“He seems very mature,” Maya said. “Is his dad here?”
Only after asking the question did Maya think to check Lila’s finger for a wedding ring. There wasn’t one.
“Who knows where his dad is,” Lila said. “Things didn’t work out.”
Maya felt embarrassed as Lila explained that her babysitter had fallen through, and then Aaron’s grandfather was supposed to watch him, but then he couldn’t, and so eventually Lila decided it would be okay to just bring him to the hotel for the night, let him watch TV. That was okay, right?
Lila may have aged, but her need for assurance was still there. She had always been the kindest among their ranks. The most compassionate. When their deliberations became loud, angry, painfully acrimonious, Lila had always reached out to the person most viciously attacked by the others. Her instinct had always been to comfort whoever needed it most.
She asked Maya about her own life. No, Maya told her, she wasn’t married either.
“Hello!” Jae Kim appeared at Maya’s side and embraced both women in a three-way hug.
“How about that kid?” he said to Maya. “Lila did pretty good, right?”
Maya had to agree. Aaron seemed impressively confident, especially at that age.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Lila said. “How’re you?”
Jae told them that his retirement was going just great. Maya remembered that he’d worked in construction—and that he’d lost his job after the verdict. Nobody had said he’d been fired because he’d been on the jury, but they’d each found, in their own way, how impossible it had been to go back to their normal lives after the trial. He was probably only approaching sixty now.
Maya thought back on the late-night talk show host who’d referred to them, in a running bit, as “the twelve dumbest people in America.” There was one Saturday Night Live sketch in which they were portrayed as mouth-breathing lunatics who were literally drooling on themselves.
What must it have been like for Jae to try to go back to work? Who wanted to set drywall alongside somebody who thought that Bobby Nock was innocent? What company wanted that much distraction over a worker making $17.25 an hour?
But talking to Jae now, he seemed to have made his peace with it.
No, she told him when he asked. She didn’t have a boyfriend.
Maya saw Trisha Harold and Fran Goldenberg glancing back at her from across the room. Trisha’s dislike—and eventual outright condemnation—of Maya ten years ago had been searing.
Maya marched right over. “Trisha! Can you believe it? Ten years …”
Trisha didn’t hesitate to give Maya a hug. “Would you believe me if I said that it’s good to see you?”
True or not, Maya appreciated the olive branch. “It’s good to see you too.”
Trisha was African American, tall but somewhat awkward about it, as if despite being middle-aged she was still getting used to her height. She explained that she’d taken an early retirement from her job as an IT tech in City Hall. Having worked for the government for so long, Trisha had always seemed the most comfortable amid the bureaucracy that had consumed their sequestered lives. She’d taken her three-quarters pension and moved to Houston to be closer to her kids and hadn’t been back to L.A. since. She didn’t miss it much.
If possible, Fran Goldenberg seemed even smaller than Maya remembered her. She had always been a maternal presence in the deliberation room. Every week she’d ordered a tin of cookies for the group and watched to make sure everyone ate at least one. She’d collected their black Sharpies after each excruciating vote. Maya had been grateful that at least someone was trying to keep things orderly.
Fran still lived in L.A., she said. Same place. And yet she hadn’t seen any of these people in ages! What was wrong with the lot of them, they couldn’t get together once a year or something? What silliness, that they should act like strangers! Half of them still lived close enough it was a wonder they hadn’t bumped into each other at Trader Joe’s.
Maya looked around: still no Rick.
“I haven’t seen him yet,” Trisha said pointedly, as if reading her thoughts.
“Who?”
Trisha raised an eyebrow. She deserved better than Maya’s coy bullshit, didn’t she?
“They told me everyone is coming,” Maya said. “Except Wayne.”
“He had a hard time after the trial,” Fran said.
“We all had a hard time after the trial,” Trisha said.
“Yes, of course,” Fran said. “But you know Wayne.… He’s a sensitive man, and after everything he’s been through …”
Maya would never have described Wayne as “sensitive,” exactly. She’d have gone for “unstable.”
Trisha did not appear sympathetic either. “Okay.”
“He’s a good person,” Fran protested.
She had always seemed closer to Wayne than the rest of them had. Maya had never quite understood why. Maybe it was just that their rooms had been next door to each other’s. Or maybe the web of allegiances and rivalries that had developed between the twelve of them had been more complicated than she could possibly have known.
A few minutes later, Maya found herself on the other side of the bar with Cal Barro. He had to be near eighty, and was bone thin. L.A. born and raised, Cal had been the Eastside lifer among them, full of colorful stories from Silver Lake’s most debauched decades. A few of the stories had been a little too colorful for Carolina, Maya remembered. And now Carolina was dead.
Cal hadn’t gone to the funeral, he told Maya. Apparently none of them had.
Who was that coming over? It took her a second to recognize Peter Wilkie, delivering a glass of wine that she hadn’t asked for. Peter’s hair was starting to gray at the temples and it was shaved at the sides, the same length as the perfectly even stubble across his cheeks. The most white-guy of all the white guys, he acted like the tab was on him. Even though they all knew it was on the TV show.
He’d done something in finance that Maya had never understood. Now, Peter was in weed. Not in the sense of smoking a lot of it, he assured them. He meant professionally. He casually—or perhaps conspicuously—puffed from a hot-pink vape pen. His company made them. He handed her a business card.
It said, “Peter Wilkie. President and CEO. WEEDZ.”
“I have clients still in prison for marijuana distribution,” she said.
He nodded sympathetically. “It’s a travesty that legalization took so long. The opportunities out there right now are killer.”
A glass of wine later, Maya realized that she’d been here for two hours and still no sign of Rick.
She let herself hope that he might not show up for this part. He was coming for justice, after all, not happy hour.
Maya huddled for a bit with Kathy Wing and Yasmine Sarraf, listening to them compare notes on their respective children. Kathy had left her husband shortly after the trial, she said. “So at least something good came out of all that mess.”
Yasmine sympathized. “That was the hardest part, afterward … Trying to explain to David—my husband—what it was like. What do you even say?”
Maya knew the feeling. At some point, she forgot about the cameras in the corner. At some point, she got a drink she actually wanted. At some point, she got another. She stopped glancing over at the doors for Rick.