Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult Page A

reasons I loved Oliver, but first and foremost was that my mother couldn’t stand him.
He’s a mess
, she said every time she came to visit.
He’s destructive. Maggie
, she said,
if you got rid of him, you could find Someone.
    Someone
was a doctor, like the anesthesiologist from Dartmouth-Hitchcock they’d set me up with once, who asked me if I thought laws against downloading child porn were an infringement on civil rights. Or the son of the cantor, who actually had been in a monogamous gay relationship for five years but hadn’t told his parents yet.
Someone
was the younger partner in the accounting firm that did my father’s taxes, who asked me on our first and only date if I’d always been a
big
girl.
    On the other hand, Oliver knew just what I needed, and when I needed it. Which is why, the minute I stepped on the scale that morning, he hopped out from underneath the bed, where he was diligently severing the cord of my alarm clock with his teeth, and settled himself squarely on top of my feet so that I couldn’t see the digital readout.
    “Nicely done,” I said, stepping off, trying not to notice the numbers that flashed red before they disappeared. Surely the reason there was a seven in there was because Oliver had been on the scale, too. Besides, if I were going to be writing a formal complaint about any of this, I’d have said that (a) size fourteen isn’t really all that big, (b) a size fourteen here was a size sixteenin London, so in a way I was thinner than I’d be if I had been born British, and (c) weight didn’t really matter, as long as you were healthy.
    All right, so maybe I didn’t exercise all that much either. But I would, one day, or so I told my mother the fitness queen, as soon as all the people on whose behalf I worked tirelessly were absolutely, unequivocally rescued. I told her (and anyone else who’d listen) that the whole reason the ACLU existed was to help people take a stand. Unfortunately, the only stands my mother recognized were pigeon pose, warrior two, and all the other staples of yoga.
    I pulled on my jeans, the ones that I admittedly didn’t wash very often because the dryer shrank them just enough that I had to suffer half a day before the denim stretched to the point of comfort again. I picked a sweater that didn’t show my bra roll and then turned to Oliver. “What do you think?”
    He lowered his left ear, which translated to, “Why do you even care, since you’re taking it all off to put on a spa robe?”
    As usual, he was right. It’s a little hard to hide your flaws when you’re wearing, well, nothing.
    He followed me into the kitchen, where I poured us both bowls of rabbit food (his literal, mine Special K). Then he hopped off to the litter box beside his cage, where he’d spend the day sleeping.
    I’d named my rabbit after Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the famous Supreme Court Justice known as the Great Dissenter. He once said, “Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being tripped over.” So did rabbits. And my clients, for that matter.
    “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” I warned Oliver. “That includes chewing the legs of the kitchen stools.”
    I grabbed my keys and headed out to my Prius. I had used nearly all my savings last year on the hybrid—to be honest, I didn’t understand why car manufacturers charged a premium if you were a buyer with a modicum of social conscience. It didn’t have all-wheel drive, which was a real pain in the neck during a New Hampshire winter, but I figured that saving the ozone layer was worth sliding off the road occasionally.
    My parents had moved to Lynley—a town twenty-six miles east of Concord—seven years ago when my father took over as rabbi at Temple Beth Or. The catch was that there
was
no Temple Beth Or: his reform congregation held Friday night services in the cafeteria of the middle school, because the original temple had burned to the ground. The expectation had been to raise