Read Mean Justice for Free Online Page B

stoicism of Wayne, Cooper, Bogart. A man who provides for his family, who makes a home, who puts meals on the table, who builds a better life for his kids than the one he enjoyed by definition shows he loves his family. You didn’t actually have to say it aloud—your daily life said it all, Pat believed. By those standards, Pat thought his drinking irrelevant, and he couldn’t see that, to his family, he checked out every time he emptied a bottle. He really did love his family, deeply, but he didn’t see the need—and, in any case, couldn’t find it in himself—to actually utter those three words, I love you, unaware of just how much they would have meant to his wife and children. Speaking of such things was far more difficult for Pat than taking a heavy sledgehammer to a ruined house—or, for that matter, showing kindness to an evicted stranger.
    Pat could be a warm and witty companion, and his family and friends knew him to be a well-meaning man, but he also seemed arrogant at times, particularly when he “had a few,” the family’s term for heavy drinking. Then he became something of a know-it-all, sitting back in his chair and dispensing lofty opinions and advice, usually preceded by the words, “When I was a principal . . .” The way he said it at times, he might as well have been a member of the Cabinet, and it became clear, then, just how much he missed his former career. In time, Pat’s drinkingleft him with few close friends and a world that extended beyond his armchair with increasing rarity. Always a big man, he grew overweight and sedentary, his beer belly hanging low over his waistline, the slightest exertion leaving him breathless.
    Predictably, Pat’s drinking gradually tore the family apart. 4 As the kids neared and reached adulthood, Nancy professed a desire to go back to college, to take up hobbies, to widen her horizons. Pat, meanwhile, wanted to sit home and drink, maybe shoot the occasional game of pool. He never wanted to go out; the last movie he left the house for was The Guns of Navarone. Twenty-five years together and Nancy, who had always been the glue of the family, the one who planned the events and forged the friendships, increasingly felt like a stranger to her husband. It’s not that she stopped loving him—there was just something about Pat, she would insist, that shone through even in his darkest moments, something kind and good—but it was no longer enough. In a decision that was a long time coming, but which still seemed to take Pat by surprise, Nancy filed for divorce in 1985. She moved out of the house, taking with her Jennifer, the only one of the couple’s children still living at home.
    Without really thinking about it, Pat gave everything but his business to Nancy and wished her well. He harbored no ill will toward her, no bitterness, though he was bewildered and hurt and wished she would change her mind. Yet he couldn’t find the words to ask her to stay. He thought them, heard them in his head, but just couldn’t make them come out. He didn’t know how. He rented an apartment and lived alone.
    A year or so later, his foreclosure business still thriving (even as the California real estate market was crashing),the fire department called and told him about some acreage in East Bakersfield choked with weeds and trash. The landowner being cited for the violation was a difficult middle-aged widow who had been totally uncooperative, distrustful of all the contractors the fire department suggested, yet unwilling to do the work herself. “How about you give her a try?” Pat was asked.
    “Sure,” he said. “What’s the lady’s name?”
    “Paola,” the fire official told him. “Alexandra Paola.”

3

    T HAT SAME AFTERNOON , P AT WENT TO THE P AOLA Development Company office at the College Center mall in East Bakersfield. The sixties-era strip mall had begun to look a bit ragged by then, he noticed, with several vacant storefronts and an air more gritty than