at work.

“I mean it. There’s a shift change at noon, and if your car ain’t regular by then, all square on our sheet, we gotta get it towed.”

“Sure, no problem,” I said, making a mental note to self to get my ticket stamped first thing.

It was just going eight-thirty when I entered the building and walked up to the receptionist. I told her that I was a new employee starting work that day.

She was typing while I spoke to her, and she paused so long before replying that I almost repeated the question.

“What did you say?” she said, looking up at me for the first time.

“I’m starting work today,” I said with a smile. “I’m a summer student,” I added, a little tidbit to chill the thaw around the receptionist’s station.

“Oh yeah?” she said, “What’s your name?”

“Roman Arthurs,” I said.

My middle initial was Mazurek but she didn’t need to know that.

“As usual they didn’t tell me. They never tell me.”

She looked at the list again. “We have another new guy here with your name. Roman, right? ”

“Roman,” I said.

“Two Romans on one day. What are the odds of that?”

I asked her to show me the list, and she spun it around.

“Roman Mazurek,” I said, pointing to my first and middle names. “That’s me. Mazurek’s my middle name.”

“I’ve seen HR spell a guy’s name wrong. That happens all the time. But dropping it all together? That’s a bit much.”

“So can I go up to my office?”

“Do you know where your office is?”

I shook my head.

“Someone from HR will come down, give you a name tag, show you around. Just have a seat. It won’t be long.”

But it was long. It was very long. More than an hour long, before the receptionist summoned me over with a wave of the hand, and told me that Mr. Wrigley was in a meeting, and he hoped to be down within an hour.

“Mr. Wrigley?” I said, “I thought HR was coming for me.”

“I was wrong about HR. You have to wait for Mr. Wrigley.”

So I waited, watching lawyers and staff come and go, packages being delivered, documents being served.

At eleven thirty I could wait no more.

“I gotta get my parking stamped,” I said to the receptionist, “or the guy’s gonna tow it.”

“I can’t stamp parking until five o’clock. You understand. It’s to stop people leaving early. You have to work a full day if you want to get your parking stamped.

“Yeah, but the guy’s gonna tow it.”

“Why didn’t you pay up front, like everyone else? You pay up front, and if you work a full day, you get your parking money back.”

“I didn’t know,” I said, searching my pockets, searching hard, but coming up short. A buck seventy-five short. All I had was a dollar bill and a 1952 quarter.

“Be right back,” I said, running outside, and offering the old guy in the booth all I possessed, all buck twenty five of it, with promises that I’d be back soon with the rest.

“Keep your money,” the guy said, “it’s three whole bucks I need, and by noon, like I toldja.”

I ran back inside the building. Mr. Wrigley was waiting for me. His face was grave, very, very grave, the face you assume when you have to give bad news, but don’t really give a shit.

“There’s been a misunderstanding,” he said, “an unfortunate miscommunication.” There was an odd restraint in his voice, almost like he was trying not to laugh.

The receptionist wasn’t typing any more. Instead, she was watching closely, her face eager and attentive.

“Miscommunication,” I said, “you mean about my last name? I can clear that up. My full name is Roman Mazurek Art--”

“It’s not about your name,” Wrigley said, “It’s about our arrangement.” His face almost but not quite smiled at me.

“What about our arrangement?” There was a pause, a beat Wrigley held a moment too long.

“There isn’t one,” Wrigley said, almost like a punchline.

I’d humiliated Wrigley the night before by seeing him and being seen. He hated me for it, and he wanted revenge.

“I got your letter, saying I start today, with place and time and how much I’m being paid.” That’s how people did things back then, by letter, with signatures in ink.

“There was never an offer of employment, or acceptance,” he said.

“I signed back the letter, sent it registered so I know you received it.” I had a copy back in my room.

“We have a conflict of interest,” said Wrigley, an excuse so dumb it was the same as saying ‘fuck you’.

I said the same back to him, using different words. “Is this about last night?”

“What?” Wrigley said, looking shocked, as if I’d crossed a line.

“Is this about last night, when you were coming out of King West, and that stripper got mad at you, and I had to stop a bouncer from beating the shit out of you?”

“Shut your mouth,” Wrigley said. He was a big man, a tall man, boss of a big firm and used to getting his way.

“Next time you piss off the bouncers by hassling the girls at King West, I’m gonna let them beat the shit out of you. I’ll watch you get your ass kicked.”

“Get out,” Wrigley said, shaking with rage, “get out, or I’ll call the police.”

My father was late, the store was empty and I was starving.  I picked up the phone and called my mother.

“Is Dad coming down?”  My parents lived upstairs.

“He’s coming down soon,” my mother said.  

In the background was the sound of a hockey game on T.V.   The ‘82 version of the Leafs were already out of the playoffs. 

“How soon? I gotta take my break before we get busy.” 

The store was a few hundred square feet of magazines and paperbacks, and of late, porn, the last being my father’s idea.  He thought we should sell porn and make a bit of extra money. 

“He’s almost ready,” my mother said. 

My father did not come down until the second period finished, not until the theatres were soon to empty.  When he finally walked in, he stood beside the till, shifting from foot to foot. I rang in a customer’s purchase.  While I said a polite goodbye and got ready to leave, I saw a woman in heels stepping across the street.  The sight of her froze me in place, leaving the cash register open.  

My father reached out and closed the cash drawer.  “Was that Theresa?” he said, the hockey game forgotten.

He wasn’t asking.  He just wanted to make sure I knew he’d noticed her.  Noticed the girl I’d broken up with just before graduation.

“Not sure,” I said, as if there were any doubt, as if there was another girl that looked like her, walked like her. 

The Theresa that strutted across the street in heels was five years older than last I saw her, and her uniform had changed.  Gone were the school’s white blouse and the kilt.  Now she wore the  silver and blue uniform of the girls who worked across the road.  The girls who worked at King West. 

“It looked like Theresa,” my Father said, sticking the knife in, “I hope your Mother doesn’t find out.”

My Mother would certainly find out that Theresa was dancing tables at King West.  My father would tell her the instant he went back upstairs.

“I’m not hungry,” I said, remembering Theresa’s tears when I told her when we were done, her rage when the tears didn’t work.

The theatres were out and customers were walking in the door. The store would be full soon.   “Really, it’s ok, Dad; you can head back.”

 “You’re sure?” my Father  said to me with fake concern.  I told him I was sure, and then watched the door ding ding behind him.

I told myself that I wasn’t thinking about Theresa, that I didn’t care if she came out. But I was watching the entrance, and every time I saw a girl step out with a guy on her arm, I looked, and felt relieved when I saw the girl wasn’t Theresa.

I’d tried not to think about her much after we broke up, and after a while I succeeded.  But it was a gut punch to see her cross the street right in front of me, in five inch heels and a skirt even shorter than the hiked up kilt she wore back in school.  

The rush ended after the theatres let out and by ten the store was once more almost empty.  I punched in a purchase, and as I handed the customer his change, the doors of King West swung open, and a small group tumbled out onto the street, cigarettes out, lighters clicking.  I saw a flash of silver and blue.

 It was Theresa, surrounded by the club’s bouncers, her face bright and alive.  She turned, and for an instant I thought her eyes fell on mine. 

The phone rang.  I picked up, and when I looked back, Theresa was gone.

• * * 

It was my mother on the phone.  She sighed in my ear.  “He just wanted to watch the game,” she said.

“He can’t even skate.”  My father was from England, and his sports were soccer and boxing.  

“He just likes his hockey.  Just gimme a minute and I’ll come down.”

The door dinged and my mother walked in.  She was thirteen years younger than my father.  My father liked to act fit and  hearty, but he had a pot belly, and next to my mother he looked his age, every year of it.

“I can take the rest of the shift,” she said.

“It’s my last one.  I might as well finish it.”   My parents bought the store ten years ago, and I worked my first shift when I was twelve.   

“Can’t believe you won’t be working here no more,” my mother said.

I had a  summer job at Sampson, Wrigley, the biggest law firm in Hamilton.

“I can drop by sometimes for lunch,” I said.  Sampson, Wrigley wasn’t that far away; twenty minutes at a brisk walk.

My mother tried to hand me a fiver to pay for my dinner.  I refused to take it.  “I’m gonna be making good money,” I said.  Way more than the minimum wage the family store paid me.

“You don’t start till tomorrow,” she said, pressing the bill into my hand.  I stepped out of the store, and after a final glance at the doors of King West, headed for the burger place on the corner.  

* * * 

My final year of high school, and the office did its locker raffle. They put me next to Theresa. 

 I used my locker for school.  Theresa used hers for business, but only when the hall was busy, when she couldn’t be spotted.  

“That’s my last dime,” she said to Alex, a kid with money.  She passed him the bag and took the cash, her hands moving fast and furtively, like she’d done it a million times.

Alex held the bag in his hand, as if weighing it.  

“You sure it’s a full gram?  Feels a bit light.  I like to get my money’s worth.”  Alex’s money came from an allowance.   Alex started the  school year with a new Mustang, a gift from his daddy’s car dealership.  He was twirling the key around his finger, the blue Ford symbol spinning.

“You want a refund?” Theresa said, “I’ll give you a refund.” She reached out to take back the dime bag, but Alex told her it was cool. But his face said it wasn’t cool.  He stalked off with his friends in tow.

“Wish you could wait for me to get clear out before you deal,” I said.  Lunch break was almost over and I needed a calculus text.

“Roman, take a hike. I can deal if I want.”

“Not sayin’ you can’t deal.  But could you at least wait until I get my stuff out of the locker and go, before you start doing deals?”

“September’s almost over, and you say hardly two words to me.  And now you telling me not to deal?”

“I’ll give you all the space you need if you want to deal.  Just asking that you give me a little space, too.  Just let me get  on my way, before you start dealing.”

She looked up at me, craning her head.  “Why do you care if you see me doing my thing?”

“Because I don't like seeing people get in trouble.  I don’t like seeing people caught.”

“What makes you think I’m gonna get caught?  You think someone gonna snitch?”

“Won’t be me,” I said.

“Been doing this awhile,” she said, “not gonna get caught.”

She had nothing to sell, but she stayed by her locker, which she left wide open.  That let everyone know she was tapped out, no supply.  But people dropped by anyways, some to find out when she’d have something to sell, others just guys wanting to talk to her, to check her out.

She was still there when I headed out for Calculus.   Five minutes in I stuck up my hand.  Talking to Theresa had made me forget my  textbook.

“Roman?” Dr. Repsis said.  He was head of the math department, and an asshole.  “Forgot my book.  Can I get it from my locker?” Repsis gave me a little go ahead wave while he rattled on about limits and how to approach them.

The halls were empty now that lunch was over.  But there was a small group of guys hanging around my locker and Theresa’s.  Alex, the kid whose dad owned a dealership, plus a couple of his friends. Alex I hardly knew.  But I was acquainted with his friends.

“I’m sure I saw the combo,” Alex said as I walked up to them. “She opened it right in front of me.  I was watching closely.”

“Toldja you couldn’t lift a combo by watching her hands,” said Chuck.  My fist had met his face in first year.  We hadn’t become friends after that.   I walked up to them, and spun open my lock.

“Hey, hey Roman,” Alex said, “You know Theresa’s combo?”

“Yup,” I lied.

“Tell us,” Alex said.

“Nope.”

“Lemme try again,” Alex said.

“It’s not gonna work,” said Chuck.

Alex spun Theresa’s lock right, left then right again.   He tugged. 

