Gray Mountain Read Online Free PDF

laughed, but it really wasn’t that funny. “I’ll think about it, Dad. Thanks.”
    “You’ll fit in, I promise. Forty hours a week, a nice office, nice people. It’ll sure beat the rat race in New York.”
    “But New York is home, Dad. Not D.C.”
    “Okay, okay. I’m not going to push. The offer is on the table.”
    “And I appreciate it.”
    A secretary tapped on the door and stuck her head in. “Your four o’clock meeting, sir.”
    Marshall frowned as he glanced at his watch to confirm the time. “I’ll be there in a moment,” he said and she disappeared. Samantha grabbed her purse and said, “I need to be going.”
    “No rush, dear. It can wait.”
    “I know you’re busy. I’ll see you tomorrow for lunch.”
    “We’ll have some fun. Say hello to Karen. I’d love to see her.”
    Not a chance. “Sure, Dad. See you tomorrow.”
    They hugged by the door and she hurried away.
    T he eighth rejection came from the Chesapeake Society in Baltimore, and the ninth came from an outfit fighting to save the redwoods in Northern California. Never, in her privileged life, had Samantha Kofer been rejected nine times in one day from any endeavor. Nor in a week, nor a month. She was not sure she could handle number ten.
    She was sipping decaf in the café at Kramerbooks near Dupont Circle, waiting and swapping e-mails with friends. Blythe still had a job but things were changing by the hour. She passed along the gossip that her firm, the world’s fourth largest, was also slaughteringassociates right and left, and that it too had cooked up the same furlough scheme to dump its brightest on as many broke and struggling nonprofits as possible. She wrote: “Must be 1000s out there knocking doors begging for work.”
    Samantha didn’t have the spine to admit she was zero for nine.
    Then number ten chimed in. It was a terse message from a Mattie Wyatt at Mountain Legal Aid Clinic in Brady, Virginia: “If you can talk right now call my cell,” and she gave her number. After nine straight stiff-arms, it felt like an invitation to the Inauguration.
    Samantha took a deep breath and another sip, glanced around to make sure she could not be heard, as if the other customers were concerned with her business, then punched the numbers of her cell phone.

4
    T he Mountain Legal Aid Clinic ran its low-budget operations from an abandoned hardware store on Main Street in Brady, Virginia, population twenty-two hundred and declining with each census. Brady was in southwest Virginia, Appalachia, the coal country. From the affluent D.C. suburbs of northern Virginia, Brady was about three hundred miles away in distance and a century in time.
    Mattie Wyatt had been the clinic’s executive director from the day she founded the organization twenty-six years earlier. She picked up her cell phone and gave her usual greeting: “Mattie Wyatt.”
    A somewhat timid voice on the other end said, “Yes, this is Samantha Kofer. I just got your e-mail.”
    “Thank you, Ms. Kofer. I got your inquiry this afternoon, along with some others. Looks like things are pretty tough at some of these big law firms.”
    “You could say that, yes.”
    “Well, we’ve never had an intern from one of the big New York firms, but we could always use some help around here. There’s no shortage of poor folk and their problems. You ever been to southwest Virginia?”
    Samantha had not. She had seen the world but had never ventured into Appalachia. “I’m afraid not,” she said as politely as possible.Mattie’s voice was friendly, her accent slightly twangy, and Samantha decided that her best manners were needed.
    “Well you’re in for a jolt,” Mattie said. “Look, Ms. Kofer, I’ve had three of you guys send e-mails today and we don’t have room for three rookies who are clueless, know what I mean? So the only way I know to pick one is to do interviews. Can you come down here for a look around? The other two said they would try. I think one is from your