Only Eleanor refused. She had called 14 law firms in the county. Three of them hung up the moment she said the name Hollister. Her own attorney, Margaret Whitfield, had taken the case for two months, and then the week before the hearing had quietly withdrawn, citing a conflict of interest.
Off the record, her hands had been shaking when she signed the paperwork. That left Eleanor alone, 78 years old, with one week to find a lawyer who wasn't afraid of Reginald Hollister. There wasn't one. So Ulisses did what he had done every time the world told his grandmother no.
He went to the kitchen table. He opened his laptop and he drafted a petition to the state supreme court requesting a limited special practice waiver permission to represent a single family member in a single case despite being too young to sit for the bar exam. He attached letters from Dean Beatrice Holloway and three professors at Harrington Law. He attached a simulated bar exam he had taken voluntarily on which he had scored higher than 95% of graduating law students in the state.
He filed the petition on a Tuesday. The court approved it on a Friday. It was the second such waiver in the history of the state. The local paper ran a small article.
Judge Harrison Wakefield read it over coffee. He clipped it. He laughed. The night before the hearing, Eleanor sat on the front porch in her good blue dress, watching the street lamps come on.
Ulisses came out and sat beside her. He had ironed the navy suit until the cuffs were sharp. The cuffs were still too big. “Baby,” she said, “you don't have to do this.” He took her hand.
“Grandma, this is Great-Granddaddy's house.” She looked at him for a long time. Then she went inside, came back out with a small wooden cross her father had carved during the war and pressed it into his palm. “You take this with you tomorrow.” He took it. The clock on the kitchen wall read four in the morning.
The suit was already pressed. Day one in the courtroom did not go better. Judge Wakefield mispronounced Ulisses's name three times in the first 20 minutes. The first time looked like an accident.
The second time he did it slower. The third time he smiled while he did it. He had read the petition. He had seen the name in print.