After she sat, she waited for the collective sound of everyone else doing the same thing to subside, and then called the court to order.
Every day, when the courtroom full of people rose and sat based on her presence, Ruth had the same thought: If only I’d had this much sway with my four children when they were growing up.
She nodded at the occupants seated at the plaintiff’s table, then scanned the courtroom for her granddaughter Jenna. Ruth found her sitting next to Ruth’s nearly ninety-year-old mother-in-law, Shirley, who had insisted on chaperoning her great-granddaughter’s field trip—further proving her theory that the Appelbaum women were forces of nature.
There was something about Jenna’s big blue eyes solemnly staring at Ruth that struck her. Those eyes had looked at Ruth for seventeen years, yet today’s expression evoked a new gravitas.
Her grandmother was the judge.
The dichotomy pulled at Ruth as well.
She’d been both a bubbe and a judge since Jenna was born, but never at the same time in front of this girl.
Ruth cleared her throat and looked down at her case files. Allocations of inheritances, one guardianship petition, one adoption. A few other things but, all in all, an easy docket. Ruth was relieved. She’d heard the scuttlebutt that she was called Hardass Appelbaum behind her back. But today she would give them no reason to whisper that in the halls, where her great-granddaughter might overhear, might feel bad about her grandmother being called names.
Truth was, Ruth never minded the nickname and secretly considered it a badge of honor after all she’d seen and done.
Though Ruth never saw Carrie Blum again, and rarely thought about her, she knew her time with that long-ago friend had burrowed under her skin, had become a breathing part of her and driven her actions of the last four decades. Memories of Carrie had slowly faded in Ruth’s mind, replaced with kids and work and years, but Carrie was always there, residing in the empty space where the little piece of her soul had been pinched out that day. Like an ache she learned to live with and ignore.
The field-trip morning passed without incident. Jenna smiled at every ruling:
Money for tutors.
Money for summer camp.
Guardianship granted.
A foster son welcomed into a forever family.
Sometimes Ruth missed the grittier work of her young-lawyer life. She’d helped establish Philadelphia Legal Assistance—a band of non-lawyer volunteers who helped people with family court cases wade through their custody forms, mental health assessments, and the gathering of information about crimes against children. Irene volunteered for the group until she divorced Stephen and moved to Cherry Hill. The last Ruth heard, Irene had married a doctor and had another baby.
Jenna and her classmates were so young, had so much of their lives ahead of them. She had picketed against the war in Iraq and marched on Washington with her mother. And she had wanted to be a lawyer since she understood that the same bubbe who crocheted ponchos for her dolls also made rules for other people—total strangers—to follow.
“And they have to follow everything Bubbe says?” Jenna had asked her mother a month ago, thinking Ruth had fibbed to her.
“They’ll go to jail if they don’t,” Ruth’s daughter, Trudy, replied.
Ruth chuckled inwardly, remembering that her daughter had said that. Having a mother for a judge hadn’t impressed a teenage Trudy, who wanted nothing to do with law—or with her father’s accounting business. Ruth was okay with Trudy’s choices because they were hers—besides, a dentist daughter was no slouch.
When court recessed for lunch, the class came to Ruth’s chambers so they could see what a judge’s chambers were like. The moment they entered, hands waggled in the air.
“We have some questions, Your Honor,” the teacher said. “If that’s okay.”
“Of course.” Ruth pointed to a plain-looking girl in the back, standing apart from Jenna and her perky friends.
“What year did you become a lawyer?” she asked.
Ruth smiled. Facts. She liked facts. “I passed the bar in 1963.” She winked at Shirley, who had been quiet in the corner, but had an unmistakable glow of familial pride emanating from her.
“According to the internet, you focused your career on helping families.”
They’d researched Ruth on the internet. She must remember to ask one of her grandchildren what they’d found. Ruth’s facts were hardly secrets, but she never checked them herself. “That’s true.”
“Why?” the girl asked. “Why become that kind of lawyer?”
Jenna turned to her and snapped, “Because she wanted to help people, of course.” Ruth’s granddaughter huffed and rolled her eyes as if it were absurd to question a judge’s motives. Asher had always said Jenna had Ruth’s chutzpah, her determination. She also had Ruth’s stubbornness.
“That’s true,” Ruth said. “And it was more acceptable for women lawyers back in the day.” This was another fact, although what she had learned about Shirley and Carrie had led Ruth definitively down the path of family law. She decided not to share the specifics. Not yet. Her lifetime of doing good for others could never possibly compensate for the women and children that society had failed to protect, and some days, she just didn’t want to think of that.
Jenna and her class were about to head back to school, yet something still nagged at Ruth. She wondered how many of her granddaughter’s classmates had already experienced some form of abuse in their own families. She wondered if they knew there were people who would listen to them.
If they knew the abuse was not their fault.
Ruth wondered if things had really changed enough, if all women and children felt safe enough to expose the secrets in their family when those secrets jeopardized their health. Their future.
She looked at the children in front of her. Was there anyone in that class who needed to know they could reach out and get help? She would ask Jenna later if their teacher gave the class a list of resources for children in danger.
After the students cleared out, Ruth still had an hour before court resumed. Enough time to run a small errand. She bought a bouquet of flowers at the corner market and walked two blocks to The Peabody, the poshest condos in the area.
Ruth pushed the black button outside the door. Buzz.
“Hello?”
“It’s Ruth.” A second buzz allowed her to open the door, sign in at the front desk, then head to the elevator. When it opened on the top floor, Ruth patted her hair, exhaled, and stepped into Lillian’s foyer.
Ruth often wondered whether Lillian missed the big house and yard she once had, but with Sunny passed away, her daughter Pammie living with her own family, and Penny living with her girlfriend in New York, it had been a good while since Lillian had decided that a luxury condo was a more manageable way to retire—especially now that Peter was undergoing chemotherapy.
“To what do we owe this honor, Your Honor?” Ruth was surprised to hear Harriet’s voice and to see that she was visiting too, decked out in pink-and-green golf gear. If it hadn’t been a workday for Ruth, Harriet would have probably handed her a screwdriver and put her to work.
But Ruth didn’t mind that Harriet only gave her a hug today; there were never enough of those to go around.