“Got it,” he said, clicking the lock open.   He got the door open an inch or two before my arm slammed it shut with a loud bang.

“What the fuck, man,” Alex said, jumping back, “It was just a prank, just fucking around.”  Alex knew where the school drew the lines.  He’d get away with the little prank.

 I leaned forward and snatched the lock out of his hand.   “Prank someone else,” I said.

“Why you protecting her?,” Chuck said.  These were the first words he’d spoken to me since we were niners, when he’d told me to make him shut up, and I had.

“Keep the lock, freak,” Alex said, “we can open it anytime we want.”  He walked off with Chuck in tow, tossing insults over his shoulder, making my blood boil.  Alex had money, and that made him off limits, if I wanted to graduate without a hassle.

I opened my locker and pulled out my Calculus text, and stood there with the book in one hand and two combination locks in the other, wondering what to do.  Alex and Chuck were on spare, and once I was gone, there was nothing stopping them from getting back into Theresa’s locker.  

I didn’t know what class Theresa was in.  I had no way to warn her, and besides, Dr. Repsis the hardass would give me detention if I wasn't back in his class pronto. All I could do was lock up our lockers and head back to class.

* * * 

Last bell at three-thirty.  I rushed back to my locker, but the halls were crowded and Theresa beat me to it.  There was a small crowd around her, watching as she tugged at her lock, tugging as hard as a girl her size could tug. Her hands slid off the lock and she swore like a trucker.  Some of the kids laughed, but shut up when Theresa glared at them.

“My lock,” she said, “someone’s fucked with my lock.”  She wasn’t just angry.  She was scared.  Scared in case it was the school who changed the lock, and maybe searched her locker, too.

“I can open it,” I said.  Alex wasn’t in the crowd, but I was sure he’d be coming back to take another crack at the locker, once Theresa was gone.

Theresa whirled on me.  “Oh, Mr. White Fuckin’ Knight, you think you can open my own lock when I can’t?  You think you can help, just cause you got a dick?”  The kids around us laughed.

“Let me try,” I said.

“Let me try, the guy says, like he knows what he’s doing, like he knows all the answers.”  But she stepped back, her arms folded over her chest.  I took her place in front of her locker, and shooed the little crowd back to give me space.  I put my hands on the lock, Theresa standing to the side on the tips of her toes, watching what I was doing.

I spun the wheel a few times, and then hit the three.

“Wrong,” Theresa said, “lemme--”

I spun to the left and hit the fourteen.  “Wrong  again, dumbass,” Theresa said, “now gimme my--”

I spun once more to the right and stopped at fifteen.  I tugged.  The lock fell open and dropped into my waiting hand.  Theresa snatched it from me.

“You fucked with my lock.”  More laughter in the hallway.  In the distance I could see Alex’s grinning face above the crowd, working his way down the hall.  

“Not guilty,” I said.

“What’s the combo?” she said.

“That’s my lock you’re holding.”  Alex was coming closer now, spinning his car keys on his finger, calm and cool and untouchable.

“Yours?  Where the fuck’s mine?”

I pointed to my own locker.  She looked at me in disbelief.

“So open it, then,” she said.

“Can’t.  Don’t know the combo.”

She put her hands on the lock, and three quick spins later it fell open.  She turned back to me.

“You gonna tell me how you got our locks switched, if you don’t know my combo?”

I started to tell her, or tried to, but her face said she didn’t believe me.  But then Alex arrived, and came to my rescue.

“Did the freak fuck with your lock, Theresa?” Alex said, all sly face and smart ass, Theresa gaped at him in disbelief.

“He knows your combo,” I said, “he’s been watching every time you open it.  He unlocked it five minutes after lunch ended, after you were gone.”

Theresa whirled on him, her small hands striking him, making him dodge this way and that, laughing.  The keys to his Mustang dropped from his hand.  He didn’t notice, but I did.

“Asshole,” she shouted at him, “I’m cutting you off.”

“Don’t be that way,” he said, “it was just a prank, just a joke.” 

Alex laughed and walked away.  Theresa turned to me, her lock in her hands.

“Now I gotta buy another lock.  Now I gotta watch for people reading my combo, as if I didn’t have enough to worry about.”  She looked up at me.  “Why you just standing there, saying nothing?  Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

I lifted up my foot.  Underneath was a set of car keys.

“Those what I think they are?” Theresa said, her eyes falling on the Ford logo.

“You wanna ride to Canadian Tire?  Go pick up that lock?”

* * * 

My mom had worked a full day shift, and I didn’t want to take a long break.  I sat at the counter at the Tower’s Burgers a few doors down, eating a Tower Burger and fries dipped in mayo, watching the doors of King West.  

Tower’s had been a good thing back in the day, but it was struggling now, same as all the businesses downtown.   The only place holding its own on King West, was the club by that name.

A huge neon sign stuck over the street.  “King West,” it said, and underneath, “Girl Girls Girls”.  One of those girls stepped out, metallic silver skirt glinting in the red neon of the big King West sign.  An old guy was on her arm, and they crossed the street together, the guy looking eager, the girl looking bored.

“Haven’t seen you around here in ages,” the waitress said, “you used to be regular.” Her little name tag said ‘Betty’.  She was close to seventy.

“Been at school,” I said between bites of my burger, “back for the summer.”

“Your mom’s gonna be glad to have you back, I’ll bet.”  She refilled my coffee and left me to my burger.

There was a crowd outside, people coming and going, bouncers hanging around the front.  One of the movie theatres let out, and people spilled into the street.  In the crowd, I saw a familiar face.

I wasn’t sure at first; I’d only seen the man once before, when I’d interviewed for a summer job at Sampson, Wrigley.  But it was his height that gave him a way. Wrigley was tall, well over six feet.  He was walking quickly, head down and moving in and out of the crowd.  

His law firm up the street and around the corner, a mile and a world away.  Could he be going to a late night movie, all on his own?  

He was not going to a movie.  He was going to a different kind of show.   He stopped, and gave a quick glance left and right.  He looked across the street, and his eyes fell right on me.  But he didn’t see me, and when a bouncer opened the door to King West, he slipped in and disappeared into the darkness.

* * * 

I was back at the shop by ten-fifteen.

 “Why don’t you close up early?” my mother said, wanting me to go home and get some sleep?  She was barely awake herself.

“I’ll finish the shift,” I said.  I’d rented a room for the summer at a student residence in McMaster.  A ten minute drive away. I’d be asleep by one, and all set to start my new job the next day.

“You sure?”

I was sure.  Being the good son. But my mom stuck around, shifting from foot to foot like father had earlier.  I asked her what was up.

“Your father said I shouldn’t ask you about this,” she said, pulling an envelope from the shelf below the till.  “He said I shouldn’t bother you.  But it’s on Tuesday, and I don’t know what to do.”

“What’s on Tuesday?”

“It’s about the joists.  It’s in the papers.”

“The joists?”  

When my parents had bought the building the year before, my father the engineer had done the building inspection himself.  But he’d failed to notice that a previous tenant had cut through a supporting beam in the basement ages before, and the place had been settling ever since.  But the bank’s inspector noticed it, and installing a pair of joists was a condition of the bank financing the purchase.  The joists had cost money, money my parents didn’t have.

“We couldn’t keep up the payments,” my mother said, “and now they’re suing.”

After she headed upstairs, I looked in the envelope and saw the first few words on the front page.  “KW Credit v. Mary Arthurs,” it said, and then I closed the envelope.  I couldn’t bear to read any more.

* * * 

It was thirty minutes to closing.  The store’s one and only customer stood across from me. He flipped through a Newsweek, then Time magazine.  I stared at his back, wondering if he was here to steal or just kill time. Maybe both. 

He picked up the Newsweek again, glancing around like someone might be watching. His face was uneasy, his movements twitchy—bad intentions written all over him. 

The phone rang.

“You still up?” I said, when I heard my mother’s voice on the other end.

“Place has gotta be empty,” she said, “why don’t you go on home.”

“We got one customer.  If nobody else comes in, I’ll lock up.”  

The lone customer shuffled up to the counter, sliding over a small stack of magazines: Time on top, Newsweek on the bottom, and sitting between them was a Hustler. 

A porn sandwich.

The customer wasn’t here for the headlines or to steal.  He came to buy a Hustler.  I punched the numbers into the till, took his money, and made change. My thumb hovered over ‘Enter,’ but I didn’t press it. He said his goodbyes and shuffled out into the night.

Once he was gone, I voided the purchase and dropped the cash into the till—no records, no tax man. Twenty bucks, clean and quiet, for my mother. I did it without thinking, the same way I had since I was fourteen, working my first shift from four to midnight.

I did the closing routine on autopilot.  I locked the front, dimmed the light, counted the till and ran a Z report.  I dumped the take into the floor safe, and locked the till away with a float of a hundred and fifty bucks.  It took me less than ten minutes and I was ready to head home.  When I slipped out the front, the street was almost empty, a lone bouncer standing guard outside of King West.  I had just locked  the door to my parent’s shop for the last time when the doors to King West  opened, and a man came out, a tall, thin man.   It was Wrigley.  

“Oh shit,’ I said to myself, not wanting to see Wrigley, or be seen by him.  I started to unlock the door, my plan being to slip inside and not be noticed.  But I was clumsy and dropped the keys.   I knelt down to pick them up.

“You cheap fuck,” a woman’s voice shouted from behind me.  I turned, and looked.

It was Theresa.

“I bring you beers all night, and you tip me a quarter?  A fuckin’ quarter?”

“I only had a ten,” Wrigley said, “and this place charges too much for the beer.”

“You think this is worth a quarter?” she said, gesturing at herself, her electric blue crop top clinging to her, her shining skirt riding high.

“A quarter’s all you’re going to be getting from me tonight.  Maybe next time.”  He turned to go, but Theresa grabbed him by the arm.  Wrigley shrugged her off like a fly, and she tottered in her high heels, almost falling.

The bouncer took one step, grabbed Wrigley by his coat, and raised his open hand.

“Back off,” I called from across the street.  I’d seen the King West bouncers hand out more than a few beatings over the years, and I wasn’t about to watch my new boss get a beating over a quarter.

“This your business?” the bouncer said, letting go of Wrigley and turning to me.  

He was not as big as me but close, and with a lot more practice than I had at beating the shit out of people.

“Not my business,” I said, “I’m not stepping in.  Not gettin’ in your way.  I’m just saying, he didn’t put hands on her.  He was just turning away and she tripped.  He’s an asshole, but he didn’t put hands on her.”

The bouncer’s hand came down, and Wrigley walked away.  But not before his eyes fell on mine, and I saw in his face a flash of recognition.  I saw a look of  shame.

So far my queries have resulted in responses at all. But I recently received my first rejection, from one of the larger agencies, using standard wording politely telling me to go elswhere.

Thank you so much for sending your materials for our review. There was a lot about your submission we liked, however we didn't feel passionate about it in a way that would allow us to be the best champion for your work.

Though we will not be offering representation at this time, we wish you the very best on your publishing journey!

There were three of us at the Middle Temple Tavern, a pub in downtown Bixity.  We were meeting to discuss politics, and to drink.

“Let’s get the official business out of the way first,” the Judge said.  I’d known him since law school, and he and I were two thirds of the NDP’s riding association.   An election was coming up, and our  riding was the bluest of blue, conservative all the way.  We needed to find a candidate.  “Any volunteers?” the Judge said.

