Small Great Things

Kennedy

WHEN I ARRIVE AT THE office, Ed Gourakis-one of my colleagues-is spouting off about the new hire. One of our junior public defenders left to have a baby and informed HR that she wasn’t returning. I knew that Harry, our boss, had been interviewing, but it isn’t until Ed corners me at my cubicle that I realize a decision’s been made.

“Did you meet him yet?” Ed asks.

“Meet who?”

“Howard. The newbie.”

Ed is the kind of guy who went into public defense because he could. In other words-he has a trust fund so large it doesn’t matter how shitty our salaries are. And yet, in spite of the fact that he’s grown up with every privilege possible, nothing is ever quite good enough. The Starbucks across the street serves coffee that’s too hot. There was an accident on I-95N that made him twenty minutes late. The vending machine at the courthouse stopped carrying Skittles.

“I literally walked in here four seconds ago. How could I have a chance to meet anyone?”

“Well, he’s clearly here to meet a diversity target. Just look for the puddles on the floor. This guy is so wet behind the ears he’s leaving a trail.”

“First, that metaphor didn’t work. No one drips from their ears. Second, so what if he’s young? I realize that it’s hard for someone of your advanced age to remember…but you were young once too.”

“There were,” Ed says, lowering his voice, “more deserving candidates.”

I rummage through the piles on my desk for the files I need. There is a stack of pink phone messages waiting for me that I patently ignore. “Sorry to hear your nephew wasn’t picked,” I murmur.

“Very funny, McQuarrie.”

“Look, Ed, I’ve got a job to do. I don’t have time for office gossip.” I lean toward my screen and pretend to be incredibly absorbed by my first email, which happens to be a solicitation from Nordstrom Rack.

Eventually Ed realizes I’m not going to engage with him anymore, and he stomps into the break room, where, no doubt, the coffee will not be up to par and we will be out of his favorite flavor of creamer. I close my eyes and lean back in my chair.

Suddenly I hear a rustle on the other side of my cubicle and a tall, slim young black man stands up. He is wearing a cheap suit with a bow tie, and hipster glasses. He is very clearly the new hire for this office, and he has been sitting there, all along, listening to Ed’s comments.

“Hashtag awkward,” he says. “I’m Howard, in case there’s any doubt in your mind.”

I stretch my face so far into a smile that I imagine the puppets Violet watches on Sesame Street, whose jaws can drop on a hinge when they are overcome by emotion. “Howard,” I repeat, jumping to my feet and immediately offering my hand to shake. “I’m Kennedy. It’s really nice to meet you.”

“Kennedy,” he says. “Like John F.?”

I get asked that all the time. “Or Robert!” I say, although Howard was actually right. I might prefer to be named for the politician who did so much for civil rights, but in reality, my mother just had a crush on his ill-fated brother and the Camelot mythology.

I will do whatever it takes to make this poor kid realize that at least one person in this office is glad he’s here. “So. Welcome!” I say brightly. “If you need anything, have any questions about the way we do things here-feel free to ask me.”

“Great. Thanks.”

“And maybe we can grab lunch?”

Howard nods. “I’d like that.”

“Well. I have to get to court.” I hesitate, and then address the elephant in the room. “Also, don’t listen to Ed. Not everyone around here thinks the way he does.” I smile at him. “For example, I think it’s pretty amazing that you’re giving back to your community.”

Howard smiles back at me. “Thanks, but…I grew up in Darien.”

Darien. One of the wealthiest towns in the state.

Then he sits down, invisible behind the partition that’s between us.

–

I HAVEN’T EVEN had my second cup of coffee yet and I’ve already hustled through far too much traffic and a tangle of reporters, leaving me to wonder what is going on in superior court in the courtroom where I’m not, since the only reason a TV crew might cover arraignments is to provide a sleep aid for insomniacs. So far we have gotten through three cases: a criminal violation of a restraining order with a defendant who did not speak English; a repeat offender with bleached hair and bags under her eyes who allegedly issued a bad check for twelve hundred dollars to buy a designer purse; and a man who was dumb enough to not just steal someone’s identity and start using the credit cards and bank account but actually pick someone named Cathy and not think he was going to be caught.

Then again, as I often tell myself, if my clients were all smarter, my job would be obsolete.

The way it works in New Haven Superior Court on arraignment day is that one of us from the PD’s office stands in for anyone who is brought before a judge and doesn’t have a lawyer but needs one. It’s like being trapped in a rotating door, and every time you step into the building, there’s a whole new décor and layout and you’re expected to know where you’re headed and how to navigate there. Most of the time I meet my new clients at the defense table, at which point I have the span of a heartbeat to assimilate the facts of their arrest and try to get them out on bail.

Did I mention I hate arraignment day? It basically requires me to be Perry Mason with ESP, and even if I do a stellar job and manage to get personal recognizance bail for a defendant who otherwise would be locked up pending trial, chances are pretty good that I will not be the attorney litigating his case. The juicy ones that I’d want to take to trial will either be plucked out of my grasp by someone with more seniority at the office or transfer to a private (read: paid) lawyer.

That is surely going to be the trajectory for the next defendant.

“Next: the State versus Joseph Dawes Hawkins the Third,” the clerk reads.

Joseph Dawes Hawkins is still so young that he has acne. He looks absolutely terrified, which is what a night in a jail will do to you when your experience with criminal behavior is limited to binge-watching The Wire. “Mr. Hawkins,” the judge asks, “will you please identify yourself for the record?”

“Um. Joe Hawkins,” the boy replies. His voice cracks.

“Where do you live?”

“One thirty-nine Grand Street, Westville.”

The clerk reads the charge: drug trafficking.

I’m going to guess, based on the kid’s expensive haircut and his wide-eyed response to the legal system, he was pushing something like Oxy, not meth or heroin. The judge enters an automatic plea of not guilty. “Joe, you’ve been charged with drug trafficking. Do you understand what that charge means?” The boy nods. “Do you have counsel present today?”

He glances over his shoulder at the gallery, goes a little paler, and then says, “No.”

“Would you like to speak to the public defender?”

“Yeah, Your Honor,” he says, and that’s my cue.

Privacy is limited to the so-called cone of silence at the defense table. “I’m Kennedy McQuarrie,” I say. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen. I’m a senior at Hopkins.”

The private school. Of course he is. “How long have you lived in Connecticut?”

“Since I was two?”

“Is that a question or an answer?” I ask.

“Answer,” he says, and he swallows. His Adam’s apple is the size of a monkey’s fist knot, which makes me think of sailing, which makes me think of Violet swearing.

“Are you working?”

He hesitates. “You mean besides selling the Oxy?”

“I didn’t hear that,” I reply immediately.

“Oh, I said-”

“I didn’t hear that.”

He glances up, nods. “Got it. No. No, I don’t work.”

“Who do you live with?”

“My parents.”

I am ticking off a checklist in my mind, peppering him with a barrage of questions. “Do your parents have the means to hire an attorney?” I ask finally.

He glances at my suit, which is from Target, and which has a stain on it from the milk that Violet upended in her cereal bowl this morning. “Yeah.”

“Shut up and let me do the talking,” I coach, and I turn to the bench. “Your Honor,” I say, “young Joseph here is only just eighteen and this is his first offense. He’s a senior in high school who lives with his mom and dad-a nursery school teacher and a bank president. His parents own their own home. We ask for Joseph to be released on his own recognizance.”

The judge turns to my counterpart in this dance, the prosecutor who stands at the mirror image of the defense table. Her name is Odette Lawton, and she is about as jolly as the death penalty. Where most prosecutors and public defenders recognize that we are flip sides of the same shitty-state-pay-grade coin and can leave the animosity in the courtroom and socialize outside it, Odette keeps to herself. “What is the State looking for, Counselor?”

She glances up. Her hair is cropped close to her head and her eyes are so dark you can’t see the pupils. She looks like she is well rested and has just had a facial; her makeup is flawless.

I stare down at my hands. The cuticles are bitten and either I have green finger paint underneath the nails or I am rotting from the inside out.

“This is a serious charge,” Odette says. “Not only was a prescription narcotic found on Mr. Hawkins’s person, but there was intent to sell. To turn him loose into the community would be a threat and a grievous mistake. The State requests that bail be set at ten thousand dollars with surety.”

“Bail is set at ten thousand dollars,” the judge repeats, and Joseph Dawes Hawkins III is lugged out of the courtroom by a bailiff.

Well, you can’t win ’em all. The good news here is that Joseph’s family can afford the bail-even if it means he will have to forfeit Christmas in Barbados. The better news is that I will never see Joseph Dawes Hawkins III again. His father may have wanted to teach him a lesson by not having the family attorney present from the get-go so Joey would have to sit in a cell overnight, but I’m sure it is only a matter of time before that same fancy lawyer calls my office and picks up Joey’s case.

“The State versus Ruth Jefferson,” I hear.

I glance up as a woman is led into the courtroom in chains, still wearing her nightgown, a scarf wrapped around her head. Her eyes scan the gallery wildly, and for the first time I realize that it’s more crowded than usual for Tuesday arraignments. Packed, even.

“Would you please identify yourself for the record?” the judge asks.

“Ruth Jefferson,” she says.

“Murderer,” a woman screams. There is a buzz in the crowd that swells into a roar. Just then Ruth flinches. I see her turn her face into her shoulder and I realize that she is wiping off the saliva that someone has spit on her from over the gallery rail.

The bailiffs are already hauling the guy off-a hulking brute I can see only from the rear. On his scalp is a tattooed swastika, twined with letters.

The judge calls for order. Ruth Jefferson stands tall and keeps looking around for someone-or something-that she can’t seem to find.

“Ruth Jefferson,” the clerk reads, “you are charged with count one, murder; count two, negligent homicide.”

I am so busy trying to figure out what the hell is going on here that I do not realize everyone is looking at me, and that this defendant has apparently told the judge that she needs a public defender.

Odette stands up. “This is a heinous criminal act involving a three-day-old infant, Your Honor. The defendant voiced her animosity and animus toward the parents of this child, and the State will show that she acted intentionally and deliberately, with malice aforethought, in reckless disregard of the newborn’s safety, and that in fact at her hands the baby suffered trauma that led to death.”

This woman killed a newborn? I’m running through scenarios in my head: Is she a nanny? Is this a shaken baby case? A SIDS death?

“This is crazy,” Ruth Jefferson explodes.

I elbow her gently. “This is not the time.”

“Let me talk to the judge,” she insists.

“No,” I tell her. “Let me talk to the judge for you.” I turn to the bench. “Your Honor, may we have a moment?”

I lead her to the defense table, just a few steps from where we are standing. “I’m Kennedy McQuarrie. We’ll talk about the details of your case later, but right now, I need to ask you some questions. How long have you lived here?”

“They put me in chains,” she says, her voice dark and fierce. “These people came to my house in the middle of the night and handcuffed me. They handcuffed my son-”

“I understand that you’re upset,” I explain. “But we have about ten seconds for me to get to know you, so I can help you through this arraignment.”

“You think you can know me in ten seconds?” she says.

I draw back. If this woman wants to sabotage her own arraignment it’s not my fault.

“Ms. McQuarrie,” the judge says. “Sometime before I get my AARP card, please…”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I say, turning to him.

“The State recognizes the insidious and unpalatable nature of this crime,” Odette says. She is staring right at Ruth. The dichotomy between these two black women is arresting: the prosecutor’s sleek suit and spike heels and crisp tailored shirt standing in counterpoint to Ruth’s rumpled nightgown and head scarf. It feels like more than a snapshot. It feels like a statement, like a case study for a course I don’t remember enrolling in. “Given the magnitude of the charges, the State requests that the defendant be held without bail.”

I can feel all the air rush out of Ruth’s lungs.

“Your Honor,” I say, and then I stop.

I have nothing to work with. I don’t know what Ruth Jefferson does for a living. I don’t know if she owns a house or if she moved to Connecticut yesterday. I don’t know if she held a pillow over that baby’s face until it stopped breathing or if she is rightfully angry about a trumped-up charge.

“Your Honor,” I repeat, “the State has offered no proof for their specious claims. This is a very serious charge with virtually no evidence. In light of this I’d ask the court to set reasonable bail in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars surety.”

It’s the best I can do, given the lack of information she’s provided. My job is to get Ruth Jefferson through her arraignment, as efficiently and as fairly as possible. I glance up at the clock. There are probably about ten more clients after her.

Suddenly there is a tug on my sleeve. “You see that boy?” Ruth murmurs, and she looks at the gallery. Her gaze locks on a young man in the rear of the courtroom, who gets to his feet as if he is being drawn upright by a magnet. “That’s my son,” Ruth says, and then she turns to me. “Do you have kids?”

I think of Violet. I think of what it would be like if the biggest problem in your life was not watching your child getting frustrated but watching your child getting handcuffed.

“Your Honor,” I say, “I’d like to retract what I just said.”

“I beg your pardon, Counselor?”

“Before we discuss bail, I would like an opportunity to speak with my client.”

The judge frowns. “You just had one.”

“I would like an opportunity to speak with my client for more than ten seconds,” I amend.

He rubs his hand over his face. “Fine,” he concedes. “You can speak to your client at the recess and we’ll revisit this matter at second call.”

The bailiffs grab Ruth’s arms. I can tell she has no idea what’s going on. “I’m coming,” I manage to tell her, and then she’s dragged out of the courtroom, and before I know it, I’m speaking on behalf of a twenty-year-old who calls himself the symbol # (“Like Prince, but not,” he tells me), who has spray-painted graffiti of a giant penis on a highway bridge and cannot understand why it’s criminal mischief, and not art.

–

I HAVE TEN more arraignments, and during all of them, I’m thinking about Ruth Jefferson. Thank God for the stenographers’ union contract, which mandates a fifteen-minute pee break, during which I find my way into the dank, dirty guts of the courthouse to the holding cell where they’ve taken my client.

She looks up from the metal bunk where she’s sitting, rubbing her wrists. She’s no longer wearing the chains that she had in the courtroom, like any other defendant accused of murder would have, but it’s almost as if she doesn’t notice they’re gone. “Where have you been?” she asks, her voice sharp.

“Doing my job,” I reply.

Ruth meets my eye. “That’s all I was doing, too,” she says. “I’m a nurse.”

I start to piece together the puzzle: something must have gone south during Ruth’s care of the infant, something that the prosecution believes was not an accident. “I need to get some information from you. If you don’t want to be locked up pending trial, you and I need to work together.”

For a long moment Ruth is silent, and it surprises me. Most people in her situation would grab on to the lifeline offered by a public defender. This woman, however, feels like she’s trying to determine if I’m going to measure up.

It’s a pretty disturbing feeling, I must admit. My clients don’t tend to be judgmental; they’re people who are used to being judged…and found lacking.

Finally she nods.

“Okay,” I say, letting out a breath I did not realize I’d been holding. “How old are you?”

“Forty-four.”

“Are you married?”

“No,” Ruth says. “My husband died in Afghanistan, during his second deployment. An IED went off. It was ten years ago.”

“Your son-is he your only child?” I ask.

“Yes. Edison’s in high school,” she says. “He’s applying to college right now. Those animals came into my house and handcuffed a straight-A student.”

“We’ll get to that in a second,” I promise. “You have a nursing degree?”

“I went to SUNY Plattsburgh and then to Yale Nursing School.”

“Are you employed?”

“I worked at Mercy-West Haven Hospital for twenty years, on the birthing pavilion. But yesterday, they took my job away from me.”

I make a note on a legal pad. “What source of income do you have now?”

She shakes her head. “My husband’s military death benefits, I suppose.”

“Do you own your own home?”

“A townhouse in East End.”

That’s the area where Micah and I live. It’s an affluent white neighborhood. The black faces I see there are usually passing through in their cars. Violence is rare, and when a mugging or a carjacking does happen, the online comments section of the New Haven Independent is full of East End folks lamenting how the “elements” from poor neighborhoods like Dixwell and Newhallville are finding their way into our perfect hamlet.

By “elements,” of course, they mean black people.

“You look surprised,” Ruth remarks.

“No,” I reply quickly. “It just happens to be where I live, too, and I’ve never seen you around.”

“I keep a pretty low profile,” she says dryly.

I clear my throat. “Do you have relatives in Connecticut?”

“My sister, Adisa. She’s the one who’s sitting with Edison. She lives in Church Street South.”

It’s a low-income apartment complex in the Hill neighborhood, between Union Station and the Yale medical district. Something like 97 percent of the kids live in poverty, and I’ve had my share of clients from there. It’s only a handful of miles away from East End, and yet it’s another world: kids selling drugs for their older brothers, older brothers selling drugs because there aren’t any jobs, girls turning tricks, gang shootings every night. I wonder how Ruth wound up living so differently from her sister.

“Are your parents still alive?”

“My mother works on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.” Ruth’s eyes slide away from mine. “You remember Sam Hallowell?”

“The TV network guy? Didn’t he die?”

“Yes. But she’s still the family maid.”

I open the folder with Ruth’s name on it, which has the indictment that was handed down by the grand jury and that precipitated her arrest. I hadn’t had time to scan anything more than the charges before this moment, but now I skim with that superpower that PDs have, where certain words leap off the page and lodge into our consciousness. “Who’s Davis Bauer?”

Ruth’s voice gets softer. “A baby,” she says, “who died.”

“Tell me what happened.”

Ruth begins to weave a story. For every thick black fact she spins, there’s a silver flicker of shame. She tells me about the parents and the supervisor’s sticky note and the circumcision and the emergency C-section and the newborn’s seizure. She says that the man with the swastika tattoo who spit at her in the courtroom was the baby’s father. Threads knot around us, like the silk from a cocoon.

“…and the next thing I knew,” Ruth says, “the baby was dead.”

I glance down at the police statement. “You never touched him?” I clarify.

She stares at me for a long moment, as if she is trying to figure out if I can be trusted. Then she shakes her head. “Not until the charge nurse told me to start compressions.”

I lean forward. “If I can get you out of here, so you can go home to your son, you’ll have to post a percentage of the bail amount. Do you have any money saved up?”

Her shoulders square. “Edison’s college fund, but I won’t touch that.”

“Would you be willing to put your home up?”

“What does that even mean?”

“You let the State put a lien on it,” I explain.

“And then what? If I lose the trial does that mean Edison won’t have anywhere to live?”

“No. This is only a measure to make sure you’re not going to skip town if they let you leave.”

Ruth takes a deep breath. “Okay. But you have to do me a favor. You have to tell my son that I’m all right.”

I nod, and then she nods.

In that moment, we’re not black and white, or attorney and accused. We’re not separated by what I know about the legal system and what she has yet to learn. We are just two mothers, sitting side by side.

–

THIS TIME, AS I walk through the gallery of the courtroom, I feel like I’ve put on corrective lenses. I notice onlookers I didn’t pay attention to before. They may not be tattooed like the baby’s father, but they are white. Only a few are wearing Doc Martens; the rest are in sneakers. Are they skinheads, too? Some hold signs with Davis’s name on them, some wear powder-blue ribbons pinned to their shirts in solidarity. How did I miss this the first time I came into the courtroom? Have they assembled to support the Bauer family?

I think about Ruth walking down the street in East End and wonder how many other residents questioned what she was doing there, even if they never said it to her face. How incredibly easy it is to hide behind white skin, I think, looking at these probable supremacists. The benefit of the doubt is in your favor. You’re not suspicious.

The few black faces in the room stand out in harsh counterpoint. I walk up to the boy Ruth acknowledged earlier, who immediately stands. “Edison?” I say. “My name is Kennedy.”

He is taller than I am by nearly a foot, but he still has the face of a baby. “Is my mama all right?”

“She’s fine, and she sent me out here to tell you so.”

“Well, you took your sweet time,” says the woman beside him. She has long braids shot through with red, and her skin is much darker than Ruth’s. She is drinking a Coke, although there’s no food or drink allowed in the courtroom, and when she sees me looking at the can she raises an eyebrow as if she is daring me to say something.

“You must be Ruth’s sister.”

“Why? Because I’m the only nigga in this room other than her son?”

I reel backward at the word she uses, which I am sure is exactly the reaction she’s going for. If Ruth seemed judgmental or prickly, then her sister is a porcupine with an anger management problem. “No,” I say, in the same tone I use with Violet when I try to reason with her. “First of all, you’re not the only…person of color…here. And second, your sister told me you were with Edison.”

“Can you get her out?” Edison asks.

I focus my attention on him. “I’m going to try my hardest.”

“Can I see her?”

“Not right now.”

The door leading to chambers opens and the clerk enters, telling us to rise as he announces the judge’s return.

“I have to go,” I tell him.

Ruth’s sister fixes her gaze on me. “Do your job, white girl,” she says.

The judge takes the bench and re-calls Ruth’s case. Ruth is brought up from the bowels of the building again, and takes a spot beside me. She gives me a questioning look, and I nod: He’s all right.

“Ms. McQuarrie,” the judge sighs. “Have you had ample time to speak with your client?”

“Yes, Your Honor. Just days ago Ruth Jefferson was a nurse at Mercy-West Haven Hospital, caring for women in labor and their newborns as she has for the past twenty years. When a medical emergency occurred involving a baby, Ruth worked with the rest of the hospital personnel trying to save the child’s life. Tragically, it was not meant to be. In the pending investigation surrounding what happened, Ruth was suspended from her job. She is a college graduate; her son is an honor student. Her husband is a military hero who gave his life for our country in Afghanistan. She has family in the community, and equity in the house she lives in. I ask the court to set reasonable bail. My client is not a flight risk; she has no prior record; she’s willing to abide by any particular conditions the court wants to set on her bail. This is a very defendable case.”

I’ve painted Ruth as an upstanding American citizen who has been misunderstood. Just about the only thing I don’t do is take out an American flag and start waving it around.

The judge turns to Ruth. “How much equity are we talking about?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“What’s the value of the mortgage on your house?” I ask.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” Ruth replies.

The judge nods. “I’m going to set bail at one hundred thousand dollars. As a condition of the bail, I’ll accept the house being posted. Next case?”

The white supremacist supporters in the gallery start booing. I am not sure they’d be happy with any verdict short of a public lynching. The judge calls for order and bangs his gavel. “Clear them out,” he finally says, and bailiffs begin to move through the aisles.

“What happens now?” Ruth asks.

“You’re getting out.”

“Thank God. How long will it take?”

I glance up. “A couple of days.”

A bailiff takes Ruth’s arm to bring her back to the holding cell. As she is being led away, that curtain behind her eyes slips, and for the first time I see panic.

It’s not like it is on TV and in the movies; you don’t just walk out of the courthouse free. There are papers to be procured and bondsmen to be dealt with. I know that because I’m a public defender. Most of my clients know that because they tend to be repeat offenders.

But Ruth, she’s not like most of my clients.

She’s not even one of my clients, when you get down to it.

I’ve been with the public defender’s office now for almost four years, and I’ve moved out of misdemeanors. I’ve done so many burglary cases and criminal mischief and identity theft and bad checks that at this point, I could probably argue them in my sleep. But this is a murder case, a high-profile trial that will be plucked out of my hands as soon as the court date is set. It will go to someone in my office who has more experience than I do, or who plays golf with my boss, or who has a penis.

In the long run, I won’t be Ruth’s lawyer. But right now, I still am, and I can help her.

I wing a silent thank-you to the white supremacists who’ve created this uproar. Then I run down the central aisle of the gallery to Edison and his aunt. “Listen. You need to get a certified copy of Ruth’s house deed,” I tell her sister. “And a certified copy of the tax assessment, and a copy of your sister’s most recent mortgage payment, which shows what the current payoff is, and you need to bring that to the clerk’s office-”

I realize that Ruth’s sister is staring at me like I’ve suddenly started to speak Hungarian. But then again, she lives in Church Street South; she does not own her own place. This might as well be a foreign language to her.

Then I realize that Edison is writing down everything I’ve said on the back of a receipt from his wallet. “I’ll figure it out,” he promises.

I give him my card. “This is my cell number. If you have any questions, you can call me. But I won’t be the one trying your mother’s case. Someone else from my office will be in touch with you after she gets out.”

This admission snaps Ruth’s sister back into action. “So that’s it? You put up her house to get her out of jail, so your good deed is done now? I guess since my sister’s black, she obviously did the crime and you’d rather not get your hands dirty, right?”

This is ridiculous on so many levels, not the least of which is that the majority of my clients are African American. But before I can explain the hierarchy of politics in the public defender’s office, Edison intercedes. “Auntie, chill out.” Then he turns to me. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” I tell him. “I am.”

–

WHEN I FINALLY get home that night, my mother is sitting with her stocking feet tucked beneath her, watching Disney Junior on television, a glass of white wine in her hand. She has had a glass of white wine every night for as long as I can remember. When I was little, she called it her medicine. Beside her on the couch is Violet, curled on her side, fast asleep. “I didn’t have the heart to move her,” my mother says.

I sit down gingerly beside my daughter, take the bottle of wine that’s on the coffee table, and drink from its neck. My mother’s eyebrows arch. “That bad?” she asks.

“You have no idea.” I stroke Violet’s hair. “You must have tired her out today.”

“Well.” My mother hesitates. “We had a little bit of a blowup at dinner.”

“Was it the fish sticks? She won’t eat them since going on her Little Mermaid kick.”

“No, she ate them, and you’ll be delighted to know that Ariel has left the building. In fact, that was what got her all hot and bothered. We started watching Princess and the Frog, and Violet informed me that she wants to be Tiana for Halloween.”

“Thank God,” I say. “She was dead set on wearing a shell bikini top a week ago, and the only way that was going to happen was if it was over her long underwear.”

My mother raises her brows. “Kennedy,” she says. “Don’t you think Violet would be happier as Cinderella? Or Rapunzel? Or even that new one with the white hair who makes everything ice over?”

“Elsa?” I fill in. “Why?”

“Don’t make me say it out loud, sugar,” my mother replies.

“You mean because Tiana’s black?” I say. Immediately, I think of Ruth Jefferson, of the white supremacists booing in the gallery.

“I don’t think Violet is making a statement about equality as much as she is about frogs. She told me she’s going to ask for one as a pet for Christmas and kiss it and see what happens.”

“She’s not getting a frog for Christmas. But if she wants to be Tiana for Halloween I’ll buy her the costume.”

“I will sew her the costume,” my mother corrects. “No grandbaby of mine is going trick-or-treating in a store-bought piece of trash that would probably go up in flames if she walked past a jack-o’-lantern.” I don’t fight her on this. I can’t even sew a seam. I have a pair of work trousers in my closet that are hemmed with superglue.

“Terrific. I’m glad you can overcome your resistance in order to make Violet’s dream come true.”

My mother lifts her chin a notch. “I did not tell you this so you could scold me, Kennedy. Just because I grew up in the South doesn’t make me prejudiced.”

“Mom,” I point out. “You had a black nanny.”

“And I adored Beattie like she was family,” my mother says.

“Except…she wasn’t.”

My mother pours more wine into her glass. “Kennedy,” she sighs. “It’s just a silly costume. Not a cause.”

Suddenly I’m so incredibly tired. It’s not just the pace of my job or the overwhelming number of cases I have that wears me down. It’s wondering if anything I do actually makes a difference.

“Once,” my mother says, her voice soft, “when I was about Violet’s age, and Beattie wasn’t looking, I tried to drink out of the colored water fountain at the park. I stepped up on the cement block and turned the knob. I was expecting something extraordinary. I was expecting rainbows. But you know-it was just like everyone else’s water.” She meets my gaze. “Violet would make the most beautiful little Cinderella.”

“Mom…”

“I’m just saying. It took how many years for Disney to give all those little black girls their own princess? You think it’s right for Violet to want something they’ve been waiting on forever?”

“Mom!”

She lifts her hands in concession. “Fine. Tiana. Done.”

I lift the bottle of wine, tilt it up, and drink down every last drop.

–

AFTER MY MOTHER leaves, I fall asleep on the couch with Violet, and when I wake up, The Lion King is being aired on Disney Junior. I blink just in time to see the death of Mufasa playing out on-screen. He is being trampled by the water buffalo just as Micah walks in, pulling off the garrote of his tie with one hand. “Hey,” I say. “I didn’t hear you drive up.”

“Because I am a ninja ingeniously masquerading as an ophthalmological surgeon.” He leans down and kisses me, smiles at Violet, who is softly snoring. “My day was full of glaucoma and vitreous fluid. How was yours?”

“Considerably less gross,” I say.

“Did Crazy Sharon come back?”

Crazy Sharon is a repeat offender, a stalker who has a thing for Peter Salovey, the president of Yale University. She leaves him flowers, love notes, and once, underwear. I’ve done six arraignments with her, and Salovey has been president only since 2013.

“No,” I say, and I tell him about Ruth, and Edison, and the skinheads in the gallery.

“Really?” Micah is most interested in the last. “Like, with suspenders and flight jackets and the boots and everything?”

“Number one, no, and number two, should I be scared that you know all that?” I move my feet on the coffee table so he can sit down opposite me. “In fact, they looked just like us. It’s pretty terrifying. I mean, what if your next-door neighbor was a white supremacist and you didn’t know it?”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Mrs. Greenblatt is not a skinhead,” Micah says. As he talks, he gently lifts Violet into his arms.

“It’s all a moot point anyway. It’s too big a case for me to be assigned,” I tell him, climbing the stairs to our daughter’s bedroom. And then I add, “Ruth Jefferson lives in East End.”

“Hunh,” Micah replies. He settles Vi into her bed and pulls up her covers, dropping a kiss on her forehead.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask, combative, even though I had the same sort of reaction.

“It’s not supposed to mean anything,” Micah says. “It was just a response.”

“What you really mean, but you’re too polite to say, is that there aren’t black families in East End.”

“I guess. Maybe.”

I follow him into our room and unzip my skirt, peel off my panty hose. When I’m wearing the T-shirt and boxers I usually sleep in, I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth beside Micah. I spit, wipe my mouth on the back of my hand. “Did you know that in The Lion King, the hyenas-the bad guys-all speak in either black or Latino slang? And that the little cubs are told not to go where the hyenas live?”

He looks at me, amused.

“Do you realize that Scar, the villain, is darker than Mufasa?”

“Kennedy.” Micah puts his hands on my shoulders, leans down, and kisses me. “There is a slight chance you’re overthinking this.”

That’s the moment I know I’m going to move heaven and earth to be Ruth’s public defender.

Turk

I’M GUESSING THIS LAWYER’S PRETTY decent, given how swanky his office is. The walls aren’t painted, they’re paneled. The glass of water his secretary gets me is a heavy crystal tumbler. Even the air smells rich, like the perfume of a lady who would normally shy away from me on a public street.

I’m wearing again today the jacket Francis and I share, and I’ve ironed my pants. I have a wool cap pulled low on my head, and I keep twirling my wedding ring around and around on my finger. I could pass for any ordinary Joe who wants to sue someone, instead of a guy who would normally skirt the legal system and take justice into his own hands.

Suddenly Roarke Matthews is standing in front of me. His suit is ironed with knife-edge pleats, his shoes are buffed to a high gloss. He looks like a soap opera star, except that his nose is a little off-kilter, like he broke it playing football in high school. He holds out a hand to greet me. “Mr. Bauer,” he says, “why don’t you come with me?”

He leads me into an even more imposing office, this one full of black leather and chrome, and gestures to a spot on the love seat. “Let me say again how sorry I am for your loss,” Matthews says, like everyone else does these days. The words have gotten so ordinary in fact that they feel like rain; I hardly even notice them anymore. “On the phone, we talked about the possibility of filing a civil suit-”

“Whatever it’s called,” I interrupt. “I just want someone to pay for this.”

“Ah,” Matthews says. “And that is why I asked you to come in here. You see, it’s quite complicated.”

“What’s so complicated? You sue the nurse. She’s the one who did this.”

Matthews hesitates. “You could sue Ruth Jefferson,” he agrees. “But let’s be realistic-she doesn’t have a pot to piss in. As you know, there’s a criminal prosecution under way that the State has undertaken. That means that if you file a civil suit simultaneously, Ms. Jefferson would ask for a stay of all discovery, so she couldn’t incriminate herself during the pending criminal prosecution. And the fact that you’ve filed a civil suit against her can be used against you in cross-examination during the criminal lawsuit.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The defense will make you out to be a gold digger with a grudge,” Matthews says bluntly.

I sit back, my hands on my knees. “So that’s it? I don’t have a case?”

“I never said that,” the lawyer replies. “I just think you’ve chosen the wrong target. Unlike Ms. Jefferson, the hospital does have deep pockets. Moreover, they have an obligation to supervise their staff, and they are responsible for the nurse’s actions or inactions. That’s who I would recommend filing the lawsuit against. Now, we’d still name Ruth Jefferson-you never know, right now she has nothing, but tomorrow she could win the lottery or receive an inheritance.” He raises a brow. “And then, Mr. Bauer, you might not just get justice-you might get a very handsome payout.”

I nod, imagining this. I think about being able to tell Brit how I’m going to do right by Davis. “So what do we do to get started?”

“Now?” Matthews says. “Nothing. Not until the criminal lawsuit is over. The civil suit will still be viable when it’s done, and that way, it can’t be used to incriminate your character.” He leans back, spreading his hands. “Come back to me when the trial’s over,” Matthews says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

–

AT FIRST I didn’t believe Francis when he said that the new wave of Anglo supremacy would be a war fought not with fists but with ideas, spread subversively and anonymously through the Internet. But all the same, I was smart enough not to tell him he was a crazy old coot. For one thing, he was still one of the legends of the Movement. And more importantly, he was the father of the girl I couldn’t get my mind off.

Brit Mitchum was beautiful, but in a way that knocked me off my feet. She had the softest skin I’d ever touched, and pale blue eyes that she ringed with dark eyeliner. Unlike other skinchicks, she didn’t buzz her hair at the crown and let wispy bangs frame her face and the back of her neck. Instead, Brit had thick hair that spilled down to the middle of her back. Sometimes she braided it, and the braid was as thick as my wrist. I thought a lot about what it would feel like to have those curls hanging over my face like a curtain as she kissed me.

But the last thing I was going to do was make a move on a girl whose father could have my spine snapped by making a single phone call. So instead, I went to visit, often. I pretended to have a question for Francis, who liked seeing me because it gave him a chance to talk up his idea for an Anglo website. I helped him change the oil in his truck and fixed a leaky garbage disposal for him. I made myself useful, but when it came to Brit, I worshiped from afar.

So I was pretty blown away when one day she came out to a chopping block where I was splitting wood for Francis. “So,” she says, “are the rumors true?”

“What rumors?” I asked.

“They say you took down a whole motorcycle gang and that you killed your own father.”

“In that case, no,” I said.

“Then you’re just a little pussy like the other guys who like to pretend they’re big bad Anglos so they can bask in my daddy’s glow?”

Shocked, I looked up at her, and saw her mouth twitch. I raised the ax over my head, flexed my muscles, and sent the ax hurtling into the piece of wood, which cleaved neatly. “I like to think I fall somewhere between the two extremes,” I said.

