A Very Quiet Lawyer
Nora Keane's office is on the second floor of a building in Randolph that used to be a feed store, and the staircase still smells, faintly, on humid days, like the bottom of a burlap sack. Her name on the door is painted in gold leaf that looks older than she is, which is because her father had the name painted, and Nora, when she took over the practice in 2014, had elected to leave the *M.* between the N and the K even though it was technically her father's middle initial, not hers, on the grounds that, and I am quoting her, *nobody cares and the paint is good.*
Terry had sent me to her. Terry had said, *Mags, I can handle the tax side. For the rest of it you need a Vermont attorney, and specifically you need Nora Keane, and specifically because Nora Keane is not impressed by any of this.*
The not-being-impressed was, I discovered within four minutes of sitting down in Nora's office, the operative quality. Nora was fifty-six. Nora had gone to law school at the University of Vermont and had come home. Nora did wills, real estate closings, small-business formation, the occasional uncontested divorce, and, once every seven years or so, a piece of civil litigation that she took on, she told me, for the specific pleasure of ruining a weekend for a big-firm lawyer from Boston. Nora's office had, on the wall behind her desk, a framed photograph of her father in a canoe and a framed