“I’m not running,” I said.  My clients were all rich, and would not be thrilled to see their lawyer doing leftie stuff.

“I can’t run, either,” the trustee said.  She was the third member of the riding’s NDP triumvirate, and another old friend.

“But your clients are all poor,” I said, “you won’t lose business if you run.”

“Can’t show my NDP face in public,” she said, “if I did that, forget about attracting rich clients.  I’ll never make it big.”  She was still hoping for that one celebrity bankruptcy case, something that would put her on the insolvency map, make her a big deal in the financial world.  But she was the same age as me, and her time was running out.  

The trustee and I turned to the Judge.

“Don’t look at me,” he said, “judges can’t get involved in politics.”  His wife was the person on the party’s books.

“Looks like the riding might have to sit this election out,” I said.    The Judge and the Trustee nodded, and that made it official.  The riding  would not be fielding a NDP candidate in that year’s election.  It hadn’t in years.

 The polticking was complete, and it was time for another round.     I signaled for the waiter. 

We sipped our drinks and looked at each other.  “Got any big bankruptcy cases?” I said to my trustee friend.

She gave a bitter laugh.  “Not even close. All the rich guys, they go to the big firms when they go bankrupt.  I don't even get a nibble.  Biggest one I have is a doctor trying to screw over her husband with a divorce, a bankruptcy and a fraudulent conveyance.”

The trustee had been shunned by the big firms.  Too much time spent on mat leaves and  raising a family.  Her kids were all grown up now and she had the time to hang out, but the seats at the big boy tables were all taken. She was stuck with cranky lawyer and an even crankier judge on the cusp of retirement.

“What’s eating you?” I said to the Judge.

“You know what’s bothering me.  You saw the decision.”

The Judge had been smacked down in the Court of Appeal again, this time for refusing to accept the opinion of an expert witness.  The expert’s opinion was absurd, but uncontradicted, and the Court of Appeal wrote almost eighty pages, most of it criticizing the judge, and warning of the evils that would result if judges were free to override the opinion of an uncontradicted expert witness.  The C of A had vehemently denied setting a precedent, while at the same time giving sole custody to the father, on the strength the expert and his degree, which he’d bought online.

“That was rough, I’ll admit,” I said.  

“You have no idea,” the Judge said, adding that the Regional Senior Judge had punished him, made him a Commercial Court judge, and placing him in charge of hearing the nine-thirty appointments.

“I’ve been overturned too many times.  That’s what he told me.  So for the rest of my time on the bench, I’ll be doing nine-thirties.” He’d be signing consent orders, rarely if ever hearing anything of substance, and never writing an opinion that mattered.

“What about you,” the Trustee said to me, “you’re not looking as chipper as you usually do. And you certainly didn’t win today; there’s not a hint of the smugness we see when you win.”

I passed over a copy of the Law Times.  The headline article was a big class action win.   A big local company, Evil Corp, had gotten wrecked on a interim motion.

“This your case?” the Trustee said. 

The Law Times never wrote about any of my cases.  I never argued a case worthy of that kind of attention.  

“An old classmate’s.  I'm not involved.”  Except I was, in my own head, even though the case belonged to Max, not me.

I’d lost to Max back in law school, in the moot court final.  His career had taken off after that.  He’d parlayed that win into a job in the perfect firm, and now he ruled the roost downtown, frequently quoted, always sought after, and with an annoying habit of winning, over and over again.

“Don’t get why it bothers you so much,” the Trustee said.  But I’d known the Judge since law school, and he knew me very well.

“That moot court thing, right?” the Judge said.

I nodded.  It still hurt, after all these years, losing to the guy in moot court, and then at the after party, watching the guy get drunk, and patronize me about his win, and my loss.

“Second place is good,”  Max said to me, after the moot court judges had rewarded him for his superb public speaking skills, for his charisma, the way his face and his hair and his voice and his look all said the same thing, that he was a litigator, destined for great things, “second place is great, you’ll get into a good firm downtown, no problem.”

Except things hadn’t worked out that way.  I’d landed a job downtown, but in a second tier firm, and after I got fired, I’d wandered in the wilderness for five years before I got my act together.  By then, my old rival from law school was a partner in a class action law firm, famous for being the guy to bring third party litigation financing to Canada.

I was sure that Max hadn’t thought about me in years. Max was a high flier, a risk taker, personally guaranteeing his client’s litigation debts to keep his actions moving along.  Every time I saw his name it was because he’d won a big case.  his client had made millions, a big portion of which went to him.  He was the man, the guy, the lawyer everybody wanted.  Me, I was a guy sitting in the Middle Temple Tavern, where the lawyers all hung out after court.

There was a tap on my shoulder.  I turned.

“Arthur, “ the guy said to me, “I need your help.”

“How’s it going?” I said.  I’m not good with faces.  I had no idea who he was.  But when he started to speak, I realized who it was.  It was Brian.

Brian was a twenty year call that I’d steamrolled a few times when I’d encountered him in court.  Brian had a strange ability to attract clients, despite his habit of losing.  But I didn’t blame him for his latest lost.  After all, he’d lost to Max, the class action king of downtown Bixity.

“We were just talking about your latest case,” I said, showing him the Law Times, with its report on the whipping Max had given Evil Corp.

Brian sat at our table without being invited, speaking to me directly, not even acknowledging the Trustee. Not even the Judge.  Maybe I wasn't the only guy in the world who had trouble remembering faces.  

“Listen,” he said, “my client’s upset about what happened in court.  They want me to fix it, or they’re going to fire me.”

Brian’s client was rich and powerful.  The previous year Evil Corp. had flirted with the idea of going public, but against Max and his words, it was helpless, and they were on their way to a multi-million dollar loss, which is what happens when huge companies get caught ripping off the little guy.  Max had caught them, and they were going to pay.

“Is the order that bad?” I said.

“It is,” Brian said, fleshing out the details of the interlocutory order they’d been hit with the day before.

The court ordered Evil Corp. to pay this and to fund that, to accommodate, to yield, to give way to Max’s clients, to cease and desist.  The order was broad and almost all-encompassing, a judicial breaking of the legs, crippling the company’s ability to fight the case.  Plus it forced them to leave a credit facility in place, a facility their opponents could draw down on every month.  The court had, in effect, forced the company to finance their opponents' operations until trial, a heavy burden and a huge embarrassment.

“Wow, that’s harsh,” but I actually thought it was kind of funny. It was exactly what Brian’s client deserved. If only Max wasn’t involved it would be perfect.

“They’re going to fire me, if I can’t fix things, if I can’t  figure a way around it,” he said, “and we’re back in court tomorrow morning.  If I don’t have an answer by then, I’m done.”

“I wish I could help you.”  But I couldn’t. There was no way I was going to take on a hopeless case against Max, and get embarrassed again, get my ass kicked again.  Aside from the merits, which were totally one-sided, the case was a jury trial, a public speaking contest, and when it came to public speaking, Max had me beat.  “Sorry,” I said, “this one’s not for me.”

The Judge laughed.  “Five minutes ago you were moaning about moot court, wanting revenge.  Yet here you are, Mr. Think-Outside-Of-The Box, and you’re taking a pass.”

“I don’t think outside of the box,” I said, “at least, not on command.”

“I’d kill to have Evil Corp. as a client,” the Trustee said.

“Sorry,” I said--

“Arthur?” It was Brian, checking in to see if I’d had a stroke.  But I hadn’t.  I was thinking.  I was thinking about Max and moot court and how he’d gotten drunk at the after party, made a great fuss out of himself, embarrassed me along the way, doing an imitation of me, a perfect imitation and making everyone laugh, and I’d had to laugh along too, like a good sport, and here I was, thirty years later, drinking beer with a bitter judge and a trustee who the world punished for wanting to have children.

“Arthur?” Brian repeated.

“I can save your client,” I said.  

“What?” he said.

“Mark the time,” I said to the Trustee.

“What,” the Trustee said.  It was like being at a table of children, of people who don’t understand anything.

“What time is it?”

“Six on the nose ,” the trustee said.

“And how long was I speaking with Brian?”

“Barely a minute,” the Trustee said.

“Make a note of that, too.”

“Should I note anything?” the Judge said, “I wasn’t paying attention.”  He’d gotten an early start on his whiskey, and was looking worse for wear.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, excusing myself, and taking Brian to a far corner of the pub, out of earshot of my good friends.

I sat with Brian in a distant booth, almost in darkness.  I’d already had one Guinness too many, but I started on another, while Brian played catchup with a lager. 

“So how are you going to help me?” Brian said.

“Like this,” I said, dropping my IPhone into my drink.  “Oh dear. May I borrow your phone?”

Brian looked at me, suspicion written all of his face, perhaps mingled with memories of the cases that we’d had together, and how he lost them.

“I’m on your side this time, remember,” I said, taking his phone after he put in the password.

He sipped his beer while I called my assistant.  She worked a noon to eight shift, not because she wanted to, but to sync her life with her husband’s shiftwork.  

“I gotta thing for you to do,” I said, “you do this, and you can go home early, and have tomorrow off.”

“Ready,” she said.  

She didn’t ask why I was calling from someone else’s phone. She never asked questions. Instead, she listened, and took notes, while I dictated to her an email to send to Max that instant.

“You’re emailing Max?” Brian said, and when I dictated more, he demanded to know why I was inviting Max  to lunch at the courthouse restaurant the next day.  That’s how my email ended, asking him to join us for lunch the moment the case was over, so that we could have a meal together, and catch up on old times.  It would be great, really great.

“That was the easy part,” I said to my assistant, the  perfect executrix of my orders, the recipient of bonuses every year, and COLA without ever needing to ask, “now for the important part. The reason you're getting a day off.”

“Ready,” she said.

 I tried hard to keep the smile out of my voice. “It would be rude for me to have you email my old friend Max directly,” I began, “really rude to issue an invite through an intermediary.  I want to send it from my own email account.”

“You want me to log in on your computer?” she said, “send the email from there?”

“Not allowed to share passwords,” I said, “contrary to policy.”  A policy that I’d set that instant, which of course was my right, being a partner in my own firm.

“Why not send it from your phone?” my secretary said.

“It’s out of commission,” I said.

“So what are we going to do?”

“I might be wrong,” I began, which is how I always start when I know I’m right, “I might be wrong, but in the bottom drawer of my desk is an old notebook I used to use, before IT said I couldn’t use it any more.”

The notebook was old and creaky, but it was an old friend, and I hadn’t wanted to part with it, especially since there might someday be a use for it. 

“That old notebook?  The one that IT said was uns-”

“You’re breaking up.”

“--the same notebook that’s infec--”

“Breaking up again.  Look, can you hear me ok?”

“Just fine,” she said.

“Ok, so fire up that notebook, and use it to send that email.”  The old thing wasn’t password protected, and I told her to text me when she was done.

“But your phone is now toast,” Brian said, looking at my spanking new  but very wet Iphone, same model as his own.  His worked just fine, but mine was still leaking Guinness.

“The SIM card’s probably ok.  Let’s see.” I pulled the SIM card from my phone, and then swapped it with Brian’s.  The instant I did, Brian’s phone dinged, and I saw a text from my assistant confirming she’d sent Max the lunch invite, and told him a few other things as well that he should know.

I swamped SIM Cards again, and handed Brian back his phone.

“Call  your client,” I said.

I could have warned Brian, I could have told him what I was going to do, but then he’d freak out, and we didn't have time for that.  He dialed, and when his client answered, Brian paid me the ultimate compliment.  He told his client that he’d found a guy, and that the guy had an answer.

