The Waiting Room

by Kathleen Ford

About the Author: Kathleen Ford has published in Yankee, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, The Virginia Quarterly, The Southern Review , The North American Review, Sewanee, Antioch and New Rivers Press. Two of her stories have won PEN awards for Syndicated Fiction. “Man on the Run,” a story first published in The New England Review, was included in Best American Mystery Stories 2012. Her first novel was published by St. Martin’s Press.

Excerpt

The clerk with a big Adam’s apple led me to the waiting room. When he nodded to the sofa I fell onto it and pulled my purse into my lap.

Adam’s Apple gave a quick sniff. “As I already told you, Mrs. Malloy,” he said through razor thin lips, “the judge may be able to see you later today, but I can’t promise anything.”

“Thank you very kindly,” I said. Old cigar smoke was burning my throat but I stifled a cough until Adam’s Apple strutted back to his office.

A three-foot high railing—identical to the altar rail in Saint Michael’s Church—divided the waiting room in two. If there’d been a cushion on the floor I might have knelt down on it to pray. At the end of the room were two doors. A plain wooden door was on my side of the room and a glass-topped door with gold lettering was on the other side. The lettering said, “The Honorable Raymond Wordell.”

I knew I wouldn’t have gotten as far as the waiting room if my employer hadn’t written a letter of introduction, and Mrs. Patterson wouldn’t have written the letter at all if she hadn’t been in the same garden club as the judge’s sister. However it happened, I was now just twenty feet from the judge’s chambers, and nothing would stop me now.

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