“Maybe I want to see for myself.” She took a step closer. “Next time your crew goes on the hunt.”

I laughed. “There is no way I’m taking Francis Mitchum’s daughter out with my guys.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re Francis Mitchum’s daughter.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Hell, yes, it was, even if she couldn’t see it.

“My father’s been taking me out with his crew my whole life.”

Somehow I found that hard to believe. (Later I found out it was true, but he left Brit buckled into her car seat, sound asleep, in the back of his truck.) “You’re not tough enough to run with my crew,” I said, just to get her off my back.

When she didn’t reply, I figured that was that. I lifted the ax again, and started the downswing, only to have Brit dart, lightning-fast, into the path of the blade. Immediately I let go of the shaft, feeling the ax spin out of my hands to wedge itself deeply in the ground about six inches away from her. “Jesus fucking Christ,” I shouted. “What is wrong with you?”

“Not tough enough?” she replied.

“Thursday,” I told her. “After dark.”

–

EVERY NIGHT, I hear my son cry.

The sound wakes me up, which is how I know he’s a ghost. Brit never hears him, but then she is still floating in a haze of sleeping pills and Oxy left over from when I busted my knee. I get out of bed and take a piss and follow the noise, which gets louder and louder and louder, and then disappears when I reach the living room. There’s no one there, just the computer screen, green and glaring at me.

I sit down on the couch and I drink a six-pack and still I can hear my boy crying.

My father-in-law gives me almost two weeks of grieving, and then starts dumping out all the beer in the house. One night, Francis comes to find me when I’m sitting on the living room couch, my head in my hands, trying to drown out the baby’s sobs. I think for a minute he’s going to deck me-he may be an old dude, but he could still take me-but instead, he yanks the laptop from its power cord and throws it at me. “Get even,” he says simply, and he walks back into his side of the duplex.

For a long time, I just sit there, the computer pressed up next to me, like a girl who’s begging for a dance.

I can’t say I reach for it. More like, it makes its way back home to me.

With the touch of a key, a webpage loads. I haven’t been here since before Brit had the baby.

When Francis and I teamed up to create our website, I read manuals on coding and metadata while Francis fed me the material we would post. We called our site LONEWOLF, because that was what we all had to become.

This was no longer the eighties. We were losing our best men to the prison system. The old guard was getting too old to curb-stomp and wield nunchucks. The fresh cuts were too plugged in to get excited about a KKK rally where a bunch of ancient yahoos sat around drinking and talking about the good ol’ days. They didn’t want to hear an old wives’ tale, like that black people stank when their hair got wet. They wanted statistics they could take back to their lefty teachers and relatives who got tangled in knots when they said we were the real victims of discrimination in this country.

So we gave them what they asked for.

We posted the truth: that the U.S. Census Bureau said Whites would be a minority by 2043. That 40 percent of black people who were on welfare could work, but didn’t. That the fact that the Zionist Occupation Government was taking over our nation could be traced right to Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve.

Lonewolf.org quickly became something bigger than itself. We were the younger, hipper alternative. The fresh edge of rebellion.

Now, my hands move across the keyboard while I log in as the administrator. Part of the reason for running this site is the anonymity, the ability to hide behind what I believe. We are all anonymous here, and we are also all brothers. This is my army of nameless, faceless friends.

But today all that is about to change.

Many of you know me by my blog posts, and have responded with your own comments. Like me, you are a True Patriot. Like me, you wanted to follow an idea, not a person. But today, I am going to step into the light, because I want you to know me. I want you to know what happened to me.

My name is Turk Bauer, I type. And I am going to tell you the story of my son.

After I hit the post button, I watch the story of my son’s short, brave life hover on the computer screen. I want to believe that if he had to die, it was for a cause. It was for our cause.

I do not drink that night, and I do not fall back asleep. Instead, I watch the numerical counter at the top of the header, which marks each page view.

1 reader.

6 readers.

37 readers.

409 readers.

By the time the sun comes up, more than thirteen thousand people know Davis’s name.

I make coffee, and scroll through the comments section as I drink my first cup.

I’m so sorry for your loss.

Your boy was a race warrior.

Goddamned blue gum shouldn’t have been allowed to work in a White hospital anyhow.

I’ve made a donation in your son’s name to the American Freedom Party.

But one of them stops me cold:

Romans 12:19, it read. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

–

THE THURSDAY AFTER Brit dodged my ax, I had dinner with her and her father. We were well into dessert before Brit looked up, as if she’d just remembered something she needed to tell us. “I hit a nigger with my car today,” she announced.

Francis reared back in his seat. “Well, what was he doing in front of your car?”

“I have no idea. Walking, I guess. But he dented the front fender.”

“I can take a look at it,” I said. “I’ve done some bodywork.”

A smile played around Brit’s mouth. “I bet you have.”

I turned thirty shades of red while Brit told her dad that she’d convinced me to take her to see a movie after dinner, some chick flick. Francis clapped me on the back. “Better you than me, son,” he said, and then we were in my car, about to make a night of it.

Brit was like a live wire, buzzing in the passenger seat. She couldn’t stop talking; she couldn’t stop asking questions: Where were we going? Who would we target? Had I been there before?

The way I figured it, either tonight went well and that earned me Brit’s undying respect, or tonight went poorly and her father broke my neck for putting her in danger.

I took her to an abandoned parking lot near a hot dog stand that was pretty popular with faggots, who sometimes met here to hook up in the bushes behind. (Seriously, though, could there be any greater cliché than gay guys meeting at a wiener stand? They deserved to be beaten up for that alone.) I had thought about messing up some coons, but they were basically animals and could be pretty strong in a fight, whereas even Brit could pound a pansy.

“Are the other guys meeting us here?” she asked.

“There are no other guys,” I admitted. “I used to have a crew, but after one of them turned on me, I realized I like working alone. That’s how the rumor started about the bikers. The only reason I took down a whole gang by myself is because I can’t trust anyone else.”

“I get it,” Brit said. “It sucks to be abandoned by the people who are supposed to support you.”

I glanced at her. “Somehow I think you’ve lived a pretty privileged life.”

“Yeah, except for the part where my mother up and left me behind when I was a baby, like I was just…trash.”

I knew Francis didn’t have a wife, but I didn’t know what had happened. “Man, that sucks. I’m sorry.”

To my surprise, Brit wasn’t upset. She was furious. “I’m not.” Her eyes burned like coals in a fire. “Daddy said she ran off with a nigger.”

Just then, two men walked up to the hot dog stand to order. They got their dogs, and walked over to a half-broken picnic table.

“You ready?” I asked Brit.

“I was born ready.”

I hid my smile; was I ever that brave? We got out of my car and sauntered across the street, as if we were going to grab a bite, too. But instead, I stopped at the picnic table and smiled pleasantly. “Hey. Either of you limp wrists got a cigarette?”

They exchanged a glance. I love that glance. It’s the same one you see on an animal when it realizes it’s been cornered. “Let’s just go,” the blond one said to the short, skinny dude.

“See, that doesn’t work for me,” I said, stepping closer. “Because I’ll still know you’re out there.” I grabbed Blondie by the throat and punched his lights out.

He went down like a stone. I turned to watch Brit, who had jumped on the skinny guy’s back and was riding him like a nightmare. Her fingernails raked across his cheek, and as he stumbled to the ground she started kicking him in the kidneys, then straddled him, lifted his head, and smashed it back down on the pavement.

I had fought beside women before. There’s a common misconception that skinchicks are subservient, barefoot, and pregnant most of the time. But if you’re going to be a skinhead girl, you have to be a tough bitch. Brit might not have gotten her hands dirty before, but she was a natural.

When she was pounding on a slack, unconscious body, I hauled her upright. “Come on,” I urged, and together we ran to the car.

We drove to a hill that offered a great view of planes taking off and landing at Tweed airport. The runway lights winked at us as we sat on the hood of the car, Brit swimming in adrenaline. “God,” she yelled, tipping her throat to the night sky. “That was unfuckingbelievable. It felt like…like…”

She couldn’t find the word, but I could. I knew what it was like to have so much bottled up inside that you had to explode. I knew what it was like to cause pain, for a few seconds, instead of feeling it. The source of Brit’s restlessness might be different from mine, but she had been reined in all the same, and she’d just found the breach in the fence. “It feels like freedom,” I said.

“Yes,” she breathed, staring at me. “Do you ever feel like you don’t belong in your own skin? Like you were meant to be someone else?”

All the time, I thought. But instead of saying that, I leaned over and kissed her.

She spun so that she was sitting on me, facing me. She kissed me harder, biting my lip, devouring. Her hands were under the tail of my shirt, fumbling with the buttons of my jeans. “Hey,” I said, trying to grab her wrists. “There’s no rush.”

“Yes there is,” she whispered into my neck.

She was on fire, and if you get too close to a fire, you go up in flames, too. So I let her slip beneath my zipper, I helped her hike up her skirt and rip off her panties. Brit lowered herself onto me, and I moved inside her like the start of something.

–

ON THE MORNING of the arraignment, I get dressed while Brit is still sleeping in the pajamas she’s worn for the past four days. I eat a bowl of cereal and I prepare myself for war.

At the courthouse are about twenty friends I didn’t know I had.

They are loyal followers of LONEWOLF, frequent posters on my site, men and women who read about Davis and wanted to do more than just type their sympathy. Like me, they don’t look the way most people would expect a skinhead to look. No one is bald, except me. They’re all wearing ordinary clothing. Some have tiny sun-wheel pins on their collars. Many wear a baby-blue ribbon for Davis. Some pat my shoulder or call me by name. Others just nod, the tiniest inclination of their heads, to let me know they are here for me as I pass down the aisle.

Just then a nigger comes up to me. I nearly shove her away when she starts talking-a knee-jerk reaction-and then I realize I know her voice, and that she’s the prosecutor.

I have talked to Odette Lawton on the phone, but she didn’t sound black. This feels like a slap, like some kind of conspiracy.

Maybe this is a good thing. It’s no surprise that the liberals who run the court system have it out for Anglos, and there’s no way we could ever get a fair trial because of it. They’ll make this about me instead of that nurse. But if the lawyer who’s on my side is black, well, then I can’t possibly be prejudiced, can I?

They’ll never have to know what I’m really thinking.

Someone reads the judge’s name-DuPont-which doesn’t sound like some Jew name, which is a good start. Then I sit through four other defendants before they call the name Ruth Jefferson.

The courtroom sizzles like a griddle. People start booing, and raising up signs with my son’s face on them-a picture I uploaded to the website, the only one I have of him. Then the nurse is brought in, wearing a nightgown and shackles on her wrists. She is looking around the gallery. I wonder if she’s trying to find me.

I decide to make it easy for her.

In one swift movement, I’m on my feet and leaning over the low railing that separates us from the lawyers and the stenographer. I take a deep breath and hurl a gob of spit that smacks the bitch on the side of the face.

I can tell the second she recognizes me.

Instantly I am flanked by bailiffs who drag me out of the courtroom, but that’s okay, too. Because even as I’m pulled away, the nurse will see the swastika snaking down the back of my scalp.

It’s okay to lose a battle, when you are in it to win the war.

–

THE TWO MEATHEAD bailiffs dump me outside the heavy doors of the courthouse. “Don’t think about coming back in,” one warns, and then they disappear inside.

I rest my hands on my knees, catching my breath. I may not have access to the courtroom, but this is a free country, as far as I know. They can’t keep me from staying here and watching Ruth Jefferson get carted to jail.

Resolved, I look up, and that’s when I see them: the vans, with satellite dishes. The reporters smoothing their skinny skirts and testing their microphones. The media that has come to report on this case.

The lawyer said they needed a grieving parent, not an angry parent? I can give them that.

But first, I pull out my cellphone and call Francis at home. “Get Brit out of bed, and park her in front of the television.” I glance at the news vans. “Channel Four.”

Then I take a cap out of my pocket, the one I wore into the courthouse this morning so I wouldn’t draw attention to my tattoo until I wanted to. I center it on my head.

I think about Davis, because that’s all I need to make tears come to my eyes.

“You saw that, right?” I approach a slant reporter I’ve seen on NBC. “You saw me get thrown out of that building?”

She glances at me. “Uh, yeah. Sorry, but we’re here to cover a different story.”

“I know,” I say. “But I’m the father of the dead baby.”

I tell the reporter that Brit and I had been so excited about our first baby. I say I’d never seen anything as perfect as his tiny hands, his nose, which looked just like Brit’s. I say that my wife is still so upset over what happened to Davis that she can’t get out of bed, can’t even be here today at court.

I say it is a tragedy for someone who has taken a vow to heal to intentionally kill a helpless infant, just because she is upset at being removed from a patient’s care. “I understand that we didn’t see eye to eye,” I say, looking at the reporter. “But that doesn’t mean my son deserved to die.”

“What do you hope the outcome will be, Mr. Bauer?” she asks.

“I want my son back,” I tell her. “But that isn’t going to happen.”

Then I excuse myself. Truth is, I’m starting to choke up, thinking about Davis. And I’m not going to be broadcast blubbering like a girl.

I duck away from the other reporters, who are now falling all over each other to speak to me, but they get distracted as the doors to the courthouse open and Odette Lawton exits. She starts talking about how this is a heinous crime, how the State will make sure that justice is done. I slip along the side of the building, past where a janitor is smoking a cigarette, to a loading dock in the back. This, I know, leads to a lower-level door, which leads to the holding cells.

I can’t get inside; there are guards posted. But I stand at a distance, huddled against the wind, until a van pulls out with the words YORK CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION printed on its side. That’s the only prison for women in the state, in Niantic. It’s where the nurse must be headed.

At the last minute, I step into its path, so that the driver has to swerve.

I know, inside that van, Ruth Jefferson will be jolted by that motion. That she’ll look out the window to see what caused it.

That the last thing she sees before prison will be me.

–

AFTER I TOOK Brit wilding, I became a regular visitor in her home, and I pretty much ran the website from Francis’s living room. On LONEWOLF we hosted discussions: tax forums that pitted Joe Legal, the White worker, against Jose, the Illegal Job Thief; threads about why our economy was being ruined by Obama; an online book club; a section for creative writing and poetry-which included a three-hundred-page alternate ending to the Civil War. There was a section for Anglo women to connect with each other, and another for teens, which helped them navigate situations like what to do when a friend said he was gay (end the friendship immediately, or explain that no one is born that way and the trend will vanish eventually). There were opinion topics (Which is worse: a White gay or a straight black? Which universities are the most anti-White?). Our most popular thread was the one about forming a White Nationalist K-12 school. We had over a million posts there.

But we also had a section of the site where we gave suggestions of what people could do individually or within their cells if they wanted to take action, without promoting outright violence. Mostly, we found ways to get minorities all twisted up believing that there was an army of us in their midst, when in reality, it was just one or two people.

Francis and I practiced what we preached. We adopted a stretch of highway in a mostly black area, and posted a sign that said it was being maintained by the KKK. One night, we drove to the Jewish Community Center in West Hartford. During Friday night services, we slipped a flyer under the windshield wiper of each car in the parking lot: a photo of Adolf Hitler in full sieg heil, and underneath it in bold letters: THE HOLOCAUST WAS A HOAX. On the back were bullets of facts:

Zyklon B was a delousing agent; for it to be used as a gas would have required huge amounts and airtight chambers, neither of which were present at the camps.

There were no remains of mass murders at the camps. Where were the bone and teeth fragments? Where were the piles of ashes?

American incinerators burn one body in eight hours, but two crematoria in Auschwitz burned 25,000 bodies a day? Impossible.

The Red Cross inspected the camps every three months and made plenty of complaints-none of which mentioned gasing millions of Jews.

The liberal Jewish media has perpetuated this myth to advance their agenda.

By the next morning, the Hartford Courant would run an article about the neo-Nazi element that was infiltrating this community. Parents would be worried for their children. Everyone would be on edge.

That was exactly how we liked it. We didn’t have to terrorize anyone as long as we could scare the shit out of them.

“Well,” Francis said, as we were driving back to the duplex. “That was a good night’s work.”

I nodded, but I kept my eyes on the road. Francis had a thing about that-he wouldn’t let me drive with the radio on, for example, in case I got too easily distracted.

“I got a question for you, Turk,” he said. I waited for him to ask me how we could get top placement for LONEWOLF in a Google search, or if we could stream podcasts, but instead he turned to me. “When are you going to make an honest woman out of my daughter?”

I nearly swallowed my tongue. “I, um, I would be honored to do that.”

He looked at me, appraising. “Good. Do it soon.”

As it turned out, it took a while. I wanted it to be perfect, so I asked around on LONEWOLF for suggestions. One guy had gotten all decked out in full SS regalia to propose. Another took his beloved to the site of their first real date, but I didn’t think a hot dog stand with gay guys blowing each other in the woods was a terrific setting. Several posters got into a vehement fight about whether or not an engagement ring was necessary, since Jews ran the diamond industry.

In the end, I decided to just tell her how I felt. So one day I picked her up and drove back to my place. “Really?” she said. “You’re going to cook?”

“I thought maybe we could do it together,” I suggested as we walked into the kitchen. I turned away because I thought for sure she would see how terrified I was.

“What are we having?”

“Well, don’t be disappointed.” I held out a container of hummus. On top, I had written: There are no words to tell you hummus I love you.

She laughed. “Cute.”

I handed her an ear of corn and mimed shucking it. She pulled down the husk and a note fell out: I think you’re amaizing.

Grinning, she held out her hand for more.

I gave her a bottle of ketchup, with a sticker on the back: I love you from my head tomatoes.

“That’s pushing it,” Brit said, smiling.

“I was limited by the season.” I passed her a stick of margarine. You’re my butter half.

Then I opened the fridge.

On the top shelf were four zucchini propped up to form the letter M, three carrots creating an A, two curved bananas: r, r, and a piece of gingerroot: Y.

On the next shelf was a cellophane-wrapped package of chopped meat that I’d shaped into the letters ME.

On the bottom shelf was a squash with Brit’s name carved into it.

Brit covered her mouth with her hand as I dropped to my knee. I handed her a ring box. Inside was a blue topaz, which was exactly the color of her eyes. “Say yes,” I begged.

She slipped the ring onto her hand as I stood. “I was kind of expecting a Hefty twist tie after all that,” Brit said, and she threw her arms around me.

We kissed, and I hiked her up on the counter. She wrapped her legs around me. I thought about spending the rest of my life with Brit. I thought about our kids; how they would look just like her; how they’d have a father who was a million times better than mine had been.

An hour later, when we lay in each other’s arms on the kitchen floor, on a pile of our clothes, I gathered Brit close. “I’m assuming that’s a yes,” I said.

Her eyes lit up, and she ran to the fridge, returning a few seconds later. “Yes,” she said. “But first you have to promise me something. We…” She dropped a melon into my hands.

Cantaloupe.

–

WHEN I COME back from court and walk into the house, the television is still on. Francis meets me at the door, and I look at him, a question on my lips. Before I can ask, though, I see that Brit is sitting in the living room on the floor, her face inches away from the screen. The midday news is on, and there is Odette Lawton talking to reporters.

Brit turns, and for the first time since our son was born, for the first time in weeks, she smiles. “Baby,” she says, bright and beautiful and mine again. “Baby, you’re a star.”

Ruth

THEY PUT ME IN CHAINS.

Just like that, they shackle my hands in front of me, as if that doesn’t send two hundred years of history running through my veins like an electric current. As if I can’t feel my great-great-grandmother and her mother standing on an auction block. They put me in chains, and my son-who I’ve told, every day since he was born, You are more than the color of your skin-my son watches.

It is more humiliating than being in public in my nightgown, than having to urinate without privacy in the holding cell, than being spit at by Turk Bauer, than having a stranger speak for me in front of a judge.

She had asked me if I touched the baby, and I’d lied to her. Not because I thought, at this point, that I still had a job to save, but because I just couldn’t think through fast enough what the right answer would be, the one that might set me free. And because I didn’t trust this stranger sitting across from me, when I was nothing more to her than the other twenty clients she would see today.

I listen to this lawyer-Kennedy something, I have already forgotten her last name-volley back and forth with another lawyer. The prosecutor, who’s a woman of color, does not even make eye contact with me. I wonder if this is because she feels nothing but contempt for me, an alleged criminal…or because she knows if she wants to be taken seriously, she has to widen the canyon between us.

True to her word, Kennedy gets me bail. Just like that, I want to hug this woman, thank her. “What happens now?” I ask, as the people in the courtroom hear the decision, and become a living, breathing thing.

“You’re getting out,” she tells me.

“Thank God. How long will it take?”

I am expecting minutes. An hour, at the most. There must be paperwork, which I can then lock away to prove that this was all a misunderstanding.

“A couple of days,” Kennedy says. Then a beefy guard has my arm and firmly pushes me back to the rabbit warren of holding cells in the basement of this godforsaken building.

I wait in the same cell I was taken to during the recess in court. I count all the cinder blocks in the wall: 360. I count them again. I think about that spider of a tattoo on Turk Bauer’s head, and how I hadn’t believed he could possibly be worse than he already was, but I was wrong. I don’t know how much time passes before Kennedy comes. “What is going on?” I explode. “I can’t stay here for days!”

She talks about mortgage deeds and percentages, numbers that swim in my head. “I know you’re worried about your son. I’m sure your sister will keep an eye on him.”

A sob swells like a song in my throat. I think about my sister’s home, where her boys talk back to their dad when he tells them to take out the trash. Where dinner is not a conversation but take-out Chinese with the television blaring. I think about Edison texting me at work, things like Reading Lolita 4 AP Eng. Nabokov = srsly messed up dude.

“So I stay here?” I ask.

“You’ll be taken to the prison.”

“Prison?” A chill runs down my spine. “But I thought I got bail?”

“You did. But the wheels of justice move exceedingly slow, and you have to stay until the bail is processed.”

Suddenly a guard I haven’t seen before appears at the door of the cell. “Coffee klatch is over, ladies,” he says.

Kennedy looks at me, her words fast and fierce like bullets. “Don’t talk about your charges. People are going to try to work a deal by prying information out of you. Don’t trust anyone.”

Including you? I wonder.

The guard opens the door of the cell and tells me to hold out my arms. There are those shackles and chains again. “Is that really necessary?” Kennedy asks.

“I don’t make the rules,” the guard says.

I am led down another hallway to a loading dock, where a van is waiting. Inside is another woman in chains. She’s wearing a tight dress and glitter eyeliner and has a weave that reaches halfway down her back. “You like what you see?” she asks, and I immediately avert my eyes.

The sheriff climbs into the front seat of the van and starts the engine.

“Officer,” the woman calls. “I’m a girl who loves her jewelry, but these bracelets are cramping my style.”

When he doesn’t respond, she rolls her eyes. “I’m Liza,” she says. “Liza Lott.”

I can’t help it; I laugh. “That’s really your name?”

“It better be, since I picked it. I like it so much better than…Bruce.” She purses her lips, staring at me, waiting for my reaction. My eyes move from her large manicured hands to her stunning face. If she’s expecting me to be shocked, she has another thing coming. I’m a nurse. I have literally seen it all, including a trans man who became pregnant when his wife was infertile, and a woman with two vaginas.

I meet her gaze, refusing to be intimidated. “I’m Ruth.”

“You get your Subway sandwich, Ruth?”

“What?”

“The food, sugar. It’s so much better at court than in jail, am I right?”

I shake my head. “I’ve never done this before.”

“Me, I should have a punch card. You know, the kind where you get a free coffee or a tiny tube of mascara at your tenth visit.” She grins. “What are you in for?”

“I wish I knew,” I say, before I can remember not to.

“What the fuck, girl? You were in the courtroom, you were arraigned,” Liza replies. “You didn’t hear what you were charged with?”

I turn away, focusing on the scenery out the window. “My lawyer told me I shouldn’t talk to anyone about that.”

“Well.” She sniffs. “Pardon me, Your Majesty.”

In the rearview mirror, the sheriff’s eyes appear, sharp and blue. “She’s in for murder,” he says, and none of us speak for the rest of the ride.

–

WHEN I APPLIED to Yale Nursing School, Mama asked her pastor to say an extra prayer for me, in the hope that God could sway the admissions committee if my transcript from college could not. I remember being mortified as I sat in church beside her, as the congregation lifted their spirits and their voices heavenward on my behalf. There were people dying of cancer, infertile couples hoping for a baby, war in third world countries-in other words, so many more important things the Lord had to do with His time. But Mama said I was equally important, at least to our congregation. I was their success story, the college graduate who was going on to Make a Difference.

On the day before classes were supposed to start, Mama took me out to dinner. “You’re destined to do small great things,” she told me. “Just like Dr. King said.” She was referring to one of her favorite quotes: If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way. “But,” she continued, “don’t forget where you came from.” I didn’t really understand what she meant. I was one of a dozen kids from our neighborhood who had gone to college, and only a handful of those were destined for graduate school. I knew she was proud of me; I knew she felt like her hard work to set me on a different path had paid off. Given that she’d been pushing me out of the nest since I was little, why would she want me to carry around the twigs that had built it? Couldn’t I fly further without them?

I took classes in anatomy and physiology, in pharmacology and principles of nursing, but I planned my schedule so that I was always home for dinner, to tell my mama about my day. It didn’t matter that my commute to and from the city was two hours each way. I knew that if Mama hadn’t spent thirty years scrubbing the floors at Ms. Mina’s house, I wouldn’t be on that train at all.

“Tell me everything,” Mama would say, spooning whatever she’d cooked onto my plate. I passed along the remarkable things I learned-that half the population carries the MRSA germs in their nose; that nitroglycerin can cause you to have a bowel movement if it makes contact with your skin; that you are taller in the morning than the evening, by nearly a half inch, because of the fluid between your spinal discs. But there were things I didn’t tell her, too.

Though I may have been at one of the finest nursing schools in the country, that mattered only on campus. At Yale, other nursing students asked to see my meticulous notes or to have me join their study group. During clinical rotations at the hospital, teachers praised my expertise. But when the day was over, I’d walk into a convenience store to buy a Coke and the owner would follow me around to make sure I didn’t shoplift. I’d sit on the train as elderly white women walked by without making eye contact, even though there was an empty seat beside me.

A month into my tenure at nursing school, I bought a Yale travel mug. My mother assumed it was because I had to leave before dawn in order to catch the train to New Haven every day, and she’d get up and make me a fresh cup of coffee each morning to fill it. But it wasn’t caffeine I needed; it was a ticket into a different world. I would settle the mug on my lap every time I got on the train, with the word YALE purposefully turned so other passengers could read it as they boarded. It was a flag, a sign saying: I’m one of you.

–

THE WOMEN’S PRISON, it turns out, is a good hour’s drive from New Haven. After we arrive, Liza and I are shuttled into a holding cell that looks exactly the same as the one I was in at the courthouse, only more crowded. There are fifteen other women already inside. There are no seats, so I slide down a wall and sit on the floor between two women. One has her hands laced in front of her and is praying under her breath in Spanish. The other is biting her cuticles.

Liza leans against the bars and begins to weave her long hair into a fishtail braid. “Excuse me,” I say quietly. “Do you know if they’ll let me make a phone call?”

She glances up at me. “Oh, now you wanna talk to me.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude. I…I’m new to all of this.”

She snaps a rubber band at the end of her braid. “Sure, you get a phone call. Right after they serve you your caviar and give you a nice massage.”

I am shocked by this. Isn’t a phone call a basic right for prisoners? “That’s not what it’s like in the movies,” I murmur.

Liza places her hands under her breasts and plumps them. “Don’t believe everything you see.”

A female guard opens the door to the cell. The praying woman gets up, her eyes full of hope, but the officer motions to Liza instead. “Good God, Liza. You back again?”

“Don’t you know nothing about economics? It’s all supply and demand. I ain’t in this business by myself, Officer. If there weren’t such a demand for my services, the supply would just dry up.”

The guard laughs. “Now there’s an image,” she says, and she takes Liza by the arm to lead her out.

One by one we are plucked from the cell. No one who leaves comes back. To distract myself I start making lists of what I must remember to tell Adisa one day when I can look back on this and laugh: that the food we are given, during our multihour wait, is so unidentifiable that I can’t tell if it’s a vegetable or a meat; that the inmate who was mopping the floor when we were marched inside looked exactly like my second-grade teacher; that although I am embarrassed by my nightgown, there is a woman in the holding cell with me who is wearing the kind of mascot costume you see at high school football games. Then finally the same officer who took Liza away opens the door and calls my name.

I smile at her, trying to be as obedient as possible. I read her name tag: GATES. “Officer Gates,” I say, when we are out of earshot of the other women in the cell, “I know you’re just doing your job, but I’m actually being released on bail. The thing is, I need to get in touch with my son-”

“Save it for your counselor, inmate.” She takes another mug shot of me, and rolls my fingerprints again. She fills out a form that asks everything from my name and address and gender to my HIV status and substance abuse history. Then she leads me into a room slightly bigger than a closet that has nothing inside but a chair.

“Strip,” she announces. “Put your clothes on the chair.”

I stare at her.

“Strip,” she repeats.

She folds her arms and leans against the door. If the first freedom you lose in prison is privacy, the second is dignity. I turn my back and pull my nightgown over my head. I fold it up carefully and set it on the chair. I step out of my panties, and fold them, too. I put my slippers on top of the pile.

As a nurse you learn how to make a patient comfortable during moments that would otherwise be humiliating-how to drape the spread legs of a woman in labor, or draw a johnny over a bare bottom. When a laboring mother defecates because of the pressure of the baby’s head, you clean it up briskly and say it happens to everyone. You take any embarrassing situation and you do what you can to make it less so. As I stand shivering, naked, I wonder if this guard’s job is the absolute opposite of mine. If she wants nothing more than to make me feel shame.

I decide I’m not going to give her the satisfaction.

“Open your mouth,” the officer says, and I stick out my tongue like I would at the doctor’s office.

“Lean forward and show me what’s behind your ears.”

I do as I’m told, although I can’t imagine what anyone could hide behind her ears. I am instructed to flip my hair, and to spread my toes and to lift up my feet so she can see the bottoms.

“Squat,” the guard says, “and cough three times.”

I imagine what a woman might be able to smuggle into jail, given the remarkable flexibility of the female anatomy. I think about how, when I was a student nurse, I had to practice to figure out the width of a dilated cervix. One centimeter was an opening the size of a fingertip. Two and a half centimeters were the second and third fingers, slipped into an opening the size of the neck of a bottle of nail polish remover. Four centimeters of dilation were those same fingers, spread in the neck of a forty-ounce bottle of Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce. Five centimeters was the opening of a fifty-ounce Heinz ketchup bottle. Seven centimeters: a plastic shaker of Kraft Parmesan cheese.

“Spread the cheeks.”

A few times, I have helped deliver the baby of a survivor of sexual assault. It makes perfect sense that, during childbirth, memories of abuse might be triggered. A body in labor is a body in stress, and for a rape survivor, that can lead to a survival reflex that physiologically slows down or stops the progress. In these cases, it’s even more important for the L & D room to be a safe space. For the woman to be listened to. For her to feel like she has a say in what happens to her.

I may not have much say here, but I still can make the choice to not be a victim. The whole point of this examination is to make me feel lesser than, like an animal. To make me ashamed of my nakedness.

But I have spent twenty years seeing how beautiful women are-not because of how they look, but because of what their bodies can withstand.

So I stand up and face the officer, daring her to look away from my smooth brown skin, the dark rings of my nipples, the swell of my belly, the thatch of hair between my legs. She hands me the orange scrubs that are designed to conform me, and the ID tag with my inmate number, meant to define me as part of a group, instead of an individual. I stare at her until she meets my eye. “My name,” I say, “is Ruth.”

–

FIFTH GRADE, BREAKFAST. My nose was buried in a book, and I was reading facts aloud. “There were twins who were born eighty-seven days apart,” I announced.

Rachel sat across from me, picking at her cornflakes. “Then they weren’t twins, stupid.”

“Mama,” I yelled automatically. “Rachel called me stupid.” I turned the page. “Sigurd the Mighty was killed by a dead man he beheaded. He tied the guy’s head to his saddle and was scraped by a tooth and got an infection and died.”

My mother hurried into the kitchen. “Rachel, don’t call your sister stupid. And Ruth, stop reading vile things while everyone’s trying to eat.”

Reluctantly, I closed the book, but not before letting my eyes light on a final fact: there was a family in Kentucky that, for generations, had been born with blue skin. It was a result of inbreeding and genetics. Cool, I thought, holding out the flat of my hand and turning it over.

“Ruth!” my mother said sharply, which was enough to let me know it was not the first time she’d called my name. “Go change your shirt.”

“Why?” I asked, before I remembered I wasn’t supposed to talk back.

My mother yanked at my uniform blouse, which had a stain the size of a dime near my ribs. I scowled. “Mama, no one’s even going to see it once I put my sweater on.”

“And if you take that sweater off?” she asked. “You don’t go to school with a stain on your shirt, because if you do, people aren’t going to judge you for being sloppy. They’re going to judge you for being Black.”

I knew better than to cross Mama when she got like this. So I took the book and ran to the room I shared with Rachel to find a clean white shirt. As I buttoned it, my gaze drifted toward the trivia book where it had fallen open on my bed.

The loneliest creature on earth is a whale that has spent more than twenty years calling out for a mate, I read, but whose voice is so different from those of other whales that none of them ever respond.

–

IN THE BEDROLL I am given are sheets, a blanket, shampoo, soap, toothpaste, and a toothbrush. I am entrusted to the custody of another inmate, who tells me important things: that from now on, all my personal hygiene items have to be purchased from the commissary, that if I want to watch Judge Judy in the rec room I have to get there early for a good seat; that halal meals are the only edible ones so I might want to say I’m Muslim; that someone named Wig gives the best tattoos, because her ink is mixed with urine, which means it’s more permanent.

As we pass by the cells I notice that two inmates occupy each one, and that the majority of the prisoners are Black, and that the officers are not. There is a part of me that feels the way I used to when my mother made my sister take me out with her friends in our neighborhood. The girls would make fun of me for being an Oreo-black on the outside, white on the inside. I’d wind up getting very quiet out of fear that I was going to make a fool of myself. What if a woman like that is my roommate? What could we possibly have in common?

The fact that we’re both in prison, for one.

I turn the corner, and the inmate sweeps her arm in a grand gesture. “Home sweet home,” she announces, and I peek inside to find a white woman sitting on a bunk.

I put my bedroll on the empty mattress and begin to pull free the sheets and blanket.

“Did I say you could sleep there?” the woman asks.

I freeze. “I…uh, no.”

“You know what happened to my last roommate?” She has frizzy red hair and eyes that do not quite look out in the same direction. I shake my head. She comes closer, until she is a breath away. “Neither does anyone else,” she whispers. Then she bursts out laughing. “Sorry, I’m just messing with your head. My name’s Wanda.”

My heart is beating in the back of my throat. “Ruth,” I manage. I gesture to the empty mattress. “So this is…”

“Yeah, whatever. I don’t give a shit, as long as you stay out of my stuff.”

