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“I'll make some tea,” I said, and Cindy put her hand over mine, quickly, as though I had said something that shocked her. But it was only sudden gratitude, or her way of saying no thanks.

“Tea would be great,” said Jack, and if I hadn't been sure that he simply wanted me out of the room for a while I would have been thankful for his bluff heartiness.

But tea was more my mother's style, what she gave me when I was in bed with a rare episode of flu. Lipton's was folk medicine to Mom, what you drank when you got bad news on the phone. I don't think anyone I know really enjoys the taste. When I had dropped pan lids and tea strainers on the floor, found a tin of Twinings Irish Breakfast that had never been opened, I had water on to boil and a set of questions ready to ask.

I was acting the part of a cool, collected lawyer's daughter. This tea was loose, not the kind that came in bags, and bits of it scattered all over the countertop, all over the floor. Two spoonfuls of tea, or five? I kept the image from my mind, my father sitting on a jail cell cot.

When I wrestled a tray from the cupboard, and had cups, spoons, sugar cubes all arranged, I reentered the dining room. Cindy was on the phone, speaking in a calm, quiet voice, saying their dinner plans had changed, they wouldn't be needing a reservation tonight.

Jack was combing his hair in the mirror over the fireplace. He was going to say that he had to rush off, that he didn't want any tea. I could tell by the I'm-out-of-here lean to his body. One glance at me and he said, “Sure, just what I need.” I saw why Dad might enjoy his company.

I used to perform what Mom called “community activities,” reading to women in a nearby nursing home. Mom donated orchids and bromeliads to the convalescent hospital, the place where her own mother had spent the last weeks of her life. I was probably following my mother's example when I dropped by on Saturday afternoons to read detective novels to white-haired people who shifted in their wheelchairs to catch every clue.

I remember feeling virtuous on the way home from these readings, but only on a honey-sweet, artificial level. On a deeper level, I felt a sickened dismay that a doctor wasn't trying to do more for these frail women. And I was both entertained and frustrated by the mysteries I read. “Start at the beginning of chapter sixteen,” a voice would quaver, and I would read all of sixteen, and most of seventeen, enough to recognize that the detective was never going to drag the body out of the creek without going to the village for help. But I never found out who had committed the murder, and I never even knew the names of the patients I read to, careful to keep my voice loud and clear.

I didn't like the way the nurses played up their own good looks and radiant health, wheeling their patients down the hall with such cheer that it seemed disrespectful. I didn't appreciate the way a nurse would beam at a stroke victim nodding off in her chair, “We're getting a head start on our nap, aren't we,” as though dying were a jolly business, a sort of summer camp PE.

I couldn't stand the way people pretend that everything is great, when it isn't. I would have called it hypocrisy, but standing there, splashing tea on the coffee-table books. I couldn't blame any of us for putting on an act. I got some paper towels from the kitchen, moving fast, as though the most serious crisis confronting humanity was the terrible problem of tea stains.

Dad would be advising his fellow inmates on how to beat their DUI raps. He'd be drawing up petitions, wills, playing five-card draw. He'd come out of the county jail with after-dinner stories to last a lifetime.

When I asked, finally, what crime my father was accused of committing, Cindy sat with one finger making a dimple in her cheek, as though I had spoken in Sanskrit, and Jack took a slurp of tea still way too hot.

“It's complicated,” he said, his eyes on Cindy, as though to get her okay to say more.

“They say he'll be disbarred,” said Cindy, her voice vague and almost inaudible, like a talk show left on in another room.

My mind jumped this way and that, eager to twist this statement into something worth celebrating. To be stripped of your license to practice law was a disaster much worse than a weekend eating jailhouse jello.

Jack said, “He's accused of defrauding his clients.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Mom took one look at me and said, “What's wrong?”

Maybe because I was home early, maybe because she had seen Jack's profile in the red Jaguar as he dropped me off. Maybe because I set my gym bag carefully in the bottom of the hall closet and didn't sling it onto the couch the way I usually did. The Jaguar purred away up the street, one of those quiet cars you can hear for a long distance.