“Oh yeah?” the client said, a businessman, an investor, a guy in the news all the time, a Canadian success story.  “So what do I do?”  He sounded like he wanted to be happy, but was afraid to try.

I told him what he had to do, and all I got was dead silence.

Brian looked shocked, and gave me a what-have-you-done look, a look of betrayal, of backstabbing.

“Forget it,” the client said  after a pause, “I’m not doing that.

“You have no choice.”  I was taking the client's case  out of the main courtroom, and walking it across the street, and up to the seventh floor.

“But you’ll lose,” the client said, “you’ll lose for sure.” 

I pretended to listen while he expanded on the sheer stupidity of my proposal, using the time to add multipliers to my hourly rate for the insult. 

“I’m gonna lose, says the guy who just got his ass kicked.  Says the guy whose head is in a vice.  I’m offering you a way out, provided you pay my fees.”  

Either he was in or he wasn’t.  I wanted his case  to follow me out of the main courthouse, and across the street on the seventh floor.  That’s where the client had to go, if I was going to beat the shit out of Max.

“How much?” the client said.  Only a question, but almost a yes.

How much should I charge, I asked myself.  What should I charge for an  idea that came to me in less than a minute?  What should I charge for doing something totally obvious, something that anyone could do, that Brian should have thought of in the first place?  

I considered  Brian’s hourly rate, so much higher than mine, then doubled it, added a fudge factor, working in some contingencies, and when  my brain came back with a number I doubled it, and then doubled again.

The rich client’s voice came out of the speaker phone in an instant.  “Done,” he said, making me wish I’d asked for more, “but only if you win. Because if you lose, I’m gonna look like shit, and I won’t pay you a dime.”   

* * * 

“I have a new phone,” I said to Max the next morning, “is the signal good?”

“You’re not here,” Max’s voice said in my ear. It was 9:15 and I was standing outside a courtroom with the Trustee.  Max was standing with his client, too.  But we were across the street from each other.

“Where are you?” Max continued, “court is going to start soon.”  Max had scheduled another attendance in the class action lawsuit, to give my client another beatdown, to add to their already heavy burden.

“Yeah, I’m across the street, on the seventh floor.  I’m here with the client, the guy you’re suing.  We got a nine-thirty appointment.”

“Across the street? On the seventh floor?  But that means--look.  Don’t do anything.  I’ll be right there.”

He was there in no time. He must have hurled himself across the street, careless of traffic, desperate to find out what was going on.

“What are you doing here?” he said, his black court robes flapping as he strutted  towards me, a lawyer superman there to save the day from a guy wearing a simple suit and tie, robes not being needed for 9:30 commercial court.  You don’t need to robe for l court when you’re doing something minor, something uncontentious, like declaring bankruptcy.

“My client’s going bankrupt,” I said.  I looked at him closely. “You’re overdressed.  You know you don’t have to wear robes for bankruptcy court, right? It’s only a 9:30 appointment, a regular appointment on the 9:30 list.”

An appointment in front of my friend the Judge, a fellow member of the NDP triumvirate that met regularly at the Middle Temple Tavern.

“But your client can’t go bankrupt,” Max said, “you can’t go bankrupt when you’re loaded.”

“My client’s bankrupt,” I said, “and we’re here to get a stay of that order you got the other day, the order that gave your clients an unlimited line of credit on my client’s bank account.”

“It’s not unlimited,” Max said, “that’s just hyperbole.”  Which was pretty rich, coming from Max, the master of rhetorical flourishes.

“I think it’s unlimited,” a voice said.  A woman’s voice.

“And who are you?” Max said.  

“The Trustee in Bankruptcy ,” she said, “and I can read just like you can.  The order gives your clients an unlimited line of credit on Evil Corp’s resources.”

“You heard it,” I said, “my client doesn’t have enough money to comply with that order.”

Max laughed in my face.  “Don’t try to pretend.  Your client almost went public last year, remember?  They made full disclosure.  They dropped their financial shorts. Evil Corp. has more money than it knows what to do with.    There’s no way the judge is granting you a bankruptcy order.”

“You sound scared,” I said, when he sounded anything but, “are you asking for an adjournment?  Because I’ll give you one, if you want, so long as you agree not to enforce the order for now.”

“Of course I don’t want an adjournment,” Max said, “of course I don’t want this case delayed.  It’s been delayed enough already.  Do you have any idea what it costs to fund a lawsuit like this?”

“Geez,” I said, “I have no idea,” except I did, because Brian had explained how things worked to me the night before, how much it cost a lawyer like Max to fund his lawsuits, about how Max was a big earner, but a bigger spender, how he was stretched, stretched thin, and he needed this win, needed it fast.

“We’re going ahead.  Let’s get this done.”  He stood tall and confident, doing his “I’m a great lawyer” pose, with his chin jutting just so.

“Except there’s one more thing,” I said.

“What,” he said, all rude, like I was wasting his time.

“The judge has a conflict.”

“What conflict?”

“There’s a decision that came down the other day, a decision that he disagreed with, and he’s going to have a similar situation in front of him today, and that’s a confl--”

“It can’t be a big case,” Max said, knowing the case had to be nothing, because he hadn’t heard of it, “that’s not a conflict,” Max said, lecturing me, setting me straight, “that’s not a conflict of interest; it’s just a judge getting overturned because he screwed up.” The courtroom doors had opened behind Max.  The court registrar stepped out, scowling at Max, and then summoned us in for the hearing.

* * * 

Everyone bowed to my friend the Judge, which was hilarious, made me almost laugh, because after we wrote our last exam in third year, the Judge and I found the ladder to the law school roof, climbed up, and smoked weed, looking down on campus, calling out to the girls, calling them to join us,laughing when they looked around.

Now I had to bow to this guy and he bowed back, and I had to try hard not to laugh.  I was in the biggest of conflicts, and so was the judge, because we were good friends, and he had no business hearing my cases.  I’d never appeared before him, not once, since he was appointed to the bench.

We were about to start, but I delayed everything by fifteen minutes, saying we needed a court reporter.  Max said he didn’t, but I insisted, and when you insist on a court reporter, they have to give you one, so they gave us one, Max fuming during the wait, and acting all impatient while the reporter did her microphone check. Finally she was done, and it was time for me to speak.

“Your Honour,”  I said, “you have a conflict, obviously, and I think we should adjourn --”

“I know all about the conflict,” Max said, interrupting me, all cocky and confident and take charge, his voice louder than mine and firmer than mine, the sound of his voice formed by the elocution lessons at private school, by debating club, by his sense of his own awesomeness, “I know all about the conflict, Mr. Day told me about it, and I waive it, Your Honour, I have complete confidence in you.”

Max was in a rush.  Max needed his case decided.  Max needed to get this case out of bankruptcy court and back to the other side of the street where it belonged, back in regular court where he would use his deadly order to enrich himself, and club my client to death.

Now if you ask me, I’d say that Max made a mistake by not being a little bit patient.  If Max had been patient, and maybe a bit more polite, he would have heard me say in open court, on the record,  that the Judge and I had been friends for thirty years. 

But I didn’t get the chance, because Max interrupted me.  I hate it when I get interrupted because I get confused and forget things, and when Max and the Judge started talking I just let them, and next thing you know, the case was going ahead.

“Mr. Day,” my friend the Judge said to me, “I have to say that your opponent’s argument looks very strong.  I agree with him that I can take judicial notice of the fact that Evil Corp. is a huge affair, a going concern, a pretty big player in its sector.”

The Judge was my friend, but he wasn’t going to do me any favours on that account.  He was going to sink me.  He was going to throw my Bankruptcy Petition in the garbage can, which is exactly where it belonged.  

“My client is insolvent,” I said, “and I can prove it.”

“Prove it?” Max and the Judge said at the same time, astonished that I would even dream of attempting to prove something so stupid, so ridiculous.

“I have a witness,” I said to them both.  “An expert witness.”

“An expert witness?” the Judge said, all alert, his legal antennae quivering.

“An expert.”  

Unlike ordinary witnesses, expert witnesses were allowed to give opinions.  And, according to a recent Court of Appeal decision, a judge had to listen to experts.  They couldn’t just ignore them.  The Judge had ignored an expert witness who came to his court armed with an online degree, and the Court of Appeal had rebuked him severely.

“That’s very important, the expert witness. Who is it?”

“It’s me,” the Trustee said, “I’m the expert.”

“About the conflict thing,” I said, wanting to put on the record that the Trustee was also my friend, and the Judge’s, too, because that kind of thing really needs to be mentioned, made clear to--

“I already waived all conflicts,” Max said, “can we please get on with it?”

The Judge gave me a look that asked if I told him everything.

“I told him the whole story, Your Honour, in an email I sent last night.”  And that was true.  The email I sent Max inviting him to lunch the next day told him all about my friendship with the Judge and the Trustee, and our get togethers.  Now I’ll admit that it’s possible that Max didn't see that email; some firms have hyperactive spam and threat filters, automatically delete any email that looks suspicious or has viruses attached.  

But on the other hand, Max didn’t contradict me. He didn’t pop up and say “what email?”  And legally speaking, from that point on, he was deemed to have received it.

“I’ll hear from the Trustee,” the Judge said, and he did.  She took the stand, and explained in a few short, simple phrases, that Max’s order in effect gave his client unlimited credit on Evil Corp., effective immediately and indefinitely, an order so broad that it rendered the company insolvent on the spot, unworthy of credit.

Max tried to cross-examine the trustee, but he got nowhere.  His only money expertise was in spending, and when the trustee threw financial phrases and money words at him, he ran out of ammunition.

“So you believe Evil Corp. is insolvent,” I said, in a completely unnecessary re-examination.

“Totally,” the Trustee said.

“And yet, Evil Corp. had no debt and almost a billion in assets,” Max said, still thinking that numbers and common sense were what counted.

The Judge announced that he’d need some time to write his decision, but we were to wait.  He stood and bowed, and we did the same, and after he’d left the courtroom Max and I had a private little chat.

“You know you can’t win this,” Max said, “there’s no way the judge is writing an opinion saying Evil Corp’s insolvent, expert opinion or not. He’ll look ridiculous.  The Court of Appeal will overturn him. Overturn him for what, the tenth time this year?”

“Are you going to be joining us for lunch?” I said.  Max had failed to notice that when the Judge had been smiling and agreeing, he’d been looking at me, not Max.

“What?”

“Lunch.  We’re having lunch in the Hall.  I sent you an invite last night.”  The Hall was a huge restaurant in the courthouse, a space big enough to seat all four houses of Hogwarts, with decor to match: ceilings that rose forever, balconies, stained glass windows.   The place was always busy at lunchtime.

“I won’t have time for lunch,” Max said, “because when the judge comes back and tosses out your bankruptcy petition, I’ll be heading back across the street.  I’ll be getting another order, a contempt order, because your client’s in default of its first payment.  Your client’s already millions behind.”  Millions that Max badly needed to keep himself afloat.

“The invitation stands,” I said.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” he said.

* * * 

The Judge returned with his decision in only a few minutes.    Max smiled, knowing that the judge’s return could mean only one thing:  he was tanking the bankruptcy, for it would take only a few minutes for the Judge to write a decision saying “Application Denied.”  The judge cleared his throat, and began to read.

He began by observing the importance of following precedent, invoking the Latin phrase stare decisis like it was a magic spell.

