Part One: The Doorway

My sister said eleven words in my doorway on a Saturday morning in October and I have typed them out perhaps two hundred times since, because typing out what people said is what I do for a living.

“If she gets too upset, you decide.

You’ve always been the decider.”

She was standing on my front step in Berwyn at nine forty-one in the morning with a diaper bag over one shoulder and her car keys already in her hand, and she put my niece into my arms and said that, and then she said something about being back by two and got into a car.

I took it as a compliment.

I want that established at the very front, because everything I did wrong over the following eighteen months came out of the fact that at nine forty-one on the eleventh of October I heard a compliment.

My name is Alma Restrepo.

I am a certified shorthand reporter and I have been one for sixteen years.

I sit in depositions and hearings and I make a verbatim record of what is said.

That is the entire job and it sounds simple and it is not, and the reason it is not is that people do not speak in sentences.

They stop and restart and talk over each other and say um four hundred times an hour, and my job is to put down exactly what came out of their mouths and nothing else.

Not what they meant.

Not what they were getting at.

What they said.

I am good at it.

I have been called in on four appellate transcript disputes.

I am the person a firm asks for when the case is going to matter.