JACOB
Marsh brought a folder.
Marsh always brings a folder. Thirty years of practicing law has taught him that people will argue with a man but not with paper, so he leads with the paper.
He sets it on my desk squared to the edge. He sits down across from me in the chair he’s worn his shape into over six years of retainer.
He lets the tab labels do the opening statement.
This one said DEPOSITION CALENDAR — DRAFT 4.
Friday, 2:30 in the afternoon. Forty-one floors below my window, uptown Charlotte went about its Friday — bank towers exhaling early leavers, the light rail sliding through the trees on Tryon like a thought somebody kept having.
My office does not look like the company’s money. It has a desk my father would approve of, two chairs, no art the decorator picked.
Exactly two personal items: a photograph of eighteen acres taken from the seat of Deke’s tractor, and a drawing taped below the monitor of what Aldrin has certified is me, standing next to what he has certified is my car, both of us the same shape.
Rumer added the caption. UNCLE JACOB AND HIS OTHER CAR PAYMENT.
She’s nine.
I had four and a half hours until seven o’clock and I intended to spend zero of them on draft four of anything.
“The fourteenth.” Marsh reached over and opened the folder himself, since I hadn’t. “That’s the IG interview. Everything else backs up from that date. Hutchins wants a prep session the week before — his word was ‘alignment.’”
“Alignment.” I let the word sit on the desk and depreciate.
“Unified narrative. His phrase also.”
“And Lattimore?”
Marsh’s mouth did the thing it does when he has to deliver information he agrees with. “Lattimore says a unified narrative is what people build when the individual ones don’t hold up. She wants you interviewed cold. No prep. Her office trusts you, which frankly makes my job harder, because trust is not a legal strategy.”
The folder sat there between us, open to a calendar with my October in it.
Somewhere in a filing cabinet in this building was another folder, thicker, the one I keep in a drawer I don’t open in daylight, with three names in it. The calendar was just the machine that would eventually make me open it in a room full of court reporters.
“You missed Tuesday’s call.” Marsh closed the folder — his tell for changing lanes. “Nine o’clock. Two generals, one lawyer, no Jacob. In six years you have never missed a call. You rescheduled a funeral once.”
“It was my funeral to reschedule.”
“Where were you?”
“The DMV.”
He looked at me the way he looks at hostile witnesses, which is to say patiently. “The DMV.”
“Turning in a plate. It ran long.”
“It ran long.” Marsh took off his glasses, polished them on the end of his tie, put them back on — the full ritual, the one that means he’s about to say something as my friend and bill it as counsel. “Jacob. Whatever it is — and it’s something, because you look like a man who slept this week, which you have not done in a month — I need you to hear the next part as law and not as insult. Anything new in your life right now is discoverable. Anyone new. Opposing counsel in the civil matters will pull your calendar, your cards, your plates. A man in your position, in this window, does not get to have a private life. He gets exhibits.”
The light rail went by again, forty-one floors down, silent from up here.
“So my advice,” and his voice had the sound of a man rolling something heavy uphill, knowing, “is that whatever started this week — end it. Or park it until spring. Before it goes any further.”