"You already have," she said, and her voice broke on the last word, and she got up and walked out of Tillie's past the pie case and the jukebox and Hettie with her arms folded, into the bright, indifferent afternoon, and did not look back, and did not look at the Citation, and walked all the way home to Hayes Street without remembering a single step.
The notice of motion was filed the following Wednesday, the day after Bush beat Dukakis, and it arrived in Department Fourteen in a blue-backed binder two inches thick. Mina read it at Bunny's insistence on Bunny's kitchen floor, with the sniffling Bunny wrapped in an afghan and pointing at paragraphs with a Kleenex. MOTION FOR NEW TRIAL ON GROUNDS OF JUROR MISCONDUCT. There were fourteen photographs attached as exhibits, black and white, eight by ten, taken through the front window of Tillie's from across Larkin Street. Juror Number Seven and the official court reporter, seated together in a booth. Juror Number Seven sliding a napkin across the table. Juror Number Seven standing over the official court reporter, on the seventeenth day of trial, setting something down in front of her, and the reporter's face turned to the window, wet.
"They made you look like Mata Hari," Bunny said, with grudging admiration. "With a tuna melt."
The hearing was set for the following Thursday. Judge Moy, as was proper, assigned a different reporter to take it down, since Mina would be a witness. She assigned Bunny.
For eight days Mina did not go to Tillie's. She ate a pretzel from a cart in the Civic Center Plaza among the pigeons. She did not ride the Powell and Hyde line. She did not walk past the turntable at Market Street, although twice she walked to within a block of it and stood on the corner of Fifth and listened, under the traffic, for a bell. She did not hear one. At night she sat on the couch on Hayes Street with her knees drawn up and her steno notes from the first afternoon of trial open in her lap, the old tape, soft now from folding and unfolding, and she read the place where it said, in a shorthand nobody else alive could read, I promise.
On the third night, she tried saying her own name aloud to the empty apartment, the whole thing, the way her mother said it. She got as far as the P.
The hearing on the motion was held in Department Fourteen at two o'clock on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of November, and the radiators, for the first time all year, were working, so that the courtroom smelled of hot dust and floor wax and the wet wool of forty coats. Word had gotten around the fourth floor. Hettie was there, in a hat, having closed Tillie's for the afternoon with a sign in the window that said FAMILY EMERGENCY. Mrs. Lucchesi sat at the plaintiff's table in her black dress beside Sy Feinberg, and did not look at anyone. Bunny sat at Mina's walnut table under Mina's lamp, with her own machine on Mina's tripod, cracking her knuckles.
Mina sat in the front row of the public benches, where she had never sat in her life. From here the room looked entirely different. It looked like a place where a person could be seen.
They called him first.
He came up the aisle in the funeral jacket and put his hand on the Bible and swore, and sat down in the witness box, and Sterling Pratt rose and buttoned his own jacket and walked toward him with the photographs in his hand, slowly, like a man approaching a horse.
Pratt was very good. He took Remy through the fourteen photographs one by one, in his warm cello voice, the twentieth day, the twenty-second, the twenty-third, until the sheer accumulation of them, the same booth, the same two heads bent eighteen inches apart, began to feel to the room like a confession. Remy agreed to everything. Yes, that's me. Yes, that's her. Yes, that's the booth. It rained a lot in September.