Puppet by Joy Fielding Read Free Book Online

of the one she was wearing yesterday. She goes over the basic facts of the defendant’s former relationship with CarolineFletcher, their prior living arrangement, their frequent squabbles, their habit of fierce fighting and making up. “Suppose you give us your version of what happened on the morning of August sixteenth,” she says, her eyes scanning the jury to make sure everyone is paying proper attention, gratified to find all eyes open and fixed upon the witness. No one nodding off just yet.
    Of course they probably all had a good night’s sleep, she thinks enviously, recalling the frustrating hours between midnight and 6 a.m. that she spent tossing and turning and cursing all things Canadian. How dare Ben call her after all these years. How dare he make such outrageous demands. How dare he call her Puppet.
    She is nobody’s puppet anymore.
    You have to come home as soon as possible.
    I can’t do that.
    What do you mean, you can’t do that?
    I’m in the middle of an important case.
    “I mean, I work all night,” Derek Clemens is saying, and Amanda wonders how much of his testimony she has missed. “I don’t think it’s asking too much for her to at least make sure there’s some milk in the apartment, so I can have a bowl of cereal when I come home.”
    “So, you’d been working all night, and you were tired and hungry.”
    “I work from eleven o’clock at night until seven in the morning …”
    Roughly the same hours she spent tossing and turning in her bed, Amanda thinks, nodding in genuine sympathy.
    “…  so, yeah, I was tired and hungry. The apartment’s a pigsty. And there she is getting ready to go out. Puttingon perfume. Not so much as a ‘Hi, how are you?’ So I go into the kitchen and I pour myself a bowl of Special K, which I’m not crazy about anyway, but that’s all we ever have, ’cause Caroline’s always on a diet. And we’re out of milk. I mean, what kind of mother is she, she doesn’t make sure there’s milk for the baby?”
    She’s your mother.
    Tell
her
that.
    “And that made you angry?” Amanda asks, shaking the intrusive voices away with a toss of her head.
    “Damn right it made me angry.”
    “What did you do?”
    “I told her that since she was sticking me with the kid all day, the least she could do was pick up a quart of milk and bring it home before she went to work. And she says she doesn’t have time. I said, what do you mean you don’t have time? It’s not even eight o’clock, the salon doesn’t open for another hour. She says she wants to get there early because Jessica promised to cut her hair before everybody arrives. Then Tiffany wakes up and starts screaming, and I’m exhausted, man, I just want to get some sleep. So I ask her to take the baby with her. She says, absolutely not. And then she tries to push me out of the way, ’cause I’m standing in front of the door. So I grab her arm, and that’s when she slaps me.”
    “She
slapped
you?”
    “Yeah. Caroline’s got a mean temper. It doesn’t take much to set her off.”
    “Objection.” Tyrone King rises partway to his feet as the judge sustains his objection.
    “Just answer the question, Mr. Clemens,” the judge directs.
    “Sorry, Your Honor.”
    “What happened after she slapped you?” Amanda asks.
    “I don’t remember the exact sequence of events.” Derek’s careful choice of words sounds like a foreign language on his tongue. “But I
do
remember trying to shield my face. I wait tables on weekends and it doesn’t look good for me to come in looking all beat up.”
    “So you’re saying she hit you more than once?”
    “Oh, yeah. She got in at least three or four shots before I had enough.”
    Your mother shot a man three times in front of at least twenty witnesses.
    “And what did you do then?” Amanda asks, her voice louder than she intends.
    “I grabbed her, pushed her out of the way, told her to get the hell out, that I’d had enough of her crap, and I was going to