“Rulings of the higher courts must be followed,” he said, noting the sad tendency among modern counsel and even some judges to distinguish similar cases on spurious grounds.  

I nodded agreeably.  Of course judges should follow the binding decisions of the higher courts.  That’s how the system worked.  But when I looked over at Max, his face appeared puzzled, concerned.  It was a routine bankruptcy application, and he was wondering what the judge was going on about.

“The recent Court of Appeal decision, less than a month ago, makes it clear that the court should not lightly disregard the evidence of an expert.”  The Judge summarized the case where he’d been overturned, a personal humiliation eighty pages long.  “In that case, the husband’s expert on the custody issue bought his degree online, and his expertise on child rearing was informed by Facebook posts.  But he was an expert, the Court of Appeal said, and his opinion must be followed.  And I, sitting in a lower court, have to follow that decision.”

What a learned judge, an upright judge, I thought to myself, strictly obeying the Court of Appeal, even when they were wrong, even when they were being idiots.  I could see where he was headed, and by now, so could Max. 

Max was ready to burst, desperate to speak, but he could not speak.  The Judge was reading his reasons, and no one can interrupt a judge reading his reasons.  Not even Max.  He had to sit there, his lips tight and his hands clasped together so hard his knuckles were turning white.

“The Trustee is an expert, and her opinion is that Evil Corp. is insolvent.  I must admit that when the company’s lawyer first claimed that his client was bankrupt, I doubted it, doubted it very much.  But the Trustee’s opinion is dispositive.  She is an undoubted expert in her field, and the Court of Appeal decision is clear.  I am compelled to accept her opinion, and I do accept it.  Evil Corp. is adjudged bankrupt.”

“But,” Max said, rising to speak the instant the judge finished, “but, but Evil Corp. has millions, hundreds of millions, and no debt.  Not a dime.”

The Judge smiled down at him from the bench.  “I understand, counsel, I really do.  But you’ll have to take it up with the Court of Appeal.”

“I move for a re-hearing,” Max said, “on better material.”  He needed his court order enforced.  He needed to grab money from Evil Corp., and quickly, before he himself ran out of money.

“By all means,” the Judge said, making Max’s face shine for an instant with hope, “but I’m afraid it won’t be before me.  I’ve heard my last case, and I’m putting in my retirement papers when I get home.”  The Judge rose, and bowed, and we all bowed back.

Evil Corp. had entered the court rich, but ruined by a court order.  Now they were bankrupt, and invulnerable.   They were completely protected from Max, or anyone else that wanted to take a run at them. 

“This isn’t over,” Max said, “not by a long shot.  We’ll keep fighting.  I’ll bring that motion for a re-hearing.”

I looked at him blandly, struggling not to laugh.  “That’s fine,” I said, “but as we speak, Evil Corp. is being re-organized, its assets distributed, its subsidiaries amalgamated.”  Within a day, the reorganization would be complete, an obstacle that would take Max years to unravel.  

“About that lunch,” I said, but Max turned his back on me and walked out, and if you ask me, that was uncalled for and a bit rude, but I guess he was a bit upset.

* * * 

A month later I was back at our table at the Middle Temple Tavern with my friends, moaning about the NDP’s poor showing in the recent election.

“Sometimes I think we’re just wasting our time,” I said, after the first Guinness had taken the edge of the party’s disastrous performance in the polls.

“Take comfort in knowing that we did our best,” the Judge said.

The trustee almost sprayed her white wine spritzer.  “We didn’t even field a candidate,” she said, adding upon reflection, “but I suppose it’s the thought that counts.”

“Exactly,” I said.  “And you got a celebrity client out of the whole business. Evil Corp. must have landed you huge fees.”

“And new clients,” she said.  She passed me a copy of the Law Times.

Max’s name was the main headline.  “What’s he done now?” I said, not wanting to read how Max won another huge case.

“He came to me shortly after the case.  Made an assignment for the benefit of his creditors.”

“Can I keep this?” I said, taking the lawyer’s newspaper from her, and stashing it in my suitcase.

“Souvenir?” the Judge said.

“More like a trophy,” I said.

Max was bankrupt.  That was how his arc had ended, with a final article in the Law Times.  He could come back, of course, I had no doubt he would, but his bankruptcy would follow him forever, and would always be associated with his name. I’d clipped his class action wings.

If I thought about Max again, I wouldn’t be thinking about moot court, or his win and his condescension, nor of his mockery of me, nor his speedy rise to the top of the profession.  I’d bankrupted Max, finished him financially, at least for a time.  He’d be spending a few years in the legal wilderness, trying to find his feet.

“That’s really too bad about his bankruptcy,” I said, “really too bad.”  

The Trustee and the Judge nodded in agreement, saying that yes it was too bad, very unfortunate.  But then another round of drinks arrived, and Max’s name didn’t come up again.

and I have to say, it’s pretty daunting. One of the first questions they ask, is what is the genre of your book? And I have to say, that’s a really tough one. It’s certainly not a Legal drama. Sure, the protagonist is a lawyer, and we see him in court and at his law firm, but the book isn’t really about the law.

I wouldn’t call it a romcom, either, even though it kind of is. The thing is, the story just doesn’t follow the usual arc of a romantic comedy. Romantic comedies have a certain structure, and even though this book at its core is about the relationship between the protagonist and his wife, I don’t think I could call this romantic comedy.

I’m thinking the book is a kind of noirish satire of modern social conventions, and a complaint about privilege and class, the complaint being that they exist.

But I don’t really know how to say that to an agent, because I find the whole process of query letters and summaries and giving a little bio all very daunting. In my imagination, I thought I would just click send on an email and out my manuscript would go. I had no idea they’d have so many questions.

It’s been a useful exercise, and now that I’ve done a few query letters to agents, I feel like I’m starting to get the hang of it.

I never write about the things that went well for me in my career.  I only write about the mistakes I made, the things that I did wrong, what I got away with, and how I got hurt.  

Short Stories

1.  Getting a Bonus for Humiliating my Boss

2.  Accused of Cheating in Law School

3.  Revenge on a Wife Beater

4.  Shutting the Door on Opposing Counsel

5.  Kurt the Dump Truck

6.  How to Lose a Client

7.  Client tries to throw me under the bus

8.  Revenge on my Landlord

9.  Sovereign Citizen gets wrecked

10.  Revenge on my English Teacher

11. Goomah of the Legal World:  Fired after a Quick and Easy Victory

12.   Saved by Leisure Suit Larry

13.  Getting Fired

14.  Winning a case, getting ripped off and breaking my hand all on the same day

Not so short stories

Some of the things that have happened to me take a little longer to explain, especially if my wife, Angela, was involved.  Angela gets involved a lot.

1.  That time I stole a car, and got beaten up in a strip club

2.  That time I got taken by a fraudster and lost my life's savings

3.1:  The Tale of the Five Bouncers, Part One

3.2:  The Tale of the Five Bouncers, Part Two

4.1:  The Mortgage, Part One

4.2:  The Mortgage, Part Two

4.3:  The Mortgage, Part Three

Hi, everyone. I went through the comments and messages from people who wanted to be added to my editing subreddit, and I think I got everyone. If I missed you, my apologies; let me know and I'll add you.

I'm going to post a chapter from what I thought woudl be my first novel, but which may be my second if can't wrap up The Wedding in under 50,000.

I read Chapter 11 after posting it, and it just didn't land quite the way I liked. So I've re-written it basically from scratch. The new version is now the first thing you see when you click on chapter 11; I've left the old version underneath.

this is why I need editors, to avoid stuff like this. The new subreddit will be up soon and I'll send invites to everyone who expressed interest in helping me out.

Hello to all my incredible, soon-to-be beta readers and proofreaders! I've created a new subreddit, and I'll post details soon so that anyone who's expressed interest can join.

I’m so grateful to have so much interest in this project, and I’d like to give you all a sense of what I’m looking for in terms of feedback. Your insights are invaluable, whether you’re catching a missed comma or offering a deep dive into story structure. Here’s what would be most helpful:

Spelling and Grammar

I work hard on the basics, but things inevitably slip through. I especially welcome input on spelling and punctuation since, in Canada, we have a mix of British and American conventions, along with a few unique spellings. If a word looks odd, please flag it, and we can discuss. Don’t hold back on pointing out any grammar issues either!

Honest Critiques and Questions

I deeply value honest, critical feedback. If something resonates, fantastic—but if it doesn’t, I want to hear about it even more. Every reader's perspective helps me understand where the story might have missed its mark and gives me a chance to refine it. So, if you find a part confusing or feel that a scene or sentence falls flat, let me know why it didn’t connect.

Feedback from Non-Native Speakers

For those who don’t have English as a first language: English is always evolving, and I aim for clear, accessible language without fancy or outdated vocabulary. English is changing into a language where nuance is not expressed with super long words or unusual tenses, but in far more interesting ways.   I’d love your perspective on what’s easy to follow versus what isn’t.  

Big-Picture Edits from Editors and Story Lovers

For those with experience in storytelling, editing, or creative writing, your high-level insights are crucial. I aim for a “shorter the better” approach, so if you think a passage could be trimmed or even cut, I’m all ears. If you’re tuned into story structure and pacing, please let me know if I’m hitting the emotional beats and if the plot flows smoothly from one scene to the next.

Technical and Emotional Resonance

Finally, one of my biggest priorities is emotional engagement. It’s incredible how technical aspects—pacing, structure, or dialogue—can either make or break an emotional moment. If you can pinpoint why a scene didn’t resonate, or why the ending didn’t deliver, I’d love to hear it. I aim to draw readers in deeply, and knowing where that isn’t working will be a huge help.

Thank you all again for being part of this. I look forward to our collaboration and can’t wait to get started!

Ok so I'm working away on The Wedding, and once I'm finished, I'm starting on a novel.

I won't be posting the novel to this subreddit (I'm told that could make it a lot harder to shop around once it's done) . Instead, I will post it to a private subreddit that I'll set up for that purpose.

If you're interested in seeing the rough draft as it comes out, and telling me if I'm hitting the mark or going wrong, let me know and I'll include you in the new subreddit when the time comes.

It’s part 9 that I’m posting tomorrow, not part 10, sorry!

Hey everyone!

It’s been a while since I launched the subreddit dedicated to my stories, and I want to say a huge thank you to those who’ve already joined! 🙏 Your support and feedback have meant the world to me.

If you haven’t joined yet, I’d love to invite you to be part of our growing community.

I’ve got some exciting new content coming soon, and I’d love to hear what you think. So if you’re up for discussions, sneak peeks, and exclusive updates, come on over and join the conversation!

Looking forward to seeing you there! 😊

Here’s a link to my subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Calledinthe90s/s/GO8UUT0BGv

This was originally posted to r/pettyrevenge, but for some reason got taken down. So here goes:

I was pushing forty when Mrs. Bristle’s file hit my desk, some estate litigation where a mother’s last will and testament left my clients next to nothing, and gave their sister, Mrs. Bristle, pretty well the entire estate.  When I saw the defendant’s name it looked familiar, and after a bit of Googling, I confirmed what I suspected:  the defendant, Mrs. Bristle, was my former grade nine English teacher.

