Glass House by Patrick Reinken

the
trees. She saw him walk into the lights of his car but then
disappear behind the black walnut at the corner of her lot.
    That one was planted when Ben was born.
She’d heard the story a hundred times. There was a call from the
hospital, it was a boy, and Ben’s grandfather – always no more
than a second fiddle in the house – went out right away and
bought a tree for the corner. Planted it that day, watered it every
other till he was gone.
    It was thirty-eight now, big and thick
enough to block part of the street from her view.
    Tapping a finger on the unopened transcript
on her lap, the Johnnie Walker in her other hand, Megan kept
thinking a few things, in a rotation that would have been alarming
if she hadn’t been too consumed by her work, and already slightly
tipsy by the booze, to notice it.
    A week for a deposition. A month for a
trial. Thirty-eight years for that tree.
    It hardly seemed fair.

Book
II
    Marketing

Chapter 10
    Deposition Preparation
    These are the ground rules for a deposition.
Almost invariably, they are stated up front, as though they’re
sacred, as much a mandated part of the attorney’s introduction as
his or her name. And they rarely vary.
    You answer out loud. You do not shake your
head when you mean to say no, and you do not nod your head when you
mean to say yes. The court reporter will be taking your testimony
down by transcription, and it’s hard to catch nods and shakes and
show what they may have meant to somebody who’s reading the words
later.
    You tell the truth. The oath you’re given is
the same as the oath you get in a courtroom. It carries the same
obligations. It carries the same penalties if you don’t tell the
truth.
    If you don’t understand a question, you
should ask to have it repeated or rephrased. You have a right to
understand the questions you’re being asked. But if you don’t ask
to have a question repeated or rephrased, you’ll be held to have
understood the question as asked.
    Those are the ground rules.
    “You understand them?” Megan said.
    She sat on one side of the table, Jeremy
Waldoch on the other. She had a stack of paper at her elbow –
documents produced in the case, some excerpts of depositions, what
have you. They were facedown so Waldoch couldn’t see what would be
coming and work to anticipate questions she might ask.
    The conference room they were in was small,
and the table that separated them was designed to seat no more than
six people. Megan had arranged to have the air conditioning shut
off in the room. It wasn’t hot, but the closed-off space was
already stuffy, and it was going to get worse.
    With a couple of people in a small room for
two or three hours, it starts to feel like too much time in the
lockers at the local gym. Skin gets clammy, temples and armpits a
little damp, clothes a bit too clingy. With six, it gets
overwhelming.
    Megan wanted Waldoch uncomfortable.
Depositions were stressful enough that discomfort was virtually
unavoidable, but some attorneys went further than that – they
intentionally set up in small rooms, they called in videographers
with hot lights that were strung above the witness, they made sure
that the people at the table were as close to each other as
possible. All that, in an effort to make a witness want to spill
everything and get it done with.
    “I understand the rules,” Waldoch
answered.
    “Now understand mine.”
    “We’ve been over that before.” And they had.
Waldoch was deposed in the first case Megan handled for him. She
went on anyway.
    “You listen to the question, Jeremy,” she
said. “You listen to each question, and you listen to it
carefully. You wait before you answer, at least two or three
seconds. That’ll give you time –”
    “Time to form my answer and time for you to
object, yes,” Waldoch interrupted in his precise manner.
    “My way,” Megan responded. “You agreed to do
it the way I say, and if I want to go through this again to remind
you how to