I jerk my head, agreeing, and make the bed as Wanda watches. “You from around here?”

“East End.”

“I’m from Bantam. You ever been there?” I shake my head. “No one’s ever been to Bantam. This your first time?”

I glance up, confused. “In Bantam?”

“In prison.”

“Yes, but I won’t be here for long. I’m waiting for my bail to clear.”

Wanda laughs. “Okay, then.”

Slowly, I turn. “What?”

“I’ve been waiting for the same thing. Going on three weeks now.”

Three weeks. I feel my knees buckle, and I sink to the mattress. Three weeks? I tell myself that my situation is not Wanda’s. But all the same: three weeks.

“So what are you in for?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“It’s amazing how nobody in here did anything illegal.” Wanda lies back on her bunk, stretching her arms up over her head. “They say I killed my husband. I say he ran into my knife.” She looks at me. “It was an accident. You know, like the way he broke my arm and gave me a black eye and pushed me down the stairs and those were accidents too.”

There are stones in her voice. I wonder if, in time, mine will sound that way, too. I think of Kennedy, telling me to keep to myself.

I think of Turk Bauer and picture the tattoo I saw in the courtroom, blazing across his shaved scalp. I wonder if he has spent time in prison. If this means we, too, have something in common.

Then I picture his baby, curled in my arms in the morgue, cold and blue as granite.

“I don’t believe in accidents,” I say, and I leave it at that.

–

THE COUNSELOR, OFFICER Ramirez, is a man with a face as round and soft as a donut, who is slurping his soup. He keeps spilling on his shirt, and I try not to look every time it happens. “Ruth Jefferson,” he says, reading my file. “You had a question about visitation?”

“Yes,” I reply. “My son, Edison. I need to get in touch with him, so that he knows how to get together the papers we need for bail. He’s only seventeen.”

Ramirez rummages in his desk. He takes out a magazine-Guns & Ammo-and a stack of flyers about depression, and then hands me a form. “Write down the name and address of the people you want on the visitor list.”

“And then what?”

“Then I mail it out and when they sign it and send it back, the form gets approved and you’re good to go.”

“But that could take weeks.”

“About ten days, usually,” Ramirez says. Slurrrrp.

Tears flood into my eyes. This is like a nightmare, the kind where someone shakes your shoulder as you are telling yourself this is a dream, and says, This isn’t a dream. “I can’t leave him alone that long.”

“I can contact child protective services-”

“No!” I blurt out. “Don’t.”

Something makes him put down his spoon and look at me, not unkindly. “There’s always the warden. He can grant you a courtesy visit for two adult visitors before the official application is processed. But given that your son is seventeen, he’d have to come in the company of another adult.”

Adisa, I think. And then, immediately, I remember why she’ll never be approved by the warden for a visit: she has a record, thanks to a forged rent check five years back.

I push the form back across the desk to him. The walls feel like the shutter of a camera closing. “Thank you anyway,” I manage, and I walk back to my cell.

Wanda is sitting on her bunk, nibbling on a Twix bar. She takes one look at me, then breaks off a tiny piece and offers it.

I take it in my hand and close my fist around it. The chocolate starts to melt.

“No phone call?” Wanda asks, and I shake my head. I sit on my bunk, and then turn away from her, so that I am facing the wall.

“It’s time for Judge Judy,” she says. “You want to watch?”

When I don’t respond, I hear Wanda pad out of our cell, presumably toward the rec room. I lick the candy from my hand and then press my palms together and talk to the only slice of hope I have left. God, I pray, please, please be listening.

–

WHEN I WAS little, I used to have sleepovers with Christina at her brownstone. We would unroll our sleeping bags in the living room and Sam Hallowell would run a movie projector with old cartoons that he must have gotten when he was a television executive. This was, back then, a big deal-there were no VCRs or video on demand; a private screening was a treat reserved for movie stars-and, I guess, their children. Although I was skittish about being away from home for the night, this was the next best thing: Mama would run the bath for us and get me into my pajamas and make a treat of hot cocoa and cookies before she left; and by the time we woke up, she was already back and making us pancakes.

Whatever differences there were between Christina and me grew more indelible as we got older. It was harder to pretend that it didn’t matter my mama worked for hers; or that I had to work after school while she became a striker for the soccer team; or that the clothes I wore on Casual Fridays used to belong to Christina. It wasn’t that she was unfriendly to me. The barricade was built with my own suspicions, one brick of embarrassment at a time. Christina’s friends were all blond, pretty, athletic, fanning around her like the matching spokes of a snowflake; if I didn’t hang around their edges, I told myself, it was because I didn’t want Christina to feel like she had to include me. The real reason I distanced myself, though, was because it hurt less to step away than to risk that inevitable moment where I would become an afterthought.

The only problem with dissociating myself from Christina was that I didn’t have many other friends. There was a Pakistani exchange student, and a girl with cataracts that I tutored in math, but what we had in common was the fact that we didn’t really fit in anywhere else. There was a cluster of other Black kids, but their upbringing was still a world away from mine-with their parents who were stockbrokers and fencing lessons and summer cottages on Nantucket. There was Rachel-who was eighteen now and pregnant with her first child. She probably needed a friend, but even when we were face-to-face across the kitchen table, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her, because the things she wanted out of her life were so different from what I hoped for in my own, and because-honestly-I was a little scared that if I started hanging around with her, all the stereotypes she’d wrapped herself in would rub off like shoe polish and make it even harder to fit in seamlessly in the halls of Dalton.

So maybe that’s why, when Christina invited me to a slumber party she was having one Friday, I said yes before I could remember to stop myself. I said yes, and hoped that she would prove me gloriously wrong. In the company of all these new friends of hers, I wanted to share our inside jokes about the time Christina and I made helmets out of tinfoil and hid in the dumbwaiter pretending it was a spaceship to the moon; or when Ms. Mina’s dog, Fergus, pooped on her bed and we used white paint to cover the stain, certain no one would ever notice. I wanted to be the only one who knew which kitchen cabinet held the snacks and where the extra bedding was kept and the names of each of Christina’s old stuffed animals. I wanted everyone else to know that Christina and I had been friends even longer than they had.

Christina had invited two other sophomores-Misty, who claimed to be dyslexic to get accommodations on homework, but who seemed to have no trouble reading aloud from the stack of Cosmo magazines that Christina had brought onto the roof deck; and Kiera, who was obsessed with Rob Lowe and her own thigh gap. We had all stretched out towels out on the teak deck. Christina turned up the radio as a Dire Straits song came on and started singing all the lyrics by heart. I thought of how we used to play Ms. Mina’s records-all original Broadway cast recordings-and dance around pretending to be Cinderella or Eva Perón or Maria von Trapp.

From my bag, I pulled out a bottle of sunscreen. The other girls had rubbed themselves with baby oil, as if they were steaks on a grill, but the last thing I wanted was to be darker. I noticed Kiera looking at me. “Can you tan?”

“Um, yeah,” I said, but I was spared going into detail by Misty interrupting.

“This is so awesome,” she said. “The British invasion.” She twisted the magazine so that we could look at the models, each one twiggier than the last, draped in next season’s clothes with Union Jacks and gold-buttoned red coats that made me think of Michael Jackson.

Christina sank down beside me, pointing. “Linda Evangelista is, like, perfect.”

“Ugh, really? She looks like a Nazi. Cindy Crawford is so natural,” Kiera countered. I peered at the photographs. “My sister’s going to London this summer,” Kiera added. “Backpacking through Europe. I made my dad promise, in writing, that when I was eighteen I could go too.”

“Backpacking?” Misty shuddered. “Why?”

“Because it’s romantic, duh. Just think about it. Eurail passes. Hostels. Meeting hot guys.”

“I think the Savoy is pretty romantic too,” Misty said. “And they have showers.”

Kiera rolled her eyes. “Back me up, Ruth. No one in a romance novel ever meets in the lobby of the Savoy. They bump into each other on a train platform or accidentally pick up each other’s backpacks, right?”

“Sounds like fate,” I said, but what I was thinking was that there was no way I couldn’t work for a summer, not if I planned to go to college.

Christina flopped onto her belly on the towel. “I’m starving. We need snacks.” She looked up at me. “Ruth, could you go get us something to eat?”

Mama smiled when I came into the kitchen, which smelled like heaven. A rack of cookies was cooling, another sheet was just going into the oven. She held out the mixing spoon and let me lick the dough. “How are things up in Saint-Tropez?”

“Everyone’s hungry,” I told her. “Christina wants food.”

“Oh, she does, does she? Then how come she isn’t the one standing in my kitchen asking?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but couldn’t find the answer. Why had she asked me? Why had I gone?

My mama’s mouth drew tight. “Why are you here, baby?”

I looked down between my bare feet. “I told you-we’re hungry.”

“Ruth,” she repeated. “Why are you here?”

This time I couldn’t pretend to misunderstand. “Because,” I said, so quietly that I could barely hear it, so quietly I was hoping my mother couldn’t either, “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“That is not true,” she insisted. “When you’re ready for us, we’ll be waiting on you.”

I grabbed a plate and began to stack cookies on it. I didn’t know what my mother meant and I didn’t really want to know. I avoided her the rest of the afternoon, and when she left for the night, we were already locked inside Christina’s bedroom, playing Depeche Mode and dancing on the mattress. I listened to the other girls confess their secret crushes and pretended I had one myself, so I could be part of the conversation. When Kiera brought out a flask filled with vodka (“It has the least calories, you know, if you want to get drunk”), I acted like it was no big deal, even though my heart was racing. I didn’t drink, because Mama would have killed me, and because I knew I had to stay in control. Every night, before bedtime, I lotioned my skin and rubbed cocoa butter into my knees and heels and elbows to keep from being ashy; I brushed my hair around my head to encourage growth and wrapped it in a scarf. Mama did this, and so did Rachel, but I was pretty sure those rituals would be foreign to everyone at this sleepover, even Christina. I didn’t want to answer questions, or stick out any more than I already did, so my plan was to be the last girl in the bathroom and to stay there until everyone had fallen asleep…and then to wake up before dawn and fix my hair before anyone else was stirring.

So I stayed awake as Misty recounted in painstaking detail what it was like to give a blow job and Kiera got sick in the bathroom. I let everyone brush their teeth before me, and waited long enough to hear snoring before I emerged in the pitch dark.

We were sleeping wedged like sardines, four of us in Christina’s queen-size bed. I lifted the covers and slipped in beside Christina, smelling the familiar peach shampoo she had used forever. I thought she was asleep, but she rolled over and looked at me.

My scarf was wrapped around my head, red as a wound, the ends trailing down my back. I saw Christina’s eyes flicker to it, and then back to mine. She did not mention the wrap. “I’m glad you’re here,” Christina whispered, and for a brief, blessed moment, so was I.

–

LATE THAT NIGHT, as Wanda’s snore whistles through the bunk, I lie awake. Every half hour a CO comes by with a flashlight, making sure that everyone is asleep. When he does, I close my eyes, pretending. I wonder if it gets easier to sleep with the sounds of a hundred women around you. I wonder if it gets easier, period.

During one of these circuits, the flashlight bounces with the CO’s footsteps and then stops at our cell. Immediately Wanda sits, scowls. “Get up,” the CO says.

“What the hell?” Wanda challenges. “Now you’re tossing cells at midnight? You ever hear of prisoners’ rights-”

“Not you.” The officer jerks his head toward me. “Her.”

At that, Wanda holds up her hands, backing off. She may have been willing to share a Twix with me, but now I am on my own.

My knees shake as I stand and walk to the open cell door. “Where are you taking me?”

The CO doesn’t respond, just steers me down the catwalk. He stops at a doorway, buzzes the control desk, and there is a grating buzz as a lock is released. We step into an air lock and wait for the door to close behind us before the next door magically opens.

In silence he leads me to a small room that looks like a closet. He hands me a paper grocery bag.

I peek inside to see my nightgown and my slippers. I yank the scrubs off my body, starting to fold them out of habit, and then leave them in a pile on the floor. I pull on my old clothes, my old life.

The CO is waiting when I open the door again. This time he takes me past the cell where I was kept waiting when I first arrived, which has only two women in it now, both curled on the floor asleep, and reeking of alcohol and vomit. Then suddenly we are outside, crossing a fence with a necklace of barbed wire.

I turn to him, panicking. “I don’t have any money,” I say. I know we are an hour or so away from New Haven, and I don’t have bus fare or a phone or even proper clothing.

The CO jerks his head into the distance, and that’s when I notice that the dark is moving, a shadow against a moonless night. The silhouette morphs until I see the outline of a car, and a person inside, who gets out and starts running toward me. “Mama,” Edison says, his face buried in my neck, “let’s go home.”

Kennedy

THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF people who become public defenders: those who believe they can save the world, and those who know damn well they can’t. The former are starry-eyed law school grads convinced they can make a difference. The latter are those of us who have worked in the system and know the problems are so much bigger than we are or the clients we represent. Once a bleeding heart calluses into realism, victories become individual ones: being able to reunite a mom who’s gone through rehab with her kid, who was put in foster care; winning a motion to suppress evidence of a former addiction that might color the odds for a current client; being able to juggle hundreds of cases and triage those that need more than a meet ’em and plead ’em. As it turns out, public defenders are less Superman and more Sisyphus, and there’s no small number of lawyers who wind up crushed under the weight of the infinite caseloads and the crappy hours and the shitty pay. To this end, we learn quickly that if we’re going to keep a tiny bit of our lives sacrosanct, we don’t bring our work home with us.

Which is why, when I dream of Ruth Jefferson for two consecutive nights, I know I’m in trouble.

In the first dream, Ruth and I are having an attorney-client meeting. I ask her the standard set of questions I’d ask of any client, but every time she speaks, it is in a language I don’t understand. It’s not even a language I recognize. Embarrassed, I have to keep asking her to repeat herself. Finally she opens her mouth, and a flock of blue butterflies pours out.

The second night I dream that Ruth has invited me over to dinner. It is the most sumptuous table, with enough food for a football team, and each dish is more delicious than the last. I drink one glass of water, and then another, and a third, and the pitcher is empty. I ask if I can get a refill, and Ruth looks horrified. “I thought you knew,” she says, and when I glance up I realize that we are locked inside a prison cell.

I wake up, dying of thirst. Rolling onto my side, I reach for the glass of water I keep on my nightstand and take a long, cool drink. I feel Micah’s arm slide around my waist and pull me against him. He kisses my neck; his hand slides up my pajama shirt.

“What would you do if I went to prison?” I blurt out.

Micah’s eyes open. “I’m pretty sure since you’re my wife, and over eighteen, this is legal.”

“No.” I roll to face him. “What if I did something…and got convicted?”

“That’s kind of hot.” Micah grins. “Lawyer in prison. Okay, I’ll play. What did you do? Say public indecency. Please say public indecency.” He pulls me flush against him.

“Seriously. What would happen to Violet? How would you explain it to her?”

“K, is this your way of telling me that you actually, finally did kill your boss?”

“It’s a hypothetical.”

“In that case, could we revisit the question in about fifteen minutes?” His eyes darken, and he kisses me.

–

WHILE MICAH SHAVES, I try to pin my hair into a bun. “Going to court today?” he asks.

His face is still flushed; so is mine. “This afternoon. How did you know?”

“You don’t stick needles into your head unless you’re going to court.”

“They’re bobby pins, and that’s because I’m trying to look professional,” I say.

“You’re too sexy to look professional.”

I laugh. “Let’s hope my clients don’t feel the same way.” I spear a flyaway hair into submission and lean my hip against the sink. “I’m thinking of asking Harry to give me a felony.”

“Great idea,” Micah says with mild sarcasm. “I mean, since you already have five hundred open cases, you should definitely take on one that requires even more time and energy.”

It’s true. Being a public defender means I have nearly ten times as many cases as are recommended by the ABA, and that, on average, I have less than an hour to prepare each case that goes to trial. Most of the time I am working, I do not eat lunch, or take a bathroom break.

“If it makes you feel any better, he probably won’t give it to me.”

Micah clatters his razor against the porcelain. When we were first married, I used to stare at the tiny hairs that dried in the bowl of the sink with wonder, thinking that I might read in them our future the way a psychic would read tea leaves. “Does this sudden ambition have anything to do with the question about you going to prison?”

“Maybe?” I admit.

“Well, I’d much rather you take his case than join him behind bars.”

“Her,” I correct. “It’s Ruth Jefferson. That nurse. I just can’t shake her story.”

Even when a client has done something unlawful, I can find sympathy. I can acknowledge a bad choice was made, but still believe in justice, as long as everyone has equal access to the system-which is exactly why I do what I do.

But with Ruth, there’s something that doesn’t quite add up.

Suddenly Violet comes charging into the bathroom. Micah tightens the towel around his waist, and I tie my robe. “Mommy, Daddy,” she says. “Today I match Minnie.”

She clutches a stuffed Minnie Mouse, and indeed, she has managed to pull on a polka-dotted skirt, yellow sneakers, a red bikini top, and long white tea gloves from the dress-up bin. I look at her, wondering how I am going to explain that she can’t wear a bikini to school.

“Minnie’s a fallen woman,” Micah points out. “I mean, it’s been seventy years. Mickey ought to put a ring on it.”

“What’s a fallen woman?” Violet asks.

I kiss Micah. “I’m going to kill you,” I say pleasantly.

“Ah,” he replies. “So that’s why you’re going to prison.”

–

AT THE OFFICE, we have a television-a tiny screen that sits between the coffee machine and the can opener. It’s a professional necessity, because of the press coverage our clients sometimes get. But in the mornings, before court is even in session, it’s usually tuned to Good Morning America. Ed has an obsession with Lara Spencer’s wardrobe, and to me, George Stephanopoulos is the perfect balance of hard-hitting reporter and eye candy. We sit through a round of hypothetical polls pitting presidential candidates against one another while Howard makes a fresh pot of coffee, and Ed recounts dinner with his in-laws. His mother-in-law still calls him by the name of his wife’s ex, even though they’ve been married for nine years. “So this time,” Ed says, “she asked me how much toilet paper I use.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Just enough,” Ed replies.

“Why did she even want to know?”

“She said they’re trying to cut back,” Ed answered. “That they’re on a fixed income. Mind you, they go to Foxwoods three out of four weekends a month, but now we’re rationing the Charmin?”

“Well, that’s crap,” I say, grinning. “See what I did there?”

Robin Roberts is interviewing a portly, middle-aged redhead whose poem was accepted for a highly literary anthology-but only after he submitted it with a Japanese pseudonym. “It was rejected thirty-five times,” the man says. “So I thought maybe I’d be noticed more if my name was more…”

“Colorful?” Roberts supplies.

Ed snorts. “Slow news day.”

Behind me, Howard drops a spoon. It clatters into the sink.

“Why is this even a thing?” Ed asks.

“Because it’s a lie,” I say. “He’s a white insurance adjuster who co-opted someone else’s culture so he could get fifteen minutes of fame.”

“If that were all it took, wouldn’t hundreds of poems by Japanese poets get published every year? Clearly what he wrote was good. How come no one’s talking about that?”

Harry Blatt, my boss, blusters through the break room, his coat a tornado around his legs. “I hate rain,” he announces. “Why didn’t I move to Arizona?” With that greeting, he grabs a cup of coffee and holes himself up in his office.

I follow him, knocking softly on the closed door.

Harry is still hanging up his drenched coat when I enter. “What?” he asks.

“You remember that case I arraigned-Ruth Jefferson?”

“Prostitution?”

“No, she’s the nurse from Mercy-West Haven. Can I take it?”

He settles behind his desk. “Right. The dead baby.”

When he doesn’t say anything else, I stumble to fill the void. “I’ve been practicing for five years, almost. And I feel really connected to this one. I’d like the opportunity to try it.”

“It’s a murder,” Harry says.

“I know. But I really, really think I’m the right public defender for this case,” I say. “And you’re going to have to give me a felony sooner or later.” I smile. “So I’m suggesting sooner.”

Harry grunts. Which is better than a no. “Well, it would be good to have another go-to lawyer for the big cases. But since you’re a rookie, I’ll have Ed second-chair it with you.”

I’d rather have a Neanderthal sitting at the table with me.

Oh, wait.

“I can do it myself,” I tell Harry. It isn’t until he finally nods that I realize I’ve been holding my breath.

–

I COUNT THE hours and the arraignments I have to slog through before I’m free to drive to the women’s prison. As I sit in traffic, I run over opening conversations in my mind that will allow Ruth to have confidence in me as her attorney. I may not have tried a murder before, but I’ve done dozens of drug and assault and domestic jury trials. “This isn’t my first rodeo,” I say out loud to the rearview mirror, and then roll my eyes.

“It’s an honor to represent you.”

Nope. Sounds like a publicist meeting Meryl Streep.

I take a deep breath. “Hello,” I try. “I’m Kennedy.”

Ten minutes later, I park, shrug on a mantle of false confidence, and stride into the building. A CO with a belly that makes him look ten months pregnant sizes me up. “Visiting hours are over,” he says.

“I’m here to see my client. Ruth Jefferson?”

The officer scans his computer. “Well, you’re out of luck.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“She was released two days ago,” he says.

My cheeks flame. I can only imagine how stupid I look, losing track of my own client. “Yes! Of course!” I pretend that I knew this all along, that I was only testing him.

I can still hear him snickering as the door of the prison closes behind me.

–

A COUPLE OF days after I send a formal letter to Ruth’s house-the address of which I have from the bail posting-she comes to the office. I am headed to the copy machine when the door opens and she walks in, nervous and hesitant, as if this cannot possibly be the right place. With the bare bones and the stacks of boxes and paper, we look more like a company that is either setting up shop or closing its doors than a functional legal office.

“Ruth! Hello!” I hold out my hand. “Kennedy McQuarrie,” I say.

“I remember.”

She is taller than I am, and stands with remarkable posture. I think, absently, that my mother would be impressed.

“You got my letter,” I say, the obvious. “I’m glad you’re here, because we’ve got a lot to talk about.” I look around, wondering where I am going to put her. My cubicle is barely big enough for me. The break room is too informal. There’s Harry’s office, but he’s in it. Ed is using the one client meeting room we have to take a deposition. “Would you like to grab a bite? There’s a Panera around the corner. Do you eat…”

“Food?” she finishes. “Yes.”

I pay for her soup and salad, and pick a booth in the back. We talk about the rain, and how we needed it, and when the weather might turn. “Please,” I say, gesturing to her food. “Go ahead.”

I pick up my sandwich and take a bite just as Ruth bows her head and says, “Lord, we thank you for our food, furnishing our bodies for Christ’s sake.”

My mouth is still full as I say Amen.

“So you’re a churchgoer,” I add, after I swallow.

Ruth looks up at me. “Is that a problem?”

“Not at all. In fact, it’s good to know, because it’s something that can help a jury like you.”

For the first time, I really look at Ruth carefully. The last time I saw her, after all, her hair was wrapped and she was wearing a nightgown. Now, she is dressed conservatively in a striped blouse and navy skirt, with shiny patent flats that are rubbed raw in one small spot each at the heels. Her hair is straight, pulled into a knot at the base of her neck. Her skin is lighter than I remember, almost the same color as the coffee milk that my mother used to let me drink when I was little.

Nerves manifest differently in different people. Me, I get talkative. Micah gets pensive. My mother gets snobbish. And Ruth, apparently, gets stiff. Which is something else I file away, because jurors who see that can misinterpret it as anger or haughtiness.

“I know it’s hard,” I say, lowering my voice for privacy, “but I need you to be a hundred percent honest with me. Even though I’m a stranger. I mean, hopefully, I won’t be one for long. But it’s important to realize that nothing you say to me can be used against you. It’s completely client-privileged.”

Ruth puts her fork down carefully, and nods. “All right.”

I take a small notebook out of my purse. “Well, first, do you prefer the term black or African American or people of color?”

Ruth stares at me. “People of color,” she says after a moment.

I write this down. Underline it. “I just want you to feel comfortable. Frankly, I don’t even see color. I mean, the only race that matters is the human one, right?”

Her lips press together tightly.

I clear my throat, breaking the knot of silence. “Remind me again where you went to school?”

“SUNY Plattsburgh, and then Yale Nursing School.”

“Impressive,” I murmur, scribbling this down.

“Ms. McQuarrie,” she says.

“Kennedy.”

“Kennedy…I can’t go back to prison.” Ruth looks into my eyes, and for a moment, I can see right down into the heart of her. “I’ve got my boy, and there’s no one else who can raise him to be the man I know he’s going to be.”

“I know. Listen, I’m going to do my best. I have a lot of experience in cases with people like you.”

That mask freezes her features again. “People like me?”

“People accused of serious crimes,” I explain.

“But I didn’t do anything.”

“I believe you. However, we still have to convince a jury. So we have to go back to the basics to figure out why you’ve been charged.”

“I’d think that’s pretty obvious,” Ruth says quietly. “That baby’s father didn’t want me near his son.”

“The white supremacist? He has nothing to do with your case.”

Ruth blinks. “I don’t understand how that’s possible.”

“He isn’t the one who indicted you. None of that matters.”

She looks at me as if I’m crazy. “But I’m the only nurse of color on the birthing pavilion.”

“To the State, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white or blue or green. To them, you had a legal duty to take care of an infant under your charge. Just because your boss said don’t touch the baby doesn’t mean you get a free pass to stand there and do nothing.” I lean forward. “The State doesn’t even have to specify what the degree of murder is. They can argue multiple theories-contradictory theories. It’s like shooting fish in a bucket-if they hit any of them, you’re in trouble. If the State can show implied malice because you were so mad at being taken off the baby’s case, and suggest that you premeditated the death, the jury can convict you of murder. Even if we told the jury it was an accident, you’d be admitting to a breach in duty of care and criminal negligence with reckless and wanton disregard for the safety of the baby-you’d basically be giving them negligent homicide on a silver platter. In either of those scenarios, you’re going to prison. And in either of those scenarios it doesn’t matter what color your skin is.”

She draws in her breath. “Do you really believe that if I was white, I’d be sitting here with you right now?”

There is no way you can look at a case that has, at its core, a nurse who is the only employee of color in the department, a white supremacist father, and a knee-jerk decision by a hospital administrator…and not assume that race played a factor.

But.

Any public defender who tells you justice is blind is telling you a big fat lie. Watch the news coverage of trials that have racial overtones, and what will stick out profoundly is the way attorneys and judges and juries go out of their way to say this isn’t about race, even though it clearly is. Any public defender will also tell you that even though the majority of our clients are people of color, you can’t play the race card during a trial.

That’s because it’s sure suicide in a courtroom to bring up race. You don’t know what your jury is thinking. Or can’t be certain of what your judge believes. In fact, the easiest way to lose a case that has a racially motivated incident at its core is to actually call it what it is. Instead, you find something else for the jury to hang their hat on. Some shred of evidence that can clear your client of blame, and allow those twelve men and women to go home still pretending that the world we live in is an equal one.

“No,” I admit. “I believe it’s too risky to bring up in court.” I lean forward. “I’m not saying you weren’t discriminated against, Ruth. I’m saying that this is not the time or place to address it.”

“Then when is?” she asks, her voice hot. “If no one ever talks about race in court, how is anything ever supposed to change?”

I don’t have the answer to that. The wheels of systemic justice are slow; but fortunately, there’s a little more oil in the machinery for personal justice, which throws cash at the victims to remove some of the indignity. “You file a civil lawsuit. I can’t do it for you, but I can call around and find you someone who works with employment discrimination.”

“But I can’t afford a lawyer-”

“They’ll take your case on contingency. They’ll get a third of whatever payout you win,” I explain. “To be honest, with that Post-it note, I think you’d be able to get compensatory damages for the salary you lost, as well as punitive damages for the idiotic decision your employer made.”

Her jaw drops. “You mean I’d get money?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a couple million,” I admit.

Ruth Jefferson is speechless.

“You’ve got one hundred and eighty days to file an EEOC complaint.”

“And then what?”

“Then, the EEOC will sit on it until the criminal trial is finished.”

“Why?”

“Because assigning a guilty verdict against a plaintiff is significant,” I say frankly. “It will change how your civil lawyer will draw up the complaint for you. A guilty finding is admissible as evidence, and would hurt your civil case.”

She turns this over in her mind. “Which is why you don’t want to talk about discrimination during this trial,” Ruth says. “So that guilty verdict won’t come to pass.” She folds her hands in her lap, silent. She shakes her head once, and then closes her eyes.

“You were kept from doing your job,” I say softly. “Don’t keep me from doing mine.”

Ruth takes a deep breath, opens her eyes, and meets my gaze. “All right,” she says. “What do you want to know?”

Ruth

THE MORNING AFTER I AM released from jail I wake up and stare at the same old crack in the ceiling that I always say I’ll patch and never get around to doing. I feel the bar from the pullout couch digging into my back and give thanks for it. I close my eyes and listen to the sweet harmony of the garbage trucks on our street.

In my nightgown (a fresh one; I will donate the one I wore to the arraignment to Goodwill at the first opportunity) I start a pot of coffee and pad down the hall to Edison’s bedroom. My boy rests like the dead; even when I turn the knob and slip inside and sit down on the edge of the mattress, he doesn’t stir.

When Edison was little, my husband and I would watch him sleep. Sometimes Wesley would put his hand on Edison’s back, and we’d measure the rise and fall of his lungs. The science of creating another human is remarkable, and no matter how many times I’ve learned about cells and mitosis and neural tubes and all the rest that goes into forming a baby, I can’t help but think there’s a dash of miracle involved, too.

Edison rumbles deep in his chest, and he rubs his eyes. “Mama?” he says, sitting up, instantly awake. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I tell him. “Everything is right in the world.”

He exhales, then looks at his clock. “I have to get ready for school.”

I know, from our conversation in the car last night on the drive home, that Edison missed a whole day of classes in order to post bail for me, learning more about mortgages and real estate than I probably know myself. “I’ll call the school secretary. To explain about yesterday.”

But we both know there’s a difference between Please excuse Edison for being absent; he had a stomach bug and Please excuse Edison for being absent; he was bailing his mother out of jail. Edison shakes his head. “That’s okay. I’ll just talk to my teachers.”

He doesn’t meet my eye, and I feel a seismic shift between us.

“Thank you,” I say quietly. “Again.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Mama,” he murmurs.

“No, I do.” I realize, to my shock, that all the tears I managed to keep inside during the last twenty-four hours are suddenly swimming in my eyes.

“Hey,” Edison says, and he reaches out to hug me.

“I’m sorry,” I say, hiccuping against his shoulder. “I don’t know why I’m falling apart now.”

“It’s going to be okay.”

I feel it again, that movement of the earth beneath my feet, the resettling of my bones against the backdrop of my soul. It takes me a second to realize that for the first time in our lives, Edison is the one comforting me, instead of the other way around.

I used to wonder if a mother could see the shift when her child became an adult. I wondered if it was clinical, like at the onset of puberty; or emotional, like the first time his heart was broken; or temporal, like the moment he said I do. I used to wonder if maybe it was a critical mass of life experiences-graduation, first job, first baby-that tipped the balance; if it was the sort of thing you noticed immediately when you saw it, like a port-wine stain of sudden gravitas, or if it crept up slowly, like age in a mirror.

Now I know: adulthood is a line drawn in the sand. At some point, your child will be standing on the other side.

I thought he’d wander. I thought the line might shift.

I never expected that something I did would be the thing that pushed him over it.

–

IT TAKES ME a long time to figure out what to wear to the public defender’s office. For twenty-five years I’ve dressed in scrubs; my nice clothing is reserved for church. But somehow a floral dress with a lace collar and kitten heels don’t seem right for a business meeting. In the back of my closet I find a navy skirt I wore to parent-teacher night at Edison’s school, and pair it with a striped blouse my mama bought me for Christmas from Talbots that still has the tags on. I rummage past my collection of Dansko clogs-the saviors of nurses everywhere-and find a pair of flats that are a little worse for the wear, but that match.

When I arrive at the address on the letterhead, I’m sure I’ve got the wrong place. There’s no one at the front desk-in fact, there isn’t a front desk. There are cubicles and towers of boxes that form a maze, as if the employees are mice and this is all part of some grand scientific test. I take a few steps inside and suddenly hear my name.

“Ruth! Hello! Kennedy McQuarrie!”

As if I could possibly have forgotten her. I nod, and shake her hand, because she’s holding out her own. I don’t really understand why she is my lawyer. She told me flat out, at the arraignment, that wouldn’t be the case.

She starts chattering, so much that I can’t get a word in edgewise. But that’s okay, because I’m nervous as all get-out. I don’t have the money for a private lawyer, at least not without liquidating everything I’ve saved for Edison’s education, and I would go to prison for life before I let that happen. Still, just because everyone can have a lawyer in this country doesn’t mean all lawyers are the same. On TV the people who have private attorneys get acquitted, and the ones with public defenders pretend that there isn’t a difference.

Ms. McQuarrie suggests we go somewhere for lunch, even though I’m too anxious to eat. I start to take out my wallet after we order, but she insists on paying. At first, I bristle-ever since I was little, and started wearing Christina’s hand-me-downs, I haven’t wanted to be someone’s charity case. But before I can complain I check myself. What if this is what she does with all her clients, just to build up rapport? What if she’s trying to make me like her as much as I want her to like me?

After we sit down with our trays, out of habit, I say grace. Mind you, I’m used to doing that when other people don’t. Corinne’s an atheist who’s always joking about the Spaghetti Monster in the Sky when she hears me pray or sees me bow my head over my bag lunch. So I’m not surprised when I find Ms. McQuarrie staring at me as I finish. “So you’re a churchgoer,” she says.

“Is that a problem?” Maybe she knows something I don’t, like that juries are more likely to convict people who believe in God.

“Not at all. In fact, it’s good to know, because it’s something that can help a jury like you.”

Hearing her say that, I look into my lap. Am I so naturally unlikable that she needs to find things that will sway people in my favor?

“First,” she says, “do you prefer the term Black or African American or people of color?”

What I prefer, I think, is Ruth. But I swallow my response and say, “People of color.”

Once, at work, an orderly named Dave went off on a rant about that term. “It’s not like I don’t have color,” he’d said, holding out his pasty arms. “I’m not see-through, right? But I guess people of more color hasn’t caught on.” Then he had noticed me in the break room, and had gone red to his hairline. “Sorry, Ruth. But you know, I hardly think of you as Black.”

My lawyer is still talking. “I don’t even see color,” she tells me. “I mean, the only race that matters is the human one, right?”

It’s easy to believe we’re all in this together when you’re not the one who was dragged out of your home by the police. But I know that when white people say things like that, they are doing it because they think it’s the right thing to say, not because they realize how glib they sound. A couple of years ago, Adisa went ballistic when #alllivesmatter took over Twitter as a response to the activists who were holding signs that said BLACK LIVES MATTER. “What they’re really saying is white lives matter,” Adisa told me. “And that Black folks better remember that before we get too bold for our own good.”

