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The first day of my trial I didn’t like Dr. Rothma
After a while I decided her eyes weren’t mean, she was just thinking hard all the time, not like some folks on my jury that were taking naps with their eyes open. Not that I blame them. All that State’s evidence was boring me, and it was my life. But Dr. Rothma
After a week or so Dr. Rothma
Yesterday I told Mr. Snow in the visiting room how, deep down, I thought the foreman lady was kind of sweet and he snorts at me, “She’s about as sweet as a jar of pickled okra.” I said I was surprised somebody rich as him even ate pickled okra but he tells me, “Charmain, I’ve got a grandmama same as you and she loved pickled okra.”
I say, “I know you do because my grandma used to clean her house and your mama’s house.”
He says, “I know. Your grandmama was the White Tornado.”
“Yes, she was and still is. She quit your mama,” I say.
He wants to know why but he’s not surprised.
I tell him. “Your mama called her a servant and said how she had to iron your daddy’s boxer shorts. And Mawmaw’s like, ‘No thank you, Mrs. Snow, I am not your servant and I am not about to put my hands in a strange man’s underpants.’”
Mr. Snow-I’m sorry, I don’t want to call him Tilden-laughed. He says, “I didn’t know that. And here’s something I bet you don’t know. I remember you. Your grandmama brought you to the house with her one time while she was cleaning-”
I nod. “She brought me with her to a lot of houses because I helped her clean till I started at Pretty Woman.”
“Well, one time when I was there visiting my grandma and I guess I was about six or seven, I asked you if you wanted to swing on my swing and then I asked you if you’d marry me. Do you remember that?”
“No.”
“You don’t remember that?”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head like he couldn’t believe I’d forget he wanted to marry me when I was four or five years old. Then he stacked up all his papers to go. He says, “Well, my grandmama was a bitch on wheels. And I bet the same can be said for your sweet Dr. Nina Rothma
People think you can’t be nice and smart both but I don’t see why. Mawmaw used to tell me and my brother Ta
Our grandma Mawmaw raised me and Ta
Poor Mawmaw, she used to tell me with my brother Ta
Way back when Daddy was fourteen and he robbed Mawmaw’s purse, stole her car and drove it down to Mardi Gras in New Orleans, she asked her minister at Church of the Open Door if the devil could of got her pregnant while she was asleep at night, ’cause she’d started wondering if Daddy was the son of Satan. But the minister said the Devil don’t make personal acquaintanceships in the modern world. Well, that minister never met my husband Kyle Markell. And I wish I could say the same. When Mawmaw came down to the hospital after they pumped out my stomach, she told me the only way somebody wouldn’t have killed Kyle sooner or later was they never met him. But I sure don’t think Mawmaw figured it’d be me. I never was a violent person, never yelled, never cursed, and I never could stand blood. I couldn’t even cut up a frog in biology. And when that Clemson guard whammed his elbow into Kyle’s nose his freshman year and they couldn’t stop the bleeding, I fainted dead away in the stands. I fainted other times too, like when Kyle had juliaRoberts put to sleep just because of her seizures. That was my dog that had eyes like Julia Roberts. I’m convinced Kyle ran over her with the van and swore he didn’t. I never wanted to hurt anything in this world till the day I picked up that gun and told Kyle to put down that basketball and shut the fuck up.
Anyhow, the reason I wouldn’t go on the stand in my own defense was the samples Mr. Snow gave of what the District Attorney would likely ask me. I wouldn’t tell that sort of thing to Mawmaw on my deathbed, much less testify on a Bible about it to everybody in my hometown. Like the weird disgusting stuff Kyle heard on the Internet that he kept trying to make me do in bed. And Mr. Snow said how they’d twist things all around so lies would look true and the true things sound like lies. So I kept telling the lawyer the same thing I used to tell Kyle. No thank you. He got real upset. The lawyer, I mean. To be honest it was nothing much compared to the way Kyle used to freak out on me when he was alive, which I guess it’s my fault he’s not anymore. All my lawyer does is grumble how I’m tying his hands behind his back. One day early on in the trial he said I had a sympathetic personality and was young and petite and pretty-the way his eyes shifted around behind his glasses when he said that, I had the feeling he was coming on to me without even knowing it, which would be pretty strange considering, but he wouldn’t be the first man that got strange on me at the wrong time. His idea was if I took the stand and started crying I could maybe win over the jury to go easy on me even if Kyle had played in the Sweet Sixteen.