A Simple Distance by K. E. Silva

and your mother finish us off.
    Okay, Granny. If you have something to say to me, say it. I’m not sure what we’re talking about. I lied, waited to see if she had the courage to really air our laundry.
    And she did. Granny, tough as nails. Oh, you know exactly what I’m talking about. That Hill girl came to George’s funeral on purpose. Just to rub your dirty business in our noses. But I tell you, I will not have it. You and your mummy can stay in California. This family does not need the likes of you.
    Death definitely brings out the worst in people. Yet, I must admit, I have never known anyone in my family, ever, to rise in a crisis. All of us sink, deep down, into our most primitive ways of being, ways that normally we see fit to hide.
    What do you mean? What does my mom have to do with this? What did she ever do to you? You can’t take Godwyn from her.
    You take me for a fool, don’t you. I give that house to her and it goes straight to you as soon as she’s gone. Not a chance. Not a chance, I tell you.
    That was why my mom needed the plane ticket. That was why she packed all her belongings, tried first for the safety of Auntie Lil in England. That was why she’d slept outside on a stranger’s porch; told me that morning she had no family left. It was all because of me. And Susan.
    I slammed down the phone. Turned to my mother, collapsed and coughing, amidst her bags on the futon, bloodred eyes streaming tears.
    * * *
    I couldn’t leave her alone. Not like that. But Cynthia’s hearing was in two days and I had to prepare. I had to get back to the office.
    I’ve always had this idea in my head I can’t seem to shake: that I’m too weak to be an attorney; that if tested, my grit would prove unable to withstand the first strong wind, and I’d crumble or wilt, like my mother after the divorce. I’d run to my bed at the first knock of adversity, like she always did when her men left her. Indeed, those days I did sleep a lot.
    But the thing that has always allowed me, ever since law school, to argue a point in public, has been this simple truth: As an advocate, the words coming out of my mouth are, by definition, not for me—they are for someone less able to articulate them.
    When I was a kid in elementary school, every year on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, we went to the library to be read to about the 1960s, his work, his struggles, his assassination. I remember thinking, the only little brown head in the library, that I sure was glad Dr. King had won that fight before I was old enough to know a world of segregation, of Jim Crow.
    I mouthed the words to those songs, feeling weak and tiny, sure that, if tested, I’d prove unable to fight for myself, much less for my whole race. I was always glad, on those days, when our teachers assured us the civil rights movement had already been won and we no longer had to worry about such injustice.
    * * *
    There are two types of wrong in law. There are actions that are wrong because they are inherently bad, and there are actions that are wrong simply because they are somehow inconvenient. It is the difference between killing someone and making a right-hand turn against a red light in the wrong state.
    We would move to dismiss at the outset of the hearing on the ground that, in light of new law, Linda was no longer Sadie’s adoptive parent and, because of that, her complaint no longer stated a legal wrong. She had no rights regarding Sadie. No recourse in this forum.
    But we still needed a backup plan. Just in case. There was always a chance things wouldn’t go as anticipated. All it would take to make parentage an issue, ripe for argument, would be for the judge to allow both sides to speak. There’d be a tug of war: between the cases that helped Cynthia, saying that a child belongs only to the one who bore her; and the cases that helped Linda, saying parents are those who act like them.
    Granted, Linda’s line of cases lacked Cynthia’s strength of