” Phil responded. I grabbed the phone and watched as the two men plodded through the house on their way to my private play-room. It was a sho...t call. I actually should have spent more time with the person on the other end, but my mind was other places, and it was becoming increasingly hard to concentrate on the conversation. After about five minutes, I hung up and raced up the stairs. By the time I got to the room, Phil was putting a DVD in and Angelo was still walking around. " No, there's not enough time," I begged."What's this for, then?" asked Pietre, glancing at my hand."I want to thank your dad for giving me a ton of food this morning. Pass it on, will you?" I suggested."Ah, my dad and I, we're not like this," Pietre explained. "Anyway, how much did he give you?" Two catering chests packed full, plus extras," I explained, giving both guys a squeeze. "He said it was leftovers that he'd have to throw away otherwise. Is he always that bad a planner?" No, I think. I turned to watch him go, but he was already lost in the growing fogthat always seemed to shroud the cemetery after the sunsets. He hadmade almost no sound in passing, and I could hear nothing but thecrickets singing as I stood listening for a moment. It was almost as ifhe had never even been there.Suppressing an instinctive shudder, I glanced down at the marker he hadbeen standing over. The large stone was engraved for a family plot. Thedate was not even a year old on the left side, but that. It’s a thirty-thousand-year-old injustice, give or take, but Hugo’s story gets me worked up anyway, just like the other injustices I read about in school—Dreyfus, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, McCarthy’s victims, on and on. That’s what I went into criminal law for, I remind myself. I’m even working out strategies in my mind for defending Hugo’s poor stutterer before I shake my­self out of it.And it took a caveman to show me!I do need to get back to the law. And I will. Hugo and Irving are.