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that
was out of the question now. If the Chouteau County prosecutor
wouldn’t hire her, she’d work in legal aid just to work in that courthouse.
    I daresay none of you have thought that deeply about
what you want and why you want it.
    She swept her fingertips across her chin where
Professor Hilliard had touched her so gently and smiled
dreamily.
    She turned on talk radio and knew by the voice
coming out of the speakers that it was four o’clock. If she timed
it right, she could cook all evening to get her week’s orders
filled and write while chili and stroganoff simmered.
    Her spirit lightened considerably when she sifted
through the mail and found the latest National Review. She
flipped through the pages quickly to find the article she had
written and submitted on a lark, bolstered by one man’s faith in
her opinions.
    She had never expected it to be published.
    She had also never expected to be asked to write
more.
    The water boiled and Justice got to cooking in
earnest. She assembled a plate for her father, who picked it up,
fished a can of beer out of the refrigerator, and walked right back
out of the kitchen without a word.
    How long Martin McKinley would pout about her
schooling this time, Justice couldn’t guess. It had taken him three
months into her undergrad for him to speak to her. She shrugged.
Sometimes it bothered her that his silence, intended to punish her,
didn’t bother her.
    Two hours later she had enough of a break from
cooking to crack open her laptop, make the rounds of her favorite
political blogs, and post a few comments. Her email chimed.
     
    *
     
    Subject: Come aboard!
    Reply-to: [email protected]
     
    Justice,
     
    We’ve been following your comments for a while and
we just read your piece in the National Review. We think you have a
lot of potential as a columnist and we’d like to invite you to
become a permanent contributor at TownSquared.
     
    Let us know!
     
    Cheers,
    The TownSquared Crew
     
    *
     
    She gasped. Giggled. Squealed, even. TownSquared was
the biggest conservative blog on the ’net and they wanted her to write for them ?
    Very good, Justice.
    * * * * *
     
     
     
     
    5:
HOT, LOOSE & CLEAN
    APRIL 2005
     
    Giselle put her backpack on a remote corner of her
desk, careful not to dislodge the piles of papers and microcassette
tapes that littered it. She sighed. It just couldn’t happen that
folks would respect her space and the clearly marked IN box she had
set up to reduce just such clutter.
    She hated clutter.
    After collecting a bottle of water from the fridge,
she set herself to putting her night’s work in order. Not as much
as it looked, once it was in a nice, tidy pile, but it didn’t take
into account the digital dictation on the server. If she finished
early, she could go home to study or, more likely, sleep.
    The clock read 4 p.m. when Giselle put the buds in
her ears and began to type. Briefs, pleadings, letters,
contracts—she could do them all by heart. One day, very soon, she
would be the one dictating and not the one transcribing. She
couldn’t wait to get the hell out of this cubicle, which she
resented all the more after having built a business and nurtured it
for so many years—
    —only to watch it burn to the ground. Starting over
again at her age and with her background really sucked.
    “Thanks a bunch, Uncle Fen,” she grumbled.
    Since it was still a half hour before the end of the
workday, the office bustled with secretaries, paralegals, and
lawyers going this way and that. Giselle sat off the beaten path,
but that didn’t stop many attorneys from making pointed detours to
her desk to drop off work, to chat, and every so often, in the case
of the more persistent, to ask her out.
    She’d typed for some time before she caught the
sight of an approaching attorney out of the corner of her eye and
sighed. That particular puppy had been hot to trot for a while now.
She had politely declined numerous invitations, but that didn’t
stop him