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big project. The kind of project that can make or break you, show whether you are associate material or not.” Tantalize a law clerk with the promise of a promotion to associate and he or she will do just about anything.
    They looked a little unsure, but I shooed them out of my office anyway. I was counting on their natural competitive streaks to guarantee an adequate job.
    Alone in my office, I looked at my remaining active cases. Piddling. All of them. And while it’s true an attorney can make a nice living on piddling cases if the cases are milked hard enough, what I wanted was a big-ass, page-one, above-the-fold medical malpractice case to defend. I punched in Henry Platt’s number, though I knew he wouldn’t be in the office today because he was busy courting Bonita and her five children. Henry is the claims adjuster at a Big Medical Malpractice Liability Insurance Company and his main job is to assign cases to me so that I can defend doctors, bill heavily, and make good press in the local newspaper.
    Well, okay, he’d probably describe his job differently.
    When his answering machine came on, I said, “Henry, Lilly here. I need a med-mal case. A big case. The biggest case you’ve got. Now.”
    Having accomplished little thus far, and nothing I could bill for, I attacked my piddling files with all the determination of a small terrier and churned my paperwork till lunch.
    By noon my coffeepot was empty, Jack Russell had popped his head in my office five times to ask irritating First Amendment questions of the sort I thought he understood he was supposed to be answering, and I’d billed enough time to take a break. I stretched and stood and went out the back door, where I got into my little Honda and drove home.
    My couscous was steaming in the pot while I cut up some beet greens and toasted some walnuts to make a hot salad, and, damn, Jimmie popped in. Opened the door, and shouted out, “Hey, Lady, you home?” and came right into the kitchen before I could say boo. He held up a greasy sack. “Want some?”
    “No, thank you. I’m a vegetarian.”
    “Well, suit yourself.” With that, Jimmie sat down at my kitchen table, opened his sack, and started eating. “Bacon cheeseburger,” he said. “Sure you don’t want some? I’ll cut you off half.”
    Apparently there wasn’t much point in explaining the vegetarian thing to Jimmie, and, after all, he must be close to eighty and he looked pretty healthy, and then, like my grandmother was overly fond of explaining, you just can’t teach a pig to sing or a cow to waltz. So instead of proselytizing about the moral and health benefits of being a vegetarian, I simply asked, “Get much grass cut?”
    “Oh, yeah, the back half.”
    I tossed my greens, nuts, and grains together, dribbled toasted sesame seed oil over my dish of healthy goodies, put it on the table next to Jimmie, and then pointedly walked into the den and looked out at the backyard. “Doesn’t look cut to me.”
    “Well, I only got to the half of it. Behind the oak tree. You can’t see it good from in here.”
    Oh, in other words, he hadn’t done anything.
    “Listen to this, I done got more of this here poem memorized.” With that, he put down his hamburger, stood up, spread his arms, and recited: “‘We were, er, er, a ménage à trois of lightning bugs in a jar with no air holes. Busted, William crashed. I danced through the shards with no visible wound.’”
    While he recited, I peeked into my trash can under the sink and, sure enough, saw an empty bottle of wine. Mine. The expensive organic stuff. I pulled the bottle out, and said, “Recycle glass, okay?”
    So, I didn’t need to wonder what he’d been up to all morning instead of cutting the grass.
    “It’s some more of that poem I told you ’bout yesterday. I done been studying them poems in that book between cutting your grass.”
    “But you gave me that book,” I said, even though I’d promptly tossed it in the