Everybody Rise (45 page)

“She's not. She says she's sick. I'm sorry.”

“What's that?” Rudy said.

“She says she's sick. My mother. She's not coming. She says she's sorry. I'm sorry.”

“She's sick.” Rudy chomped on his gum so that his lips smacked against one another with each jaw movement. “She's sick. Okay, so, what, she's bent over the toilet throwing up?”

Evelyn sat looking at the seat in front of her.

Rudy was working his gum into a saliva-filled lather. “She understands the concept here, right? You show up as an upstanding member of the community, your responsible wife and your pretty daughter at your side, judge is gonna look at you with a little more lenience than if your wife cares enough about you to go ahead and get sick the morning you're being sentenced for obstruction of justice.”

Her father flipped down the visor mirror so he could see his daughter. “Evelyn, why don't you see if you can get her down here? Just go up to the room and see—”

Rudy chawed. “Yeah, hon, why don't you go up there and tell that mother of yours she'd better get down here, oh, five minutes ago? This car is going to leave and she had best be in it.”

Evelyn turned to look at Rudy, spittle clinging to his lips, and then to her father. She took a breath. “Driver, you know where we're going, don't you?” The man looked in the rearview mirror and grunted. “Great. We'd better get going. Dad, are you ready? Rudy, if you're going in this car, I suggest you get in.”

“Listen, sweetheart—” Rudy said.

“Evelyn. That's my name. Not ‘sweetheart.' I'm not going back up there, all right? Don't you think I had this conversation with her already? If you want to go up there and slam the door and plead and cry and make a scene in the Friendship Inn hallway, go ahead. But I won't do it, and I think we'd better go. It's better to have his daughter there with him than just you. Right? Rudy?”

“Fuck!” Rudy shouted to the universe, then, a minute later, opened the back door and plopped down next to Evelyn.

The courthouse's exterior, to its credit, promised nothing. It looked more like a prison than anything, square, drab, from an era of Soviet-inspired cinder-block architecture. Rudy led Evelyn and Dale through the metal detectors and to a courtroom where the benches were already populated, some of the people, obviously reporters, holding notepads. The hearing started right on time, with the prosecutor and Rudy arguing over the sentencing-guideline calculations, then about $9 million in restitution, which was a whole lot more than Evelyn had thought her father would owe. Then the judge asked if Dale had anything to say.

He did. The back of Dale's neck was stretched long, his head seeming heavy. Then Dale stood up a little straighter. “Judge Nakamura, my respected colleagues in the legal profession, I just wanted to tell you all that I have thought seriously about what I did, and really faced some of my demons here, and I take full responsibility for it. I understand that it was wrong in the eyes of the law, however right I may have thought it was at the time, and however much I thought it helped my clients. I was always working for my clients, and I always believed I was doing right by them. Nevertheless, when the law tells you you're wrong, you'd better listen.”

He sat, and the judge looked up at the room. The sentencing guidelines in this case were fifteen to twenty-one months, the judge said, and those guidelines were suggested but not mandatory. He had taken into account all of the factors, he said, including Dale Beegan's strong community support, his family, and his long work record that suggested this was an aberrance in behavior.

Evelyn saw the back of her father's head nodding. That was good; he always said he could read a judge better than anyone. Please, she thought, trying to send a message to the judge. Please. Probation with no prison time. Please.

The judge coughed, almost bronchial. However, given the state of Delaware and the current administration's stance on what was and was not proper conduct among lawyers, and the egregious nature of the scheme outlined by prosecutors, the judge said, it was important to send a message that the blind pursuit of money cannot be tolerated. Dale Beegan was hereby sentenced to twenty-nine months.

The courtroom blurred around Evelyn's father, who twisted his head to look at her. It was a look she'd seen only once in her life, when a blind man had been crossing the street and a semitruck driver laid on the horn and the man turned, terrified, his hands up, shaking, thinking these were the final moments of his life and he couldn't even see what was coming.

