September 29, Tuesday
JUROR NUMBER eleven Yolanda Pruitt had a way of settling into a room that I'd started to notice more each week—not loud, not commanding attention, but somehow the room organized itself around her.
She sat five seats down in the box, spine straight, hands folded in her lap during testimony with the composed stillness of someone who'd spent two decades running a church office and had long since stopped being rattled by drama.
Today's witness was a forensic accountant working through another volume of shell-company records, numbers stacking on numbers until even my knitting rhythm started to falter.
I glanced over and caught Yolanda's eyes briefly closed, not asleep, just resting, the stillness of someone gathering herself rather than checking out.
When they opened again a moment later, she caught me looking and gave a small, unbothered smile, entirely unembarrassed.
At the noon recess, I found myself beside her at the coffee station. The good creamer had already been claimed by others, leaving us both stuck with the powdered kind.
"I was praying," she said, before I could ask, answering the question I hadn't voiced. "Not about the case, don't worry—just for patience. This part always runs long, and my mind wanders if I don't give it somewhere to land."
"That sounds nice, actually. Having somewhere for it to land."
"It's kept me upright more years than I can count.
" She stirred the powdered creamer into her cup, unhurried.
"I lost my husband young—car accident, our youngest was barely out of diapers—and I had four kids and a church full of people who all needed something from me at once.
Somewhere in there I figured out that if I didn't have someplace to set the weight down, even for five minutes, I wasn't going to make it through. "
"How old were you?"
"Twenty-nine. Same age as our Denise, if you can believe that. I look at her sometimes and think about how young twenty-nine actually is, though it certainly didn't feel that way at the time."
I thought about my own twenty-nine—Lily still a toddler, Warren traveling constantly for the dealership, exhausted but never once imagining I might have to do it entirely alone. "I don't know how you managed all of that by yourself."
"You don't manage it so much as you keep getting up the next morning," Yolanda said, with a small, wry laugh.
"Some days that's the whole plan. Get up.
Feed the children. Repeat." She glanced at me, something perceptive in it.
"You've got that look some mornings. The getting-up-anyway look. I recognize it."
I inhaled sharply at being seen so plainly, without having explained anything at all. "It's been a hard few weeks. My daughter's furious with me. Missed her birthday yesterday."
"That's a hard one." Yolanda didn't offer platitudes, didn't rush to fix it. "She'll remember, eventually, that you were somewhere important, doing something that mattered. Might take her a few years to get there, but she will."
"I hope so."
"In the meantime," she said, nodding toward my knitting bag, "you keep your hands busy and your mind where it needs to be, and you get up the next morning. That's the whole plan, remember."
I smiled, the phrase settling into me with more comfort than I expected from something so simple. As we walked back toward the box, I decided whatever came next, in the deliberation room or beyond it, Yolanda would be someone worth having nearby.