Ms. McQuarrie coughs lightly, and I realize my mind’s been wandering. I force my eyes to her face, smile tightly. “Remind me again where you went to school?” she asks.

I feel like this is a test. “SUNY Plattsburgh, and then Yale Nursing School.”

“Impressive.”

What is? That I’m college educated? That I went to Yale? Is this what Edison will face for the rest of his life, too?

Edison.

“Ms. McQuarrie,” I begin.

“Kennedy.”

“Kennedy.” The familiarity sits uncomfortably on my tongue. “I can’t go back to prison.” I think of how, when Edison was a toddler, he’d put on Wesley’s shoes and shuffle around in them. Edison will have a lifetime to see the magic he used to believe in as a child be methodically erased, one confrontation at a time. I don’t want him to have to face that any sooner than necessary. “I’ve got my boy, and there’s no one else who can raise him to be the man I know he’s going to be.”

Ms. McQuarrie-Kennedy-leans forward. “I’m going to do my best. I have a lot of experience in cases with people like you.”

Another label. “People like me?”

“People accused of serious crimes.”

Immediately, I am on the defensive. “But I didn’t do anything.”

“I believe you. However, we still have to convince a jury. So we have to go back to the basics to figure out why you’ve been charged.”

I look at her carefully, trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. This is the only case on my radar, but maybe she is juggling hundreds. Maybe she honestly has forgotten the skinhead with the tattoo who spit on me in the courtroom. “I’d think that’s pretty obvious. That baby’s father didn’t want me near his son.”

“The white supremacist? He has nothing to do with your case.”

For a moment, I’m speechless. I was removed from the care of a patient because of the color of my skin, and then penalized for following those directions when the same patient went into distress. How on earth could the two not be related? “But I’m the only nurse of color on the birthing pavilion.”

“To the State, it doesn’t matter if you’re Black or white or blue or green,” Kennedy explains. “To them you had a legal duty to take care of an infant under your charge.” She starts listing all the ways the jury can find a reason to convict me. Each feels like a brick being mortared into place, trapping me in this hole. I realize that I have made a grave mistake: I had assumed that justice was truly just, that jurors would assume I was innocent until proven guilty. But prejudice is exactly the opposite: judging before the evidence exists.

I don’t stand a chance.

“Do you really believe that if I was white,” I say quietly, “I’d be sitting here with you right now?”

She shakes her head. “No. I believe it’s too risky to bring up in court.”

So we are supposed to win a case by pretending the reason it happened doesn’t exist? It seems dishonest, oblivious. Like saying a patient died of an infected hangnail, without mentioning that he had Type 1 diabetes.

“If no one ever talks about race in court,” I say, “how is anything ever supposed to change?”

She folds her hands on the table between us. “You file a civil lawsuit. I can’t do it for you, but I can call around and find you someone who works with employment discrimination.” She explains, in legalese, what that means for me.

The damages she mentions are more than I ever imagined in my wildest dreams.

But there is a catch. There’s always a catch. The lawsuit that might net me this payout, that might help me hire a private lawyer who might actually be willing to admit that race is what landed me in court in the first place, can’t be filed until this lawsuit wraps up. In other words, if I’m found guilty now, I can kiss that future money goodbye.

Suddenly I realize that Kennedy’s refusal to mention race in court may not be ignorant. It’s the very opposite. It’s because she is aware of exactly what I have to do in order to get what I deserve.

I might as well be blind and lost, and Kennedy McQuarrie is the only one with a map. So I look her in the eye. “What do you want to know?” I say.

Kennedy

WHEN I COME HOME THE night after my first meeting with Ruth, Micah is working late and my mother is watching Violet. The house smells of oregano and freshly baked dough. “Is it my lucky day?” I call out, shuffling off the heaviness of my job as Violet gets up from the table where she’s coloring and makes a beeline for me. “Is there homemade pizza for dinner?”

I swing my daughter up in my arms. She is clutching a violent red crayon in one small fist. “I made you one. Guess what it is.”

My mother comes out of the kitchen holding an amoebic blob on a plate. “Oh, clearly it’s an…alie-” I catch my mother’s eye, and she shakes her head. Behind Violet’s back she puts her hands up and bares her teeth. “Dinosaur,” I correct. “I mean, obviously.”

Violet smiles widely. “But he’s sick.” She points to the oregano spotting the cheese. “That’s why he has a rash.”

“Is it chicken pox?” I ask, as I take a bite.

“No,” she says. “He has a reptile dysfunction.”

I nearly spit out the pizza. Immediately I drop Violet to her feet. As she runs back to the table to continue coloring, I raise a brow. “What were you watching?” I calmly ask my mother.

She knows that the only television we let Violet watch is Sesame Street or Disney Junior. But from the studied wash of innocence on my mother’s face I know she’s hiding something. “Nothing.”

I pivot, staring at the blank TV screen. On a hunch, I pick the remote up from the couch and turn it on.

Wallace Mercy is grandstanding in all his glory, outside City Hall in Manhattan. His wild white hair stands on end, like he’s been electrocuted. His fist is raised in solidarity with whatever apparent injustice he’s currently championing. “My brothers and sisters! I ask you: when did the word misunderstanding become synonymous with racial profiling? We demand an apology from the New York City police commissioner, for the shame and inconvenience suffered by this celebrated athlete-” The Fox news logo runs beneath the slightly familiar face of a handsome dark-skinned man.

Fox News. A channel that Micah and I do not generally watch. A channel that would easily be the home of multiple ads about erectile dysfunction.

“You let Violet watch this?”

“Of course not,” my mother says. “I just turned it on during her naptime.”

Violet looks up from her coloring. “The Five-o-Meter!”

I shoot my mother the Look of Death. “You’re watching The Five with my four-year-old daughter.”

She throws up her hands. “All right, fine, yes, sometimes I do. It’s the news, for goodness’ sake. It’s not like I’m putting on P-O-R-N. Besides, did you even hear about this? It’s a simple misunderstanding and that ridiculous fake reverend is shooting his mouth off again all because the police were trying to do their job.”

I look at Violet. “Honey,” I say, “why don’t you go pick out the pajamas you want to wear, and two books for bedtime?”

She runs upstairs and I turn back to the television. “If you want to watch Wallace Mercy, at least put on MSNBC,” I say.

“I don’t want to watch Wallace. In fact I don’t think he’s doing Malik Thaddon any good by taking on his cause.”

Malik Thaddon, that’s why he looks familiar. He won the U.S. Open a few years back. “What happened?”

“He walked out of his hotel and was grabbed by four policemen. Apparently it was a case of mistaken identity.”

Ava settles beside me on the couch as the camera zooms in on Wallace Mercy’s verbal tantrum. The cords in his neck stand out and there is a throbbing vein at his temple; this man is a heart attack waiting to happen. “You know,” my mother says. “If they weren’t so angry all the time, maybe more people would listen to them.”

I don’t have to ask who they are.

I take another bite of my dinosaur pizza. “How about we go back to only turning the television on to a channel that doesn’t have commercials with side effects?”

My mother folds her arms. “I would think of all people you’d want your child to be a student of the world, Kennedy.”

“She’s a baby, Mom. Violet doesn’t need to think that the police might grab her one day.”

“Oh, please. Violet was coloring. All that went right over her head. The only thing she even remarked on was Wallace Mercy’s extremely poor choice of hairdo.”

I press my fingers to the corners of my eyes. “Okay. I’m tired. Let’s just table this conversation.”

My mother takes my empty plate and stands up, clearly miffed. “Far be it from me to see myself as more than just the hired help.”

She disappears into the kitchen, and I go to put Vi to bed. She has picked a book about a mouse with a mouthful of a name none of her friends can pronounce, and Go, Dog. Go! which is the title I hate more than anything else in her library. I climb into bed with her and drop a kiss on the crown of her head. She smells like strawberry bubble bath and Johnson’s shampoo, exactly like my own childhood. As I start to read aloud, I make a mental note to thank my mother for bathing Violet and feeding her and loving her as fiercely as I do, even if she did expose her to Wallace Mercy’s righteous wrath.

In that moment, my mind drifts to Ruth. Violet doesn’t need to think that the police might grab her one day, I had said to my mother.

But honestly, the odds of my child being a victim of mistaken identity are considerably smaller than, say, Ruth’s.

“Mommy!” Violet demands, and I realize I’ve inadvertently stopped reading, lost in thought.

“ ‘Do you like my hat?’ ” I read aloud. “ ‘I do not.’ ”

Ruth

ADISA SAYS I NEED TO treat myself, so she offers to buy me lunch. We go to a little bistro that bakes its own bread, and that serves portions so large you always wind up taking home half. It’s busy, so Adisa and I sit at the bar.

I have been spending more time with my sister, which is both comforting and strange. Before, I was almost always working when I wasn’t with Edison; now my schedule is empty.

“This is nice and all,” Adisa says to me, “but have you given any thought to how you gonna pay for your own lunch down the road?”

I think about what Kennedy said yesterday about filing a civil suit. It’s money, but it’s money I cannot count on yet-maybe never. “I’m a little more concerned with feeding my son,” I admit.

She narrows her glance. “How much cushion you have?”

There’s no point lying to her. “About three months.”

“You know if things get tight, you can ask me for help, right?”

At that, I can’t help but smile. “Seriously? I had to give you a loan last month.”

Adisa grins. “I said you can ask me for help. I didn’t say I’d be able to provide it.” She shrugs. “Besides, you know there’s an answer.”

What I have learned this week is that I am overqualified for nearly every entry-level administrative job in New Haven, including all open secretarial and receptionist positions. My sister believes I should file for unemployment. But I see that as dishonest, since once this is settled, I plan to go back to work. Getting a part-time job is another alternative, but I’m qualified as a nurse, and my license is suspended. So instead, I’ve avoided the conversation.

“All I know is that when Tyana’s boyfriend got busted for larceny and went to trial, the court date wasn’t for eight months,” Adisa says. “Which puts you five months in the hole. What advice did that skinny white lawyer give you?”

“Her name is Kennedy, and we were too busy trying to figure out how I won’t go to prison to discuss how I can support myself while I’m waiting for a trial date.”

Adisa snorts. “Yeah, because that kind of detail probably never occurs to someone like her.”

“You met her once,” I point out. “You know nothing about her.”

“I know that people who become public defenders are doing it because morals are more important to them than money, or else they would be off making partner in the big city. Which means Miz Kennedy either has a trust fund or a sugar daddy.”

“She got me out on bail.”

“Correction: your son got you out on bail.”

I shoot Adisa a glare and turn my attention to the bartender, who is polishing glasses.

Adisa rolls her eyes. “You don’t want to talk, that’s fine.” She looks up at the television over the bar, on which an infomercial is playing. “Hey,” she says to the bartender. “Can we watch something else?”

“Be my guest,” he says and hands her a remote control.

A minute later, Adisa is flipping through the cable stations. She stops when she hears a familiar gospel jingle: Lord, Lord, Lord, have Mercy! And then, the camera cuts tight to Wallace Mercy, the activist. Today he is lambasting a Texas school district that had a young Muslim boy arrested after he brought a homemade clock to school to show his science teacher and it was mistakenly identified as a bomb. “Ahmed,” Wallace says, “if you are listening, I want to tell you something. I want to say to all the black and brown children out there, who are afraid that they too might be misunderstood because of the color of their skin…”

I am pretty sure Wallace Mercy used to be a preacher, but I don’t think he ever got the memo that said he doesn’t need to shout when he’s miked on a television set.

“I want to say that I too was once thought to be less than I was, because of how I looked. And I am not going to lie-sometimes, when the Devil is whispering doubt into my ear, I still think those people were right. But most of the time, I think, I have shown all of those bullies up. I have succeeded in spite of them. And…so will you.”

Adisa gasps. “Oh my God, Ruth, that’s what you need. Wallace Mercy.”

“I am one hundred percent sure that Wallace Mercy is the last thing I need.”

“What are you talking about? Your kind of story is exactly what he lives for. Job discrimination because of race? He’ll eat it up. He’ll make sure everyone in the country knows you were wronged.”

On the television, Wallace is shaking a fist. “Does he have to be so mad all the time?”

Adisa laughs. “Well, hell, girl. I’m mad all the time. I’m exhausted, just from being Black all day,” she says. “At least he gives people like us a voice.”

“A loud one.”

“Exactly. Damn, Ruth, you been drinking the Kool-Aid. You been swimming with the sharks for so long, you’ve forgotten you’re krill.”

“What?”

“Don’t sharks eat krill?”

“They eat people.”

“This is what I’m telling you!” Adisa sighs. “White folks have spent years giving Black folks their freedom on paper, but deep down they still expect us to say yes, massuh, and be quiet and grateful for what we got. If we speak our minds we can lose our jobs, our homes, even our lives. Wallace is the man who gets to be angry for us. If it weren’t for him, white folks would never know the stupid shit they do upsets us, and Black folks would get madder and madder because they can’t risk talking back. Wallace Mercy is what keeps the powder keg in this country from blowing up.”

“Well, that’s all very well and good, but I’m not on trial because I’m Black. I’m on trial because a baby died when I was on duty.”

Adisa smirks. “Who told you that? Your lily-white lawyer? Of course she don’t think this is about race. She don’t think about race, period. She don’t have to.”

“Okay, well, when you get your law degree, you can advise me about this case. Until them, I’m going to take her word for it.” I hesitate. “You know, for someone who hates being stereotyped, you sure as hell do it a lot yourself.”

My sister holds up her hands, a surrender. “Okay, Ruth. You’re right. I’m wrong.”

“I’m just saying-so far, Kennedy McQuarrie is doing her job.”

“Her job is to rescue you so she can feel good about herself,” Adisa says. “It’s called a white knight for a reason.” She narrows her gaze at me. “And you know what’s on the other end of that color spectrum.”

I don’t give her the satisfaction of a response. But we both know the answer.

Black. The color of the villain.

–

I HAVE ONLY been to Christina’s Manhattan home once, just after she married Larry Sawyer. It was to drop off a wedding gift, and the whole experience had been awkward. Christina and Larry had a destination wedding in Turks and Caicos, and Christina had said over and over how sorry she was that she couldn’t invite all of her friends down there but instead had to limit the guest list. When she opened my present-a set of linen tea towels, screen-printed with the handwritten recipes of my mother’s cookies and cakes and pies she loved most-she burst into tears and hugged me, saying that it was the most personal, thoughtful gift she’d received, and that she would use them every day.

Now, more than ten years later, I wonder if she ever used her kitchen, much less the tea towels. The granite countertops gleam, and in a blue glass bowl there are fresh apples that look like they’ve been polished. There is no evidence that a four-year-old lives anywhere nearby. I have an itch to open the double Viking oven, just to see if there’s a single crumb or grease stain.

“Please,” Christina says, gesturing to one of the kitchen chairs. “Sit.”

I do, startled to find that there is soft music coming out of the wall behind me.

“It’s a speaker,” she says, laughing at my face. “It’s hidden.”

I wonder what it would be like to live in a place that feels like it is constantly part of a photo shoot. The Christina I used to know left a trail of destruction from the foyer to the kitchen the moment she came home from school-dropping her coat and book bag and kicking off her shoes. Just then, a woman appears so silently she might as well have emerged from the wall as well. She sets a plate of chicken salad down in front of me, and one in front of Christina.

“Thanks, Rosa,” Christina says, and I realize that she probably still drops her coat and her bags and her shoes when she comes into her house. But Rosa is her Lou. It’s just a different person now who’s picking up after her.

The maid slips away again, and Christina starts talking about a hospital fundraiser and how Bradley Cooper agreed to come and then backed out at the last minute because of strep throat, and then Us Weekly photographed him that same night in a dive bar in Chelsea with his girlfriend. She is chattering so much about a topic I care nothing about that before I even finish half my salad, I realize why she’s invited me here.

“So,” I interrupt. “Did you hear about it from my mom?”

Her face falls. “No. Larry. Now that he’s filed the paperwork to run for office, we have the news on twenty-four/seven.” She bites her lower lip. “Was it awful?”

A laugh bubbles up in my throat. “What part of it?”

“Well, all of it. Getting fired. Being arrested.” Her eyes grow wide. “Did you have to go to jail? Was it like Orange Is the New Black?”

“Yeah, without the sex.” I look at her. “It wasn’t my fault, Christina. You have to believe me.”

She reaches across the table and grabs my hand. “I do. I do, Ruth. I hope you know that. I wanted to help you, you know. I told Larry to hire someone from his old firm to represent you.”

I freeze. I try to see this as a gesture of friendship, but it feels like I’m a problem to solve. “I…I couldn’t accept that…”

“Well, before you go thinking I’m your fairy godmother, Larry shot me down. He feels as badly as I do, honestly, but with his candidacy, it’s just not a good time to be connected to something scandalous.”

Scandalous. I taste the word, bite into it like a berry, feel it burst.

“We had a huge fight about it. I mean, like, I made him move into the second bedroom and everything. It’s not like he’s going for the neo-Nazi vote. But it’s not that simple, I guess. Race relations are a mess right now, with the police commissioner under fire and everything, and Larry needs to stay as far away from that as possible or it could cost him the election.” She shakes her head. “I am so sorry, Ruth.”

My jaw feels too tight. “Is this why you had me over here?” I ask. “To tell me you can’t be associated with me anymore?”

What had I been stupid enough to think? That this was a social visit? That for the first time in a decade Christina had suddenly decided she wanted me to drop in for lunch? Or had I known all along that if I came here, it was because I was hoping for a miracle in the form of the Hallowells-even if I was too proud to admit it?

For a long moment, we just stare at each other. “No,” Christina says. “I needed to see you with my own eyes. I wanted to make sure you were…you know…all right.”

Pride is an evil dragon; it sleeps underneath your heart and then roars when you need silence.

“Well, you can check this off your good deed list,” I say bitterly. “I’m doing just fine.”

“Ruth-”

I hold up my hand. “Don’t, Christina, okay? Just…don’t.”

I try to feel through the chain of our history for the snag, the mend in the links, where we went from being two girls who knew everything about each other-favorite ice cream flavor, favorite New Kids on the Block member, celebrity crush-to two women who knew nothing about how the other lived. Had we drifted apart, or had our closeness been the ruse? Was our familiarity due to friendship, or geography?

“I’m sorry,” Christina says, her voice tiny.

“I am too,” I whisper.

Suddenly she bolts from the table and comes back a moment later, emptying the contents of her bag. Sunglasses and keys and lipsticks and receipts scatter the surface of the table; Advil tablets, loose in the bottom of her bag, spill like candy. She opens her wallet and takes a thick wad of bills and presses it into my hand. “Take this,” Christina says. “Just between the two of us.”

When our hands brush, there’s an electric shock. I jump up, as if it were a bolt of lightning. “No,” I say, backing away. This is a line, and if I cross it, everything changes between Christina and me. Maybe we have never been equals, but at least I’ve been able to pretend. If I take this money, I can’t go on fooling myself.

“I can’t.”

Christina is fierce, folding my fingers around the money. “Just do it,” she says. Then she looks up at me as if all is well in the world, as if nothing has changed, as if I have not just become a beggar at her feet, a charity, a cause. “There’s dessert,” Christina says. “Rosa?”

I trip over my chair in my hurry to escape. “I’m not really very hungry.” I avert my glance. “I have to go.”

I grab my coat and my purse from the rack in the foyer and hurry out the door, closing it tight behind me. I push the elevator button over and over, as if that might make it come faster.

And I count the bills. Five hundred and fifty-six dollars.

The elevator dings.

I hurry toward the welcome mat outside Christina’s door and slip all the money beneath it.

This morning I told Edison we couldn’t drive the car anymore. The registration has expired and I can’t afford to renew it. Selling it will be my last resort, but in the meantime, while I try to save enough to cover the state and federal fees and the gas, we will take the bus.

I get into the elevator and close my eyes until I reach ground level. I run down Central Park West until I cannot catch my breath, until I know I will not change my mind.

–

THE BUILDING ON Humphrey Street looks like any other government building: a square, cement, bureaucratic block. The welfare office is packed, every cracked plastic seat filled with someone who is bent over a clipboard. Adisa walks me up to the counter. She’s working now-making minimum wage as a part-time cashier-but she’s been in and out of this office a half dozen times when she was between jobs, and knows the ropes. “My sister needs to apply for assistance,” she announces, as if that statement doesn’t make me die a little inside.

The secretary looks to be Edison’s age. She has long, swinging earrings shaped like tacos. “Fill this out,” she says, and she hands me a clipboard with an application.

Since there is nowhere to sit, we lean against the wall. While Adisa searches for a pen in her cavernous shoulder bag, I glance at the women balancing clipboards and toddlers on their knees, at the men who reek of booze and sweat, at a woman with a long gray braid who is holding a doll and singing to herself. About half the room is Caucasian-mothers wiping the noses of their children in wads of tissues, and nervous men in collared shirts who tap their pens against their legs as they read each line on the form. Adisa sees me glancing at them. “Two-thirds of welfare goes to white folks,” she says. “Go figure.”

I have never been so grateful for my sister.

I fill out the first few queries: name, address, number of dependents.

Income, I read.

I start to put down my annual salary, and then cross it out. “Write zero dollars,” Adisa says.

“I get a little bit from Wesley’s-”

“Write zero dollars,” Adisa repeats. “I know people who got rejected for SNAP because they had cars that were worth too much. You’re going to screw the system the way the system screwed you.”

When I don’t start writing, she takes the application, fills in the blanks, and returns it to the secretary.

An hour passes, and not a single person is called from the waiting room. “How long does this take?” I whisper to my sister.

“However long they feel like making you wait,” Adisa replies. “Half the reason these people can’t get a job is because they’re too busy sitting here waiting on benefits to go apply anywhere.”

It’s nearly three o’clock-four hours after we’ve arrived-before a caseworker comes to the door. “Ruby Jefferson?” she says.

I stand up. “Ruth?”

She glances at the paperwork. “Maybe,” she concedes.

Adisa and I follow her down a hallway to a cubicle and sit. “I’m going to ask you some questions,” she says in a monotone. “Are you still employed?”

“It’s complicated…I was suspended.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I’m a nurse, but my license has been put on hold until an impending lawsuit is over.” I say these words in a rush, like they are being purged from the core of me.

“It don’t matter,” Adisa says. “Imma break it down fuh you. She don’t got no job and she don’t got no money.” I stare at my sister; I had been hoping that maybe the caseworker and I could find some common ground, that she might recognize me not as a typical governmental assistance applicant but as someone middle-class who has gotten a bum deal. Adisa, on the other hand, has whipped out the Ebonics, pushing as far away from my tactic as possible.

The caseworker shoves her glasses up her nose. “What about your son’s college fund?”

“It’s a five twenty-nine,” I say. “You can only use it for education.”

“She need medical,” Adisa interrupts.

The woman glances at me. “What are you paying right now for COBRA?”

“Eleven hundred a month,” I answer, flushing. “But I won’t be able to afford that by next month.”

The woman nods, noncommittal. “Get rid of your COBRA payment. You qualify for Obamacare.”

“Oh, no, you don’t understand. I don’t want to get rid of my coverage; I want to just get temporary funding,” I explain. “That’s the health insurance that comes from the hospital. I’m going to get my job back eventually-”

Adisa rounds on me. “And in the meantime what if Edison breaks his leg?”

“Adisa-”

“You think you O. J. Simpson? You gonna get off and walk away? News flash, Ruth. You ain’t O.J. You fa sho ain’t Oprah. You ain’t Kerry Washington. They get passes from white people because they famous. You just another nigga who’s going down.”

I am sure that the caseworker can see the steam rising from my hair. My fingers are clenched so tightly into fists that I can feel myself drawing blood. I’m not quite sure what precipitated this transformation into full-on gangsta, but I’m going to kill my sister.

Hell, I’ve already been indicted for homicide.

The caseworker glances from Adisa to me and then down at the paperwork. She clears her throat. “Well,” she says, all too happy to get rid of us, “you qualify for medical, SNAP, and cash assistance. You’ll be hearing from us.”

Adisa hooks her arm through mine and pulls me up from my chair. “Thank you,” I murmur, as my sister drags me from the cubicle.

“Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” she says, when we are out of earshot, standing next to a potted plant near the elevator bank. She is suddenly back to her normal self.

I round on her. “What the hell was that? You were a total asshole.”

“An asshole who got you the money you need,” Adisa points out. “You can thank me later.”

–

MY TRAINER IS a girl named Nahndi, and I am old enough to be her mother. “So basically there are five stations,” she tells me. “Cashier, headset, coffee headset, presenter, and runner. I mean, there are people on table too, of course, they’re the ones who are making the food…”

I trail her, tugging at my uniform, which has an itchy tag at the neck. I am working an eight-hour shift, which means I get a thirty-minute break and a free meal and minimum wage. After exhausting all the temp agency office job positions, I’d applied to McDonald’s. I said I’d taken time off from work to be a mom. I didn’t even mention the word nurse. I just wanted to be hired, so that I could give up some of the benefits I’d received at the unemployment office. For my own sanity I needed to believe that I could still, at least in part, take care of myself and my son.

When the manager called to offer me the job, he asked if I could start immediately, since they were short-staffed. So I left a note for Edison on the kitchen counter saying I had a surprise for him, and caught a bus downtown.

“The fry hopper is where the fries are loaded. There are three basket sizes to use, depending on how busy we are,” Nahndi says. “There’s a timer here you push when you drop the basket. But at two-forty, you need to shake it so the fries don’t just become one giant blob, okay?”

I nod, watching the line worker-a college student named Mike-do everything she is saying. “Once the timer goes off, you hold the basket over the vat and let the oil drain for about ten seconds. And then dump them into the fry station-watch out, that’s hot-and salt them.”

“Unless it’s a no-salt fry order,” Mike says.

“We’ll worry about that later,” Nahndi replies. “The salt dispenser puts the same amount on every batch. Then you toss with the fry scoop and press a timer. All those fries need to be sold in five minutes, and if they’re not, they get dumped out.”

I nod. It’s a lot to process. I had a thousand things to remember as a nurse, but after twenty years, that was muscle memory. This is all new.

Mike lets me try the fry station. I am surprised at how heavy the basket is when it’s dripping. My hands are slippery in their plastic gloves. I can feel the oil settling through my hairnet. “That’s great!” Nahndi says.

I learn how to bag properly, how many minutes each food item can sit in a warming basket before being discarded, which cleaners are used on which surfaces, how to tell the manager you need more quarters, how to push the medium-size button on the register before you push the button for Number 1 meal, or else the customer won’t get fries with his order. Nahndi has the patience of a saint when I forget ranch dipping sauce or grab a McDouble instead of a double cheeseburger (they’re identical, except for one extra slice of cheese). She feels confident enough, after an hour, to put me on table, assembling the food.

I have never been one to shy away from scut work. God knows, in nursing you have your share of holding emesis basins and changing soiled sheets. What I always would tell myself was that after an episode like that, the patient was even more uncomfortable-physically, or emotionally, or both-than I was. My job was to make things better as professionally as possible.

So getting a job as a fast-food worker really doesn’t bother me. I’m not here for the glory. I’m here for the paycheck, as meager as it might be.

I take a deep breath and grab the three-part bun and set the pieces in their spots in the toaster. Meanwhile, I open a Big Mac box. This is easier said than done while wearing plastic gloves. The top part of the bun is sesame-seed down in the top of the box; the middle piece sits balanced on top of that; the bottom part is bottom-side down in the bottom half of the box. Two squirts of Big Mac sauce from the giant metal sauce gun go on each side; shredded lettuce and minced onions are sprinkled on top of that. The middle piece gets two strategically located pickles (they should be “dating, not mating,” said Nahndi). The bottom gets a slice of American cheese. Then I reach into the warmer for two 10:1 patties, and place one on the top and one on the bottom. Lift the middle piece and place on the bottom part, place the top of the bun on that, and the box is closed and given to a runner for bagging or counter service.

It’s not delivering a baby, but I feel the same flush of a job well done.

Six hours into my shift, my feet hurt and I reek of oil. I’ve cleaned the bathrooms twice-including once after a four-year-old got sick all over the floor. I have just started working as a runner to Nahndi’s cashier when a woman orders a twenty-piece McNuggets. I check the box myself before putting it on a tray, and like I’ve been taught, I call her order number and tell her to have a nice day as I am handing it over. She sits down ten feet away from me and eats every last piece of chicken. Then suddenly, she is back at the counter. “This box was empty,” she tells Nahndi. “I paid for nothing.”

“I’m so sorry,” Nahndi says. “We’ll get you a new one.”

I sidle closer, lowering my voice. “I checked that box myself. I watched her eat all twenty of those nuggets.”

“I know,” Nahndi whispers back. “She does this all the time.”

The manager on duty, a cadaverous man with a soul patch, approaches. “Everything all right here?”

“Just fine,” Nahndi says. She takes the new box of nuggets out of my hand and passes it to the customer, who carries it out to the parking lot. The manager goes back to the presenter position, handing out food at the drive-through.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I mutter.

“If you let it get under your skin, you won’t make it through a single shift.” Nahndi turns her attention toward a high-spirited group of kids who surf through the door on the wave of their own laughter. “After-school rush,” she warns. “Get your game face on.”

I turn back to the screen, waiting for the next order to magically appear.

“Welcome to McDonald’s,” Nahndi says. “Can I take your order?”

I hope it’s not a shake. That’s the one machine I don’t feel confident running yet, and Nahndi already told me a story about how, her first week, she forgot to put in the pins and the milk exploded all over her and onto the floor.

“Um, I’ll take a Big Mac meal,” I hear. “Dude, what do you want?”

“I left my wallet at home…”

I spin around, because I know that voice. Standing in front of the counter is Edison’s friend Bryce, and beside him, hands jammed into the pockets of his jacket, is my son.

I can see the absolute horror in Edison’s eyes as he scans my hairnet, my uniform, my new life. So instead of smiling at him, or saying hello, I turn my back again before Bryce can recognize me, too. Before I have to hear Edison make yet another excuse for the situation I’ve put him in.

–

EDISON IS NOT home when I arrive, strip off my uniform, and shower away the smell of grease. I text him, but he doesn’t answer. So instead, I cook dinner, pretending that nothing is wrong. By the time he finally comes home, I have just put a casserole on the table. “It’s hot,” I tell him, but he goes straight to his bedroom. I think he is still upset about my new job, but a moment later he appears, holding a giant Mason jar full of coins, as well as a checkbook. He tosses these on the table. “Two thousand three hundred and eighty-six,” Edison announces. “And there’s got to be a couple hundred more in the jar.”

“That’s money for college,” I say.

“We need it now. I’ve got the whole spring and summer to work; I can make more.”

I know how scrupulously Edison has saved his earnings from the grocery store where he’s worked since he was sixteen. It was always understood that he’d chip in for his education, and between scholarships and FAFSA and the 529 plan we started for him as a baby, I would swing the rest of the tuition. The thought of taking money that is earmarked for college makes me feel sick. “Edison, no.”

His face crumples. “Mama, I can’t. I can’t let you work at McDonald’s when I have money we could use. You got any idea how that makes me feel?”

“First, that isn’t money, that’s your future. Second, there’s no shame in a good honest day’s work. Even if it’s making French fries.” I squeeze his hand. “And it’s only for a little while, till this is all cleared up and I can work at the hospital again.”

“If I drop track I can get more shifts at the Stop and Shop.”

“You’re not dropping track.”

“I don’t care about a dumb sport.”

“And I don’t care about anything but you,” I tell him. I sit down across from him. “Baby, let me do this. Please.” I feel my eyes fill with tears. “If you asked me who Ruth Jefferson was a month ago, I would have said she’s a good nurse, and she’s a good mother. But now I have people telling me I wasn’t a good nurse. And if I can’t put a casserole on the table and clothes on your back-then I have to second-guess myself as a mother, too. If you don’t let me do this…if you don’t let me take care of you…then I don’t know who I’m supposed to be anymore.”

He folds his arms tight across his chest, looks away from me. “Everyone knows. I hear them whispering and then they stop when I get close.”

“The students?”

“Teachers, too,” he admits.

I bristle. “That’s inexcusable.”

“No, it’s not like that. They’re going out of their way, you know? Like giving me extra time for papers and saying that they know things are rough at home right now…and every time one of them is like that-so nice, and understanding-I feel like I want to hit something, because it’s even worse than when people pretend they don’t know you missed school because your mother was in jail.” He grimaces. “That test I failed? It wasn’t because I didn’t know the stuff. It was because I cut class, after Mr. Herman cornered me and asked if there was anything he could do to help.”

“Oh, Edison-”

“I don’t want their help,” he explodes. “I don’t want to be someone who needs their help. I want to be just like everyone else, you know, not a special case. And then I get mad at myself because I’m whining like I’m the only one with problems when you might…when you…” He breaks off, rubbing his palms against his knees.

“Don’t say it,” I say, folding him into my arms. “Don’t even think it.” I pull away and frame his beautiful face. “We don’t need their help. We’ll get through this. You believe me, right?”

He looks at me, really looks at me, like a pilgrim searches the night sky for meaning. “I don’t know.”

“Well, I do,” I say firmly. “Now, eat what’s on your plate. Because I am sure as hell not going to McDonald’s if it gets cold.”

Edison picks up his fork, grateful for the distraction. And I try not to think about the fact that for the first time in my life, I’ve lied to my son.

–

A WEEK LATER I am rushing around, trying to find my uniform visor, when the doorbell rings. Standing on my porch, to my shock, is Wallace Mercy-wiry white shock of hair, three-piece suit, pocket watch, and all. “Oh, my,” I say. The words are puffs of breath, dry in the desert of my disbelief.

“My sister,” he booms. “My name is Wallace Mercy.”

I giggle. I actually giggle. Because, really, who doesn’t know that?

I glance around to see if he is being followed by an entourage, by cameras. But the only sign of his renown is a sleek black town car pulled up to the curb with its flashers on, and a driver in the front seat. “I wonder if I might take a moment of your time?”

The closest brush with fame I’ve had is when a late-night-TV-show host’s pregnant wife got into a car accident near the hospital and was put on the ward for twenty-four hours of monitoring. Although she turned out to be perfectly fine, my role segued from healthcare provider to publicist, holding back the crowd of reporters who threatened to overrun the ward. It figures that now, the only other time in my life I’ve met a celebrity, I am wearing a polyester uniform. “Of course.” I usher him through the door, silently thanking God that I already made my pullout bed back into a couch. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Coffee would be a blessing,” he says.

As I turn on the Keurig, I’m thinking that Adisa would die if she were here. I wonder if it would be rude to take a selfie with Wallace Mercy and send it to her. “You have a lovely home,” he tells me, and he looks at the photos on my mantel. “This your boy? I’ve heard he’s something else.”

From whom? I think. “Do you take milk? Sugar?”

“Both,” Wallace Mercy says. He takes the mug and gestures to the couch. “May I?” I nod, and he motions so that I will sit down on the chair beside him. “Miz Jefferson, do you know why I’m here?”

“Honestly, I can’t even quite believe you are here, much less figure out why.”