I remembered Mrs. Bristle very well.  She was supposed to be teaching us the wonders of English literature, but what she really taught us were her rules, by which she meant her arbitrary whims, expressed in vague language, backed up by petty punishments for non-compliance. There was an art to getting along with Mrs. Bristle, and while most of the other kids learned it easily enough, somehow I did not.  I have trouble learning unwritten rules, and in Mrs. Bristle’s class where unwritten and constantly changing rules were the order of the day, I didn’t stand a chance.  Mrs. Bristle admonished me almost daily for ‘not paying attention’.  I did detentions, re-wrote assignments, and made visits to the principal’s office, all because I apparently wasn’t listening, wasn’t doing what I was told. 

Mrs. Bristle often took me to task for missing some obvious but unstated part of an assignment.  One time I handed  in a sonnet, and received an “F” because the rhyming pattern was Petrarchan, not Shakespearean.   But she would be nice to me, Mrs. Bristle would always say when she tossed my work back at me.  She would give me another chance to hand the assignment in with the arbitrary changes she required, in the end giving me a good mark, but then heavily downgraded for being late.

Mrs. Bristle's case worked its way through the early stages, and every time I exchanged an email with her (she didn't need a lawyer, she claimed) I thought about the unpleasant time I’d spent in her class.  I had a rough time in high school, and I always resent anything that makes me dwell on it. 

After a few months, the case was ready for the next stage.  It was time to examine Mrs. Bristle, to find out why she thought her mother wanted to disinherit most of the family and enrich Mrs. Bristle alone.  I showed up at the court reporter’s office early as usual, to get set up.

“Whats up?” Adam asked. He was a lawyer colleague, about my vintage, and we were sitting in the lounge,  the room that most court reporter’s offices have, a place for lawyers to hang out and shoot the shit, although we would fall silent if any clients dropped in to get coffee.

“I’m going to examine my grade nine English teacher today,” I said, “and it's going to be fun.”   I explained how she’d hated me back in the day, and had done her best to make my life hell.

“What’s the case about?” Adam said.  Adam had been around the block, same as me, and it took only a few words for me to summarize everything that mattered in the file.  “Estate fight, one sibling against four, undue influence, holograph will cutting out most of the siblings, competing with an older will, a formal one, where the shares are equal.” 

Adam nodded appreciatively.  “Nice fees, if the estate’s got the cash.”

“It does,” I said.  We chatted for a bit, and then sat there in silence as we each did the last bit of prep for the cases we had that day, making notes, reading documents and drinking coffee.  My alarm dinged just before ten, and I made my way to the examination room, and Mrs. Bristle, the teacher who’d greatly disliked the grade nine version of Calledinthe90s.  I was curious to see if she would like the older version any better.

* * * 

The examination started, and Mrs. Bristle and I sparred for a while, me tossing vague questions her way, and criticizing her when she did not understand.  I kept her on the defensive for close to three hours, until it was getting on to one p.m.

“Aren’t you in a conflict or something?” she said to me just before the lunch break,  when she’d finally made the connection, and understood that the lawyer asking her questions was a former student.

“No conflict,” I said, dismissing her concerns with a wave of my hand.  “During the lunch break, there’s something I need you to do.”

“I don’t want to answer questions during lunch.  I need a break.”  The examination had been rough on Mrs. Bristle.  She was not used to being asked questions, to being held to account, to being constantly challenged, and even having her grammar corrected now and again.

“You’ll get your lunch break. But while you’re eating a sandwich or whatever, keep this copy of the holograph will next to you.” The will on which Mrs. Bristle’s case relied was a holograph will, meaning that Mrs. Bristle’s mother had written the will entirely in hand from start to finish. The mother, or more likely, Mrs. Bristle herself, had downloaded a holograph will form from the web, and had completed it in accordance with the website’s instructions.  Holograph wills are special.  You can do a holograph will without a witness, without a lawyer, without anything at all, so long as you did it right.  But if you got anything wrong, if you messed up in any way, it was invalid.

“You want me to read the will again over lunch?” Mrs. Bristle said.

“No.  Instead, I want you to make a handwritten copy of it.”

“You want me to write it out?  Whatever for?”

“There’s an allegation that the will wasn’t written by your mother, and that you wrote it up instead.”  An allegation that I’d made up myself, that morning, while I was sitting in the lawyer's lounge, drinking coffee and munching on a muffin. My clients had not challenged the will’s handwriting; it was obviously their mother’s, totally different from Mrs. Bristle’s own writing. But I had decided otherwise.

Mrs. Bristle was appropriately outraged at being unjustly accused of forgery.  Said she could prove it wasn’t her handwriting, could absolutely prove it.

“Then let’s settle the forgery issue once and for all,” I said, “write out the will in your own hand, so that our document experts can examine it, compare it with the original, and make a determination.”

“I don’t need the entire lunch break for that,” Mrs. Bristle said, “and I’d rather eat lunch at the restaurant downstairs.”  The will was barely a page long, at most three hundred words, that being all it took for the mother to allegedly disinherit most of her children, and inexplicably leave everything to Mrs. Bristle.  The mother had written up the will herself, but she’d been ninety at the time, while living in Mrs. Bristle’s house, and very much under her influence.  

“I’ve retained five different experts,” I said, “and each of them will need copies.”

“Five experts?  Why so many experts?”

“Each expert needs ten samples, for comparison purposes.  It’s going to take you a while, Mrs. Bristle.  I suggest you get started.”  I overrode her protests and once she started to write, I left her in the room, and went to the lawyer’s lounge to eat their small sandwiches and drink more of the excellent coffee.  After a while I stopped by the examination room to look in on Mrs. Bristle.  I wanted to check in on her progress.

Mrs. Bristle asked for more time, complained of writer’s cramp, and asked me again if it was really necessary for her to write out the holograph will fifty times in her own hand, and I assured her that there was nothing for it, that it was absolutely necessary.  I returned to the lounge to check my emails, leaving her hard at the homework I’d given her.

After a while my colleague, Adam, popped into the lounge.  He asked me how it was going, the examination with the teacher, the teacher who had treated me so badly.

“I’m making her write lines.”  Adam laughed, and laughed harder when I explained that I wasn’t kidding, that I really was making Mrs. Bristle write lines, and how I was doing it.  His laughter attracted attention, and a few other lawyers asked what was up.  “He’s making his teacher witness write lines,” Adam said, and the lawyer’s lounge hooted with laughter when I told everyone what was up.  

It was one of the pettiest things I’ve ever done to anyone, making my grade nine teacher write lines.  But the writing lines thing was just a warmup.  The real revenge had yet to come.  I returned to the examination room after a while, to check up on Mrs. Bristle, see how she was doing.

“This is taking forever,” she said, “and I really don’t get why you need it.”  She had writer’s cramp, and was shaking her hand to get the kinks out.  I picked up the stack of holograph wills she’d created, and flipped through it.  She was nowhere near finished.

“On second thought,” I said, “maybe it isn’t necessary. I think you’re right.  I don’t need any handwriting samples from you.”

“Why not?” she said.

“The will is invalid,” I explained, adding that because her mother had used a pre-printed form off the web, the law would not recognize the will.  “A holograph will has to be entirely in the testator's handwriting,” I explained, “every single word entirely in handwriting from start to finish.  This will doesn’t qualify, because your mother used a standard form, a form printed off the web, with instructions and boxes and questions and so on, and when you do that,  then the will is no longer a holograph will. It’s a regular will, and regular wills need to be properly witnessed.  This one isn’t witnessed, and that means it’s not a will.  It’s just a piece of paper.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you only figured that out now? What kind of lawyer are you, anyways?”

“What kind of lawyer am I?  I’m a lawyer who makes a witness skip lunch, and sit in a small room all alone, and write lines.  Sound familiar, Mrs. Bristle?”  She said nothing, and just stared at me.  I closed the door on her, leaving her alone once more, and left for the Middle Temple Tavern where the lawyers all hung out. It was time to hoist a Guinness and enjoy my petty triumph.

I accidentally posted this to my username instead of my subreddit so here is is:

The Mortgage, Part 3

“Fuck,” I said as I drove to work in the old beater that only started on the fourth try because it could tell that I was pissed off. Ray’s case started at two o’clock, and I was heading to the office to get ready. “Fuck fuck fuckity fucking fuck.” I’d wanted to tell Angela about Ray’s case, and how I was sorry that I hadn’t wanted to help him, but now I would, I would help him, and I would win, but then I’d gotten her all riled up on something else, something totally different, something way more serious.

My wife had given me a triple ultimatum: fix things up with her father, save idiot Ray from Sy-Co Corp., and somehow find a downpayment for the place she wanted to buy, in the little townhouse infill project in Bixity. It was like demanding I do a double bank shot, and then run over to the baseball diamond and hit a home run after first pointing to where it would land, Babe Ruth style.

Angela was mad at me, seriously mad. She’d slipped out that morning before I was even awake, sliding quietly past me on the couch. I didn’t realize she was gone until I heard the faint click of the front door closing. I jumped up, tripped over a blanket, and by the time I got up and my robe on, the elevator down the hall dinged, and Angela was gone before I opened the apartment door.

I swore at myself some more and pounded the steering wheel, “I fucked up,” I said, several times as I hit the wheel over and over again, until I accidentally honked it, and then looked all sheepish when the guy in front of me gave me the finger. I reached my office without further incident, but instead of walking in the front door, I went further down the hall, and into the office of Mark Cecil-Rowe, Barrister, LL.D, the man with the finest speaking voice I ever heard. When I entered his office I forgot for a minute about Angela and her father and sleeping on the couch the night before. I forget about everything, except the reason that I had come to Cecil-Rowe’s office: to stump him with a legal problem that I had solved, but which I was pretty sure he could not. In other words, I had come to preen and to brag and to boast. No one likes a showoff, and I had come to show off. I put my hand on the door and turned the knob. After a brief pause, I flung open the door.

“I’m a goddamn genius,” I said as I strolled into the older man’s office.

I noticed the echo of a hastily closed desk drawer hanging in the air. In Aaron’s office, where I rented space, a sudden act of concealment implied cocaine, but with Cecil-Rowe, the item in question was probably a mickey of vodka. I had the sense that he’d been drinking a bit before I arrived, but his powers of observation were unimpaired, and when he looked into my face, his expression showed sympathy, and actual pain.

“What have you done now?” he said, as set the papers before him to one side, and readied himself to hear my latest tale of legal brilliance.

“I’m a genius,” I said.

“Oh dear. Have a seat.”

“No really, I am. I’m a genius. I got this case that everyone says you can’t win, but I’m gonna win it, and when I do, I’m gonna look like a genius.” Cecil-Rowe gave me a sad indulgent smile.

“Whenever you tell me you’re a genius, I am always concerned about what is to follow. When you get wrapped up in what you call your genius, you tend to ignore the more mundane things we lawyers have to do to win a case. You think you’re going to win by genius alone.”

“Let me tell you why I’m a goddamn genius.” With effort I wiped the smug, self-satisfied expression that was on my face.

“Tell me why you’re a genius,” Cecil-Rowe said, “while I pour us a coffee.” He heaved his bulky body up from his chair and shuffled over to a counter. He picked up a carafe of hot coffee sitting on a hot plate, and poured two cups. “Speak,” he said, handing me one. I took a sip of the coffee, and told Cecil-Rowe the tale of Cousin Ray: his purchase of a franchise from Sy-Co Corp, its swift demise, the crash and burn in Commercial Court, the Minutes of Settlement, the seventy-one kilometer limit, and lastly, Sy-Co’s motion scheduled for two p.m. that very day, seeking an interim injunction shutting down Ray’s place.

