The Guardianship Papers on My Table

What a Lawyer Costs

In March, Kurt had asked me for sixty thousand dollars.

He asked it in my kitchen with his hat on his knee, after he had fixed my dripping faucet. He called it a bridge. He had borrowed to open the lot in Edgewood and a big customer had gone under owing him. He would pay me back by the first of the year with interest, he said. He said it twice.

I told him no, and I told him gently. That thirty-eight thousand dollars is every cent between me and a county nursing home. I said I would sit down with him and his banker any day he liked, but I would not hand him my cushion.

He said he understood and kissed my cheek. He did not come for Sunday dinner after that until the fever in August. I put it down to embarrassment, and I carry that.

Now I will tell you why I did not hire a lawyer the way everyone said I should.

I called one in Albuquerque the next morning, a woman with a good name who handled these cases. She was kind. She said the retainer would be seventy-five hundred dollars, and if Kurt fought, twenty thousand more. She said I would very likely win. I did the arithmetic on the back of an envelope while she talked.

Seventy-five hundred is a fifth of everything I have. Kurt’s paper said I could not be trusted with my money. If I handed a fifth of it to a stranger to prove I could, I would be spending my cushion to defend my cushion, and there is a word for that, and the word is not smart.

Two days later a young woman came to my kitchen door with a briefcase and said the court had sent her. Her name was Anita Archuleta. She was about thirty, with a face that gave away very little.

When a person is accused of not being able to manage her own life, she told me, the law gives her a lawyer, and if she cannot pay, the court does. I had one all along. I had been too insulted to read page nine.

She sat at my table and did not touch the coffee until I told her it was not a trick.

“Mrs. Hargis, here is the truth,” she said. “A judge sees people all day who say I am fine. The ones who are slipping say it, and the ones who are fine say it. She can’t tell the difference by listening to you.”

“Then what does she believe?”

“People who see you when you’re not performing. People who know what you’re like on a bad Tuesday.”

I thought about thirty-one years of Tuesdays in that school kitchen.

“Then I’ll call them,” I said.

“You can. Or you can let them come.”

“I do not ask people for things.”

“I noticed,” Anita said, and for the first time her face moved a little.

That is my whole pride, laid out plain. I fed that valley for thirty-one years and would not make one telephone call to ask for anything back. I called it dignity. It was stubbornness wearing a better coat.