Chapter 48: Adequate Provocation
The offer came on the first of May, by email, at seventeen minutes past four.
Ruth printed it and put it on the table between us on the Monday and said nothing while I read it.
It is one and a half pages.
The state will move to reduce the charge from assault in the second degree, a felony, to assault in the third degree, a misdemeanour.
The defendant will plead guilty to the reduced charge.
Recommended sentence: no period of incarceration.
Two years probation. Supervision fee, thirty dollars a month.
Completion of a twenty-six week course. The document calls it anger management.
Restitution in the sum of four thousand one hundred and eighty dollars, being the complainant's uninsured medical costs.
Continuation of the order of protection for five years.
That is the whole of it, in terms of what happens to me. Nothing happens to me.
I would walk out of that building on the eleventh of May and go to work that night.
Then there is the last paragraph, which is why we are here.
The defendant will provide a written factual basis, to be read aloud by the defendant in open court, in the following terms.
And then it is set out in quotation marks. Four sentences, prepared by somebody in an office.
On the twenty-fifth of December I intentionally caused physical injury to Damon Ashford.
He was unarmed.
He did not strike me, and I was not in fear for my safety.
I acted without adequate provocation.
Ruth let me read it three times before she said anything.
Then she gave me the arithmetic, because she always gives me the arithmetic.
If I take it: a misdemeanour conviction for assault. My second.
A second assault conviction closes every door I have ever been any good behind. Care work. Schools. Hospitals. Permanently.
And if anybody ever puts a hand on me again, for the rest of my life, I am a woman with two.
If I refuse it: trial on the eleventh. Four days, maybe five.
Exposure on conviction is two to seven years. Ruth says a first custodial term for a woman with a completed probation from twelve years ago is likelier to be two.
Two years is two years.
I asked her for a number. I had to ask twice.
“Four in ten. A little better with Milena. Not five.”
“Four in ten to win?”
“Four in ten to walk out.”
Then she said the thing she had decided in advance to say once and not repeat.
“I can't tell you to take it and I can't tell you to refuse it. It is the only decision in this entire case that is actually yours.”
That knocked something loose and I had to sit still for a moment.
In three years, nobody in that family ever gave me a decision.
I asked her what she would want if it were her.
She said, “It isn't.”
The offer expires at nine in the morning on the eighth. Seven days.
I want to write down what those four sentences are, because the arithmetic is not the problem.
The first is true. I meant to put him on the floor and I did it correctly.
The second is true. He was unarmed. He is twenty-nine, in a dinner jacket, holding a fistful of my dress.
The third is true, and it is the one that keeps me awake. He did not strike me and I was not in fear.
I have never been in fear in a room with Damon Ashford. That is the whole tragedy of it, and it will not fit inside a courtroom.
It is the fourth one.
I acted without adequate provocation.
To be allowed to keep my life, I have to stand in a public room and say out loud that there was nothing in it.
That being told to serve dinner on my knees in front of twenty-two people was nothing.
That twelve times on an oak floor across three years was nothing.
That a woman paid three thousand and sixty-four dollars, five months before my wedding, to establish which weakness a rule could be built around. Nothing.
They are not asking me to lie about the throw. The throw is accurate in all four sentences.
They are asking me to say the three years were nothing, in my own voice, on a record, permanently.
That is the same transaction as the floor.
It costs nothing physically. It leaves no mark. Nobody is hurt. It takes about eleven seconds.
And afterwards everything is calm again, and everybody can eat.
Ruth said, “You have until nine o'clock on the eighth.”
I said, “All right.”
Then I put the page down on the table and put both hands flat on my thighs, which is where they go, and I went to work, and I did one hundred and forty-one picks an hour, and I did not drop one single thing.