People were getting up now, the hearing over. Twenty-nine months? Almost double the suggested minimum sentence? Sending a message about the blind pursuit of money? Her father had messed up, but why were the consequences so severe for him? Companies were offering bribes to expand faster internationally, investors were scamming their clients, manufacturers were skirting environmental regulations, all to make ever more money, yet no one from those groups was in court. No one from there was going to prison.

Her father started to shuffle forward, and Evelyn thought of the boy with the flattop haircut who just wanted to show all those rich kids that they didn't run the world.

Rudy was opening the gate into the spectators' section to lead her father out, and Evelyn stumbled to her feet. “I'll handle this,” she said.

“There's press outside. You don't know how to handle it,” Rudy said.

“I do know how to handle it,” Evelyn said. She pulled her father to the side; he was staring at the ground. She waited until the crowds had dispersed, then took the elevator down with him. Outside, she could see a few photographers gathered.

“I don't know…,” Dale began, but he was too stunned to finish.

Evelyn took his elbow. “We'll just head straight to the car, okay, Dad? You don't have to say anything. Just look straight ahead. I know photographers. Just follow my lead. We'll get through this.”

She pushed open the courthouse door, passed the photographers clicking and running after them, and kept her eyes locked straight ahead as she escorted him to the car. As she opened the door for her father, he looked at her and said, his eyes still wide and frightened, “Thank you.”

 

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Self-Surrender

Dale's self-surrender date was December 19, and despite Rudy's pleas to push it back after the holidays, the Bureau of Prisons wouldn't budge. Before he left, Dale told Evelyn that he'd settled with her rental company; she'd forgotten he'd been the guarantor on her lease. When she'd said that she had a job and should handle it herself, he gave her the Bedazzler, which she hadn't seen in months. “Couldn't resist one last settlement,” he said.

On December 19, Barbara walked out to the living-dining room with a cup of tea, wearing a St. John suit that Evelyn hadn't seen since Sag Neck and didn't think her mother had brought to the Marina Air.

“Your father's coming at ten?”

“Yeah. I think it's about a three-hour drive and he wanted to leave some time in case we got lost. I guess you don't want to be late reporting for prison,” Evelyn said.

“What are they going to do if you're late? Send you to prison?” Barbara said, and laughed, a strange, sharp sound that Evelyn hadn't heard in a long time.

“Mom!” Evelyn said, giggling despite herself.

Dale rang the doorbell that morning, an uncommonly warm morning for a Bibville December, looking like he was about to go golfing, in a light khaki jacket, pink polo shirt, khaki pants, and tennis shoes. He was missing his usual alligator belt; Evelyn wondered whether that was the sort of thing that prison guards would take from one's belongings and sell.

“Hi, Daddy. You look nice.” Evelyn wasn't quite sure what she was supposed to say, but the corners of his eyes crinkled a little bit.

“Thank you, honey. And thank you for driving me. I'll be the envy of all the fellows at prison with such a pretty chauffeur.” The pads of fat that used to give him a chubby-cheeked grin were gone. He looked past her to her mother. “Barbara, hello.”

Barbara's teacup was in front of her, but she hadn't had a sip. “Dale,” she said, her voice trembling.

Evelyn waited a minute, then jangled the keys, trying to add merriment. “So, are you ready?” she said to her father.

“I just want to say good-bye to your mother,” he said.

Barbara stood up quickly, nearly knocking over her cup. “I think I'll go with you,” she said. “What are you both looking at me like that for? It's a nice day for a drive.”

The parking lot at that hour was filled with people doing their daily exurban tasks: a woman lifted several huge plastic Lowe's bags with shelving poking from them out of the back of her SUV, and another screamed at her child that she was in charge of him and not the other way around. As Barbara and Dale walked toward the car, they looked like dolls of a different scale, her mother plumping out as her father caved in.

In the car, Evelyn put on a Hank Williams CD, one of her father's favorites. To her surprise, as she backed out of the Marina Air lot, she heard her mother's deep voice from the back, singing along to “Jambalaya.”