Her voice steel quiet, she asked, “What did he do?”

I took my time arranging myself on the sofa, determined to say nothing about any of this to Mom. Jack had not talked much on the drive except to tell me not to sweat this, as though a slangy, casual approach would give me peace of mind. He did add, as he pulled over to the curb, “Cops love reading lawyers their rights.”

But I wondered if news about Dad's arrest had been on the radio—Mom doesn't watch much TV. Or if the grapevine of Mom's friends had flashed word that Harvey Chamberlain was marched in handcuffs down the front steps, away from his new bride. Did they use plainclothes cops, or uniforms? When they told him he had a right to remain silent, I wonder if he lifted his eyes from the driveway, the front lawn, to shame them with a smile.

Mom had Polaroids of tropical flower arrangements spread out on the rosewood side table, proteas and ginger blossoms, and classical guitar tinkled in the background, the sort of music she stands in line to hear in concert. But when she saw I wasn't talking, she snapped the remote to shut down the Bose sound system and brushed the pretty flower pictures into a pile with the side of her hand.

“Talk to me, Bonnie,” she said, and even when I understood the impression she had, and wanted to reassure her, I still couldn't make a sound.

“If he messed with you—” Mom has bursts of articulate language, but she fades out when she's upset. Her web page is almost all pictures, anthuriums and pink-fruited bananas, not nearly enough text.

“Jack didn't do anything,” I said, sounding like he had. I studied the way the toe of my tennis shoe scuffed and smoothed the nap of the carpet.

“What happened?”

I was surprised at how the sounds came out, distorted by my feelings, and I knew Mom couldn't make out a word. But she was a little mollified, half-convinced that Jack hadn't overstepped decency in the front seat of his XJ6. She came over and sat next to me, and right beside me, knee to knee, waiting companionably for me to recover enough to talk, but not pressing, not reassuring me, because by now she knew she didn't have a clue what was wrong.

“They took Dad,” I said.

Mom sat with her wise-cat expression and heard everything, everything I knew. I paced up and down, blowing my nose and telling her Dad would sue the County of Alameda for false arrest, and she kept the same attitude, her arms folded easily, letting me wind down.

“Your father will deal with this,” she said, after my energy had spun itself out and I was seated again, on the floor with my back to the sofa. “He can take care of himself,” she added, but she said this like it was a character flaw.

“I know it,” I said, aware that we were having a serious disagreement, even though our words seemed to follow the same path.

She fed some silence into the conversation, the way you feed a fireplace with kindling. “You need to think about us,” she said.

I was very close to telling her that life did not consist of making sure all the root fungus in the East Bay has been gamma-rayed to death.

“You need to think about
you,”
she said.

I used minimal force, but I couldn't keep my voice steady. “Don't you have any compassion at all?”

I knew, as soon as I had spoken, that I was close to challenging Mom in a way she would never tolerate. She would get up and leave the room.

“Think about your own future, Bonnie. Close your mouth, and take a breath, and think.”

I spoke with care. “It's a vendetta. The DA is out to get him.”

“Maybe you're right,” she said. She went to the side table and sorted her flower snapshots, like a game of solitaire.

Maybe
. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

“It's a real embarrassment for Cindy,” she said. She snapped a rubber band around her Polaroids.

“They hauled him away? Your
dad?”
said Denise.

Hauled
was a typical Denise verb. Things were always getting stuck, busted, ripped off in her local dialect.

“You make it sound like it would make more sense if my mom got arrested,” I said.

“Your mom would make a good crook,” said Denise.

“That's a nice thing to say,” I responded, feeling no desire to laugh.

“She knows how to keep her mouth shut.”

I didn't say, Maybe you should take lessons.

I could hear Denise kicking clothes and shoes off her bed, clearing a place to sit down. My own room was organized, in a fuzzy-logic way. A picture of the first female Olympic champion, Charlotte Cooper, cocked her racket beside a blow-up of Rowan working in the Rockies, cradling a boom mike. I rarely visited Denise's room, not wanting to scale the piles of rubble.

