“Sure you do. Besides, it’s not theirs. Money belongs to whoever has it. Don’t you think that should be you?”
“They can stick it up their ass.”
“You need it, Nora. These girls are going to need, well, many things. Three kids on a single mother’s salary would be hard no matter where you lived, but—”
“What’s wrong with here?”
“Not a lot of job prospects.”
“And whose fault is that?” said Nora.
“Belsum’s! That’s what I keep telling you.”
“So you’re doing this to make up for my dead husband, my wronged children, and my poisoned town?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. Nothing can make up for that. No one’s talking ‘making up for.’ I’m talking money.”
“As compensation?”
“To meet your significant, egregious needs. Significant, egregious needs for which they are at fault.”
“And you get a cut?”
“If we win, yes, I would get a cut.”
“For your pain and suffering?”
He shrugged. “This is my job, Nora. You get paid for yours, don’t you?”
“This is why people are slamming the door in your face, Russell.”
“Why?”
She laughed at his earnest confusion, real laughter. “It sounds an awful lot like the deal we started with.”
“The deal you…？”
“The one we’re still getting fucked by.”
“How? I’m on your side! I’m making you money.”
“So was Belsum.”
“No they weren’t. Belsum was never on anyone’s side but Belsum’s.”
“They pitched us exactly what you’re selling. We’d all be rich. Sure, they’d make money too, of course, but that just made it win-win. Without them we’d get nothing. With them, there’d be jobs, growth, opportunity. There’d be infrastructure improvement, increased services, a bolstered local economy.”
“That’s completely different.”
“How?”
“They’re a giant corporation. Of course they don’t have your interests at heart.” He looked at her, considered. “Okay. It is about the money, but not the way you think. If we fought, if we won, you’d make some, and your neighbors would make some, and my firm would make some, enough to continue to do this kind of work. It wouldn’t make up for what’s happened to you, but it would make things easier.” Maybe he took her hand while he said it. Maybe their eyes met and sparked. “But none of that’s the reason to do it. The reason to do it is to prevent it from happening ever again. And the only way to do that is to punish them severely enough for what they did. And the only way to do that is to make them pay. Literally.”
She smiled then. “You should have led with that.”
“Prevention?”
“Revenge.”
He laughed. But then he was serious. “It’s the only thing that works. Legislation doesn’t. Corporations like Belsum just ignore it, knowing enforcement is years away, if ever, or they buy politicians and, with them, favorable policy. Citizen pressure doesn’t work. These issues are impossibly complicated, way too complex for the public to understand, and besides, Belsum can spin it and sound bite it into anything they like. Public shaming doesn’t even do it. People’s memories are too short. Corporations just wait for everyone to get over it, and we do, quickly. What works, the only thing that works, is simple math. It has to cost them more to ruin your life than it costs them not to. That is what we have to do.”
“How?” Nora said simply.
“Well, first you say yes to letting me help,” said Russell E. Russo. “And then we get to work.”
Around her days at the clinic, they did get to work. Many of the people who said no to Russell said yes to Nora. Together, they held meetings at the then-library. First, people came to air grievances.
“‘They killed my husband’ is not a grievance,” Nora objected. “‘I have only one leg now’ is not a complaint for the company comment box.”
“First things first,” said Russell. “People need to talk, be heard. They’ve been ignored long enough.”
They were long, weepy meetings, half the town, more, filling all the chairs in the Reference and Research section then sitting on the tables, packing in hip to hip, then standing along the encyclopedia shelves at the back of the room, boots tracking ice and mud into the carpet, everyone sweating beneath their winter coats because it was over-warm in there with all the people, all their rage. Nora stood at the podium and called on her friends and neighbors and even the ones she’d never liked much, for everyone who showed up was an ally, and everyone who showed up deserved to be heard, and everyone who showed up had a story that would help their cause. Russell sat beside her in a folding chair, hands between his knees, head bowed, concentrating.