Look Closer(15)

“And you say you want a thousand minutes?” she asks.

“Yes.” I pull out cash and drop it on the counter.

“And . . . would you be interested in one of our monthly plans—”

“No, ma’am, no thank you. Just the phone and the minutes and the green case.”

She looks down at the cash.

“I’m a drug dealer,” I say. “I sell heroin to children.”

She looks up at me.

“Just kidding. It’s for my ten-year-old son. It’s a trial run. I don’t want him getting more minutes each month until I see how fast he burns through these minutes.”

“Oh, I have a granddaughter who’s ten years old,” she says, brightening. “Is your son going into the fifth grade?”

“He sure is!”

“Where does he go?”

Uh, boy. “We homeschool,” I say and pull my phone out of my pocket as if I’m answering it, before this woman gets any nosier.

This sneaking-around stuff is harder than it looks.





13

Vicky

I get out of bed a few hours after Simon left and search through his chest of drawers. Simon is organized enough to keep a backup list of all his important passwords but is far too paranoid to put them on a computer or phone. Electronic surveillance is the bread-and-butter of Simon’s scholarship; he is convinced the government looks at a lot more of our information than it lets on, and the Fourth Amendment is being shredded in the process. He says “old school,” good old pen and paper, is the smarter way. He writes his passwords on a piece of notebook paper he keeps in his sock drawer, or maybe he said underwear drawer, I don’t remember.

On top of the chest of drawers are photographs of Simon’s mother, Glory. Some are from before she married Ted Dobias, Simon’s father, but most are after. I see a lot of Simon in her, the chestnut hair and warm eyes and radiant smile, which is how I describe Simon’s smile when he chooses to flash it, which isn’t often enough.

The early pictures: a high school yearbook photo of Glory looking over her shoulder in that awkward school-picture pose. A picture of her with her parents at Wrigley Field when she was a toddler, her face smeared with mustard. One of her standing on Navy Pier in her cap and gown, holding her diploma from the University of Chicago Law School.

The later ones, after she married Ted Dobias, do not feature Ted at all, just Glory and Simon. Glory holding her swaddled newborn in the hospital bed, a beaming but exhausted mother. A photo of them laughing at each other, noses almost touching, when Simon was five or six. The two of them outside Symphony Hall. Eating pizza at Gino’s East, the cheese stretched like rubber. Little Simon in his mother’s arms after she just completed the Chicago Marathon, her hair matted with sweat, a silver runner’s poncho over her shoulders, Simon holding the runner’s medal and staring at it with that inquisitive look he never lost.

That’s the Glory I always hear about, vibrant and active and silly and whimsical, always ready with a corny joke or a smile.

Then there’s Glory the lawyer, the laser-focused attorney. The photo of mother and son on the steps of the United States Supreme Court the day that Glory argued a case before them. The sharpest of legal minds, Simon always says, “and the sharpest of tongues. Fearlessly blunt.”

On the wall in a frame, a page of a transcript from a court hearing when Glory was a new lawyer working at some fancy, highbrow law firm, one of only a handful of women back then:

THE COURT: The objection is sustained, Mrs. Dobias.

COUNSEL: Your Honor, we weren’t offering the testimony for the truth of the matter asserted, but merely to show the fact that the statement was made.

THE COURT: I understand, hon, but when a judge sustains an objection, the attorney moves on to the next question, I don’t care how pretty she is.

COUNSEL: I think I understand. And—what does the lawyer do when the judge is acting like a horse’s ass?

THE COURT: I’m sorry? What did you say to me?

COUNSEL: I was just speaking hypothetically, Your Honor. Please understand, all these rules and formalities are enough to overwhelm a girl.

THE COURT: Did you just call me a horse’s ass?

COUNSEL: Did you just call me hon? Did you just call me pretty? Maybe we both misheard.

Apparently, at that point, the judge ordered the lawyers into chambers and shooed away the court reporter. Simon said the judge asked Glory for one reason why he shouldn’t hold her in contempt. She replied that she was concerned about how the Judicial Inquiry Board might feel about a sitting judge making on-the-record demeaning comments toward a female lawyer. The judge announced a recess for the rest of the day.

Word got back to the law firm, and the firm’s executive committee demanded she apologize to the judge. She refused. She left the firm that day and never went back.

But one of the women in the courtroom gallery that day obtained a copy of the transcript, framed this page, and gave it to Glory as a present.

It sounds like I would’ve liked Simon’s mom.

The last two photos were near the end, when Glory was bound to a wheelchair and had lost a good amount of her functioning. The animation in her face was replaced by a more deadened stare, her beaming smile now a crooked turn of her lip. I don’t know why Simon keeps these around. The last two years of her life were difficult for everyone and not the way to remember her, not the way she’d want to be remembered, if everything I’ve heard about her is true.