and Nisqually and Lake Cle Elum and Chenuis Falls and Horse Heaven and the Yakima Valley. Jennifer learned to climb on Mount Rainier and to ski at Timberline with her father.
Her father always had time for her, while her mother, beautiful and restless, was mysteriously busy and seldom at home. Jennifer adored her father. Abner Parker was a mixture of English and Irish and Scottish blood. He was of medium height, with black hair and green-blue eyes. He was a compassionate man with a deep-rooted sense of justice. He was not interested in money, he was interested in people. He would sit and talk to Jennifer by the hour, telling her about the cases he was handling and the problems of the people who came into his unpretentious little office, and it did not occur to Jennifer until years later that he talked to her because he had no one else with whom to share things.
After school Jennifer would hurry over to the courthouse to watch her father at work. If court was not in session she would hang around his office, listening to him discuss his cases and his clients. They never talked about her going to law school; it was simply taken for granted.
When Jennifer was fifteen she began spending her summers working for her father. At an age when other girls were dating boys and going steady, Jennifer was absorbed in lawsuits and wills.
Boys were interested in her, but she seldom went out. When her father would ask her why, she would reply, ‘They’re all so young, Papa.’ She knew that one day she would marry a lawyer like her father.
On Jennifer’s sixteenth birthday, her mother left town with the eighteen-year-old son of their next-door neighbor, and Jennifer’s father quietly died. It took seven years for his heart to stop beating, but he was dead from the moment he heard the news about his wife. The whole town knew and was sympathetic, and that, of course, made it worse, for Abner Parker was a proud man. That was when he began to drink. Jennifer did everything she could to comfort him but it was no use, and nothing was ever the same again.
The next year, when it came time to go to college, Jennifer wanted to stay home with her father, but he would not hear of it.
‘We’re going into partnership, Jennie,’ he told her. ‘You hurry up and get that law degree.’
When she was graduated she enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle to study law. During the first year of school, while Jennifer’s classmates were flailing about in an impenetrable swamp of contracts, torts, property, civil procedure and criminal law, Jennifer felt as though she had come home. She moved into the university dormitory and got a job at the Law Library.
Jennifer loved Seattle. On Sundays, she and an Indian student named Ammini Williams and a big, rawboned Irish girl named Josephine Collins would go rowing on Green Lake in the heart of the city, or attend the Gold Cup races on Lake Washington and watch the brightly colored hydroplanes flashing by.
There were great jazz clubs in Seattle, and Jennifer’s favorite was Peter’s Poop Deck, where they had crates with slabs of wood on top instead of tables.
Afternoons, Jennifer, Ammini and Josephine would meet at The Hasty Tasty, a hangout where they had the best cottage-fried potatoes in the world.
There were two boys who pursued Jennifer: a young, attractive medical student named Noah Larkin and a law student named Ben Munro; and from time to time Jennifer would go out on dates with them, but she was far too busy to think about a serious romance.
The seasons were crisp and wet and windy and it seemed to rain all the time. Jennifer wore a green-and-blue-plaid lumber jacket that caught the raindrops in its shaggy wool and made her eyes flash like emeralds. She walked through the rain, lost in her own secret thoughts, never knowing that all those she passed would file away the memory.
In spring the girls blossomed out in their bright cotton dresses. There were six fraternities in a row at the university, and the fraternity brothers would gather on the lawn and watch the girls go by, but there was something about Jennifer that made them feel unexpectedly shy. There was a special quality about her that was difficult for them to define, a feeling that she had already attained something for which they were still searching.
Every summer Jennifer went home to visit her father. He had changed so much. He was never drunk, but neither was he ever sober. He had retreated into an emotional fortress where nothing could touch him again.
He died when Jennifer was in her last term at law school. The town remembered, and there were almost a hundred people at Abner Parker’s funeral, people he had helped and advised and befriended over the years. Jennifer did her grieving in private. She had lost more than a father. She had lost a teacher and a mentor.
After the funeral Jennifer returned to Seattle to finish school. Her father had left her less than a thousand dollars and she had to make a decision about what to do with her life. She knew that she could not return to Kelso to practice law, for there she would always be the little girl whose mother had run off with a teenager.
Because of her high scholastic average, Jennifer had interviews with a dozen top law firms around the country, and received several offers.
Warren Oakes, her criminal law professor, told her: ‘That’s a real tribute, young lady. It’s very difficult for a woman to get into a good law firm.’
Jennifer’s dilemma was that she no longer had a home or roots. She was not certain where she wanted to live.
Shortly before graduation Jennifer’s problem was solved for her. Professor Oakes asked her to see him after class.
‘I have a letter from the District Attorney’s office in Manhattan, asking me to recommend my brightest graduate for his staff. Interested?’
New York. ‘Yes, sir.’ Jennifer was so stunned that the answer just popped out.
She flew to New York to take the bar examination, and returned to Kelso to close her father’s law office. It was a bittersweet experience, filled with memories of the past and it seemed to Jennifer that she had grown up in that office.
She got a job as an assistant in the law library of the university to tide her over until she heard whether she had passed the New York bar examination.
‘It’s one of the toughest in the country,’ Professor Oakes warned her.
But Jennifer knew.
She received her notice that she had passed and an offer from the New York District Attorney’s office on the same day.
One week later, Jennifer was on her way east.
She found a tiny apartment (Spc W/U fpl gd loc nds sm wk, the ad said) on lower Third Avenue, with a fake fireplace in a steep fourth-floor walk-up. The exercise will do me good, Jennifer told herself. There were no mountains to climb in Manhattan, no rapids to ride. The apartment consisted of a small living room with a couch that turned into a lumpy bed, and a tiny bathroom with a window that someone long ago had painted over with black paint, sealing it shut. The furniture looked like something that could have been donated by the Salvation Army. Oh, well, I won’t be living in this place long, Jennifer thought. This is just temporary until I prove myself as a lawyer.
That had been the dream. The reality was that she had been in New York less than seventy-two hours, had been thrown off the District Attorney’s