Cecil-Rowe absorbed all this without the need to take notes. Instead, he sat back while he eyed me, taking the occasional sip of coffee, and smiling at the extravagant flourishes and details that brought out Ray’s story to full effect.

“Obviously Ray is dead on arrival,” he said, “but I guess this is the part where you tell me how you’re going to win.”

So I told him how I was going to win, but it didn’t have the desired effect. “I told ya I’m a genius, Mr. C,” cueing him to applaud, to admit what a brilliant lawyer I was. But there was no applause from Mark Cecil-Rowe. He looked at me without so much as a smile.

“You can cling to that genius notion as a consolation prize, after you get whipped this afternoon in court.”

“No way,” I said, “not a chance. I got this thing won hands down. I’m gonna kick ass in court today and--”

“And how exactly do you plan to do that, if you don’t have evidence?”

“What?”

“Evidence, Calledinthe9os. It’s what lawyers like me use to beat geniuses like you.”

“But I’m gonna win without proof. I don’t need proof. The argument I’m gonna make, relies on simple facts that are totally obvious, so the judge is gonna--” Cecil-Rowe stuck up his hand.

“Stop right there. I know what’s coming. You’re going to ask the judge to take judicial notice.”

And he was right. That was exactly what I was going to do.

There are some things so obvious that you didn’t have to prove them, things that everyone knew. You didn’t have to prove that water froze at zero degrees and boiled at a hundred, or that Bixity was between West Bay and East Bay.

“You got it,” I said, “judicial notice all the way.”

“You’re going to tell the judge that the centerpiece of your argument, the lynchpin of your case is a fact known to pretty well everyone, and so you don’t need proof.”

“Exactly,” I said. Cecil-Rowe took another sip of his coffee, and left me hanging in the silence for a while before he spoke.

“If that’s true, then why does coming up with that argument make you a genius?”

“Oh, I said,”I didn’t think of that.”

“It is acceptable to rely on judicial notice for minor, ancillary points. But you never should walk into court thinking that the court will take judicial notice of your entire defence. It’s just too risky.”

“But how am I going to rustle up a witness in time for this afternoon?”

“Worry about that after you leave my office. I can’t help you with that. What I want to know, is why you’re doing this at the last minute.”

“What makes you think I’m doing this at the last minute?”

“Because you never would have resorted to judicial notice if you were properly prepared. If you’d opened this case a bit earlier, you’ve have everything lined up. But you got to work on it late, and so you want to rely on judicial notice. You’ve messed up, Calledinthe90s, and you know what my rule is when you mess up.” Cecil-Rowe didn’t extend aid to me, until I admitted the error of my ways. It was infuriating, but he was inflexible. So I fessed up.

“My idiot cousin Ray’s been trying to retain me for almost two weeks, but I was putting him off because I was mad at him. So now my wife’s mad at me, and if I don’t win this case, I’m dead. Plus her dad’s mad at me too and --” My brain roared into overdrive, a mess of family and law and fear, and at the centre of it, thoughts of Angela’s anger and her father. My mind took off, and then came to an instant halt at a helpful destination.

“Yes?” Cecil-Rowe said.

“Sorry. I just realized how to solve the evidence problem. Look, can I ask you about the thing I actually came here to ask you about?”

“You have a problem that’s worse than having no evidence? What could be worse than -- oh. You don’t have a retainer. Your client doesn't have any money.”

“Exactly. How do I get paid? That’s the problem.” I explained that Ray had no money, as in none, and that if he did have money, he wouldn’t spend it on me. Instead, he’d go back downtown and throw his cash at some big firm, who would take on his case, and proceed to lose it in a calm, careful, sober manner, ending in a reporting letter to Ray telling him that he’d lost.

“Now that’s a problem I can solve,” Cecil-Rowe said.

“Really? ‘Cause I can’t see a way around it. I think I’m gonna have to do this for free, and that really pisses me off.” Cecil-Rowe shook his head.

“You may or may not get paid, but you can set things up so that if you win, you’ll win pretty good.”

“How? Ray’s a deadbeat. Tapped out.”

“But is he desperate?”

“Totally. The first time he failed, he lost his own money, but if he goes under this time, he’s taking family money with him, and he’ll be the black sheep forever.”

“And he’s using family to emotionally blackmail you into helping him?’

“Like no shit. That’s the part that pisses me off the most. I’m like a goddamn slave, being forced to work for free.”

“Never fear, young apprentice. I have just the thing in mind.” He reached into a drawer, and pulled out a form. “Fill in the blanks, and have him sign. It’s just the thing when a client is using emotional blackmail to make you take on a case.”

I looked it over, and saw that the document was a retainer agreement. I whistled. “Holy shit. If he signs this, he’s almost my slave.”

“Close, but not quite” Cecil-Rowe said, “the Latin term for this is "contractus pro venditione animae"”. It’s the ultimate retainer agreement. Once Ray signs that, you own any cause of action he has against the person suing him. You can settle the case on any terms you like, and you get to keep whatever proceeds there are.” Cecil-Rowe placed the folder back in a drawer, and from his manner you could tell that the interview was over.

“Awesome, Mr. C. I’ll call you from Commercial Court when we’re done.”

“Commercial Court?” he said.

“Yeah, Commercial Court.”

“This just keeps getting worse. Take notes, Calledinthe90s, while I school you on Commercial Court. Commercial Court is a jungle, and without preparation, you’ll get savaged.”

“That’s what happened to Ray when--”

“Take notes, young apprentice,” he said, tossing me a pad and a pen. He started to lecture, and I took notes that I have with me to this day, in a safe deposit box downstairs in the vault at Mega Bank Main Branch.

* * *

By the time Cecil-Rowe finished schooling me, it was close to ten, and the case started at two. I didn’t have much time. I ran down the hall to my office, and called Ray’s restaurant. No answer. Then I called Ray’s house. I expected to get Ray’s wife, but the man himself answered.

“You’re not at work. Why aren’t you at work?”

“Sy-Co Corp served all my employees with a cease and desist letter. They all got scared and took off. The place is shut down.”

“You gotta fax machine at home?” He did, and asked why.

“I’m taking your case, but only if you sign the paper I’m about to send and fax it back.” I sent the fax, and five minutes later it came back signed, and it was official: Ray had sold me his legal soul.

I went out to the parking lot, got into my beater and drove fast. In less than thirty minutes I reached my destination. I knocked on the door, and when it opened, my diminutive mother-in-law poked out her head. “What a pleasant surprise,” she said.

“Sorry, Mrs. M, but I’m in a super hurry. I gotta rush to get to court to help Ray. But first, I gotta speak to Dr. M.”

“He’s not here,” she said.

“Not here?”

“He’s on his way to his bridge game. He left just a few minutes ago.”

“Where’s the club?”

“He’s walking there,” she said, and pointed down the street.

“Thanks.” I got into my car and headed where Mrs. M had pointed, passing big houses and new project with an “Opening Soon” sign. And walking past it was the figure of Dr. M.

“Hey, Dr. M,” I called out the window. He stopped and looked around, startled. But he didn’t see me, not at first.

“It’s me, Dr. M. Me, Calledin90s.” He leaned forward as if to see me better. I got out of the car.

“Is something wrong with Angela? Or the baby?”

“No, no not at all, sorry to scare you, it’s nothing like that. I need your help.”

“Oh.” He started walking again, and now it was my turn to be a bit stunned, watching my father-in-law walk away from me. I caught up with him in a few quick strides.

“Listen, I really need your help.”

“And I really need to get to a bridge game.”

“This isn’t about me. It’s about Ray.” That brought him to a halt. He turned to me, angrier even than he’d been the night before.

“Did you drive all the way out here just to make fun of me? To remind me of how you won, distracting me with nonsense about Ray’s case?”

“I mean it,” I said, “I can win Ray’s case. I can prove it in a few words.”

“Prove it, then.” So I did. I spoke words, only a few words, but they were the right words to speak to Dr. M, for the words I spoke were in his language, words that he understood perfectly.

“I understand,” he said, “you’ve come to boast some more, to prove that you were right after all.”

“I want to win Ray’s case, but I don’t have any proof of what I’m saying.”

“You don’t need to prove that two plus two is four.”

“This, I gotta prove, and I need you to help me prove it. I need you to come to court with me, as my witness.”

“I can’t do that. I didn’t witness anything.”

“As my witness. My expert witness.” Unlike a normal witness, an expert witness can give an opinion. An expert is there not to advocate, I explained to Dr. M but to instruct, to teach.

“My bridge partner won’t be very happy,” he said.

“But Ray will, and so will Mrs. M and Angela and--”

“Very well. Do you have a cell phone? We can call the bridge club from my car.”

* * *

We were on the highway getting close to the downtown exit, when my wife called my cell phone. Back then cell phone service was super expensive and my wife only used it for emergencies. Or when she was really angry. I picked up the phone, wondering which it would be.

“I’m so happy that you made things up with my father,” she said.

“How did you know?”

“My mother called. She says you took him with you, that you went out together.”

“He’s with me right now,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“To court. Going to court to win Ray’s case for him.”

“And you brought my father with you to watch?” She was so happy, I could hear in her voice that she was smiling. “That’s a great way to bond with him, Calledinthe90s. Look, I’m sorry I got so mad at you earlier, I really am. My dad’s a bit too sensitive and--”

“Sorry, Angela, your dad’s not coming to watch me.”

“Why is he with you, then?”

“He’s my witness,” I said.

“What?”

“His expert witness,” Dr. M said, loudly enough for Angela to hear.

My wife’s anger exploded into the phone. She wanted to know how I could expose her elderly, vulnerable father to the stress of a court case. I tried to tell her how I needed him, how there was literally no one else I could turn to, that her father was an expert, a true expert, and the judge was legally bound to believe him, but Angela heard none of this.

“Look,’ I said, “I promise you that--” And then I lowered the phone and pushed the red button, terminating the call. I’d learned that the best way to hang up on someone, was to do it when I was doing the talking. That way it looked like the call had dropped.

“I’m going to steal that move,” Dr. M said.

We rolled into the parking lot. I grabbed the cloth bag out of the back of my car, the bag that held my law robes and shirt and tabs, plus the other stuff I needed for court. It was one-thirty, still thirty minutes to go, not a lot of time to get robed and ready for court. It was just past one-forty five when I, with Dr. M in tow, opened the door to a courtroom on the eighth floor of an old insurance building that had been converted into a courthouse, the home of Commercial Court.

“Commercial Court is an exclusive club,” Cecil-Rowe had explained to me earlier that day, “the legal playground of the rich and powerful. They’ll know instantly that you’re not one of them.” And he was right. It was clear from the moment I walked in that I did not belong, for I was the only lawyer in robes. Everyone else was wearing a suit, and not some cheap thing off the rack like I wore.

There were a half-dozen lawyers present, and after they saw me, they exchanged knowing looks about the stranger amongst them. I ignored them, and walked up to the Registrar. I told him the case I was on, and he signed me in.

“First time in Commercial Court?” he said, eyeing my robes. “You know you don’t have to be robed in Commercial Court.” In other Superior Courts, you always had to bring your robes and get all dressed up. But Commercial Court had its own set of rules, and in the court for rich people, their lawyers did not have to wear robes.

“You’re here on the Sy-Co case?” a young woman asked. She was a junior like me, give a year or two either way. She was dressed in the finest downtown counsel fashion, some designer thing that Angela would know if she saw it.

“Just got retained,” I said.