He smiles. He has the most even white teeth I have ever seen, stark against the darkness of his skin. I realize that up close, he is younger than I expected. “I have come to tell you that you are not alone.”

Confused, I tilt my head. “That’s very kind, but I already have a pastor-”

“But your community is much bigger than just your church. My sister, this is not the first time our people have been targeted. We may not have the power yet, but what we have is each other.”

My mouth rounds as I start to put the pieces together. It’s like Adisa said: my case is just another apple box for him to stand on, to get noticed. “It’s very kind of you to come here, but I don’t think my story is one that would be particularly interesting to you.”

“On the contrary. May I be so bold as to ask you a question? When you were singled out and asked to not interfere with the care of a white baby, did any of your colleagues come to your defense?”

I think about Corinne, squirming when I complained about Marie’s unjust directive, and then defending Carla Luongo. “My friend knew I was upset.”

“Did she go to bat for you? Would she risk her job for you?”

“I would hardly have asked her to do that,” I say, getting annoyed.

“What color skin does your colleague have?” Wallace asks bluntly.

“The fact that I’m Black was never an issue in my relationship with my colleagues.”

“Not until they needed a scapegoat. What I am trying to say, Ruth-may I call you that?-is that we stand with you. Your Black brothers and sisters will go to bat for you. They will risk their jobs for you. They will march on your behalf and they will create a roar that cannot be ignored.”

I stand up. “Thank you for your…interest in my case. But this is something that I’d have to discuss with my lawyer, and no matter what-”

“What color skin does your lawyer have?” Wallace interrupts.

“What difference does it make?” I challenge. “How can you ever expect to be treated well by white people if you’re constantly picking them over for flaws?”

He smiles, as if he’s heard this before. “You’ve heard of Trayvon Martin, I assume?”

Of course I have. The boy’s death had hit me hard. Not just because he was about Edison’s age but because, like my son, he was an honor student who had been doing nothing wrong, except being Black.

“Do you know that during that trial, the judge-the white judge-banned the term racial profiling from being used in the courtroom?” Wallace says. “She wanted to make sure that the jury knew the case was not about race, but about murder.”

His words punch through me, arrows. They are almost verbatim what Kennedy told me about my own case.

“Trayvon was a good kid, a smart boy. You are a respected nurse. The reason that judge didn’t want to bring up race-the same reason your lawyer is skirting it like it’s the plague-is because Black people like you and Trayvon are supposed to be the exceptions. You are the very definition of when bad things happen to good people. Because that is the only way white gatekeepers can make excuses for their behavior.” He leans forward, his mug clasped in his hands. “But what if that’s not the truth? What if you and Trayvon aren’t the exceptions…but the rule? What if injustice is the standard?”

“All I want is to do my job, live my life, raise my boy. I don’t need your help.”

“You may not need it,” he says, “but apparently there are a lot of people out there who want to help you, just the same. I mentioned your case last week, briefly, on my show.” He shifts, reaching into the inside breast pocket of his suit and pulling out a small manila envelope. Then he stands and passes it to me. “Good luck, sister. I’ll be praying for you.”

As soon as the door closes behind him, I open the seal and dump out the contents. Inside are bills: tens, twenties, fifties. There are also dozens of checks, written out to me, from strangers. I read the addresses on them: Tulsa, Oklahoma. Chicago. South Bend. Olympia, Washington. At the bottom of the pile is Wallace Mercy’s business card.

I gather everything into the envelope, tuck it into an empty vase on a shelf in the living room, and then see it: my missing visor, resting on the cable box.

It feels like a crossroads.

I settle the visor on my head, grab my wallet and my coat, and head out the door to my shift.

–

I KEEP MY favorite picture of Wesley and me on the mantel of my house. We were at our wedding, and his cousin snapped it when we weren’t looking. In the photo, we are standing in the lobby of the elegant hotel where we had our reception-the rental of which was Sam Hallowell’s wedding gift to me. My arms are looped around Wesley’s neck and my head is turned. He is leaning in, his eyes closed, whispering something to me.

I have tried so, so hard to remember what my handsome husband, breathtaking in his tuxedo, was saying. I’d like to believe it was You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen or I can’t wait to start our life together. But that is the stuff of novels and movies, and in reality, I am pretty sure we were planning our escape from a roomful of well-wishers so that I could pee.

The reason I know this is because although I cannot remember the conversation that Wesley and I had when that photograph was taken, I do remember the one we had afterward. There was a line at the ladies’ room off the main lobby, and Wesley gallantly volunteered to stand guard at the men’s room so that no one would enter while I was inside. It took me a significant amount of time to maneuver my wedding gown and do my business, and when I finally made it out of the bathroom, a good ten minutes had passed. Wesley was still outside the door, my sentry, but now he was holding a valet claim ticket.

“What’s that?” I asked. We didn’t have a car then; we’d taken public transport to our own wedding.

Wesley shook his head, chuckling. “Some dude just walked up to me and asked me to bring his Mercedes around.”

We laughed and gave the ticket to the bellhop desk. We laughed, because we were in love. Because when life is full of good things, it does not seem important if an old white guy sees a Black man in a fancy hotel and naturally assumes he must work there.

–

AFTER A MONTH of working at McDonald’s, I begin to see the paradox between service and sanitary food preparation. Although all orders are supposed to be prepared in less than fifty seconds, most items on the menu take longer than that to cook. McNuggets and Filet-O-Fish fry for almost four minutes. Chicken Selects take six minutes, and weighing in longest in the fry vat are crispy chicken breasts. Ten-to-one meat takes thirty-nine seconds to cook; four-to-one meat takes seventy-nine seconds. The grilled chicken is actually steamed while it cooks. Apple pies bake for twelve minutes, cookies for two. And yet in spite of all this, we employees are supposed to have the customer walking out the door in ninety seconds-fifty for food prep, forty for a meaningful interaction.

The managers love me, because unlike most of the staff, I do not have to juggle class schedules with my shifts. After decades of working nights, I don’t mind coming in at 3:45 A.M. to open grill, which takes a while to heat up before we unlock the doors at 5:00. Because of my flexibility, I am usually given my favorite job-cashier. I like talking to the customers. I consider it a personal challenge to make them smile before they walk away from the counter. And after literally having women throw things at my head in the thick of labor, being berated for mayo instead of mustard really doesn’t faze me.

Most of our regulars come in the mornings. There are Marge and Walt, who wear identical yellow sweat suits and walk three miles from their house and then get matching hotcake meals with orange juice. There’s Allegria, who’s ninety-three and comes once a week in her fur coat, no matter how warm it is outside, and eats an Egg McMuffin, no meat, no cheese, no muffin. There’s Consuela, who gets four large iced coffees for all the girls at her salon.

This morning, one of the homeless folks who pepper the streets of New Haven wanders in. Sometimes my manager will give them food, if it’s about to be thrown out-like the fries that go unsold after five minutes. Sometimes they come in to warm up. Once, we had a man pee in the bathroom sink. Today, the man who enters has long, tangled hair, and a beard that reaches his belly. His stained T-shirt reads NAMASTAY IN BED, and there is dirt crusted underneath his fingernails.

“Hello,” I say. “Welcome to McDonald’s. Can I take your order?”

He stares at me, his eyes rheumy and blue. “I want a song.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A song.” His voice escalates. “I want a song!”

My manager on duty, a tiny woman named Patsy, steps up to the counter. “Sir,” she says, “you need to move along.”

“I want a fucking song!”

Patsy flushes. “I’m calling the police.”

“No, wait.” I meet the man’s eye and start crooning Bob Marley. I used to sing “Three Little Birds” to Edison as a lullaby every night; I’ll probably remember the words till the day I die.

The man stops screaming and shuffles out the door. I paste a smile on my face so that I can greet the next customer. “Welcome to McDonald’s,” I say and find myself looking at Kennedy McQuarrie.

She is dressed in a shapeless charcoal suit, and she’s holding on to a little girl with strawberry-blond curls erupting from her scalp in a crazy tumble. “I want the pancakes with the egg sandwich,” the girl chatters.

“Well, that’s not an option,” Kennedy says firmly, and then she notices me. “Oh. Wow. Ruth. You’re…working here.”

Her words strip me naked. What did she expect me to do while she was trying to build a case? Dip into my endless savings?

“This is my daughter, Violet,” Kennedy says. “Today is a sort of treat. We, uh, don’t come to McDonald’s very often.”

“Yes we do, Mommy,” Violet pipes up, and Kennedy’s cheeks redden.

I realize she doesn’t want me to think of her as the kind of mother who would feed her kids our fast food for breakfast, no more than I want her to think of me as someone who would work at this job if I had any other choice. I realize that we both desperately want to be people we really aren’t.

It makes me a little braver.

“If I were you,” I whisper to Violet, “I’d pick the pancakes.”

She clasps her hands and smiles. “Then I want the pancakes.”

“Anything else?”

“Just a small coffee for me,” Kennedy replies. “I have yogurt at the office.”

“Mm-hmm.” I punch the screen. “That’ll be five dollars and seven cents.”

She unzips her wallet and counts out a few bills.

“So,” I ask casually. “Any news?” I say this in the same tone I might ask about the weather.

“Not yet. But that’s normal.”

Normal. Kennedy takes her daughter’s hand and steps back from the counter, in just as much of a hurry to get out of this moment as I am. I force a smile. “Don’t forget the change,” I say.

–

A WEEK INTO my career as a Dalton School student, I developed a stomachache. Although I didn’t have a fever, my mama let me skip school, and she took me with her to the Hallowells’. Every time I thought about stepping through the doors of the school, I got a stabbing in my gut or felt like I was going to be sick or both.

With Ms. Mina’s permission, my mother wrapped me in blankets and settled me in Mr. Hallowell’s study with saltines and ginger ale and the television to babysit me. She gave me her lucky scarf to wear, which she said was almost as good as having her with me. She checked in on me every half hour, which is why I was surprised when Mr. Hallowell himself entered. He grunted a hello, crossed to his desk, and leafed through a stack of paperwork until he found what he was looking for-a red file folder. Then he turned to me. “You contagious?”

I shook my head. “No, sir.” I mean, I didn’t think I was, anyway.

“Your mother says you’re sick to your stomach.”

I nodded.

“And it came on suddenly after you started school this week…”

Did he think I was faking? Because I wasn’t. Those pains were real.

“How was school?” he asked. “Do you like your teacher?”

“Yes, sir.” Ms. Thomas was small and pretty and hopped from the desk of one third grader to another like a starling on a summer patio. She always smiled when she said my name. Unlike my school in Harlem last year-the school my sister was still attending-this school had large windows and sunlight that spilled into the hallways; the crayons we used for art weren’t broken into nubs; the textbooks weren’t scribbled in, and had all their pages. It was like the schools we saw on television, which I had believed to be fiction, until I set foot in one.

“Hmph.” Sam Hallowell sat down next to me on the couch. “Does it feel like you’ve eaten a bad burrito? Comes and goes in waves?”

Yes.

“Mostly when you think about going to school?”

I looked right at him, wondering if he could read minds.

“I happen to know exactly what’s ailing you, Ruth, because I caught that bug once too. It was just after I took over programming at the network. I had a fancy office and everyone was falling all over each other to try to make me happy, and you know what? I felt sick as a dog.” He glanced at me. “I was sure that any minute everyone was going to look at me and realize I didn’t belong there.”

I thought of what it felt like to sit down in the beautiful wood-paneled cafeteria and be the only student with a bag lunch. I remembered how Ms. Thomas had shown us pictures of American heroes, and although everyone knew who George Washington and Elvis Presley were, I was the only person in the class who recognized Rosa Parks and that made me proud and embarrassed all at once.

“You are not an impostor,” Sam Hallowell told me. “You are not there because of luck, or because you happened to be in the right place at the right moment, or because someone like me had connections. You are there because you are you, and that is a remarkable accomplishment in itself.”

That conversation is in my thoughts as I now listen to the principal at Edison’s magnet high school tell me that my son, who will not even swat a bug, punched his best friend in the nose during their lunch period today, the first day back after Thanksgiving vacation. “Although we’re cognizant of the fact that things at home have been…a challenge, Ms. Jefferson, obviously we don’t tolerate this kind of behavior,” the principal says.

“I can assure you it won’t happen again.” All of a sudden I’m back at Dalton, feeling lesser than, like I should be grateful to be in this principal’s office.

“Believe me, I’m being lenient because I know there are extenuating circumstances. This should technically go on Edison’s permanent record, but I’m willing to waive that. Still, he’ll be suspended for the rest of the week. We have a zero tolerance policy here, and we can’t let our students go around worrying for their own safety.”

“Yes, of course,” I murmur, and I duck out of the principal’s office, humiliated. I am used to coming to this school wrapped in a virtual cloud of triumph: to watch my son receive an award for his score on a national French exam; to applaud him as he’s crowned Scholar-Athlete of the Year. But Edison is not crossing a stage with a wide smile right now, to shake the principal’s hand. He is sprawled on a bench just outside the office door, looking for all the world like he doesn’t give a damn. I want to box his ears.

He scowls when he sees me. “Why did you come here like that?”

I look down at my uniform. “Because I was in the middle of a shift when the principal’s office called me to say my son was going to be expelled.”

“Suspended…”

I round on him. “You do not get to speak right now. And you most definitely do not get to correct me.” We step out of the school, into a day that bites like the start of winter. “You want to tell me why you hit Bryce?”

“I thought I don’t get to speak.”

“Don’t you back-talk me. What were you thinking, Edison?”

Edison looks away from me. “You know someone named Tyla? You work with her.”

I picture a thin girl with bad acne. “Skinny?”

“Yeah. I’ve never talked to her before in my life. Today she came up at lunch and said she knew you from McDonald’s, and Bryce thought it was hilarious that my mother got a job there.”

“You should have ignored him,” I reply. “Bryce wouldn’t know how to do a good honest day’s work if you held a gun to his head.”

“He started talking smack about you.”

“I told you, he’s not worth the energy of paying attention.”

Edison clenches his jaw. “Bryce said, ‘Why is yo mama like a Big Mac? Because she’s full of fat and only worth a buck.’ ”

All the air rushes from my lungs. I start toward the front door of the school. “I’m going to give that principal a piece of my mind.”

My son grabs my arm. “No! Jesus, I’m already the punch line for everyone’s jokes. Don’t make it worse!” He shakes his head. “I’m so sick of this. I hate this fucking school and its fucking scholarships and its fucking fakeness.”

I don’t even tell Edison to watch his mouth. I can’t breathe.

All my life I have promised Edison that if you work hard, and do well, you will earn your place. I’ve said that we are not impostors; that what we strive for and get, we deserve. What I neglected to tell him was that at any moment, these achievements might still be yanked away.

It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life and think you are seeing yourself clearly. And then one day, you peel off a filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, and you realize you’ve never truly seen yourself at all.

I am struggling to find the correct response here: to tell Edison that he was right in his actions, but that he could beat up every boy in that school and it would not make a difference in the long run. I am struggling to find a way to make him believe that in spite of this, we have to put one foot in front of the other every day and pray it will be better the next time the sun rises. That if our legacy is not entitlement, it must be hope.

Because if it’s not, then we become the shiftless, the wandering, the conquered. We become what they think we are.

–

EDISON AND I take the bus home in silence. As we turn the corner of our block, I tell him he’s grounded. “For how long?” he asks.

“A week,” I say.

He scowls. “This isn’t even going on my record.”

“How many times I tell you that if you want to be taken seriously, you gotta be twice as good as everyone else?”

“Or maybe I could punch more white people,” Edison says. “Principal took me pretty seriously for doing that.”

My mouth tightens. “Two weeks,” I say.

He storms away, taking the porch stairs in one leap, pushing through the front door, nearly knocking down a woman standing in front of it, holding a large cardboard box.

Kennedy.

I’m so angry about Edison’s suspension that I’ve completely forgotten we have picked this afternoon to review the State’s discovery. “Is this a bad time?” Kennedy asks delicately. “We can reschedule…”

I feel a flush rise from my collar to my cheeks. “No. This is fine-something…unexpected…came up. I’m sorry you had to hear that; my son is not usually so rude.” I hold the door open so that she can enter my house. “It gets harder when you can’t give them a swat on the behind anymore because they’re bigger than you are.”

She looks shocked, but covers it quickly with a polite smile.

As I take her coat to hang up, I glance at the couch and single armchair, the tiny kitchen, and try to see it through her eyes. “Would you like something to drink?”

“Water would be great.”

I go to the kitchen to fill a glass-it’s only steps away from her, separated by a counter-while Kennedy glances at the photographs on the mantel. Edison’s latest school photo is there, as well as one of us on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and the picture of Wesley and me on our wedding day.

She begins to unpack the box of files she lugged inside as I sit down on the couch. Edison is in his bedroom, stewing. “I’ve had a look through the discovery,” Kennedy begins, “but this is where I really need your help. It’s the baby’s chart. I can read legalese, but I’m not fluent in medical.”

I open the file, my shoulders stiffening when I turn the photocopied page of Marie’s Post-it note. “It’s all accurate-height, weight, Apgar scores, eyes and thighs-”

“What?”

“An antibiotic eye ointment and a vitamin K shot. It’s standard for newborns.”

Kennedy reaches across me and points to a number. “What’s that mean?”

“The baby’s blood sugar was low. He hadn’t nursed. The mom had gestational diabetes, so that wasn’t particularly surprising.”

“Is that your handwriting?” she asks.

“No, I wasn’t the delivery nurse. That was Lucille; I took over for her after her shift ended.” I flip the page. “This is the newborn assessment-the form I filled out. Temperature of ninety-eight point one,” I read, “nothing concerning about his hair whorls or fontanels; Accu-Chek at fifty-two-his sugar was improving. His lungs were clear. No bruising or abnormal shaping of the skull. Length nineteen point five inches, head circumference thirteen point five inches.” I shrug. “The exam was perfectly fine, except for a possible heart murmur. You can see where I noted it in the file and flagged the pediatric cardiology team.”

“What did the cardiologist say?”

“He never got a chance to diagnose it. The baby died before that.” I frown. “Where are the results of the heel stick?”

“What’s that?”

“Routine testing.”

“I’ll subpoena it,” Kennedy says absently. She starts tossing around papers and files until she finds one labeled with the seal of the medical examiner. “Ah, look at this…Cause of death: hypoglycemia leading to hypoglycemic seizure leading to respiratory arrest and cardiac arrest,” Kennedy says. “Cardiac arrest? As in: a congenital heart defect?”

She hands me the report. “Well, I was right, for what it’s worth,” I say. “The baby had a grade-one patent ductus.”

“Is that life-threatening?”

“No. It usually closes up by itself the first year of life.”

“Usually,” she repeats. “But not always.”

I shake my head, confused. “We can’t say the baby was sick if he wasn’t.”

“The defense doesn’t have the burden of proof. We can say anything-that the baby was exposed to Ebola, that a distant cousin of his died of heart disease, that he was the first kid to be born with a chromosomal abnormality inconsistent with life-we just have to lay out a trail of bread crumbs for the jury and hope they’re hungry enough to follow.”

I sift through the medical file again until I find the photocopy of the Post-it note. “We could always show them this.”

“That does not create doubt,” Kennedy says flatly. “That, in fact, makes the jury think you might have a reason for being pissed off in the first place. Let it go, Ruth. What really matters here? The pain from just a little bruise to your ego? Or the guillotine hanging over your head?”

My hand tightens on the paper, and I feel the sting of a paper cut. “It was not a little bruise to my ego.”

“Great. Then we’re in agreement. You want to win this case? Help me find a medical issue that shows the baby might still have died, even if you’d taken every single measure possible to save it.”

I almost tell her, then. I almost say that I tried to resuscitate that child. But then I would have to admit that I had lied to Kennedy in the first place, when here I stand, telling her it’s wrong to lie about a cardiac anomaly. So instead, I stick my finger in my mouth and suck at the wound. In the kitchen, I find a box of Band-Aids and carry them back to the table, wrap one around my middle finger.

This is not a case about a heart murmur. She knows it, and I know it.

I look down at my kitchen table, and run my thumbnail against the grain of the wood. “You ever make your little girl peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”

“What?” Kennedy glances up. “Yes. Sure.”

“Edison, he was a picky eater when he was little. Sometimes he decided he didn’t want the jelly, and I’d have to try to scrape it off. But you know, you can’t ever really take the jelly off a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, once it’s there. You can still taste it.”

My lawyer is looking at me as if I’ve lost my mind.

“You told me this lawsuit isn’t about race. But that’s what started it. And it doesn’t matter if you can convince the jury I’m the reincarnation of Florence Nightingale-you can’t take away the fact that I am Black. The truth is, if I looked like you, this would not be happening to me.”

Something shutters in her eyes. “First,” Kennedy says evenly, “you might very well have been indicted no matter what race you were. Grieving parents and hospitals that are trying to keep their insurance premiums from going through the roof create a perfect recipe for finding a fall guy. Second, I am not disagreeing with you. There are definite racial overtones in this case. But in my professional opinion, bringing them up in court is more likely to hinder than to help you secure an acquittal, and I don’t think that’s a risk you should take just to make yourself feel better about a perceived slight.”

“A perceived slight,” I say. I turn the words over in my mouth, running my tongue across the sharp edges. “A perceived slight.” I lift my chin and stare at Kennedy. “What do you think about being white?”

She shakes her head, her face blank. “I don’t think about being white. I told you the first time we sat down-I don’t see color.”

“Not all of us have that privilege.” I reach for the Band-Aids and shake them across all her charts and folders and files. “Flesh color,” I read on the box. “Tell me, which one of these is flesh color? My flesh color?”

Two bright spots bloom on Kennedy’s cheeks. “You can’t blame me for that.”

“Can’t I?”

She straightens her spine. “I am not a racist, Ruth. And I understand that you’re upset, but it’s a little unfair of you to take it out on me, when I’m just trying to do my best-my professional best-to help you. For God’s sake, if I’m walking down a street and a Black man is coming toward me and I realize I’m going the wrong way, I keep going the wrong direction instead of turning around so he won’t automatically think I’m afraid of him.”

“That’s overcompensating, and that’s just as bad,” I say. “You say you don’t see color…but that’s all you see. You’re so hyperaware of it, and of trying to look like you aren’t prejudiced, you can’t even understand that when you say race doesn’t matter all I hear is you dismissing what I’ve felt, what I’ve lived, what it’s like to be put down because of the color of my skin.”

I don’t know which one of us is more surprised by my outburst. Kennedy, for being confronted by a client she thought was grateful to bask in the glow of her professional advice, or I, for letting loose a beast that must have been hiding inside me all these years. It had been lurking, just waiting for something to shake my unshakable optimism, and free it.

Tight-lipped, Kennedy nods. “You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to be Black. But I do know what it’s like to be in a courtroom. If you bring up race in court, you will lose. Juries like clarity. They like being able to say, Because A, therefore B. Sprinkle racism over that, and everything gets cloudy.” She starts gathering up her files and reports, jamming them back in her briefcase. “I’m not trying to make it seem like your feelings don’t matter to me, or that I don’t believe racism is real. I’m just trying to get you acquitted.”

Doubt is like frostbite, shivering at the edges of my mind.

“Maybe we both need to cool down,” Kennedy says diplomatically. She gets to her feet and walks to the door. “I promise you, Ruth. We can win this case, without bringing any of that up.”

After the door closes behind her, I sit, my hands folded in my lap. How, I think, is that winning?

I pick at the edge of the Band-Aid on my finger. Then I walk to the vase on the shelf near the television. I pull out the manila envelope and rummage through the checks until I find what I’m looking for.

Wallace Mercy’s business card.

Turk

FRANCIS LIKES TO OPEN UP his home to guys in the Movement every other Sunday afternoon. Once the crews stopped roaming the streets looking for people to mess up, we hardly ever saw each other. You can reach a lot of people through the World Wide Web, but it’s a cold, impersonal community. Francis recognizes that, which is why twice a month the street is packed with cars with license plates from as far away as New Jersey and New Hampshire, enjoying an afternoon of hospitality. I’ll put on the football game for the guys, and the women congregate in the kitchen with Brit, organizing the potluck dishes and trading gossip like baseball cards. Francis takes it upon himself to entertain the older kids with colorful lectures. You can stand at a distance and almost see words blazing from his mouth, like he is a dragon, as the boys sit mesmerized at his feet.

It’s been almost three months since we’ve had a Sunday session. We haven’t seen these people since Davis’s funeral. To be honest, I haven’t really thought about it, since I’m still stumbling through the days like a zombie. But when Francis tells me to post an invitation on Lonewolf.org, I do it. You just don’t say no to Francis.

And so, the house is full again. The tone, though, is a little different. Everyone wants to seek me out, ask how I’m doing. Brit is in our bedroom with a headache; she didn’t even want to pretend to be social.

But Francis is still the happy host, pulling the caps off beers and complimenting the ladies on their haircuts or blue-eyed babies or the deliciousness of their brownies. He finds me sitting by myself near the garage, where I’ve gone to dump a bag of trash. “People seem to be having a good time,” he says.

I nod. “People like free beer.”

“It’s only free if you’re not me,” Francis replies, and then he looks at me shrewdly. “Everything all right?” he asks, and by everything he means Brit. When I shrug, he purses his lips. “You know, when Brit’s mama left, I didn’t understand why I was still here. Thought about checking out, if you know what I mean. I was taking care of my six-month-old, and I still couldn’t find the will to stick around. And then one day, I just got it: the reason we lose people we care about is so we’re more grateful for the ones we still have. It’s the only possible explanation. Otherwise, God’s a sorry son of a bitch.”

He claps me on the back and walks into the tiny fenced backyard. The young teens who’ve been dragged here by their parents are suddenly alert, awakened to his magnetism. He sits down on a stump and starts his version of Sunday School. “Who likes mysteries?” There is nodding, a general buzz of assent. “Good. Who can tell me who Israel is?”

“That’s a pretty crappy mystery,” someone mutters and is elbowed by the boy beside him.

Another boy calls out, “A country filled with Jews.”

“Raise your hand,” Francis says. “And I didn’t ask what Israel is. I asked who.”

A kid who’s just getting fuzz over his upper lip waves and is pointed to. “Jacob. He started being called that after he fought the angel at Peniel.”

“And we have a winner,” Francis says. “Israel went on to have twelve sons-that’s where the twelve tribes of Israel come from, you follow…”

I walk back into the kitchen, where a few women are talking. One of them is holding a baby who’s fussing. “All’s I know is she doesn’t sleep through the night anymore and I’m so tired I actually walked out the front door in my pajamas yesterday headed to work before I realized what I was doing.”

“I’m telling you,” one girl says. “I used whiskey, rubbed on the gums.”

“Can’t start them too early,” says an older woman, and everyone laughs.

Then they see me standing there, and the conversation drops like a stone from a cliff. “Turk,” says the older woman. I don’t know her name, but I recognize her face; she’s been here before. “Didn’t see you come in.”

I don’t respond. My eyes are glued to the baby, who is red-faced, waving her fists. She is crying so hard she can’t catch her breath.

My arms are reaching out before I can stop myself. “Can I…?”

The women glance at each other, and then the baby’s mother places her into my arms. I can’t get over how light the baby is, rigid arms and legs kicking as she shrieks. “Shh,” I say, patting her. “Quiet, now.”

I rub my hand on her back. I let her curl like a comma over my shoulder. Her cries become hiccups. “Look at you, the Baby Whisperer,” her mother says, smiling.

This is how it could have been.

This is how it should have been.

Suddenly I realize that the ladies are not looking at the baby anymore. They are staring at something behind me. I turn around, the baby fast asleep, tiny bubbles of spit on the seam of her lips.

“Jesus,” Brit says, an accusation. She turns and runs out of the kitchen. I hear the door to the bedroom slam behind her. “Excuse me,” I say, trying to juggle the baby back to her mother as gently and as quickly as possible. Then I run to Brit.

She’s lying on our bed, facing away from me. “I fucking hate them. I hate them for being in my house.”

“Brit. They’re just trying to be nice.”

“That’s what I hate the most,” she says, her voice a blade. “I hate the way they look at me.”

“That’s not what-”

“All I wanted was a fucking drink of water from my own sink. Is that too much to ask?”

“I’ll get you water…”

“That’s not the point, Turk.”

“What is the point?” I whisper.

Brit rolls over. Her eyes are swimming with tears. “Exactly,” she says, and she starts to cry, just as hard as that baby was crying, but even after I gather her into my arms and hold her tight and rub her back she doesn’t stop.

It feels just as foreign to be soothing Brit while she sobs as it was for me to cradle an infant. This is not the woman I married. I wonder if I buried that fierce spirit along with the body of my son.

We stay there, in the cocoon of the bedroom, long after the sun sets and the cars drive away and the house is empty again.

–

THE NEXT NIGHT we are all sitting in the living room watching television. My laptop is open; I’m writing a post for Lonewolf.org about something that happened in Cincinnati. Brit brings me a beer and curls up against me, the first contact she’s initiated since, well, I can’t even remember. “What are you working on?” she asks, craning her neck so that she can read what’s on my screen.

“White kid got body-slammed by two niggers at school,” I say. “They broke his back, but they didn’t get charged. You can bet if it were the other way around, the White kids would have been charged with assault.”

Francis points the remote at the television and grunts. “That’s because Cincinnati is in the ninety-ninth percentile of shit schools,” he adds. “It’s an all-black administration. What do we really want for our kids?”

“That’s good,” I say, typing in his words. “I’m gonna end with that.”

Francis flips through the cable stations. “How come there’s Black Entertainment TV but no White Entertainment TV?” he asks. “And people say there’s no reverse racism.” He turns off the television and stands up. “I’m headed to bed.”

He kisses Brit on the forehead and leaves for the night, headed to his side of the duplex. I expect her to get up, too, but she makes no move to leave.

“Doesn’t it kill you?” Brit asks. “The waiting?”

I glance up. “How do you mean?”

“It’s like there’s nothing immediate anymore. You don’t know who’s reading the stuff you post.” She pivots to face me, sitting cross-legged. “Things used to be so much clearer. I learned my colors by looking at the shoelaces of the guys my dad was meeting up with. White Power and neo-Nazis had red or white laces. SHARPs were blue or green.”

I smirk. “I have a hard time imagining your father meeting with SHARPs.” Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice are the biggest race traitors you’ll ever meet; they target those of us who are fighting the good fight by trying to get rid of lesser races. They think they’re fucking Batman, every one of them.

“I didn’t say it was a…friendly meeting,” Brit replies. “But actually, sometimes he did. You did what you had to do-even if it seemed to go against all reason-because you were seeing the big picture.” She glances up at me. “You know Uncle Richard?”

Not personally, but Brit did. He was Richard Butler, the head of Aryan Nations. He died when Brit was about seventeen.

“Uncle Richard was friends with Louis Farrakhan.”

The leader of the Nation of Islam? This was news to me. “But…he’s…”

“Black? Yeah. But he hates Jews and the federal government as much as we do. Daddy always says the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Brit shrugs. “It was kind of an unspoken understanding: after we worked together to bring down the system, then we’d fight each other.”

We’d win, of that I have no doubt.

She looks at me carefully. “What do we really want for our kids?” Brit says, repeating Francis’s earlier comment. “I know what I want for my kid. I want him to be remembered.”

“Baby, you know we won’t forget him.”

“Not us,” Brit says, her words suddenly hard. “Everyone.”

I look at her. I know what she’s saying: that typing a blog may indeed crumble foundations, but it’s far more dramatic-and faster-to blow the building up from the top down.

To some extent I’d been too late for the Skinhead Movement, which had its heyday ten years before I was born. I imagined a world where when people saw me coming, they ran away. I thought about how Francis and I had spent the past two years trying to convince crews that anonymity was more insidious-and terrifying-than overt threats. “Your father won’t go along with this,” I say.

Brit leans down and kisses me, softly, pulling away so I am left wanting more. God, I’ve missed this. I missed her.

“What my father doesn’t know can’t hurt him,” she answers.

–

RAINE IS PUMPED to get my phone call. It’s been two years since I’ve seen him; he didn’t make it to my wedding, because his wife had just had their second baby. When I tell him I’m in Brattleboro for the day, he invites me to his house for lunch. He’s moved, so I jot the address down on a napkin.

At first I’m sure I’m in the wrong place. It’s a little ranch on a cul-de-sac, with a mailbox that is shaped like a cat. There’s a bright red plastic slide on the front lawn and a ticky-tacky wooden snowman hanging near the front door. The welcome mat says HI! WE’RE THE TESCOS!

Then a slow grin spreads over my face. The smart bastard. He’s taking hiding in plain sight to a whole new level. I mean, who would ever expect that the dad living next door who power-washes his porch and lets his kid ride a bike with training wheels up and down the driveway is actually a White Supremacist?

Raine opens the door before I even get a chance to knock. He’s holding a chunky toddler in his arms, and poking out from between the towers of his legs is a shy little girl wearing a tutu and a princess crown. He grins, reaching out to embrace me. I can’t help but notice he is wearing sparkling pink nail polish.

“Bro,” I say, glancing at his fingers. “Nice fashion statement.”

“You should see how good I am at tea parties. Come in! Man, it’s good to see you.”

I walk inside, and the little girl ducks behind Raine’s legs. “Mira,” he says, crouching down, “this is Turk, Daddy’s friend.”

She sticks her thumb into her mouth, like she’s sizing me up.

“She’s not great with strangers,” Raine says. He juggles the baby in his arms. “This bruiser here is Isaac.”

I follow him inside, past toys that are littered like confetti, and into the living room. Raine gets me a cold one, but he doesn’t take a beer for himself. “I’m drinking alone?”

He shrugs. “Sal doesn’t like when I drink in front of the kids. Doesn’t think it sets a great example, and some crap like that.”

“Where is Sally?” I ask.

“At work! She does radiology at the VA. I’m kind of in between jobs, so I’m home with the hobbits.”

“Cool,” I say, taking a long pull from the bottle.

Raine sets Isaac on the floor. He starts stumbling around like a very tiny drunk. Mira runs down the hallway into her bedroom, her feet pounding like a round of artillery. “So what’s up with you, man?” Raine asks. “You good?”

I rest my elbows on my knees. “I could be better. It’s kind of what brought me here.”

“Trouble in paradise?”

I realize that Raine has no idea Brit and I had a baby. That we lost that baby. I start to tell him the whole story-from that nigger nurse to the moment Davis stopped breathing. “I’m calling on all the squads. From the Vermont NADS all the way down to the Maryland State Skinheads. I want a day of vengeance to honor my son.”

When Raine doesn’t respond, I lean forward. “I’m talking vandalism. Good old-fashioned fights. Firebombs. Anything short of a casualty, I figure. It’s up to the individual squads and their leaders. But something visible that gets us noticed. And I know it goes against what we’ve been working toward by blending in, but maybe it’s time for a little reminder of our power, you know? There’s strength in numbers. If we make a statement that’s big enough, they can’t arrest us all.” I look him in the eye. “We deserve this. Davis deserves this.”