“Mom? You're a secret Hank Williams fan?” she said.

“I've always hated my singing voice. It's flat,” Barbara said.

Hank had moved on to “Half As Much,” and the washed-out winter colors on the side of the road whizzed by.

“I'll get everything back,” Dale said suddenly. “I have a plan. Once I'm out. I know I can't practice law anymore, but there's a whole list of things I'm planning on. I can't technically be a lawyer, but I can still be one heck of a consultant. I'm going to put both of you right back in Sag Neck.”

“Dad.” Evelyn looked at her father, who was staring out the side window. “You don't need to get it all back. It might not even be possible.”

“It's always possible.”

Evelyn looked at the road. She knew that wasn't true. A person can't re-create an old life with everything and everyone he once had. People react and interact, develop, and the puzzle pieces change shape and no longer fit together with a satisfying snap.

“Barbara,” Dale said. “Will you be all right?”

She heard a click of a soda can opening from the backseat, and saw that her mother was now enjoying a Tab. “Vending machine,” Barbara said by way of an answer. “I never supposed I would live somewhere with a vending machine, but it's rather useful, having a cold soda available at all hours. I've stopped making my own ice, in fact.”

“Is that right?” Dale said.

“There's an ice machine right at the end of the hallway. It's all the ice you could ever want and I don't have to do a thing.”

Evelyn glanced at her father, who had a little smile starting, then caught her mother's eye in the rearview mirror and gave her a respectful nod.

“And you, Evie? Are you going to be all right? You're not missing New York too badly?” Dale asked.

Evelyn watched the lane paint markers at the side of the car, thinking about how to answer that question. She owed so much on all of her credit cards. The Caffeiteria was a good step, and at least she was earning something, but her debt was so massive, always hovering gray around the edges of whatever else she was doing, that it wouldn't be enough. She could work there for years and still have bills looming.

She had been waiting, she thought. Always waiting. In New York, waiting for her life to be replaced by some other, more interesting life on offer. Waiting for money that she felt ought to be hers to flood in and elevate her position, from some male source, her father, Scot, Jaime. Waiting to be recognized and accepted in the social scene, starring on Appointment Book. When she thought about it, she had always imagined her future self in pictures with her face on others' bodies, in others' dresses, at others' parties, in others' poses. Now, back home, she had been biding time, waiting for some sign about what her life's goal ought to be. Maybe it didn't work like that. Maybe you had to change things step-by-step.

The fact that New York still existed was puzzling. It was disconnected from her present, this car and the prison drop-off. It was far from her feet, which tingled after standing all day, and her hair, which smelled like coffee even after multiple shampoos, and the tug of the espresso-machine filter handle, the turn of the frother dial, the cool splash of white milk against the metal cup. In Bibville, she looked different enough from how she had as a kid that old classmates didn't seem to recognize her, and her mother's former friends would order skim lattes and scuttle away, embarrassed for Barbara or her or themselves, she couldn't tell. Her twenty-eighth birthday was not too many months away, and she was living at home, working at a coffee shop, with a father who would be an inmate in a matter of hours and a mother who was not highly equipped for real life, and she was deep in debt. This was not the best set of facts, but as she put her foot on the gas, they just seemed like facts. No more, no less.

“Yeah,” Evelyn said. “Yeah, I'm going to be all right.”

When they pulled into the prison parking lot three hours later, Evelyn looked for reasons that it wouldn't be so bad. There was grass, and there were different brick buildings like at Sheffield, and the group of men in olive-green jumpsuits waiting to get on a truck were at least chatting with one another. Evelyn turned off the car's engine, and after they got out of the car she and Barbara gathered next to Dale. Evelyn looked around, wondering if a guard would come retrieve him.

“Do we go in with you?” Evelyn said.

“I don't want you to, honey. I have to go register with the officer and it'll take a while. I'll see you soon, okay?”

“I'll take your jacket,” Barbara said. “I don't trust the federal system to get anything right, and they're certainly not going to lose a perfectly good jacket if I can help it. What about your ring?”