Impact Read Free Page B

looked down where everyone was gathered around my parents. Mrs. Mercer looked at Mr. Mercer. She shook her head. He said something to her, but she shook her head again and went back into the house. After a few minutes, he followed her inside. Everybody seemed to relax again.
    A month later, a For Sale sign went up on the Mercers’ front lawn. By the end of the summer, they were gone.

Chapter Five
    â€œIt has been so hard,” my father says. He finishes the page he has been reading and shuffles it to the bottom of the small pile of sheets he is holding. I can’t believe he has written so much. My father works on an assembly line. He reads the newspaper, mainly the sports page, but I have never seen him read a book. I have never seen him write anything but a check. “We have been here for every single day of this trial. We have heard everything that was said.”
    The trial started in January, nearly fifteen months after Mark was killed. In that time, my father stopped drinking, started again and then stopped again. By the first day of the trial, he had been sober for four straight months.
    My mother stayed on antidepressants, but she didn’t stay in bed. She got up and found another job at another store, a 24-hour grocery store this time. My aunt moved back to her own place.
    All my friends graduated the spring before the trial started. I got a part-time job that fall and started taking classes at night to get my high school diploma. The plan was that I should be able to graduate by the Christmas after the trial.
    My father arranged to work permanent nights at the plant so that he could attend the trial every day. My mother also worked it out so that if she was scheduled to work during the week, it would either be in the evening or at night. She didn’t want to miss a single day either.
    I tried to get my boss to scale my time back to Friday nights and Saturdays, but hesaid he needed me to work during the week. So I quit and got another job delivering pizza at night instead. We were all tired, but we all showed up every single day.
    A real trial isn’t like a trial on tv or in the movies. When you see a trial on tv, it seems like people are up there testifying for five or ten minutes at the most. It also seems like the lawyers and the prosecutors are really smooth.
    But in real life, it’s not like that. In real life, people can be up there testifying for an hour or two hours or even longer. Some of the lawyers stumble and fumble and say
um
and
er
. And there are plenty of times when they’re arguing over whether they can even show a certain piece of evidence or ask certain questions, so sometimes court gets adjourned early, and sometimes it takes a day or two for the judge to decide about whatever the lawyers are arguing about. So sometimes it’s boring or frustrating or just seems like a big waste of time.
    They had a pathologist up there who talked about how Mark died. He’d beenkicked and beaten with fists and with a piece of pipe. There were bruises and cuts all over his body, plus some broken ribs. She said what killed him, though, was having his head kicked in with some steel-toed boots. My mother cried quietly when she heard that. My father just stared straight ahead.
    They had the pizza guy up. The prosecutor took him through everything he had seen and done, and asked him about what Mark had said, which was just the one word, the name
Tony
.
    Then the defense lawyers got into it. There were four of them, one for each defendant. They grilled the pizza guy like you wouldn’t believe. First they wanted to know what the pizza guy had seen. He described again hearing a sound and calling out to see if everything was okay, and then going into the parking lot and seeing Mark lying there and three or four guys running away.
    The lawyers wanted to know if the pizza guy had seen the three or four guys doing anything except running away. The pizza guy said he hadn’t.
    The