Just then Mira dances down the hallway and drops a crown on her father’s head. He pulls it off, looking soberly at the cheap foil circle. “Baby, can you go draw me a picture? That’s a good girl.” He follows her with his eyes as she goes back to her room. “I’m guessing you didn’t hear,” Raine says to me.

“Hear what?”

“I’m out, man. I’m not with the Movement anymore.”

I stare at him, shocked. Raine was the one who had gotten me into White Power in the first place. Once I had joined NADS, we were brothers for life. It wasn’t like this was a job you could just walk away from. It was a calling.

Suddenly I remember the line of swastika tattoos Raine had up and down his arm. I look at his shoulders, his biceps. The swastikas have been repurposed into a sleeve of vines. You can’t even tell the symbols were there in the first place.

“It happened a couple years ago. Sal and I had gone to a rally that summer, like you and me and the boys used to, and everything was great except there were guys waiting in line to screw a skinchick in her tent. It freaked Sal out, taking our baby to a place where that was happening. So I started going to the rallies by myself, leaving Sal with the baby. Then we got called into preschool because Mira tried to bury some Chinese kid in the sandbox, because she said she was playing kitty and that’s what cats do with their shit. I acted like I was shocked, but as soon as we got out of the building I told Mira what a good girl she was. Then one day I was in the grocery store with Mira. She was, oh, maybe turning three. We were waiting to check out, with a full cart. People were staring at me, you know, because of my tats and all, and I was used to that. Anyway, standing behind us in line, was a black man. And Mira, sweet as could be, said, Daddy, look at the nigger.” Raine looks up. “I didn’t think nothing of it. But then the woman in front of us in line said to me, Shame on you. And the checkout clerk said, How dare you teach that to an innocent baby? Before I knew it the whole store was yelling and Mira started to cry. So I grabbed her and left the whole cart of food behind and I ran out to our truck. That was the moment I started thinking maybe I wasn’t doing the right thing. I mean, I thought it was my duty to raise my kids to be race warriors-but maybe I wasn’t doing Mira any favors. Maybe all I was doing was setting her up for a life where everyone would hate her.”

I stare at him. “What else are you going to tell me? You volunteer at the local temple? Your best friend’s a gook?”

“Maybe the shit we’ve been saying all these years isn’t legit. It’s the ultimate bait and switch, man. They promised us we’d be part of something bigger than us. That we’d be proud of our heritage and our race. And maybe that’s, like, ten percent of the whole deal. The rest is just hating everyone else for existing. Once I started thinking that, I couldn’t stop. Maybe that’s why I felt like shit all the time, like I wanted to fucking bust someone’s face in constantly, just to remind myself that I could. That’s okay for me. But it’s not how I want my kid to grow up.” He shrugs. “Once word got around that I wanted out, I knew it was a matter of time. One of my own guys jumped me in a parking lot after Sal and I went to a movie. He messed me up bad enough that I had to get stitches. But then, that was that.”

I look at Raine, who used to be my best friend, and it’s like the light shifts and I realize I’m looking at something completely different. A coward. A loser.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Raine says. “We’re still brothers, right?”

“Sure,” I say. “Always.”

“Maybe you and Brit can come up here and go skiing this winter,” he suggests.

“That would be awesome.” I finish my beer and stand up, make an excuse about having to get back before dark. As I drive away, Raine is waving, and so is baby Isaac.

I know I’ll never see them again.

–

TWO DAYS LATER I have met with former squad leaders up and down the Eastern Seaboard. With the exception of Raine, they are all active posters on Lonewolf.org, and they all knew about Davis before I even started to relay the story. They all have histories with Francis-they heard him speak at a rally once; they knew a guy he killed; they were personally tapped by him to lead a crew.

Exhausted and hungry, I park on the street in front of our place. When I see the flicker of the television in the living room-even though it’s nearly 2:00 A.M.-I suck in my breath. I’d been hoping to just slide into the house unnoticed, but now I’m going to have to come up with some fake excuse for Francis about why I’ve been running around behind his back.

To my surprise, though, it’s not Francis who’s got insomnia. Brit is sitting on the couch, wrapped in one of my sweatshirts, which reaches her thighs like a dress. I cross the room, lean down, and drop a kiss on the crown of her head. “Hey, baby,” I say. “Can’t sleep?”

She shakes her head. I glance at the television, where the Wicked Witch of the West is leaning close to Dorothy, making a threat. “Did you ever watch this?”

“Yeah. You want me to tell you how it ends?” I joke.

“No, I mean really watch it. It’s like a whole fairy tale about White Power. The wizard who’s pulling everyone’s strings is a little Jew. The villain is a weird color and works with monkeys.”

I kneel down in front of her, drawing her attention. “I did what I promised. I met with all the guys who used to run squads. But no one wants to take a risk. Your dad did too good a job drumming into them that our new approach is to infiltrate, I guess. They just don’t want to run the risk of going to prison.”

“Well, you and I could-”

“Brit, if something goes down, the first place the cops will look is anyone connected to the Movement. And we’re already named in the media, thanks to the lawsuit.” I hesitate. “You know I’d do anything for you. But you’ve only just started to come back to me. If I get sent away to do time, it would be like losing you all over again.” I wrap my arms around her. “I’m sorry, baby. I thought I could make it work.”

She kisses me. “I know. It was worth a try.”

“Come to bed?”

Brit turns off the television, comes into the bedroom with me. Slowly I peel off the sweatshirt she’s wearing; I let her tug my boots and jeans off. When we get under the covers, I press against her. But when I go to move between her legs, I’m soft, slipping out of her.

She looks at me in the dark, her eyes hooded, her arm crossed over her soft belly. “Is it me?” she asks, in a voice so small I have to reach for it.

“No,” I swear. “You’re beautiful. It’s stupid shit in my head.”

She rolls away. Even like that, I can feel her skin heat up, red with shame.

“I’m sorry,” I say to her back.

Brit doesn’t answer.

In the middle of the night I wake up and reach for her. I’m not thinking, which is why I do it. Maybe if I get out of my own way, I can find comfort. My hand snakes over the sheets, searching, but Brit is gone.

–

IN THE BEGINNING there were many of us, and we were all different. You could be Aryan Nations but not a Skinhead, depending on whether or not you bought into Christian Identity theology. White Supremacists were more academic, publishing treatises; Skinheads were more violent, preferring to teach a lesson with their fists. White Separatists were the guys buying land in North Dakota and trying to divide the country so that anyone nonwhite would be kicked over the perimeter they created. Neo-Nazis were a cross between Aryan Nations and the Aryan Brotherhood in prisons-if there was a violent street gang criminal element to the Movement, they were it. There were Odinists and Creationists and disciples of the World Church of the Creator. But in spite of the ideology that split us into factions, we’d all come together one day of the year to celebrate: April 20, the birthday of Adolf Hitler.

There were birthday festivals scattered around the country, kind of like the old KKK rallies that I went to as a teen. They were usually on someone’s back forty, or on a piece of conservation land no one ever monitored, or in whatever passed for an alpine village. Directions were by word of mouth, turns marked off with tiny flags no bigger than those used by electric dog fences, except these weren’t pink plastic but SS red.

I’d probably been to five Aryan festivals since I joined up with the White Power Movement, but this one was special. At this one, I was getting married.

Well, in spirit at least. Technically Brit and I would have to go to city hall next week and fill out the legal forms. But spiritually, it would happen tonight.

I was twenty-two years old, and this was the pinnacle of my life.

Brit didn’t want me around while she was fussed over by the girls, so I wandered the festival. Overall, there were far fewer people here than at the rallies I’d gone to five years ago, mostly because the feds had started cracking down wherever we congregated. But even so, there were the usual groups of drunks, some brawling, some pissing behind the portable tents where vendors sold everything from corn dogs to thongs printed with the words SKINHEAD LOVE. There was a kid zone with coloring books and a bouncy castle that had a big-ass SS flag draped in the back, like in the Sportpalast where Hitler used to give his speeches. At the end of the row of food and merchandise vendors were the tattoo artists, who were in high demand during festivals like this.

I cut in line, which I knew would piss off the guy I cut. We had the necessary scuffle, and I gave him a bloody nose, and then he shut up and let me take his place. When I sat down in front of the tattoo artist, he looked at me. “What’s it going to be?”

Francis and I had been working for six months now to convince squads to stop flaunting sun-wheel tattoos and shaved heads and suspenders and to start looking like ordinary Joes. Part of that meant wearing long sleeves or getting acid treatments to cover up the ink on our faces. But today was a special day. Today, I wanted everyone to know what I stood for.

When I left that tent, there were eight Gothic letters, one inked on each of my finger knuckles. On the right hand, when I made a fist, it read H-A-T-E. On the left, the side closest to my heart, was L-O-V-E.

At sunset, it was time. In the distance was the throaty roar of motorcycles, and everyone who was still at the festival formed two lines. I waited, my hands clasped in front of me, the skin still red and swollen from the new tats.

Then suddenly, the crowd parted, and I could see Brit, backlit in the oranges and yellows of the end of day. She wore a white lace dress that made her look like a cupcake, and her Doc Martens. I started smiling. I smiled so hard that I thought my jaw would crack.

When she was close enough to touch, I tucked her arm into mine. If the world had ended at that moment, I would have been okay with it. We started to walk down the makeshift aisle. As we passed, arms flew up, everyone Sieg Heiling. At the end of the line stood Francis. He smiled at us, his eyes bright and sharp. He had presided over dozens of Aryan weddings, but this one was different. “Ladybug,” he said, husky. “Aren’t you something?” Then he turned to me. “You fuck with her and I will kill you.”

“Yes, sir,” I managed.

“Brittany,” Francis began, “do you promise to obey Turk and continue the heritage of the White race?”

“I do,” she vowed.

“And Turk, will you honor this woman in war as your Aryan bride?”

“I will,” I said.

We turned toward each other. I looked her in the eye, unwavering, as we recited the Fourteen Words, the mantra David Lane created when he was running the Order: We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children.

I kissed Brit, while behind us, someone lit a wooden swastika to brand this moment. I swear I felt a shift in me that day. Like I really had handed over half my heart to this woman, and she had given me hers, and the only way we would both continue to survive was with this patchwork.

I was dimly aware of Francis speaking, of people clapping. But I was pulled toward Brit, like we were the last two people on earth.

We might as well have been.

Kennedy

“MY CLIENT HATES ME,” I tell Micah, as we are standing in the kitchen washing dishes.

“I’m sure she doesn’t hate you.”

I glance at him. “She thinks I’m a racist.”

“She has a point,” Micah says mildly, and I turn to him, my eyebrows shooting up to my hairline. “You’re white and she’s not, and you both happen to live in a world where white people have all the power.”

“I’m not saying that her life hasn’t been harder than mine,” I argue. “I’m not one of those people who thinks that just because we elected a black president we’re magically postracial. I work with minority clients every day who’ve been screwed by the healthcare system and the criminal justice system and the educational system. I mean, prisons are run as a business. Someone’s profiting from keeping a steady stream of people going to jail.”

We had hosted some of Micah’s colleagues for dinner. I’d had high hopes of serving a gourmet meal but wound up making a taco bar and offering a store-bought bakery pie that I passed off as being homemade after I broke off the edges of the crust a little to make it slightly less perfect. Throughout the evening, my mind wandered. Granted, when conversation drifted toward rates of retinal nerve fiber layer loss in contralateral eyes of glaucoma patients with unilateral progression, I couldn’t be blamed. But I already was obsessing over my earlier argument with Ruth. If I was in the right, how come I couldn’t stop rehashing what I’d said?

“But you just don’t bring up race in a criminal trial,” I say. “It’s like one of those unspoken rules, you know, like Don’t use your brights in oncoming traffic…or Don’t be the asshole who brings a full cart to the twelve items or less lane. Even the cases based on stand-your-ground laws steer clear of it, and ninety-nine percent of the time it’s a white guy in Florida who got scared by a black kid and pulled a trigger. I get that Ruth feels singled out by her employer. But none of that has to do with a murder charge.”

Micah passes me a platter to dry. “Don’t take this the wrong way, babe,” he says, “but sometimes when you’re trying to explain something and you think you’re dropping a hint, you’re actually more like a Mack truck.”

I turn to him, waving my dish towel. “What if one of your patients had cancer, and you were trying to treat it, but she also kept telling you she had poison ivy. Wouldn’t you tell her it was more important to focus on getting rid of the cancer, and then you’d take care of the rash?”

Micah considers this. “Well, I’m not an oncologist. But sometimes, when you’ve got an itch, you keep scratching it and you don’t even realize that you’re doing it.”

I am totally lost. “What?”

“It was your metaphor.”

I sigh. “My client hates me,” I say again.

Just then the phone rings. It is nearly 10:30, the time for calls about heart attacks and accidents. I grab the receiver with a damp hand. “Hello?”

“Is this Kennedy McQuarrie?” booms a deep voice, one I know but cannot place.

“It is.”

“Excellent! Ms. McQuarrie, this is Reverend Wallace Mercy.”

The Wallace Mercy?

I don’t even realize I’ve said that aloud until he chuckles. “Rumors of my superstardom have been greatly exaggerated,” he paraphrases. “I am calling about a friend we have in common-Ruth Jefferson.”

Immediately, I go into lockdown mode. “Reverend Mercy, I’m not at liberty to discuss a client.”

“I assure you, you can. Ruth has asked me to serve as an adviser, of sorts…”

I clench my teeth. “My client hasn’t signed anything stating that.”

“The release, yes, of course. I emailed one to her an hour ago. It will be on your desk tomorrow morning.”

What. The. Hell. Why would Ruth go and sign something like that without consulting me? Why wouldn’t she even mention that she’d been talking to someone like Wallace Mercy?

But I already know the answer: because I told Ruth her case had nothing to do with racial discrimination, that’s why. And Wallace Mercy is about nothing but racial discrimination.

“Listen to me,” I say, my heart pounding so hard that I can hear its pulse in every word. “Getting Ruth Jefferson acquitted is my job, not yours. You want to boost your ratings? Don’t think you’re going to do it on my back.”

I end the call, punching the button with such vehemence that the handset goes spinning out of my hand and skitters across the kitchen floor. Micah turns off the faucet. “Damn cordless phones,” he says. “It was so much more satisfying back when you could slam them down, right?” He approaches me, his hands in his pockets. “You want to tell me what that was all about?”

“That was Wallace Mercy on the phone. Ruth Jefferson wants him to advise her.”

Micah whistles long and low. “You’re right,” he says. “She hates you.”

–

RUTH OPENS THE door in her nightgown and bathrobe. “Please,” I say. “I only need five minutes of your time.”

“Isn’t it a little late?”

I don’t know if she’s talking about the fact that it’s almost 11:00 P.M. or the fact that we parted on such a divisive note early this afternoon. I choose to assume the former. “I knew if I called you’d recognize my number and ignore it.”

She considers this. “Probably.”

I pull my sweater more tightly around me. After Wallace Mercy’s call, I got in the car and started driving. I didn’t even grab a coat first. All I could think was that I needed to intercept Ruth before she mailed back that release form.

I take a deep breath. “It’s not that I don’t care about how you were treated-I do. It’s that I know having Wallace Mercy involved is going to cost you in the short run, if not the long run.”

Ruth watches me shiver again. “Come in,” she says, after a moment.

The couch is already made up with pillows and sheets and a blanket, so I sit at the kitchen table as her son pokes his head out of the bedroom. “Mama? What’s going on?”

“I’m fine, Edison. Go to bed.”

He looks dubious, but he backs up and closes the door.

“Ruth,” I beg, “don’t sign that release.”

She takes a seat at the table, too. “He promised me that he wouldn’t interfere with whatever you’re doing in court-”

“You’ll sabotage yourself,” I say bluntly. “Think about it-angry mobs in the street, your face on TV every night, legal pundits weighing in on the case on morning shows-you don’t want them taking control of the narrative of this case before we have a chance to.” I gesture to the closed door of Edison’s bedroom. “What about your son? Are you ready to have him dragged into the public eye? Because that’s what happens when you become a symbol. The world knows everything about you, and your past, and your family, and crucifies you. Your name will be just as familiar as Trayvon Martin’s. You’re never going to get your life back.”

She meets my gaze. “Neither did he.”

The truth of that statement separates us like a canyon. I look down into that abyss and see all the reasons why Ruth shouldn’t do this; she looks down and no doubt sees all the reasons why she should.

“Ruth, I know you have no reason to trust me, especially given the way white people have treated you recently. But if Wallace Mercy grandstands, you won’t be safe. The last thing you want is for your case to be tried in the media. Please, let’s do this my way. Give it a chance.” I hesitate. “I’m begging you.”

She folds her arms. “What if I tell you I want the jury to know what happened to me? To hear my side of the story?”

I nod, striking a bargain. “Then we put you on the stand,” I promise.

–

THE MOST INTERESTING thing about Jack DeNardi is that he has a rubber band ball on his desk the size of a newborn’s head. Other than that he is exactly what you would expect to find working in a dingy cubicle in the Mercy-West Haven Hospital office: paunch, gray skin, comb-over. He’s a paper pusher, and the only reason I’m here is that I’m fishing. I want to see if there’s anything they’d say about Ruth that might help her-or that is going to hurt her.

“Twenty years,” Jack DeNardi says. “That’s how long she worked here.”

“How many times in those twenty years was Ruth promoted?” I ask.

“Let’s see.” He pores through the files. “Once.”

“Once in twenty years?” I say, incredulous. “Doesn’t that seem low to you?”

Jack shrugs. “I’m really not at liberty to discuss that.”

“Why is that?” I press. “You’re part of a hospital. Isn’t your job to help people?”

“Patients,” he clarifies. “Not employees.”

I snort. Institutions are allowed to scrutinize their personnel and find and label every flaw-but no one ever turns the magnifying glass back on them.

He scrolls through some more paperwork. “The term used in her most recent performance review was prickly.”

I’m not going to disagree with that.

“Clearly Ruth Jefferson is qualified. But from what I can gather in her file, she was passed over for promotions because she was seen by her superiors as a little…uppity.”

I frown. “Ruth’s superior, Marie Malone…how long has she been working here?”

He enters a few keystrokes into his computer. “Roughly ten years.”

“So someone who worked here for ten years was giving Ruth orders-dubious ones at that-and maybe Ruth questioned them from time to time? Does that sound like she’s being uppity…or just assertive?”

He turns to me. “I couldn’t say.”

I stand up. “Thanks for your time, Mr. DeNardi.” I gather my coat and my briefcase, and just before I cross the threshold I turn. “Uppity…or assertive. Is it possible the adjective changes depending on the color of the employee?”

“I resent that implication, Ms. McQuarrie.” Jack DeNardi presses his lips together. “Mercy-West Haven does not discriminate based on race, creed, religion, or sexual orientation.”

“Oh, okay. I see,” I say. “Then it was just dumb luck that Ruth Jefferson was the employee you chose to throw to the wolves.”

As I walk out of the hospital, I consider that none of this conversation can or will be used in court. I’m not even sure what made me turn back at the last minute and toss that final question to the HR employee.

Except, perhaps, that Ruth is rubbing off on me.

–

THAT WEEKEND, A cold rain pelts the windows. Violet and I sit at the coffee table, coloring. Violet is scribbling across the page, without any regard for the predrawn outline of a raccoon in her coloring book. “Grandma likes to color inside the lines,” my daughter informs me. “She says it’s the right way.”

“There is no right way or wrong way,” I say automatically. I point to her explosion of reds and yellows. “Look how pretty yours is.”

Who came up with that rule anyway? Why are there even lines?

When Micah and I went on our honeymoon to Australia, we spent three nights camping in the red center of the country, where the ground was cracked like a parched throat and the night sky looked like a bowl of diamonds that had been upended. We met an Aboriginal man, who showed us the Emu in the Sky, the constellation near the Southern Cross that is not a dot-to-dot puzzle, like our constellations, but the spaces in between the dots-nebulas swirling against the Milky Way to form the long neck and dangling legs of the great bird. I couldn’t find it, at first. And then, once I did, it was all I could see.

When my cellphone starts to ring and I recognize Ruth’s number, I immediately pick up. “Is everything all right?” I ask.

“Fine.” Ruth’s voice sounds stiff. “I was wondering if maybe you had any free time this afternoon.”

I glance at Micah, who’s come into the living room. Ruth, I mouth.

He scoops up Violet, tickling her, letting me know that I have all the time I need. “Of course,” I say. “Was there something in the discovery you wanted to talk about?”

“Not exactly. I need to go shopping for a birthday gift for my mama. And I thought you might like to come along.”

I recognize an olive branch when I see it. “I’d like that,” I say.

As I drive to Ruth’s, I think about all the reasons this is a colossal mistake. When I was starting out as public defender, I spent my salary, which didn’t even cover my groceries for the week, on my clients when I could see they needed a clean set of clothes or a hot meal. It took me a while to realize that helping my clients couldn’t extend to my bank account. Ruth seems too proud to drag me to a mall and hint that she could really use a new pair of shoes, however. I think maybe she just wants to clear the air between us.

But as we drive to the mall, all we discuss is the weather-when the rain is going to stop, if it might turn to sleet. Then we talk about where we will be spending the upcoming holidays. At Ruth’s suggestion, I park near T.J.Maxx. “So,” I say. “Are you looking for something in particular?”

She shakes her head. “I’ll know it when I see it. There are items that just scream my mama’s name, usually ones covered in sequins.” Ruth smiles. “The way she dresses for church, you’d think she was headed to a black-tie wedding. I always figured it was because she wears a uniform all week long, maybe this was her way of cutting loose.”

“Did you grow up here in Connecticut?” I ask, as we get out of the car.

“No. Harlem. I used to take the bus into Manhattan every day with my mama to work, and then get dropped off at Dalton.”

“You and your sister went to Dalton?” I ask.

“I did. Adisa wasn’t quite as…scholarly minded. It was Wesley who made me settle in Connecticut.”

“How did you two meet?”

“At a hospital,” Ruth says. “I was a nursing student, on an L and D ward, and there was a woman having a baby whose husband was in the service. She had tried and tried to contact him. She was delivering twins a month early, and she was scared, and convinced she was gonna have those babies alone. Suddenly when she was in the middle of pushing, a guy comes flying in, wearing camo. He takes one look at her and drops like a stone. Since I was just a student, I was stuck taking care of the fainter.”

“So wait,” I say. “Wesley was married to someone else when you met?”

“That’s what I assumed. When he came to, he started hitting on me, turning up the charm. I thought he was the biggest jackass I’d ever met, flirting while his wife was delivering his twins, and I told him so. Turned out they weren’t his babies. His best friend was the father, but was out training and couldn’t get furlough, so Wesley promised to take his place and help the guy’s wife till he got there.” Ruth laughs. “That’s about when I started thinking maybe he wasn’t the biggest jackass after all. We had some good years, Wesley and me.”

“When did he pass away?”

“When Edison was seven.”

I can’t imagine losing Micah; I can’t imagine raising Violet by myself. What Ruth has done with her life, I realize, is braver than anything I’ve ever done. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” Ruth sighs. “But you know, you go on, right? Because what other choice have you got?” She turns to me. “Mama taught me that, as a matter of fact. Maybe I’ll find it embroidered on a pillow.”

“In glitter,” I say, and we walk through the store doors.

Ruth tells me about Sam Hallowell, whose name rings a faint bell, and how her mother has been working as a domestic in that household for almost fifty years. She talks about Christina, who gave her her first illicit sip of brandy when she was twelve, from her father’s liquor cabinet, and who paid her way through trigonometry, buying the answers to tests off an exchange student from Beijing. She tells me, too, how Christina tried to give her money. “She sounds awful,” I admit.

Ruth considers this. “She’s not. It’s just what she knows. She never learned any other way of being.”

We move through the aisles, trading stories. She confesses that she wanted to be an anthropologist, until she studied Lucy the Australopithecus: How many women from Ethiopia do you know named Lucy? I tell her how my water broke in the middle of a trial, and the dick of a judge wouldn’t give me a continuance. She tells me about Adisa, who convinced her when she was five that the reason Ruth was so pale by comparison was because she was turning into a ghost, that she’d been born black as a berry but was fading away little by little. I tell her about the client I hid in my basement for three weeks, because she was so sure her husband was going to kill her. She tells me about a man who, in the middle of labor, told his girlfriend she needed to wax. I confess that I haven’t seen my father, who is in an institution for Alzheimer’s, in over a year, because the last time I was so sad I couldn’t shake the visit for months. Ruth admits that walking through Adisa’s neighborhood scares her.

I am starving, so I grab a box of caramel corn from a display and open it as we talk, only to find Ruth staring at me. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“Eating?” I say, my mouth full of popcorn. “Take some. It’s my treat.”

“But you haven’t paid for it yet.”

I look at her like she’s crazy. “I’m going to, obviously, when we leave. What’s the big deal?”

“I mean-”

But before she can answer, we are interrupted by an employee. “Can I help you find something?” she asks, looking directly at Ruth.

“Just browsing,” Ruth says.

The woman smiles, but she doesn’t leave. She trails us at a distance, like a child’s toy being dragged on a string. Ruth either doesn’t notice or doesn’t choose to notice. I suggest gloves or a nice winter scarf, but Ruth says her mother has one lucky scarf she’s owned forever, and she’d never trade up. Ruth keeps up a steady patter of conversation until we find a section of bargain basement DVDs. “This might be fun. I could do up a whole bunch of her favorite shows, and package them with microwave popcorn and call it movie night.” She begins sifting through the barrels of DVDs: Saved by the Bell. Full House. Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“Dawson’s Creek,” I say. “Man, does that take me back. I was absolutely going to grow up and marry Pacey.”

“Pacey? What kind of name is that?”

“Didn’t you ever watch it?”

Ruth shakes her head. “I’ve got about ten years on you. And if there was ever a white-girl show, this was it.”

I reach deep into the barrel and pull out a season of The Cosby Show. I think about showing it to Ruth, but then hide it underneath a box of The X-Files, because what if she thinks that the only reason I’m picking it is the color of their skin? But Ruth plucks it out of my hand. “Did you watch this when it was on TV?”

“Of course. Didn’t everyone?” I say.

“I guess that was the point. If you make the most functional family on TV a black one, maybe white folks won’t be quite as terrified.”

“Don’t know that I’d use the words Cosby and functional in the same sentence these days,” I muse, as the T.J.Maxx employee walks up to us again.

“Everything all right?”

“Yeah,” I say, getting annoyed. “We’ll let you know if we need help.”

Ruth decides on ER, because her mother has a crush on George Clooney, along with mittens that have real rabbit fur sewed along the edges. I pick up a pair of pajamas for Violet, and a pack of undershirts for Micah. When we walk up to the cash register, the manager follows us. I pay first, handing over my credit card to the cashier, and then wait for Ruth to finish her transaction.

“Do you have any ID?” the cashier asks. Ruth pulls out her license and Social Security card. The cashier looks at her, then at the picture on the license, and rings up the items.

As we are leaving the store, a security guard stops us. “Ma’am,” he says to Ruth, “can I see your receipt?”

I start to rummage in my bag so that he can check mine, too, but he waves me away. “You’re fine,” he says dismissively, and he turns his attention back to Ruth, matching the contents of the bag with what’s been rung up.

That’s when I realize that Ruth didn’t want me to come here with her because she needed help picking out a present for her mother.

Ruth wanted me to come here so that I could understand what it was like to be her.

The manager hovering, in case of shoplifting.

The wariness of the cashier.

The fact that out of a dozen people leaving T.J.Maxx at the same time, Ruth was the only one whose bag was checked.

I can feel my cheeks redden-embarrassed on Ruth’s behalf, embarrassed because I didn’t realize what was going on even as it was happening. When the security guard gives Ruth back the bag, we leave the store, running through the driving rain to my car.

Inside, we sit, out of breath and soaked. The rain is a sheet between us and the world. “I get it,” I say.

Ruth looks at me. “You haven’t even begun to get it,” she replies, not unkindly.

“But you didn’t say anything,” I point out. “Do you just get used to it?”

“I don’t imagine you ever get used to it. But you figure out how to let it go.”

I hear her words about Christina, echoing in my mind: She never learned any other way of being.

Our eyes meet. “True confession? The worst grade I got in college was for a course on black history. I was the only white girl in the seminar. I did fine on exams, but half of the grade was participation, and I never opened my mouth that semester, not once. I figured if I did, I’d say the wrong thing, or something stupid that made me sound prejudiced. But then I worried that all those other kids thought I didn’t give a damn about the subject because I never contributed to the discussion.”

Ruth is quiet for a moment. “True confession? The reason we don’t talk about race is because we do not speak a common language.”

We sit for a few moments, listening to the rain. “True confession? I never really liked The Cosby Show.”

“True confession?” Ruth grins. “Neither did I.”

–

THROUGHOUT DECEMBER, I double down on my efforts to keep my nose to the grindstone. I sort through discovery, I write pretrial motions, and I catch up on the other thirty cases vying with Ruth’s for a moment of my attention. After lunch, I am supposed to depose a twenty-three-year-old who was beaten up by her boyfriend when he found out she was sleeping with his brother. However, the witness gets into a fender-bender on the way so we have to reschedule, leaving me with two hours free. I look down at the mountains of paperwork surrounding my desk and make a snap decision. I poke my head over the edge of my cubicle, toward where Howard is sitting. “If anyone asks,” I tell him, “say I had to go out to buy tampons.”

“Wait. Really?”

“No. But then they’ll be embarrassed, and it serves them right for checking up on me.”

It’s unseasonably warm-almost fifty degrees. I know that when the weather is good my mother usually picks Violet up from school and walks her to the playground. They have a snack-apples and nuts-and then Violet plays on the jungle gym before heading home. Sure enough, Violet is hanging upside down from the monkey bars, her skirt tickling her chin, when she sees me. “Mommy!” she cries, and with a grace and athleticism that must have come from Micah’s genes, she flips herself to the ground and races toward me.

As I lift her into my arms, my mother turns around on the bench. “Did you get fired?” she asks.

I raise a brow. “Is that honestly the first thing that pops into your mind?”

“Well, the last time you made an impromptu visit in the middle of the day I think it was because Micah’s father was dying.”

“Mommy,” Violet announces, “I made you a Christmas present at school and it’s a necklace and also birds can eat it.” She squirms in my embrace, so I set her down, and immediately she runs back to the play structure.

My mother pats the spot on the bench beside her. She is bundled up in spite of the temperature, has her e-reader on her lap, and beside her is a little Tupperware bento box with apple slices and mixed nuts. “So,” she says, “if you still have a job, to what do we owe this very excellent surprise?”

“A car accident-not mine.” I pop a handful of nuts into my mouth. “What are you reading?”

“Why, sugar, I’d never read while my grandbaby is on a jungle gym. My eyes never leave her.”

I roll my eyes. “What are you reading?”

“I don’t remember the name. Something about a duchess with cancer and the vampire who offers to make her immortal. Apparently it’s a genre called sick lit,” my mother says. “It’s for book club.”

“Who chose it?”

“Not me. I don’t pick the books. I pick the wine.”

“The last book I read was Everyone Poops,” I say, “so I guess I can’t really pass judgment.”

I lean back, tilting my face to the late afternoon sun. My mother pats her lap, and I stretch out on the bench, lying down. She plays with my hair, the way she used to when I was Violet’s age. “You know the hardest thing about being a mom?” I say idly. “That you never get time to be a kid anymore.”

“You never get time, period,” my mother replies. “And before you know it, your little girl is off saving the world.”

“Right now she’s just enjoying stuffing her face,” I say, holding out my hand for more nuts. I slip one between my lips and almost immediately spit it out. “Ugh, God, I hate Brazil nuts.”

“Is that what those are?” my mother says. “They taste like feet. They’re the poor bastard stepchildren of the mixed nuts tin, the ones nobody likes.”

Suddenly I remember being about Violet’s age, and going to my grandmother’s home for Thanksgiving dinner. It was packed with my aunts and uncles and cousins. I loved the sweet potato pie she made, and the doilies on her furniture, which were all different, like snowflakes. But I did my absolute best to avoid Uncle Leon, my grandfather’s brother, who was the relative that was too loud, too drunk, and who always seemed to kiss you on the lips when he was aiming for your cheek. My grandmother used to put a big bowl of nuts out as an appetizer, and Uncle Leon would man the nutcracker, shelling them and passing them to the kids: walnuts and hazelnuts and pecans, cashews and almonds and Brazil nuts. Except he never called them Brazil nuts. He’d hold up a wrinkled, long brown shell. Nigger toes for sale, he’d say. Who wants a nigger toe?

“Do you remember Uncle Leon?” I ask abruptly, sitting up. “What he used to call them?”

My mother sighs. “Yes. Uncle Leon was a bit of a character.”

I hadn’t even known what the N-word meant, back then. I’d laughed, like everyone else. “How come no one ever said something to him? How come you didn’t shut him up?”

She looks at me, exasperated. “It wasn’t like Leon was ever gonna change.”

“Not if he had an audience,” I point out. I nod toward the sandbox, where Violet is shoulder to shoulder with a little black girl, chipping away at the packed sand with a stick. “What if she repeated what Leon used to say, because she doesn’t know better? How do you think that would go over?”

“Back then, North Carolina wasn’t like it is here,” my mother says.

“Maybe that wouldn’t have been the case if people like you had stopped making excuses.”

I feel bad as soon as the words leave my mouth, because I know I’m berating my mother when I really want to beat up on myself. Legally I still know that the soundest course for Ruth is to avoid any discussion of race, but morally, I’m having a hard time reconciling that. What if the reason I have been so quick to dismiss the racial elements of Ruth’s case is not because our legal system can’t bear that load, but because I was born into a family where black jokes were as much of the holiday tradition as my grandmother’s bone china and sausage stuffing? My own mother, for God’s sake, grew up with someone like Ruth’s mom in the house-cooking, cleaning, walking her to school, taking her to playgrounds like this one.

My mother is quiet for so long that I know I’ve offended her. “In 1954, when I was nine years old, a court ruled that five black children could come to my school. I remember one boy in my class who said they had horns, hidden in their fuzzy hair. And my teacher, who warned us that they might try to steal our lunch money.” She turns to me. “The night before they came to school, my daddy held a meeting. Uncle Leon was there. People talked about how white children would be bullied, and how there’d be classroom control issues, because those kids didn’t know how to behave. Uncle Leon was so mad his face was red and sweaty. He said he didn’t want his daughter to be a guinea pig. They were planning to picket outside the school the next day, even though they knew there would be police there, making sure the kids could get inside. My daddy swore he would never sell Judge Hawthorne another car again.”

She starts collecting the nuts and the apples, packing them up. “Beattie, our maid, she was there that night too. Serving lemonade and cakes she’d made that afternoon. In the middle of the meeting I got bored, and went into the kitchen, and found her crying. I’d never seen Beattie cry before. She said that her little boy was one of those five who’d be bused in.” My mother shakes her head. “I didn’t even know she had a little boy. Beattie had been with my family since before I could walk or talk, and I didn’t ever consider she might belong with someone other than us.”