“But your
dad
. It doesn't make any sense,” Denise said.

“I know it.”

“I mean, in order to defraud his clients he would have to withhold payments from them, for example, right?” Denise was tossing things, soft thuds.

“Clients pay lawyers,” I said, “not the other way around.”

“Some of the people my dad has working for him,” said Denise in her husky monotone, “you absolutely would not believe.”

Rowan wasn't home. They have one of those professionally recorded answering messages, a telephone company sort of voice that says that none of the Beals are available right now. I couldn't leave the message I wanted, that my father was in a county correctional facility. I asked Rowan to give me a call, sitting there fingering the plush box that held the pearl.

Mom knocked and put her head in once, just before I snapped out my light. “Myrna's in my room, I forgot to tell you.”

Mom has a polyester shoe organizer in her closet, two dozen pockets for pumps, sandals, walking shoes, go-aheads, mukluks, handmades, flats, heels, ninety percent of them shoes she has worn once. Myrna had carried each kitten all the way to this new closet, and now she was ensconced in Mom's old file boxes.

Mom keeps her financial archives here, records going back to the days of the marriage, three steel boxes with latches and locks. Myrna had her back against one of the boxes,
FIREPROOF
in red letters.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sometimes a bed is a trap, the sheets a tangled net. I kicked, sweating, tearing the blankets from my body. I was afraid to search my scalp, afraid to press in on my head, sure the skull cap would be fragmented, my hand covered with warm strawberry jam.

I had worked my way through the Dimond Pharmacy vial, and I was down to my last three codeine. I cat-footed into the bathroom, tossed down the medicine with a swallow of water, and stood without turning on the light, wondering what it's like, lying in a jail bunk.

Back in my bedroom, I closed my eyes, groping for the lamp switch. I pushed it, and the light dazzled me, even with my eyes tight.

Pearls come in hues. You can't see the variations at first. Only when you hold one in the creases of your hand and really look. Some pearls are pink blushed, others a soft blue. The gift Dad had given me swung back and forth on its fine gold chain, luminous, the color of a vein just beneath the skin.

To my surprise, Dad had not changed the message on his answering machine on his return from Hawaii. “This is Harvey!” he said, like it was great news, stop the presses, the message he had recorded the day he brought the Panasonic home from Circuit City. I thought Cindy would have recorded a new greeting. “Hello, Cindy,” I singsonged into the phone. I added that I was just checking in, aware more than ever what a peculiar, solitary conversation it is, talking to a machine.

Mom had torn the page out of the newspaper, a big ad for pickup trucks, a smiling auto with hands and feet holding up a
CREDIT PROBLEMS?
sign. She had left the entire page draped over a bowl of wooden Indonesian apples.

My hand reached for it then fell back to my side.

In the end, even though I didn't want to read it, I did, in a few heartbeats. “Grand Jury Slams Eastbay Att'y.” No picture, just news of an indictment, a charge of grand theft and fraud, the state bar association commenting how seriously it took the fiduciary conduct of its members. I knew from past interviews with sports reporters how much gets left out of a news story. It said nothing about my father being in custody.

His name wasn't in the headline, although it was printed three times within the news column. Most of the people I knew wouldn't read page nineteen of the Saturday newspaper.

Mom was outside, beyond the pool, near the fishpond, talking on the phone. She has four large white and gold carp, living submarines that nose the tendrils of green scum, mouthing it like very old men. It's one of the reasons she's cautious about loving a cat, sure that Myrna is going to wrestle one of these whales onto the patio. Mom saw me and her expression softened, but we didn't speak, sending each other reassurance across the leaf-flecked surface of the swimming pool.

What was I going to say to him when we met?
Hi, Dad, too bad about your trouble with the cops?
My mother might recommend the silent hug, heartfelt but free of definition. But I didn't know how Dad was going to carry this off.
Hi, Champion, I'm suing Alameda County
.