Just Mercy: A Novel by Dorothy Van Soest Read Free Book Online

futile way. He never thought of Bernie as an anxious person. In fact, his wife was the strongest, most courageous woman he’d ever known. And he’d known some powerful women in his lifetime, starting with his own mother and continuing to the present day with the few women professors in his philosophy department at The University of Texas at Austin who were tough as they come. They had to be to survive in his field, of course, but even they couldn’t hold a candle to his Bernie.
    At five o’clock, after he’d finished cleaning the dead bugs from the light globes on the ceilings in the entryway and kitchen, he sat at the round oak table with his list. One chore remained undone. He’d saved the best for last.
    He headed for the living room and the 1902 mahogany bookshelves that had sealed the deal for him when they decided to buy the house decades ago. He looked around the room for a few seconds, admiring the old oriental rug Bernie had found at a garage sale, the original dark woodwork, the way the eclectic mix of modern and traditional paintings blended so nicely with all their family pictures. Everything was impeccable, as usual, thanks to Bernie; even the multi-colored pillows on the dark maroon leather couch were lined up in sharp precision.
    With the sound of Beethoven in the background, he set about his remaining task with relish, rearranging the existing volumes on the bookshelves in alphabetical order and making room for the books he’d finished reading. As he worked, he introduced the authors to each other, assuring them that they would make good neighbors and colleagues, and thought about the times when he and Bernie would sit out on the deck, reading. He favored philosophy books by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Foucault, and Kierkegaard, while she preferred the latest literary novel, New Yorker short story , or political commentary by the likes of Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower. Every so often, she would interrupt him to share some poignant or laugh-out-loud turn of phrase, like when Ivins wrote that if a certain Texas congressman’s IQ slipped any lower, you’d have to water him twice a day.
    “What is intelligence?” he remembered asking her.
    “When you can walk and chew gum at the same time. I doubt this guy can,” she’d retorted.
    How he missed times like that, when he would ask her about some lofty concept just to hear her pithy Midwestern take on it, always practical. But that was all before. Before she stopped reading altogether. Before she quit engaging in causes about which she used to feel so passionate. Before she reverted to her old habit of trying to manage everyone and everything. Before Veronica was murdered.
    It was a few minutes after six o’clock when Marty slipped the last book into its proper place on the bookshelf, right next to The Other America . He pulled Michael Harrington’s book out and caressed its cover, reliving the dinner debate it had spawned when Veronica had been assigned the book for school.
    “I can’t imagine what it must be like,” she’d said, “to be trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty and not be able to get out of it.”
    “Right,” Fin had chimed in.
    “Can’t you guys see,” Annamaria had said, taking the opposite point of view as usual, “all that’s happened since that book was written? The Great Society, the War on Poverty, civil rights legislation. Social Security and Medicare have all but eliminated poverty among the elderly.”
    “Come on, you can’t be serious,” Fin had said.
    “What about all those high-rise public housing projects?” Veronica added.
    “There but for the grace of God,” Bernie had said.
    “You would see it that way,” Annamaria had retorted.
    At that point Marty had chimed in, rubbing his chin in thoughtful reflection. “So what do you think about the argument that poverty is caused by cultural pathology?”
    “Pretty funny,” Annamaria had said. “That was considered a liberal idea in the 1960s, and now it’s the