“What happened?” I ask.

“Those children came to school. The police walked them inside. Other kids called them horrible names. One boy got spit on. I remember him walking by me, the saliva running down into his white collar, and I wondered if he was Beattie’s son.” She shrugs. “Eventually there were more of them. They kept to themselves, eating together at lunch and playing together at recess. And we kept to ourselves. I can’t say it was much of a desegregation, really.”

My mother nods toward Violet and her little friend, sprinkling grass over their mud pies. “This has been going on so much longer than either of us, Kennedy. From where you stepped in, in your life, it looks like we’ve got miles to go. But me?” She smiles in the direction of the girls. “I look at that, and I guess I’m amazed at how far we’ve come.”

–

AFTER CHRISTMAS AND New Year’s, I find myself doing the work of two public defenders, literally, because Ed is vacationing with his family in Cozumel. I’m in court representing one of Ed’s clients, who violated a restraining order, so I decide to check the docket to see which judge has been assigned to Ruth’s case. One typical pastime for lawyers is storing away the details of the personal lives of judges-who they marry, if they’re wealthy, if they go to church every weekend or just on high-water-mark holidays, if they’re dumber than a bag of hammers, if they like musical theater, if they go out drinking with attorneys when they are off the clock. We store away these facts and rumors like squirrels put away nuts for winter, so that when we see who is assigned to our case, we can pull out the minutiae and figure out if we have a fighting chance of winning.

When I see who it is, my heart sinks.

Judge Thunder lives up to his name. He’s a hanging judge, and he prejudges cases, and if you get convicted, you’re going away for a long, long time. I know this not from hearsay, however, but from personal experience.

Before I was a public defender, when I was clerking for a federal judge, one of my colleagues became tangled up in an ethical issue involving a conflict of interest from his previous job at a law firm. I was part of the team that represented him, and after years of building the case, we went to trial in front of Judge Thunder. He hated any kind of media circus, and the fact that a federal judge’s clerk was caught in an ethical violation had turned our trial into just that. Even though we had an airtight case, Thunder wanted to set a precedent for other attorneys, and my colleague was convicted and sentenced to six years. If that wasn’t shocking enough, the judge turned to all of us who had been on the defense team. “You should be ashamed of yourselves. Mr. Dennehy has fooled you all,” Judge Thunder scolded. “But he hasn’t fooled this court.” For me, it was the last straw. I had been burning the candle at both ends, working for about a week without sleep. I was sick as a dog, on cold medication and heavy doses of prednisone, exhausted and demoralized after losing the case-so perhaps I was not as gracious or lucid as I could have been in that moment.

I might have told Judge Thunder he could suck my dick.

What ensued was a chambers conference where I begged to not be disbarred and assured the judge that I did not have, in fact, any male genitalia and had actually said, Such magic! because I was so impressed by his ruling.

I’ve had two cases in front of Judge Thunder since then. I’ve lost both.

I resolve not to tell Ruth about my history with the judge. Maybe the third time is a charm.

I button my coat, getting ready to leave the courthouse, giving myself a silent pep talk the whole way. I’m not going to let a tiny setback like this affect the whole case for me, not when we have jury selection next month.

As I walk out of the building, I hear the swell of gospel music.

On the New Haven Green is a sea of black people. Their arms are linked. Their voices harmonize and fill the sky: We shall overcome. They carry posters with Ruth’s name and likeness on them.

Front and center is Wallace Mercy, singing his heart out. And beside him, her elbow tucked in his, is Ruth’s sister, Adisa.

Ruth

I’M WORKING THE CASH REGISTER, getting toward the end of my shift, when my arches ache and my back hurts. Although I took as many extra shifts as I could, it was a bleak and meager Christmas, and Edison spent most of it sullen and moody. He’s been back at school for a week, but there’s been a seismic shift in him-he barely talks to me, grunting out responses to my questions, riding the knife edge of rudeness until I call him on it; he’s stopped doing his homework at the kitchen table and instead vanishes into his room and blares Drake and Kendrick Lamar; his phone buzzes constantly with texts, and when I ask him who needs him so desperately he says it’s nobody I know. I have not received any more calls from the principal, or emails from his teachers telling me he’s slacking on his work, but that doesn’t mean I’m not anticipating them.

And then what will I do? How am I supposed to encourage my son to be better than most people expect him to be? How can I say, with a straight face, you can be anything you want in this world-when I struggled and studied and excelled and still wound up on trial for something I did not do? Every time Edison and I get into it these days, I can see that challenge in his eyes: I dare you. I dare you to say you still believe that lie.

School has let out; I know this because of the influx of teens who explode into the building like a holiday, filling the space with bright ribbons of laughter and teasing. Inevitably they know someone working table and call out, begging for free McNuggets or a sundae. Usually they don’t bother me; I prefer to be busy rather than slow. But today, a girl comes up to me, her blond ponytail swinging, holding her phone while her friends crowd around to read an incoming text with her. “Welcome to McDonald’s,” I say. “Can I help you?”

There is a line of people behind her, but she looks at her friend. “What should I tell him?”

“That you can’t talk because you’re meeting up with someone,” one of the girls suggests.

Another girl shakes her head. “No, don’t write anything. Keep him waiting.”

Like the customers behind her in line, I am starting to get annoyed. “Excuse me,” I try again, pasting a smile on my face. “Are you ready to order?”

She glances up. She has blush on her cheeks that has glitter in it; it makes her look awfully young, which I’m sure is not what she’s going for. “Do you have onion rings?”

“No, that’s Burger King. Our menu is up there.” I point overhead. “If you’re not ready, maybe you can step aside?”

She looks at her two friends, and her eyebrows shoot up to her hairline as if I’ve said something offensive. “Don’t worry, mama, I was jus’ aksin’…”

I freeze. This girl isn’t Black. She’s about as far from Black as possible. So why is she talking to me like that?

Her friend cuts in front of her and orders a large fries; her other friend has a Diet Coke and a snack wrap. The girl orders a Happy Meal, and as I angrily stuff the items into the box, the irony is not lost on me.

Three customers later, I’m still watching her out of the corner of my eye as she eats her cheeseburger.

I turn to the runner who’s working at the register with me. “I’ll be right back.”

I walk into the dining area where the girl is still holding court with her friends. “…so I said, right to her face, Who lit the fuse on your tampon?-”

“Excuse me,” I interrupt. “I did not appreciate the way you spoke to me at the counter.”

A hot blush burns in her cheeks. “Wow, okay. I’m sorry,” she says, but her lips twitch.

My boss suddenly is standing beside me. Jeff is a former middle manager at a ball bearing plant who got cut when the economy tanked, and he runs the restaurant like we are giving out state secrets and not French fries. “Ruth? Is there a problem?”

There are so many problems. From the fact that I am not this girl’s mama to the fact that she will not remember this conversation an hour from now. But if I choose this particular moment to stand up for myself, I will pay a price. “No, sir,” I tell Jeff, and in silence, I walk back to my register.

–

MY DAY ONLY gets worse when I leave work and see six missed phone calls from Kennedy. I immediately ring her back. “I thought you agreed that working with Wallace Mercy was a bad idea,” she hammers, without even saying hello.

“What? I did. I do.”

“So you had no idea that he was leading a march in your honor today in front of the courthouse?”

I stop walking, letting the foot traffic funnel around me. “You gotta be kidding. Kennedy, I did not talk to Wallace.”

“Your sister was shoulder to shoulder with him.”

Well, mystery solved. “Adisa tends to do whatever she wants.”

“Can’t you control her?”

“I’ve been trying for forty-four years but it hasn’t worked yet.”

“Try harder,” Kennedy tells me.

Which is how I wind up taking the bus to my sister’s apartment, instead of going right home. When Donté lets me in, Adisa is sitting on the couch playing Candy Crush on her phone, even though it is nearly dinnertime. “Well, look what the cat drug in,” she says. “Where you been?”

“It’s been crazy since New Year’s. Between work, and going over things for trial, I haven’t had a free minute.”

“I came by the other day, did Edison tell you?”

I kick her feet off the couch so there’s room for me to sit. “Did you come over to tell me your new best friend is Wallace Mercy?”

Adisa’s eyes light up. “You see me on the news today? It was just my elbow and up to here on my neck, but you can tell it’s me by the coat. I wore the one with the leopard collar-”

“I want you to stop,” I say. “I don’t need Wallace Mercy.”

“Your white lawyer tell you that?”

“Adisa,” I sigh. “I never wanted to be someone’s poster child.”

“You didn’t even give Reverend Mercy a chance. You know how many of our people have had experiences like yours? How many times they been told no because of their skin color? This is bigger than just your story, and if some good can come out of what happened to you, why not let it?” Adisa sits up. “All he wants is a chance to sit down with us, Ruth. On national television.”

Alarm bells ring in my head. “Us,” I repeat.

Adisa’s gaze slides away. “Well,” she admits, “I indicated that I might be able to change your mind.”

“So this isn’t even about helping me move forward. It’s about you getting recognition. Jesus, Adisa. This is a new low, even for you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She gets to her feet and stares down at me, her hands balanced on her hips. “You really think I’d use my baby sister like that?”

I challenge her. “You really gonna stand here drenched to the bone and tell me it’s not raining?”

Before she can answer there is a loud crash as a door falls back on its hinges and slams into the wall. Tabari swaggers out from one of the bedrooms with a friend. “You rob a trucker fuh that hat, yo?” He laughs. They are amped up, loud, their pants riding so low I don’t know why they even bother to wear them. All I can think is that I’d never let Edison out of the house like that, like he was looking to intimidate.

Then Tabari’s friend turns around and I realize it’s my son.

“Edison?”

“Ain’t it nice,” Adisa says, smiling. “The cousins hanging?”

“What are you doing here?” Edison says, in a tone that lets me know this is not a pleasant surprise.

“Don’t you have homework to do?”

“Did it.”

“College applications?”

He looks at me, his eyes hooded. “They ain’t due for another week.”

Ain’t?

“What’s the problem?” he asks. “You’re always telling me how important family is.” He says that word as if it is a swear.

“Where exactly are you and Tabari going?”

Tabari looks up. “The movies, Auntie,” he says.

“The movies.” Like hell, I think. “What film are you seeing?”

He and Edison exchange a look and start laughing. “We gonna pick when we get there,” Tabari says.

Adisa steps forward, arms crossed. “You got a problem with that, Ruth?”

“Yes. Yes I do,” I explode. “Because I think it’s a lot more likely that your son is going to take Edison down by the basketball court to smoke weed than to see the next Oscar nominee.”

My sister’s jaw drops. “You judging my family,” she hisses, “when you on trial for murder?”

I grab Edison’s arm. “You’re coming with me,” I announce, and then I turn to Adisa. “Have fun doing your interview with Wallace Mercy. Just make sure you tell him, and the adoring public, that you and your sister are no longer on speaking terms.”

With that, I drag my son out of her home. I rip the hat off his head when we get downstairs and tell him to pull up his pants. We are halfway to the bus station before he says a word. “I’m sorry,” Edison begins.

“You better be,” I answer, rounding on him. “You lost your damn mind? I didn’t raise you to be like this.”

“Tabari’s not as bad as his friends.”

I start walking, and I don’t look back. “Tabari is not my son,” I say.

–

WHEN I WAS pregnant with Edison, all I knew was that I didn’t want the experience of giving birth to be anything like Adisa’s-who claimed to not even realize she was pregnant for six months when she had her first baby, and who practically had her second on the subway. Me, I wanted the best care I could get, the finest doctors. Since Wesley was on a tour of duty, I enlisted Mama as my birthing coach. When it was time, we took a taxi to Mercy-West Haven because Mama couldn’t drive and I was in no state to. I had planned for a natural birth, because as a labor and delivery nurse I’d written this moment in my head a thousand times, but just like any well-laid plan, that wasn’t in the cards for me. As I was being wheeled into the OR for a C-section, Mama was singing Baptist hymns, and when I came to after the procedure, she was holding my son.

“Ruth,” she said to me, her eyes so full of pride they were a color I’d never seen before. “Ruth, look at what God made for you.”

She held the baby out to me, and I suddenly realized that although I’d planned my first birth down to the minute, I hadn’t organized a single second of what might come afterward. I had no idea how to be a mother. My son was stiff in my arms, and then he opened his mouth and started wailing, like this world was an affront to him.

Panicked, I looked up at my mama. I was a straight-A student; I was an overachiever. I had never imagined that this-the most natural of all relationships-would make me feel so incompetent. I jiggled the baby in my arms, but that only made him cry louder. His feet kicked like he was traveling on an imaginary bicycle; his arms flailed, each tiny finger flexed and rigid. His screams grew tighter and tighter, an uneven seam of anger punctuated by the tiny knots of his hiccups. His cheeks were red with effort, as he tried to tell me something I was not equipped to understand.

“Mama?” I begged. “What do I do?”

I held out my arms to her, hoping she would take him and calm him down. But she just shook her head. “You tell him who you are to him,” she instructed, and she took a step back, as if to remind me I was in this by myself.

So I bent my face close to his. I pressed his spine up under my heart, where it had been for so many months. “Your name is Edison Wesley Jefferson,” I whispered. “I am your mama, and I’m going to give you the best life I can.”

Edison blinked. He stared up at me through his dark eyes, as if I were a shadow he had to distinguish from the rest of this new, strange world. His cries hitched twice, a train headed off its track, and then crashed into silence.

I could tell you the exact minute my son relaxed into his new surroundings. I know this detail because it was the moment I did the same.

“See,” Mama said, from somewhere behind me, somewhere outside the circle of just us two. “I told you so.”

–

KENNEDY AND I meet every two weeks, even when there’s no new information. Sometimes she’ll text me, or stop by McDonald’s to say hello. At one of these visits she invites me and Edison over for dinner.

Before going to Kennedy’s home, I change three times. Finally Edison knocks on the bathroom door. “We going to your lawyer’s,” he asks, “or to meet the queen?”

He’s right. I don’t know why I’m nervous. Except that this feels like crossing a line. It’s one thing to have her here to review information about my case, but this invitation didn’t have any work attached to it. This invitation was more like…a social call.

Edison is dressed in a button-down shirt and khaki pants and has been told on penalty of death that he will behave like the gentleman I know him to be, or I will whup him when he gets home. When we ring the doorbell, the husband-Micah, that’s his name-answers, with a girl tucked under his arm like a rag doll. “You must be Ruth,” he says, taking the bouquet I offer and shaking my hand warmly, then shaking Edison’s. He pivots, then turns the other way. “My daughter, Violet, is around here somewhere…I just saw her…I’m sure she’ll want to say hello.” As he twists, the little girl whips around, her hair flying, her giggles falling over my feet like bubbles.

She slips out of her dad’s arm, and I kneel down. Violet McQuarrie looks like a tiny version of her mama, albeit dressed in a Princess Tiana costume. I hold out a Mason jar that is filled with miniature white lights, and flip the switch so that it illuminates. “This is for you,” I tell her. “It’s a fairy jar.”

Her eyes widen. “Wow,” Violet breathes, and she takes it and runs off.

I get to my feet. “It also doubles as an excellent night-light,” I tell Micah, as Kennedy comes out of the kitchen, wearing jeans and a sweater and an apron.

“You made it!” she says, smiling. She has spaghetti sauce on her chin.

“Yes,” I answer. “I must have driven past your place a hundred times. I just didn’t know, you know, that you lived here.”

And still wouldn’t, had I not been indicted for murder. I know she’s thinking it, too, but Micah saves the moment. “Drink? Can I get you something, Ruth? We have wine, beer, gin and tonic…”

“Wine would be nice.”

We sit down in the living room. There is already a cheese plate on the coffee table. “Look at that,” Edison murmurs to me. “A basketful of crackers.”

I shoot him a look that could make a bird fall from the sky.

“It’s so nice of you to invite us into your home,” I say politely.

“Well, don’t thank me yet,” Kennedy replies. “Dinner with a four-year-old is not exactly a gourmet dining experience.” She smiles at Violet, who is coloring on the other side of the coffee table. “Needless to say we don’t entertain much these days.”

“I remember when Edison was that age. I am pretty sure we ate a variation of macaroni and cheese every night for a full year.”

Micah crosses his legs. “Edison, my wife tells me you’re quite the student.”

Yes. Because I neglected to mention to Kennedy that of late, he’s been suspended.

“Thank you, sir,” Edison replies. “I’ve been applying to colleges.”

“Oh yeah? That’s great. What do you want to study?”

“History, maybe. Or politics.”

Micah nods, interested. “Are you a big fan of Obama?”

Why do white people always assume that?

“I was kind of young when he was running,” Edison says. “But I went around with my mom campaigning for Hillary, when she was running against him. I guess because of my dad I’m sensitive to military issues, and her position on the Iraq War made more sense at the time; she was vocally in favor of invasion and Obama was opposed from the start.”

I puff up with pride. “Well,” Micah says, impressed. “I look forward to seeing your name on a ticket one day.”

Violet, clearly bored by this conversation, steps over my legs to hold out a crayon to Edison. “Wanna color?” she asks.

“Um, yeah, okay,” Edison replies. He sinks down to his knees, shoulder to shoulder with Kennedy’s girl, so that he can reach the coloring book. He starts making Cinderella’s dress green.

“No,” Violet interrupts, a tiny despot. “That’s supposed to be blue.” She points to Cinderella’s dress in the coloring book, half hidden beneath Edison’s broad palm.

“Violet,” Kennedy says, “we let our guests make their own choices, remember?”

“That’s okay, Mrs. McQuarrie. I wouldn’t want to mess with Cinderella,” Edison answers.

The little girl proudly hands him the right color crayon, a blue one. Edison bends his head and starts to scribble again.

“Next week you start jury selection?” I ask. “Should I be worried about that?”

“No, of course not. It’s just-”

“Edison?” Violet asks. “Is that a chain?”

He touches the necklace he’s been wearing lately, ever since he started hanging with his cousin. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“So that means you’re a slave,” she states matter-of-factly.

“Violet!” Both Micah and Kennedy shout her name simultaneously.

“Oh my God, Edison. Ruth. I’m so sorry,” Kennedy blusters. “I don’t know where she would have heard that-”

“In school,” Violet announces. “Josiah told Taisha that people who look like her used to wear chains and their history was that they were slaves.”

“We’ll discuss this later,” Micah says. “Okay, Vi? It’s not something to talk about now.”

“It’s okay,” I say, even though I can feel the unease in the room, as if someone has taken away all the oxygen. “Do you know what a slave is?”

Violet shakes her head.

“It’s when someone owns someone else.”

I watch the little girl turn this over in her head. “Like a pet?”

Kennedy puts her hand on my arm. “You don’t have to do this,” she says quietly.

“Don’t you think I already had to, once?” I glance at her daughter again. “Kind of like a pet, but also different. A long time ago, people who looked like you and your mama and daddy found a place in the world where people looked like me, and like Edison, and like Taisha. And we were doing things so fine there-building homes, and cooking food, making something out of nothing-that they wanted it in their country too. So they brought over the people who looked like me, without asking our permission. We didn’t have a choice. So a slave-that’s just someone who doesn’t have a choice in what they do, or what’s done to them.”

Violet sets down her crayon. Her face is twisted in thought.

“We weren’t the first slaves,” I tell her. “There are stories in a book I like, called the Bible. The Egyptians made Jewish people slaves who would build temples for them that looked like huge triangles, and were made out of bricks. They were able to make the Jewish people slaves because the Egyptians were the ones with the power.”

Then, like any other four-year-old, Violet bounces back to her spot beside my son. “Let’s color Rapunzel instead,” she announces-but then she hesitates. “I mean,” she corrects, “do you want to color Rapunzel?”

“Okay,” Edison says.

I may be the only person who notices, but while I’ve been explaining, he has taken off that chain from his neck and slipped it into his pocket.

“Thank you,” Micah says, sincere. “That was a really perfect Black history lesson.”

“Slavery isn’t Black history,” I point out. “It’s everyone’s history.”

A timer goes off, and Kennedy stands up. When she goes into the kitchen, I murmur something about wanting to help her and follow her. Immediately, she turns, her cheeks burning. “I am so, so sorry for that, Ruth.”

“Don’t be. She’s a baby. She doesn’t know any better yet.”

“Well, you did a much better job explaining than I ever would have.”

I watch her reach into the oven for a lasagne. “When Edison came home from school and asked if we were slaves, he was about the same age as Violet. And the last thing I wanted was to have that talk and leave him feeling like a victim.”

“Violet told me last week she wished she could be just like Taisha, because she gets to wear beads in her hair.”

“What did you say?”

Kennedy hesitates. “I don’t know. I probably bungled it. I said something about how everyone’s different and that’s what makes the world great. I swear, when she asks me things about race I turn into a freaking Coke commercial.”

I laugh. “In your defense, you probably don’t talk about it quite as much as I do. Practice makes perfect.”

“But you know what? When I was her age, I had a Taisha in my class too-except her name was Lesley. And God, I wanted to be her. I used to dream that I’d wake up Black. No joke.”

I raise my brows in mock horror. “And give up your winning lottery ticket? No way.”

She looks at me, and we both laugh, and in that instant we are merely two women, standing over a lasagne, telling the truth. In that instant, with our flaws and confessions trailing like a slip from a dress, we have more in common than we have differences.

I smile, and Kennedy smiles, and for that moment, at least, we really, really see each other. It’s a start.

Suddenly Edison comes into the kitchen holding out my cellphone. “What’s the matter?” I tease. “Don’t tell me you were fired because you made Ariel a brunette?”

“Mama, it’s Ms. Mina,” he says. “I think you better take it.”

–

ONE CHRISTMAS, WHEN I was ten, I got a Black Barbie. Her name was Christie, and she was just like the dolls Christina had, except for the skin color, and except for the fact that Christina had a whole shoe box full of Barbie clothes and my mama couldn’t afford those. Instead, she made Christie a wardrobe out of old socks and dish towels. She glued me a dream house out of shoe boxes. I was over the moon. This was even better than Christina’s collection, I told Mama, because I was the only person in the world who had it. My sister, Rachel, who was twelve, made fun of me. “Call them what you want,” she told me. “But they’re just knockoffs.”

Rachel’s friends were mostly the same age as her, but they acted like they were sixteen. I didn’t hang out with them very often, because they went to school in Harlem and I commuted to Dalton. But on weekends, if they came over, they made fun of me because I had wavy hair, instead of kinks like theirs, and because my skin was light. “You think you all that,” they’d say, and then they’d giggle into each other’s shoulders as if this were the punch line to a secret joke. When my mother made Rachel babysit me on weekends, and we would take the bus to a shopping center, I sat in the front while they all sat in the back. They called me Afrosaxon, instead of by my name. They sang along to music I didn’t know. When I told Rachel that I didn’t like her friends making fun of me, she told me to stop being so sensitive. “They just crackin’ on you,” she said. “Maybe if you let it slide a little, they’d like you more.”

One day, I ran into her friends when I was on my way home from school. This time, though, Rachel wasn’t with them. “Ooh, look what we got here,” said the tallest one, Fantasee. She yanked at my French braid, which was how the girls in my school were wearing their hair those days. “You think you so fancy,” she said, and the three of them surrounded me. “What? Can’t you talk for yourself? You need your sister to do it for you?”

“Stop,” I said. “Leave me alone. Please.”

“I think someone needs to remember where she from.” They grabbed at my backpack, unzipping it, throwing my schoolwork into the puddles on the ground, shoving me into the mud. Fantasee grabbed my Christie doll and dismembered her. Suddenly, like an avenging angel, Rachel arrived. She pulled Fantasee away and smacked her across the face. She tripped one of the other girls and pummeled the third. When they were all flattened, she stood over them with her fist. They crawled away, crabs in the gutter, and then scrambled to their feet and ran. I crouched down next to my broken Christie, and Rachel knelt beside me. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But you…you hurt your friends.”

“I got other friends,” Rachel answered. “You’re my only sister.” She tugged me to my feet. “C’mon, let’s get you clean.”

We walked home in silence. Mama took one look at my hair and my ripped tights and hustled me into a bath. She put ice on Rachel’s knuckles.

Mama glued Christie back together, but her arm kept popping out and there was a permanent dent in the back of her head. Later that night, Rachel crawled into my bed. She’d done that when we were little, during thunderstorms. She handed me a chair that was made out of an empty cigarette pack, a yogurt cup, and some newspaper. Trash, that she had glued and taped together. “I thought Christie could use this,” she said.

I nodded, turning it over in my hands. Probably it would break apart when Christie first sat in it, but that wasn’t the point. I lifted up the covers and Rachel fitted herself to me, her front to my back. We rode out the night like that, like we were Siamese twins, sharing a heart that beat between us.

–

MY MOTHER SUFFERED her first stroke while she was vacuuming. Ms. Mina heard the crash of her body falling down, and found her lying on the edge of the Persian rug with her face pressed up against the tassel, as if she was inspecting it. She suffers her second stroke in the ambulance en route to the hospital. She is dead on arrival when we get there. I find Ms. Mina waiting for us, sobbing and overwrought. Edison stays with her, while I go to see Mama.

Some kind nurse has left the body for me. I go into the small curtained cubicle and sit down beside her. I take her hand; it’s still warm. “Why didn’t I call you last night?” I murmur. “Why didn’t I go visit you this past weekend?”

I sit on the edge of the bed, then tuck myself under her arm for a moment, lying with my ear against her still chest. This is the last chance I will have to be her baby.

It is a strange thing, being suddenly motherless. It’s like losing a rudder that was keeping me on course, one that I never paid much mind to before now. Who will teach me how to parent, how to deal with the unkindness of strangers, how to be humble?

You already did, I realize.

In silence, I cross to the sink. I fill a basin with warm, soapy water, and I place it beside my mama. I pull down the sheet that was left on her, after emergency intervention failed. I have not seen my mama naked in ages, but it is like looking in a mirror that distorts by years. This is what my breasts will look like, my belly. These are the stretch marks by which she remembered me. This is the curve of a spine that has worked hard to make her useful. These are the laugh lines that fan from her eyes.

I begin to wash her, the way I would wash a newborn. I run the cloth up the length of her arms and down her legs. I wipe between her toes. I sit her up, leaning her against the strength of my chest. She weighs next to nothing. As the water drips down her back, I rest my head on her shoulder, a one-sided embrace. She brought me into this world. I will help her leave it.

When I am finished, I cradle her in my arms, setting her back gently against the pillow. I pull the sheet up and tuck it beneath her chin. “I love you, Mama,” I whisper.

The curtain is yanked open, and Adisa stands there. In counterpoint to my quiet grief, she is wailing, sobbing loudly. She throws herself on Mama, clutching fistfuls of the sheet.

Like any fire, I know she’ll burn out. So I wait until her cries become hiccups. When she turns and sees me standing there, I truly think it’s the first time she realizes that I’m even in the room.

I don’t know if she holds out her arms to me or I hold out my arms to her, but we hold on for dear life. We talk over each other-Did Mina call you? Had she been feeling poorly? When was the last time you spoke to her? Shock and anguish run in loop, from me to her and back again.

Adisa hugs me tight. My hand tangles in her braids. “I told Wallace Mercy to find himself a new interview subject,” she whispers.

I draw away just long enough to meet her eye.

Adisa shrugs, as if I’ve asked a question. “You’re my only sister,” she says.

–

MAMA’S FUNERAL IS an Affair with a capital A, which is exactly how she’d want it. Her longtime church in Harlem is packed with parishioners who have known her for years. I sit in the front row beside Adisa, staring at the giant wooden cross hanging on the chancel wall, between two massive panes of stained glass, with a fountain beneath. On the altar is Mama’s casket-we got the fanciest one money could buy, which is what Ms. Mina insisted on, and she’s the one who is paying for the funeral. Edison stands near Pastor Harold, looking shell-shocked, wearing a black suit that is too short at his wrists and ankles, and his basketball sneakers. He is wearing reflective sunglasses, although we are inside. At first I thought that was disrespectful, but then I realized why. As a nurse, I see death visit all the time, but this is his first experience; he was too little to remember his daddy being sent home in a flag-draped coffin.

A long snake of folks shuffles down the aisle, a macabre dance to look in Mama’s open casket. She is wearing her favorite purple dress with sequins at the shoulders, and the black patent pumps that made her feet hurt, and the diamond studs that Ms. Mina and Mr. Sam gave her one year for Christmas that she never wore because she was so afraid one would fall out and she would lose it. I wanted to bury her in her lucky scarf, but in spite of turning her apartment upside down, I could not find it to bring to the undertaker. “She looks like she’s at peace,” I hear, over and over. Or “She looks just like herself, don’t she?” Neither one of these is true. She looks like an illustration in a book, two-dimensional, when she ought to be leaping off the page.

When everyone has had a chance to file by, Pastor Harold starts the service. “Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters…this is not a sad day,” he says. He smiles gently at my niece Tyana, who’s sobbing into little Zhanice’s tiny Bantu knots. “This is a happy day, for we are here to celebrate our beloved friend and mother and grandmother, Louanne Brooks, who is finally at peace and walking beside the Lord. Let us begin with prayer.”

I bow my head, but sneak a glance around the church, which groans at the seams with well-wishers. They all look like us, except for Ms. Mina and Christina, and in the back, Kennedy McQuarrie and an older woman.

It surprises me to see her here, but then, of course she knows about Mama. I was at her house when I heard.

Still, it feels like a blurred line, like wine and cheese at her home was. Like I am trying to put her in a box and she keeps escaping the confines.

“Our friend Louanne was born in 1940,” the pastor says, “to Jermaine and Maddie Brooks, the youngest of four. She had two daughters, and made the best of her life after their daddy left, raising them to be good, strong women. She devoted her life to serving others, creating a happy home for the family that employed her for over fifty years. She won more ribbons at our church fair for her pies and cakes than anyone else in this congregation, and I do believe that at least ten pounds around my middle can be credited to Lou’s sweets. She loved gospel music and The View and baking and Jesus, and is survived by her daughters and her six beloved grandchildren.”

The choir sings Mama’s favorite hymns: “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” and “I’ll Fly Away.” Then the pastor returns to the podium. He lifts his eyes to the congregation. “God is good!” he calls.

“All the time!” everyone responds.

“And He has called His angel home to glory!”

After a round of Amens, he invites those so moved to stand and witness the impact Mama made on their lives. I watch some of her friends get up, moving slowly, as if they know they might be next. She helped me through breast cancer, one says. She taught me how to sew a hem. She never lost at bingo. It is illuminating-I knew Mama in one way, but to them, she was something different-a teacher, a confidante, a partner in crime. As their stories shape who Mama used to be, people are crying, rocking, calling out their praise.

Adisa squeezes my hand, and takes to the podium. “My mama,” she says, “was strict.” The crowd laughs at this truth. “She was strict about manners, and homework, and dating, and how much bare skin we could show when we went out in public. There was a ratio, right, Ruth? It changed depending on the season, but it cramped my style year-round.” Adisa smiles faintly, turning in to herself. “I remember how once, she put out a place setting at the dinner table for my attitude, and she told me, Girl, when you leave the table, that can stay behind.”

Oh yes she did, I hear behind me.

“The thing is, I was a wild child. Maybe I still am. And Mama rode us on things that other parents never seemed to care about. At the time, it seemed so unfair. I asked her what difference it would make in God’s grand scheme if I wore a red pleather miniskirt, and she said something I will never forget. Rachel, she told me, I got precious little time for you to belong to me. I’m gonna make sure it isn’t any shorter than it has to be. I was too young, and too much of a rabble-rouser, to understand what she meant. But now I do. See, what I didn’t realize back then was the flip side of that coin: I had precious little time for her to be my mama.”

Teary, she steps down, and I stand up. To be honest, I didn’t know Adisa could be such a good speaker, but then again, she has always been the brave one. Me, I recede into the background. I had not wanted to talk at the funeral, but Adisa said people would be expecting it, and so I did. Tell a story, she suggested. So I take the podium, clearing my throat, and grip the edge of the wood with overwhelming panic. “Thank you,” I say, and the microphone squeals. I step back. “Thank you for coming out to say goodbye to Mama. She would have loved knowing you all cared, and if you hadn’t come you know she’d be up in Heaven throwing shade about your manners.” I glance out-that was supposed to be a joke, but no one is really laughing.

Swallowing, I forge on. “Mama always put herself last. You all know that she’d feed anyone and everyone-God forbid you ever left our home hungry. Like Pastor Harold, I bet all of you have had her blue-ribbon pies and cakes. Once, she was baking a Black Forest cake for a church contest, and I insisted on helping. I was of the age where I was no help at all, of course. At some point, I dropped the measuring spoon into the batter and was too embarrassed to tell her, so it got baked into the cake. When the judge at the contest cut into the cake, and found the spoon, Mama knew exactly what had happened. But instead of getting mad at me, she told the judge it was a special trick she used to make the cake moist. You probably remember how the next year, several of the cakes entered in the contest had metal measuring spoons baked inside them-well, now you know why.” There is a titter of laughter, and I let out a breath I had not even realized I’d been holding. “I heard people say Mama was proud of her ribbons, of her baking, but you know, that isn’t true. She worked hard at that. She worked hard at everything. Pride, she would tell us, is a sin. And in fact the only thing I ever saw her take pride in was me and my sister.”

As I say the words, I remember the look on her face when I told her about the indictment. Ruth, she had said, when I came home from jail and she wanted to see me face-to-face, to make sure I was all right, how could this happen to you? I knew what she meant. I was her golden child. I had escaped the cycle. I had achieved. I had busted through the ceiling she spent her life butting her head against. “She was so proud of me,” I repeat, but the words are viscous, balloons that pop when they hit the air, that leave a faint stench of disappointment.

It’s all right, baby, I hear, from the crowd. And: Mm-hmm, you okay.

My mother never said as much, but was she still proud of me? Was it enough that I was her daughter? Or was the fact that I was on trial for a murder I didn’t commit like one of those stains she worked so hard to get out?

There is more to my speech, but it is gone. The words on my little index card might as well be written in hieroglyphs. I stare at them, but nothing makes sense anymore. I can’t imagine a world where I might go to prison for years. I can’t imagine a world where my mother isn’t.

Then I remember something she told me once, the night I went to Christina’s slumber party. When you’re ready for us, we’ll be waiting on you. At that moment, I feel another presence I haven’t felt before. Or maybe one I never noticed. It’s solid as a wall, and warm to the skin. It’s a community of people who know my name, even when I don’t always remember theirs. It’s a congregation that never stopped praying for me, even when I flew from the nest. It’s friends I did not know I had, who have memories of me that I’ve pushed so far to the back of my mind, I’ve forgotten.

I hear the flow of the fountain behind me, and I think about water, how it might rise above its station as mist, flirt at being a cloud, and return as rain. Would you call that falling? Or coming home?

I don’t know how long I stand there, weeping. Adisa comes to me, her shawl open like the great black wings of a heron. She wraps me in the feathers of unconditional love. She bears me away.

