So at their eleventh conference in the clerk-magistrate's office of the saddeningly rundown Canterbury District Courthouse, on the morning of the third Saturday in August, she once more earnestly described to Merrion her trust in routine as a pathway to the virtuous life she believed he wanted her to lead. "I think that's how I can do, you know, like you said for me to do: to see if I can just stay out of trouble. For a year. So that other thing I did there, you can make it disappear. You know: like you said you would."
The courthouse, closed on Saturday, was quiet. "Not so much distraction," Merrion explained to Hilliard. "Man can actually hear himself think in there if he wants to, on a Saturday. Not so many fuckin' people always callin' you, the phone, bumpin' into you and stoppin' you, asking' things and sayin' things, getting' in your way.
"S why whenever me and Lennie decide we're gonna take on another one our projects stay outta trouble a year and we drop the charges on 'em I always see them Saturdays, when there's a chance I can think straight."
Mornings Mondays through Fridays the beige rubber-tiled corridors and stairwells, eight feet wide, were fetidly overcrowded. The ventilation system became overloaded by nine' fifteen each day. Too little air rebreathed too often by too many nervous, sweating people became warm and moist.
Describing his work-day environment at the shag end of a winter day to Hilliard in the dark-panelled grill room of the clubhouse at Grey Hills, the room lightly touched with the aroma of maple logs burning on the hearth, Merrion said: "When I first got into it, over Chicopee, I wasn't ready for it.