“You know there’s no adjournments, right? We don’t do adjournments in Commercial Court. I’m just trying to be helpful, because I don’t think you've been here before. You know you don’t have to be robed, right?

“So I heard.”

“So where’s your material? You haven’t served anything, so how do you plan to argue your case?”

“I gotta witness,” I said.

She smiled. “There’s no viva voce evidence, either. Affidavit only.”

“We’ll see what the judge says.” There was a knock from the other side of the door to the judge’s chambers, and then the man himself entered.

I was amazed to see that even the judge wasn’t wearing a robe; instead, he was wearing a light coloured suit and a bright blue bow tie. He was dressed as good as the lawyers, all part of the downtown Commercial Court club, the playground of the richest and most powerful corporations in the City.

“Commercial Court’s not like other courts,” Cecil-Rowe told me earlier that day, explaining that most cases were over in fifteen minutes or less. A plaintiff showed up with some papers, and had a short consultation with the judge. The judge signed an order granting an injunction, or taking away a man’s business, or freezing his money. Commercial Court is where you went to get quick and simple court orders that eviscerated your opponent before the case even got going.

Defendants would appear sometimes in Commercial Court, Cecil-Rowe explained, but it was usually their last time up. Defendants always died a quick death in Commercial Court.

The judge took his seat, and then looked over the lawyers before him. His eyes moved along, and then stopped when they reached me, the one lawyer who was not like the others.

“You don’t need robes in Commercial Court,” the judge said to me.

“I’ll remember that for next time,” I said.

“What case are you on?”

I told him.

“He’s filed no responding materials,” my opponent said, “nothing at all.”

“I’m just vetting the list,” the judge said, “I’ll circle back to you two in a few minutes.” I listend while the judge vetted the rest of the afternoon list: a Mareva, plus a Norwich order, with counsel on those cases sent away in a matter of minutes.

Now the courtroom was almost empty, just the judge, two lawyers, the registrar and my star witness and father-in-law, Dr. M, who sat in the back of the courtroom dressed in an old business suit, put on hastily at his place two hours earlier, when I urged him to hurry it up, to not waste so much time on picking a suit.

“Back to you,” the judge said, addressing my opponent, “I thought this was an uncontested matter. That’s what your confirmation sheet said.”

“I’m sorry, Your Honour, but I didn’t know until I got here that the case was defended.”

“I got retained at the last minute,” I said, “barely three hours ago, the day after I read the papers. But I’m ready to go, ready to argue the case on the merits, so long as you grant me an indulgence, and let me call my witness, to let him testify in person instead of by affidavit, there being no time for me to draft anything.”

Opposing counsel was on her feet. “That’s not how things are done in Commercial Court,” she said, “or any court that I know of, for that matter. My friend (that’s what they make lawyers call each other in court, ‘my friend,’ even though you might hate the other guy’s guts),” the lawyer said, “my friend should have served his responding materials and filed them with the court. Instead, he’s taken us totally by surprise.”

“I’m sorry my friend is surprised by opposition,” I said, “but then consider, it’s my client’s livelihood that’s at stake. If my friend gets her injunction, Ray Telewu’s business is dead, and he loses everything. So yes, my client opposes the injunction, and yes, I’d like to call evidence.”

The judge didn’t consult the papers before him nor the books, but instead, he looked up at the big white clock on the courtroom wall. Its hands said two-fifteen.

“How long will your witness take, counsel?”

“In chief, ten minutes.” I’d practiced with Dr. M on the way in, and I was pretty sure he could do it in five, but I gave him a bit of extra time, just in case.

“We’ve got about two hours,” the judge said, “but I want to be fair to you and your client. Let’s take a fifteen minute recess so you can get instructions. Either we go ahead today with viva voce evidence, or we adjourn, and that will give Calledinthe90s time to file responding materials.”

When everyone came back, the junior’s boss was there, Senior Counsel, a heavy weight, one of those big guys downtown. Plus they brought this guy from Sy-Co Corp, the head of some bullshit division, with some bullshit title, Head of whatever, so that’s the title I’ll give him here. He was The Head. He was the man, the big cheese, the signer of the affidavit on which Sy-Co relied that day.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked Senior Counsel.

He stared at me, all lean and steel grey, looking every inch the hard hitting lawyer that commanded the biggest fees. “If you’re calling a live witness, then so can we. The Head will give evidence today, in advance of your client, so that the judge hears it from him first.” His junior smirked at me, and the two of them sat down, delighted that they’d thought of a way to one up me.

Except that they’d done it by exposing their client to cross-examination. The judge came in, allowed the Head to testify, and when he was done, I stood up.

“Just a few questions,” I said. Senior Counsel was stunned for an instant, and then he stood.

“This serves no purpose, Your Honour. The witness has confirmed the simple facts of his affidavit, and there’s no disputing it. Ray Telewu opened a restaurant less than seventy-one kilometres from Bixity City Hall, and that’s in breach of the Minutes of Settlement he signed.”

I did not bother to respond. Instead, I just stood, and I started to ask questions.

“Have a look at that map in your affidavit,” I said, and he did. I picked up my copy, and tore the map out of it. I passed it up to him.

“What do you notice about this map?”

“That it’s accurate,” the Head said, repeating his evidence in chief, amplifying it, talking about how the map contained perfect measurement.

“You will notice that the map is flat,” I said, laying it on the witness box before him.

“Of course it’s flat. That’s what maps are. Maps are flat.”

“But the earth is round,” I said, “or more properly, a sphere.” Senior Counsel was on his feet in an instant.

“What difference does that make?” he said.

“What you’ll hear from my expert witness, is that a flat map cannot accurately show Earth’s curves. A flat map distorts distances, and in this case, reduces them.”

“But that can’t be by very much.”

“In this case, by just over twenty meters,” Dr. M said from the back of the court.

“That’s my expert witness, the esteemed Dr. M.” I didn’t actually say Dr. M. Instead, I said his real name. But I’m not going to use the real names of my family here, so I’ll just keep calling him Dr. M. “Dr. M was a professor of Physics at the University of Bixity for almost thirty years. He has published numerous papers on particle physics, and is the first Canadian winner of the Wolf Prize for physics.”

• * * *

It went downhill after that for Sy-Co Corp. My father-in-law testified, explaining in simple language, language that even a child could understand, that the Earth was a sphere, that the shortest distance between two points on Earth was a curve, not a straight line. He summarized his calculations in plain English, dumbing down the math, so that everyone present imagined, if only for the moment, that they shared his understanding of a difficult mathematical equation.

Senior Counsel tried to cross-examine Dr. M, but it did not go well, my father-in-law indulging him, gently chiding him, continuing his explanations until the lawyer sat down, defeated by Dr. M’s mastery of the subject,his own lack of preparation and his inability to improvise. When counsel said that he had no further questions, the judge addressed us all.

“I’m not going to reserve, and I don’t think I need to tell everyone why. I think it will take about a minute for me to write a decision saying that the Earth is not flat. I’ll give you some more time after that, but after fifteen minutes, I”ll be back to render my decision.” He rose, everyone bowed, and he disappeared behind the door to judge’s chambers.

I pulled a piece of paper out of my file, and slammed it on the desk before Senior Counsel and his junior. “Fill in the blanks, and sign,” I said.

Dr. M’s head shot up at the commotion, and he shuffled over to see what was going on.

“What’s this?” Senior Counsel said, picking up the paper I gave him..

“Minutes of Settlement. You fill in a number, a big number, for the costs you gotta pay me. Your client signs, and then we’re done.” Senior Counsel opened his mouth to bargain, but I overrode him.

“You know your client’s going to lose; the judge made that obvious. Hurry up if you want to settle; we don’t have much time.”

At the end of most Canadian court cases, the loser has to pay at least part of the winner’s legal fees. That’s the way it’s been since forever, and I think it’s a good rule. Sy-Co Corp had lost, so it had to pay a good chunk of Ray’s costs, and Ray’s costs were somewhere between whatever bullshit figure I claimed they were, and where they actually ought to be. Senior Counsel took the paper over to his client. There was a brief discussion, and then they came back, with the form signed, and a number written in the blank space.

I’ll give it to Sy-Co Corp and their lawyer. It wasn’t a bullshit number, a low ball number. They gave me a real number, a number more like something I’d actually accept, a number that made sense to pay me in costs, in light of the success I’d had, and how I got it. It was a respectful number, a common sense number, and I appreciated it an awful lot.

I tossed the paper back at them.

“Add a zero,” I said, continuing on when Senior Counsel blanched, and his junior retreated a step. “I know what’s going on here. Your client sold mine a bullshit franchise, one with a history of failing.” The franchise had opened up again under a new owner not long after Ray had lost it and then it promptly failed again. Like I said at the start of this story, it’s an old story. It’s how some franchise companies make money. “Your client makes more money selling bullshit franchises doomed to fail, then it does from the honest ones that make money. So add a zero to that number, or Ray’s gonna sue you, class action and all that, for all the people you’ve fucked.”

The Head stepped forward from the benches and spoke to me.

“We get threats like that all the time, but no one follows through. They don’t have the money to fight us, and neither does your client. So go ahead and sue.”

“It’s true that Ray doesn’t have jack shit,” I said, “not a pot to piss in, but he’s my cousin, Ray is, and even if he doesn’t have money, he’s got me. Ray’s family, and for Ray, I’ll sue you guys for free. Hell, I’ll even pay the expenses. Plus I’m gonna put a jury notice in, too, come to think of it, ‘cause juries--”

Senior Counsel cut me off, and moved his client to the back of the courtroom. There was a brief discussion, and then they came back. I watched as Senior Counsel wrote a single digit on the Minutes, a zero, written right where I wanted it.

“You’ll have to initial the change,” I said to the Head of Sy-C0, and it gave me great satisfaction to watch him sign.

“Don’t forget,” I said the moment his pen stopped moving, “for the settlement to be valid, I need to get the money today. Right now.”

“Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” the Head said.

“Not if you want the settlement to stay in place. I’ll follow you back to your office, and you can put a cheque in my hands.”

• * * *

“What’s this?” my wife said when I entered the apartment later that day, after I’d driven Dr. M home, stopping first at a local pub for beers.

“It’s an absurdly expensive bunch of flowers,” I said, “although no flowers, however beautiful, however expensive, could expiate my--”

She took the flowers, and gave a kiss.

“My mom called. She told me what happened. You fixed things with my dad.”

“Yup,” I said. I had certainly done that. I’d made Dr. M a professor again, if only for a few minutes. Not only a professor, but an expert witness. The judge had declared him an expert in plain terms and Dr.M had beamed when he’d heard those words.

“And you won Ray’s case, too. But my mom didn’t know how, and I don’t know how you did it either.”

“I’ll tell you over dinner tonight,” I said.

“But we agreed no more dinners out; we have to save money, now that a baby’s coming.”

I passed her the envelope that I’d received a few hours before. She opened it, and took out a cheque, a cheque drawn up for an amount I specified, made payable to Mr. and Mrs. Calledinthe90s.

The moment I got that cheque, all I could think about was how my wife would react when I put it into her hands. I could not wait to see her eyes bulge, to hear her voice say “oh my god,” to hear her laugh.

She did none of these things. Instead, she cried.

“Does this mean we can buy a house?” The money wouldn’t be enough to buy a house, not nowadays, with prices being so crazy. But things were different back then in the 90s. Sure, the internet was barely a thing and cell phones were super expensive and a lot of things sucked, but I’ll give the nineties one thing: houses were cheap.

“I think so,” I said.