The Jury Room

Deidre Freeman had been divorced for eleven months. She knew that number because she counted it every morning like pills. Married at twenty-one, done at twenty-two. Now she was twenty-three, and the sting had mostly faded, except for mornings like this one.

Mornings like this one, when she walked into the county courthouse jury assembly room and saw Lee Benton sitting in the third row.

Well. She had to laugh at that. The universe had a sense of humor. It just wasn't a nice one.

Lee looked the same. Twenty-eight now, still with that flat little mouth and the jaw that worked when he was pretending to be bored. He was pretending to be bored right now, reading the same page of a newspaper he'd clearly picked up off the floor. Deidre checked her name against the posted list, got her badge sticker, and sat down four rows behind him where she could watch the back of his neck.

There was a time she'd have been happy to sit behind that neck. Huh. Time moved on.

Her divorce had been the ordinary kind. He worked a job out of town four days a week. Deidre worked the ranch they'd bought together with money she'd mostly earned. And somewhere in those four days a week, Lee had found a woman named Karen with a pool and no chores. Deidre found out from a phone bill. Real romantic stuff.

She'd kept the ranch. He'd kept Karen. Fair trade, mostly.

Except some nights it didn't feel fair. Some nights it felt like he'd gotten away with something.

The clerk called them into the courtroom around nine. Voir dire took forever. Deidre got passed over for a civil case about a fender bender, which suited her fine. She didn't want to serve. She wanted her thirty dollars a day and her lunch hour, and then she wanted to go home and check her fences.

Rico Weiss got passed over too. Of course he did. Rico had that face, open and honest, which lawyers on both sides hate in a juror, and he'd been a carpenter in this county long enough that half the panel knew him by name. He was twenty-nine and built like a man who carried lumber for a living, because he did.

He slid into the seat next to her during the late-morning panel shuffle. Close. Deliberately close.

"Small world," he said under his breath.

"Small county."

"Lee's here."

"I saw."

"You okay?"

Deidre thought about it. Actually thought about it, which surprised her. "You know what? I got an idea."

Rico raised an eyebrow. He'd been her friend since she was eighteen and he was twenty-four, back when she helped her dad haul hay and Rico was framing the new barn. He'd had a look for her even then. She'd seen it. She'd ignored it, because she was busy getting married at twenty-one to a man with a flat little mouth.

Worst decision of her life. Not marrying young. Marrying Lee.

"An idea," Rico repeated. "Those get people in trouble."

"You listening or not?"

"I'm listening." But he leaned in, so she knew he was.

Deidre kept her voice down under the clerk's droning. "Lee is sitting over there pretending he doesn't know me. He's checking me in the reflections and the window and the top of his newspaper. He's been doing it since nine."

Rico glanced down the rows. Looked back. "Yeah, I clocked that."

"He wants me back. He told my cousin at the feed store he made a mistake."

"Big of him."

"Hush." She smiled anyway. "So here's the thing. He wants to watch me. Fine. I'm gonna give him something to watch."

Rico went still in a particular way. She'd seen him go still like that over lumber prices. "What kind of something?"

"The kind where you and me take a long lunch, and he follows us, and he sees it." She looked straight ahead while she said it, like she was reading the panel list. "You've had that look for five years, Rico. I'm just now in a mood to let you use it."

"Deidre." He said it quiet. Careful. "You sure? 'Cause I'm not doing this to be a prop. You know that."

That was the part she liked about him. Most men would've said yes before she finished the sentence.

"I'm sure," she said. "It's not just for him. I'm twenty-three and I've been kissed by exactly two men, and one of them was a liar. I'd like to even the score."

He blew out a breath. "Okay. But we do it my way. Anything I do, you say yes first. And if you say stop anywhere along the line, we stop and eat a damn sandwich."

"Deal."

"One more thing. If we get that far, I've got a condom in my jacket. I know it ain't romantic. I don't care."

Deidre almost laughed out loud in the middle of voir dire. "Rico Weiss, you are the most sensible man in this building."

"That's what the judge keeps skipping me for."

* * *

They broke for lunch at noon. One hour. The bailiff said it plain: back by one or get marked absent. Deidre gathered her purse slow. Rico ambled. Lee bolted for the door as if he had been waiting on a gunshot, and then, forty feet down the sidewalk, slowed way down. Casual. Real casual. Heading in the general direction of the diner across the street, at a pace a tortoise could beat.

"Oh, he is terrible at this," Rico said.

"Terrible," Deidre agreed. "Been terrible at sneaking around since I met him. That's how I caught him, if you want the truth. He's just bad at it."

The diner sat across the street, the kind that never closed, with vinyl booths and a coffee pot that had probably been brewing since the late 1970s, and that was fine, coffee that old probably had character. Deidre picked the booth by the front window on purpose. Street view. Courthouse view. Everything view.

Lee came in two minutes behind them and sat two tables away. Facing them. He had the newspaper again. He didn't even order first. Just sat down and opened the paper like it was appointment reading.

"Window seat, huh," Rico said.

"Best seat in the house."

The waitress came. Rico ordered a burger and a chocolate shake, because he was twenty-nine years old and had never once grown out of chocolate shakes. Deidre ordered pie and coffee. They made small talk about the ranch, the hay, his current job reframing an old store downtown. Normal stuff. Warm stuff. Rico had always been easy to talk to, and it occurred to Deidre, sitting there, that she'd never once been bored with him, and she'd been bored with Lee by their second anniversary.

Then his hand found hers on the table. Just covered it. Warm and rough and steady.

"Last chance to say no," he said.

"Ask me properly."