–

AFTER THE CHOIR sings “Soon and Very Soon,” as the casket is carried from the church and we file out behind it; after the graveside ceremony, where the pastor speaks yet again, we reconvene at my mother’s apartment-the small space where I grew up. The church ladies have done their duty; there are giant bowls of potato salad and coleslaw and platters of fried chicken set out on pretty pink tablecloths. There are silk flowers on almost every horizontal space, and someone has thought to bring folding chairs, although there isn’t nearly enough room for everyone to sit.

I take refuge in the kitchen. I look over the stacked plates of brownies and lemon squares, and then walk to a tiny bookshelf above the sink. There’s a small black and white composition book there, and I open it, nearly brought to my knees by the spiky hills and valleys of Mama’s handwriting. Sweet potato pie, I read. Coconut dreams. Chocolate Cake to Break a Man. I smile at that last recipe-it was what I had cooked for Wesley, before he proposed, to which Mama only said, I told you so.

“Ruth,” I hear, and I turn around to find Kennedy and the other white woman she brought with her looking awkward and out of place in my mama’s kitchen.

I reach into the abyss and find my manners. “Thank you for coming. It means a lot.”

Kennedy takes a step forward. “I’d like you to meet my mother. Ava.”

The older woman holds out her hand in that southern way, like a limp fish, pressing just the tips of her fingers to the tips of mine. “My condolences. It was a lovely service.”

I nod. Really, what is there to say?

“How are you holding up?” Kennedy asks.

“I keep thinking Mama’s going to tell me to go tell Pastor Harold to use a coaster on her good coffee table.” I don’t have the words to tell her what it really feels like, seeing her with her own mother, knowing I don’t have that option. What it’s like being the balloon, when someone lets go of the string.

Kennedy glances down at the open book in my hands. “What’s that?”

“A recipe book. It’s only half finished. Mama kept telling me she was going to write down all her best ones for me, but she was always too busy cooking for someone else.” I realize how bitter I sound. “She wasted her life, slaving away for someone else. Polishing silver and cooking three meals a day and scrubbing toilets so her skin was always raw. Taking care of someone else’s baby.”

My voice breaks on that last bit. Falls off the cliff.

Kennedy’s mother, Ava, reaches into her purse. “I asked to come here today, with Kennedy,” she says. “I didn’t know your mom, but I knew someone like her. Someone I cared for very much.”

She holds out an old photo, the kind with scalloped edges. It is a picture of a Black woman wearing a maid’s uniform, holding a little girl in her arms. The girl has hair as light as snow, and her hand is pressed against her caregiver’s cheek in shocking contrast. There’s more than just duty between them. There’s pride. There’s love. “I didn’t know your mother. But, Ruth-she didn’t waste her life.”

Tears fill my eyes. I hand the photo back to Ava, and Kennedy pulls me into an embrace. Unlike the stiff hugs I remember from white women like Ms. Mina or my high school principal, this one does not feel forced, smug, inauthentic.

She lets go of me, so that we are eye to eye. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Kennedy says, and something crackles between us: a promise, a hope that when we go to trial, those same words will not cross her lips.

Kennedy

ON MY SIXTH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY, Micah gives me the stomach flu.

It started last week with Violet, like most transmittable viruses that enter our household. Then Micah began throwing up. I told myself I did not have time to get sick, and thought I was safe until I bolted upright in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat, and made a beeline for the bathroom.

I wake up with my cheek pressed against the tile floor, and Micah standing over me. “Don’t look at me like that,” I say. “All smug because you’ve already been through this.”

“It gets better,” Micah promises.

I moan. “Wonderful.”

“I was going to make you breakfast in bed, but instead I opted for ginger ale.”

“You’re a prince.” I push myself upright. The room spins.

“Whoa. Steady, girl.” Micah crouches beside me, helping me to my feet. Then he sweeps me into his arms and carries me into the bedroom.

“In any other circumstance,” I say, “this would be very romantic.”

Micah laughs. “Rain check.”

“I’m trying really hard not to vomit on you.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that,” he says gravely, and he crosses his arms. “Would you like to have a fight now about how you’re not going into the office? Or do you want to finish your ginger ale first?”

“You’re using my tactics against me. That’s the kind of either-or I offer Violet-”

“See, and you think I never listen.”

“I’m going to work,” I say, and I try to get on my feet, but I black out. When I blink a moment later, Micah’s face is inches from mine. “I’m not going to work,” I whisper.

“Good answer. I already called Ava. She’s going to come over and play nurse.”

I groan. “Can’t you just kill me instead? I don’t think I can handle my mother. She thinks a shot of bourbon cures everything.”

“I’ll lock the liquor cabinet. You need anything else?”

“My briefcase?” I beg.

Micah knows better than to say no to that. As he goes downstairs to retrieve it, I prop myself up on pillows. I have too much to do to not be working, but my body doesn’t seem to be cooperating.

I drift off in the few minutes it takes Micah to come back into the bedroom. He’s trying to gently put the briefcase on the floor so he doesn’t disturb me, but I reach for it, overestimating my strength. The contents of the leather folio spill all over the bed and onto the floor, and Micah crouches to pick them up. “Huh,” he says, holding up a piece of paper. “What are you doing with a lab report?”

It’s wrinkled, having slipped between files to get wedged at the bottom of my bag. I have to squint, and then a run of graphs comes into focus. It’s the newborn screening results that I subpoenaed from the Mercy-West Haven Hospital, the ones that had been missing from Davis Bauer’s file. They came in this week, and given my lack of understanding of chemistry, I barely glanced at the charts, figuring I’d show them to Ruth sometime after her mother’s funeral. “It’s just some routine test,” I say.

“Apparently not,” Micah replies. “There’s abnormality in the blood work.”

I grab it out of his hand. “How do you know that?”

“Because,” Micah says, pointing to the cover letter I didn’t bother to read, “it says here there’s abnormality in the blood work.”

I scour the letter, addressed to Dr. Marlise Atkins. “Could it be fatal?”

“I have no idea.”

“You’re a doctor.”

“I study eyes, not enzymes.”

I look up at him. “What did you get me for our anniversary?”

“I was going to take you out to dinner,” Micah admits.

“Well,” I suggest, “take me to see a neonatologist instead.”

–

WHEN WE SAY, in America, that you have a right to be tried by a jury of your peers, we’re not exactly telling the truth. The pool of jurors is not as random as you’d think, thanks to careful scrutiny by the defense and the prosecution to eliminate both ends of the bell curve-the people most likely to vote against our clients’ best interests. We weed out the folks who believe that people are guilty until proven innocent, or who tell us they see dead people, or who hold grudges against the legal system because they were once arrested. But we also prune on a case-by-case basis. If my client is a draft dodger, I try to limit jurors who have proudly served. If my client is a drug addict, I don’t want a juror who lost a family member to an overdose. Everyone has prejudices. It’s my job to make sure that they work in favor of the person I’m representing.

So although I would never play the race card once the trial starts-as I’ve spent months explaining to Ruth-I’m damn well going to stack the odds before it begins.

Which is why, before we begin voir dire to choose jurors, I march into my boss’s office and tell him I was wrong. “I’m feeling a little overwhelmed after all,” I say to Harry. “I was thinking I might need a cochair.”

He takes a lollipop out of a jar he keeps on his desk. “Ed’s got a shaken-baby trial starting this week-”

“I wasn’t talking about Ed. I was thinking of Howard.”

“Howard.” He looks at me, baffled. “The kid who still brings his meals in a lunchbox?”

It’s true that Howard is fresh out of law school and that so far, in the few months he’s been at the office, has only done misdemeanors-domestics and a few disorderlies. I offer my smoothest grin. “Yeah. You know, he’ll just be an extra pair of hands for me. A runner. And in the meantime, it would be good for him to get trial experience.”

Harry unwraps the lollipop and sticks it in his mouth. “Whatever,” he says, his teeth gripped on the stem.

With his blessing, or the closest I’m going to get to one, I head back to my cubicle and poke my head over the divider that separates me from Howard. “Guess what,” I tell him. “You’re going to second-chair the Jefferson case. Voir dire’s this week.”

He glances up. “Wait. What? Really?”

It’s a big deal for a rookie who is still doing scut work in the office. “We’re leaving,” I announce, and I grab my coat, knowing he will follow.

I do need an extra pair of hands.

I also need them to be black.

–

HOWARD SCRAMBLES AT my side as we walk through the halls of the courthouse. “You don’t speak to the judge unless I’ve told you to,” I instruct. “Don’t show any emotions, no matter what theatrical display Odette Lawton puts on-prosecutors do that to make themselves feel like they’re Gregory Peck in Mockingbird.”

“Who?”

“God. Never mind.” I glance at him. “How old are you, anyway?”

“Twenty-four.”

“I have sweaters older than you,” I mutter. “I’ll give you the discovery to read over tonight. This afternoon I’m going to need you to do some fieldwork.”

“Fieldwork?”

“Yeah, you have a car, right?”

He nods.

“And then, once we actually get the jurors inside, you’re going to be my human video camera. You’re going to record every tic and twitch and comment that each potential juror makes in response to my questions, so that we can go over it and figure out which candidates are going to fuck us over. It’s not about who’s on the jury…it’s about who’s not on it. Do you have any questions?”

Howard hesitates. “Is it true that you once offered Judge Thunder a blow job?”

I stop walking and face him, my hands on my hips. “You don’t even know how to clean out the coffee machine yet, but you know that?”

Howard pushes his glasses up his nose. “I plead the Fifth.”

“Well, whatever you heard, it was taken out of context and it was prednisone-induced. Now shut up and look older than twelve, for God’s sake.” I push open the door to Judge Thunder’s chambers to find him sitting behind his desk, with the prosecutor already in the room. “Your Honor. Hello.”

He glances at Howard. “Who’s this?”

“My co-counsel,” I reply.

Odette folds her arms. “As of when?”

“About a half hour ago.”

We all stare at Howard, waiting for him to introduce himself. He looks at me, his lips pressed firmly together. You don’t speak to the judge unless I’ve told you to. “Speak,” I mutter.

He holds out a hand. “Howard Moore. It’s an honor, Your…um…Honor.”

I roll my eyes.

Judge Thunder produces a huge stack of completed questionnaires, which are sent out to people who are called for jury duty. They are full of practical information, like where the recipient lives and where he or she works. But they also include pointed questions: Do you have any problems with the presumption of innocence? If a defendant doesn’t testify, do you assume he is hiding something? Do you understand that the Constitution gives the defendant the right to not say anything? If the State proves this case beyond reasonable doubt, would you have any moral qualms about convicting the defendant?

He splits the pile in half. “Ms. Lawton, you take this bunch for four hours; and Ms. McQuarrie, you take these. We’ll reconvene at one P.M., switch piles, and then voir dire begins in two days.”

As I drive Howard back to our office, I explain what we are looking for. “A solid defense juror is an older woman. They have the most empathy, the most experience, and they’re less judgmental, and they’re really hard on young punks like Turk Bauer. And beware of Millennials.”

“Why?” Howard asks, surprised. “Aren’t young people less likely to be racist?”

“You mean like Turk?” I point out. “The Millennials are the me generation. They usually think everything revolves around them, and make decisions based on what’s going on in their lives and how it will affect their lives. In other words, they’re minefields of egocentrism.”

“Got it.”

“Ideally we want a juror who has a high social status, because those people tend to influence other jurors when it comes to deliberations.”

“So we’re looking for a unicorn,” Howard says. “A supersensitive, racially conscious, straight white male.”

“He could be gay,” I reply, serious. “Gay, Jewish, female-anything that can help them identify with discrimination in any form is going to be a bonus for Ruth.”

“But we don’t know any of these candidates. How do we become psychic overnight?”

“We don’t become psychic. We become detectives,” I say. “You’re going to take half the surveys and drive to the addresses that are listed on them. You want to find out whatever you can. Are they religious? Are they rich? Poor? Do they have political campaign signs on the lawn? Do they live above where they work? Do they have a flagpole in the front yard?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“More often than not that’s someone who’s extremely conservative,” I explain.

“Where are you going to be?” he asks.

“Doing the same thing.”

I watch Howard leave, plugging the first address into his phone GPS. Then I wander the halls of the office asking other public defenders if they’ve had any of these folks on their panels-a lot of the jurors get recycled. Ed is about to head out the door to court, but he glances at the sheaf of papers. “I remember this guy,” he says, pulling one survey free. “He was part of my jury on Monday-grand larceny case. He raised his hand during my opening statement and asked if I had a business card.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Sadly,” Ed says, “no. Good luck, kiddo.”

Ten minutes later, I’ve plugged an address into my GPS and find myself driving through Newhallville. I lock the doors for safety’s sake. Presidential Gardens, the apartment building between Shelton and Dixwell Avenues, is a lower-income pocket of the city, with a quarter of the residents living below the poverty line, and the streets that bracket the residences are rife with drug traffic. Nevaeh Jones lives in this building, somewhere. I watch a little boy run out the door of one building, not wearing a coat, and start jogging when the cold hits him. He wipes his nose on his sleeve in midstride.

Will a woman from this area see Ruth and think she’s being railroaded? Or will she see the socioeconomic difference between them and be resentful?

It’s a hard call. In Ruth’s unique case, the best juror may not be one with the same color skin.

I put a question mark at the top of the survey-this is one I’ll have to consider further. Driving slowly out of the neighborhood, I wait until I see children playing outside and then pull over to the curb and call Howard’s cell. “So?” I ask when he picks up. “How’s it going?”

“Um,” he says. “I’m sort of stuck.”

“Where?”

“East Shore.”

“What’s the problem?”

“It’s a gated community. There’s a low fence and I could look over it, but I’d have to get out of the car,” Howard says.

“Then get out of the car.”

“I can’t. See, back when I was in college, I kind of made a rule for myself-don’t get out of the car unless there’s a happy, living black person in sight.” He exhales. “I’ve been waiting for forty-five minutes, but the only people in this part of New Haven are white.”

That’s not necessarily a bad thing for Ruth. “Can’t you just go peek over the wall? Make sure she doesn’t have a Trump sign on her lawn?”

“Kennedy-there are neighborhood watch signs all over the place. What do you think is going to happen if they see a black man trying to peek over a wall?”

“Oh,” I say, embarrassed. “I get it.” I look out the window to where three kids are jumping into piles of leaves; I think of the little black boy I saw streaking away from Presidential Gardens. Ed told me last week that he defended a twelve-year-old involved in a gang shooting with two seventeen-year-olds, and that the prosecution was gunning to have all three tried as adults. “Give me an hour and then meet me at 560 Theodore Street in East End. And, Howard? When you arrive, it’s safe to get out of the car,” I say. “I live there.”

–

I LIGHTLY DROP the bag of Chinese food onto the desk of my home office. “I have goodies,” I say, taking out the lo mein and laying claim to it.

“So do I,” Howard says, and he points to a stack of papers he’s printed out.

It’s 10:00 P.M., and we’ve set up camp at my home. I left Howard there all afternoon to do online research while Odette and I swapped stacks of surveys. For hours, I’ve battled traffic, sussed out more jurors by neighborhood, and scanned the plaintiff and defendant lists at the courthouse to see if any of the potential jurors have been criminally prosecuted or have relatives that were criminally prosecuted.

“I found three guys who were charged with domestics, a woman whose mother got convicted of arson, and a lovely little old lady whose grandson’s meth lab was busted last year,” Howard announces.

The screen reflects, glowing green around Howard’s face as he scans the page. “Okay,” he says, opening a plastic container of soup and drinking from the side without a spoon. “God, I’m starving. So here’s the thing: you can get some good dirt on Facebook, but it depends on privacy settings.”

“Did you try LinkedIn?”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s a gold mine.”

He beckons me to the floor, where he’s spread out the surveys and has paper-clipped printouts to each one. “This guy? We love him,” Howard says. “He’s a social justice educator at Yale. And even better-his mother is a nurse.” I hold up my hand, he high-fives. “This is my second favorite.”

He passes me the survey. Candace White. She’s forty-eight years old, African American, a librarian, mother of three. She looks like someone who could be friends with Ruth, not just rule in favor of the defense.

Her favorite TV show is Wallace Mercy.

I may not want Reverend Mercy messed up in Ruth’s case, but the people who watch him are definitely going to have sympathy for my client.

Howard is still listing his finds. “I’ve got three ACLU memberships. And this girl ran a whole tribute to Eric Garner on her blog. A series called I Can’t Breathe Either.”

“Nice.”

“On the other end of the spectrum,” Howard says, “this lovely gentleman is the deacon of his church and also supports Rand Paul and advocates the repeal of all civil rights laws.”

I take the survey from his hand and put a red X through the name at the top.

“Two people who posted about reducing funding for welfare,” Howard says. “I’m not sure what you want to do about that.”

“Put them in the middle pile,” I reply.

“This girl updated her status three hours ago: Jesus Christ some chink just sideswiped my car.”

I place her survey on top of the Rand Paul advocate’s, as well as someone whose profile pic on Twitter is Glenn Beck. There are two candidates Howard has nixed because they liked Facebook pages for Skullhead and Day of the Sword. “Is that some Game of Thrones thing?” I ask, baffled.

“They’re white power bands,” Howard says, and I am pretty sure he blushes. “I found a group called Vaginal Jesus too. But none of our potential jurors listen to them.”

“Thank God for small mercies. What’s the big pile in the middle?”

“Indeterminate,” Howard explains. “I have a few pictures of people making gun gang signs, a handful of stoners, one idiot who took a video of himself shooting up heroin, and thirty selfies of people who are rocked-off-their-gourd drunk.”

“Doesn’t it just warm the cockles of your heart to know that we entrust the legal system to these folks?”

I’m joking, but Howard looks at me soberly. “To tell you the truth, today’s been a little shocking. I mean, I had no idea how people live their lives, and what they do when they think no one’s looking-” He glances at a photo of a woman brandishing a red Solo cup. “Or even when they are.”

I spear a Peking ravioli with my chopstick. “When you start to see the seedy underbelly of America,” I say, “it makes you want to live in Canada.”

“Oh, and there’s this,” Howard says, pointing to the computer screen. “Do with it what you will.” He reaches across me for a Peking ravioli.

I frown at the Twitter handle: @WhiteMight. “Which juror is it?”

“It’s not a juror,” he says. “And I’m pretty sure Miles Standup is a fake name.” He clicks twice on the profile picture: a newborn infant.

“Why have I seen that photo before…?”

“Because it’s the same picture of Davis Bauer that people were holding up outside the courthouse before the arraignment. I checked the news footage. I think that’s Turk Bauer’s account.”

“The Internet is a beautiful thing.” I look at Howard with pride. “Well done.”

He looks at me, hopeful, over the white lip of the paper carton. “So we’re finished for the night?”

“Oh, Howard.” I laugh. “We’ve only just begun.”

–

ODETTE AND I meet the next morning at a diner to cross-check the survey numbers of the potential jurors that we each want to decline. In the rare occasion when our numbers match (the twenty-five-year-old who just got out of a psychiatric hospital; the man who was arrested last week) we agree to let them go.

I don’t know Odette very well. She is tough, no-nonsense. At legal conferences, when everyone else is getting drunk and doing karaoke, she is the one sitting in the corner drinking club soda with lime and filing away memories she can use to exploit us later. I’ve always thought of her as an uptight piece of work. But now I’m wondering: when she goes shopping, is she, like Ruth, asked to show her receipts before exiting the store? Does she mutely hand them over? Or does she ever snap and say she is the one who puts shoplifters on trial?

So, in an attempt to offer an olive branch, I smile at her. “It’s going to be quite a trial, huh?”

She stuffs her folder of surveys into her briefcase. “They’re all big trials.”

“But this one…I mean…” I stumble, trying to find the words.

Odette meets my gaze. Her eyes are like chips of flint. “My interest in this case is the same as your interest in this case. I am prosecuting it because everyone else in my office is overworked and maxed out, and it landed on my desk. And I do not care if your client is black, white, or polka-dotted. Murder is remarkably monochromatic.” With that she stands up. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Odette says, and she walks away.

“Nice chatting with you too,” I mutter.

At that moment, Howard blusters in. His glasses are askew and his shirt is untucked in the back and he looks like he’s already had about ten cups of coffee. “I was doing some background research,” he begins, sitting down in the chair Odette just vacated.

“When? In the shower?” I know exactly when we stopped working last night, which leaves little room for free time.

“So, there was a study done by SUNY Stony Brook in 1991 and 1992 by Nayda Terkildsen, about how white voters assess black politicians who are running for office, and how prejudice affects that, and how that changes for people who actively try not to act prejudiced-”

“First,” I say, “we are not using a defense based on race, we are using one based on science. Second, Ruth is not running for office.”

“Yeah, but there are crossover implications in the study that I think could tell us a lot about the potential jurors,” Howard says. “Just hear me out, okay? So Terkildsen took a random sample of about three hundred and fifty white people from the jury pool in Jefferson County, Kentucky. She made up three sets of packets about a fake candidate for governor that had the same biography, the same résumé and political platform. The only difference was that in some of the head shots, the candidate was a white man. In others, it was Photoshopped to be a light-skinned black man or a dark-skinned black man. The voters were asked to identify if they were racially biased, and if they tended to be aware of that racial bias.”

I motion with my hands to hurry him up.

“The white politician got the most positive responses,” Howard says.

“Big surprise.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the interesting part. As prejudice increased, the rating of the light-skinned black man dropped quicker than the rating of the dark-skinned black man. But when prejudiced voters were divided into those who were aware of their racism and those who generally weren’t, things changed. The people who didn’t care if they looked prejudiced were harder on the dark-skinned black man than on the light-skinned black man. The voters who were worried about what people would think of them if they were racist, however, rated the dark-skinned black way higher than the light-skinned black. You get it, right? If a white person is trying extra hard to not look racist, they’re going to overcompensate for their prejudice by suppressing their real feelings about the darker-skinned person.”

I stare at him. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because Ruth is black. Light-skinned, but still black. And you can’t necessarily trust the white people in that jury pool if they tell you they aren’t prejudiced. They may be a lot more implicitly racist than they show on the outside, and that makes them wild cards for the jury.”

I look down at the table. Odette is wrong. Murder is not monochromatic. We know that from the school-to-prison pipeline. There are so, so many reasons the cycle is hard to break-and one of them is that white jurors come into a trial with bias. They are far more likely to make concessions for a defendant who looks like them than for one who doesn’t.

“All right,” I say to Howard. “What’s your plan?”

–

WHEN I CRAWL into bed that night, Micah is already asleep. But then he reaches out and wraps his arm around me. “No,” I say. “I am too tired to do anything right now.”

“Even thank me?” he says.

I turn to face him. “Why?”

“Because,” he says. “I found you a neonatologist.”

Immediately I sit up. “And?”

“And we’re going to see him this weekend. He’s a guy I knew from med school.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That my crazy lawyer wife is going all Lysistrata on me until I can get her an expert in the field.”

I laugh, then frame Micah’s face with my hands and kiss him, long and slow. “Go figure,” I say. “I’ve gotten my second wind.”

In one quick move he grabs me and rolls, so that I am pinned beneath him. His smile gleams in the light of the moon. “If you’ll do that for a neonatologist,” he murmurs, “what would you give me if I found you something really impressive, like a parasitologist? Or a leprologist?”

“You spoil me,” I say, and I pull him down to me.

–

I MEET RUTH at the back entrance of the courthouse, just in case Wallace Mercy has decided that jury selection is worth his time and energy. She is wearing a plum suit that I went with her to buy at T.J.Maxx last week, and a crisp white shirt. Her hair is pulled back and knotted at the nape of her neck. She looks every inch the professional, and I would have assumed she is at court because she is an attorney if not for the fact that her knees are shaking so uncontrollably they are knocking together.

I take her arm. “Relax. Honestly, this isn’t worth getting nervous over.”

She looks at me. “It’s just suddenly…very real.”

I introduce her to Howard, and as they shake hands I see something almost imperceptible pass between them-an acknowledgment that it is surprising for both of them to be in this courthouse, for different reasons. Howard and I flank Ruth as we walk into the courtroom and take our seats at the defense table.

For all that Judge Thunder is an asshole to us attorneys, juries eat him up. He looks the part, with wavy silver hair and grave lines of experience bracketing his mouth, forming parentheses around whatever wisdom he has yet to speak. When our hundred potential jurors are jammed into the courtroom, he gives preliminary instructions.

“Remember,” I whisper to Howard, leaning behind Ruth’s back. “Your job is to take notes. So many notes that your hand cramps. If one of those jurors flinches at a certain word, I need to know the word. If they fall asleep, I want to know when.”

He nods as I scan the faces of the potential jurors. I recognize some, from their Facebook photos. But even those I don’t recall have expressions I am used to seeing: there are the faces of those I secretly call Boy Scouts, who are delighted to be performing this duty to their country. There are the Morgan Stanleys-businessmen who keep checking their watches because their time is clearly more important than spending the day in a jury box. There are the Repeat Offenders, who have been through this process before and wonder why the hell they’ve been called again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m Judge Thunder, and I’d like to welcome you to my courtroom.”

Oh, good grief.

“In this case, the State is represented by our prosecutor Odette Lawton. Her job is to prove this case by reason of evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt. The defendant is represented by Kennedy McQuarrie.” As he begins to list the charges that Ruth was indicted for-murder and involuntary manslaughter-her knee starts trembling so hard I reach under the table and press it flat.

“I will explain to you later what those charges mean,” Judge Thunder says. “But at this moment, is there any member of the panel who knows the parties in this case?”

One juror raises his hand.

“Can you approach the bench?” the judge asks.

Odette and I move closer for the conference as a noise machine is turned on so that the rest of the jury cannot hear what this guy says. He points to Odette. “She locked up my brother on a drug charge, and she’s a lying bitch.”

Needless to say, he’s excused.

After a few more blanket queries, the judge smiles at the group. “All right, folks. I’m going to excuse you, and the bailiff will take you to the jury lounge. We’ll be calling you in one at a time so that the counselors can ask some individual follow-ups. Please don’t talk about your experiences with your fellow jurors. As I told you, the State has the burden of proof. We haven’t started to take evidence yet, so I urge you to keep an open mind and to be honest with your answers in front of the court. We want to make sure you are comfortable sitting as a juror in this case, just as the parties involved have the right to feel that their process can be judged by someone fair and impartial.”

If only the judge were the same, I think.

Voir dire is a cocktail party without any booze. You want to schmooze your jurors, you want them to like you. You want to act interested in their careers, even if that career is quality control at a Vaseline plant. As each individual juror is paraded before you, you rate him or her. A perfect juror is a 5. A bad juror is a 1.

Howard will list the reasons that a juror isn’t acceptable, so we can keep them straight. Ultimately we’ll wind up taking 3s and 4s and 5s, because we have only seven peremptory strikes we can use to kick a juror out of the pool without having to give a reason. And we don’t want to use those all up at once, because what if there’s a bigger problem juror yet to come?

The first man to take the stand is Derrick Welsh. He’s fifty-eight and has bad teeth and is wearing an untucked plaid shirt. Odette greets him with a smile. “Mr. Welsh, how are you doing today?”

“All right I guess. A little hungry.”

She smiles. “Me too. Tell me, have we ever worked on any cases together?”

“No,” he says.

“What do you do for a living, Mr. Welsh?”

“I run a hardware store.”

She asks him about his children and their ages. Howard taps me on the shoulder. He’s been frantically sifting through the surveys. “This is the one whose brother is a cop,” he whispers.

“I read The Wall Street Journal,” Welsh is saying, when I turn back. “And Harlan Coben.”

“Have you heard about this case?”

“A little bit. On the news,” he admits. “I know the nurse was accused of killing a baby.”

Beside me, Ruth flinches.

“Do you have any opinion about whether the defendant is guilty of that offense?” Odette asks.

“As far as I know, in our country everyone’s innocent till they’re proven guilty.”

“How do you see your role as a juror?”

He shrugs. “I guess listen to evidence…and do what the judge says.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Odette says, and she sits down.

I rise from my seat. “Hi there, Mr. Welsh,” I say. “You have a relative in law enforcement, don’t you?”

“My brother is a police officer.”

“Does he work in this community?”

“For fifteen years,” the juror replies.

“Does he ever tell you about his job? What kinds of people he deals with?”

“Sometimes…”

“Has your store ever been vandalized?”

“We were robbed once.”

“Do you think the increase in crime is due to an influx of minorities in the community?

He considers this. “I think it has more to do with the economy. People lose jobs, they get desperate.”

“Who do you think has the right to dictate medical treatment-the family of the patient or the medical professional?” I ask.

“It’s a case-by-case thing…”

“Have you or someone in your family had a bad outcome at a hospital?”

Walsh’s mouth tightens. “My mother died on the operating table during a routine endoscopy.”

“Did you blame the doctor?”

He hesitates. “We settled.”

And a flag is on the field. “Thank you,” I say, and as I sit down I look at Howard and shake my head.

The second potential juror is a black man in his late sixties. Odette asks him how far he went in school, if he is married, who he lives with, what his hobbies are. Most of these questions are on the survey, but sometimes you want to ask them again, to look the person in the eye when he tells you he does Civil War reenactments, for example, to see if he’s just into history or if he’s a gun nut. “I understand you’re a security guard at a mall,” she says. “Do you consider yourself a member of law enforcement?”

“I guess in a small sense,” he replies.

“Mr. Jordan, you know we’re looking for an impartial jury,” Odette says. “It surely has not escaped your notice that you and the defendant are both people of color. Might that impact your ability to make a fair decision?”

He blinks. After a moment, he replies to Odette, “Is there anything about your color that makes you unfair?”

I think Mr. Jordan might be my favorite person in the world right now. I stand up as Odette finishes her questioning. “Do you think black people are more likely to commit crimes than white people?” I ask.

I already know the answer, so that’s not why I’m asking.

I want to see how he reacts to me, a white woman, posing a question like that.

“I believe,” he says slowly, “that black people are more likely to wind up in jail than white folks.”

“Thank you, sir,” I say, and I turn toward Howard, nodding imperceptibly, as if to say: That is a ten.

There are several witnesses who fall somewhere in between horrific and perfect, and then juror number 12 takes the stand. Lila Fairclough is the perfect age for a juror, blond and spry. She teaches in the inner city in a racially integrated classroom. She’s very polite and professional with Odette, but she smiles at me the minute I stand up. “My daughter’s going to be in the school district where you work,” I tell her. “It’s why we moved there.”

“She’ll love it,” the woman says.

“Now, here I am, Ms. Fairclough, a white woman representing a black woman, who’s facing one of the most serious accusations that can be brought against a person. I have some concerns, and I’d like to talk about them, because it’s just as critical for you to feel comfortable on this jury as it is for me to feel comfortable representing my client. You know, we all talk about prejudice being a bad thing, but it’s a reality. For example, there are certain kinds of cases I could never be impaneled on. I mean, I love animals. If I see someone being cruel to them I can’t be objective-I’m just so angry that my anger supersedes any rational thought. If that was the case, I’d have a hard time believing anything the defense told me.”

“I totally get your point, but I don’t have a biased bone in my body,” Ms. Fairclough assures me.

“If you got on the bus and there were two seats available-one next to an African American man and one next to an elderly white woman, where would you sit?”

“In the first available seat.” She shakes her head. “I know what you’re getting at, Ms. McQuarrie. But honestly, I don’t have a problem with black people.”

That’s when Howard drops his pen.

I hear it like a gunshot. I spin around, meet his eye, and start to fake an Oscar-worthy coughing fit. This was our prearranged signal. I choke as if I am hacking out a lung, and drink from the glass of water on the defense table, and then rasp at the judge, “My colleague will finish up here, Your Honor.”

When Howard stands up, he starts swallowing convulsively. I’m sure that the judge is going to think the entire defense team has the plague, when I see the reaction on Lila Fairclough’s face.

She freezes the minute Howard steps in front of her.

It’s infinitesimal, the time between that and how fast she stretches her lips into a smile. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t witnessed it. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Fairclough,” he says. “Just a couple more questions.

“What’s the percentage of black children in your classroom?”

“Well, I have a class of thirty, and eight of my children are African American this year.”

“Do you find that the African American children have to be disciplined more frequently than the white children?”

She starts twisting her ring on her finger. “I treat all my students equally.”

“Let’s step outside of your classroom for a moment. Do you think in general that African American children have to be disciplined more frequently than white kids?”

“Well, I haven’t read studies on it.” Twist, twist. “But I can tell you I’m not part of the problem.”

Which, of course, means that she thinks there is a problem.

–

WHEN WE FINISH the individual questioning, and the first set of fourteen jurors are led back to the holding room, Howard and I huddle together and sort through who, if anyone, we want to strike for cause. “Are we ready to discuss excusals?” Judge Thunder asks.

“I’d like to excuse juror number ten,” Odette says, “the one who indicated that a black person can’t get a fair job, let alone a fair trial.”

“No objection,” I answer. “I’d like to excuse juror number eight, whose daughter was raped by a black man.”

“No objection,” Odette says.

We excuse a man whose wife is dying, and a mother with a sick baby, and a man who supports his family of six and whose boss has told him he cannot miss a week of work without risking his job.

“I’d like to excuse juror number twelve,” I say.

“No way,” Odette says.

Judge Thunder frowns at me. “You haven’t developed a challenge for cause, Counselor.”

“She’s racist?” I explain, but it sounds ridiculous even to me. The woman teaches black students and swore she wasn’t prejudiced. I might know she has implicit bias based on her reaction to Howard and her nervous tic of twisting her ring, but if I explain our little experiment to Odette or the judge, I’ll be in trouble.

I know if I call her in for further questioning, it won’t do any good. Which means that I either have to accept her as a juror or must use one of my peremptory strikes.

Odette has exercised one strike against a nurse, and another against a community organizer who admitted that he can find injustice anywhere. I’ve dismissed a woman who lost an infant, a man who sued a hospital for malpractice, and one of the guys who-thanks to Howard and Facebook-I know went to a white power music festival.

Howard leans across Ruth so he can whisper in my ear. “Use it,” he says. “She’s going to be trouble, even if she doesn’t look it.”

“Counselor,” the judge demands, “are we all invited to your little gossip session?”

“I’m sorry, Your Honor-a moment to consult with my co-counsel?” I turn back to Howard. “I can’t. I mean, I have another eighty-six jurors to get through here, and only four more strikes. Satan could be part of the next pool, for all we know.” I meet his gaze. “You were right. She’s biased. But she doesn’t think she is, and she doesn’t want to be seen that way. So maybe, just maybe, it’ll swing in our favor.”

Howard looks at me for a long second. I can tell he wants to speak his mind, but he just nods. “You’re the boss,” he says.

“We accept juror number twelve,” I tell the judge.

“I’d like to strike juror number two,” Odette continues.

That is my black security guard, my perfect ten. Odette knows this, which is why she is willing to use a peremptory strike against him. But I am up like a shot before she even finishes her sentence. “Your Honor, sidebar?” We approach the bench. “Judge,” I say, “this is a blatant violation of Batson.”

James Batson was an African American man who was tried for burglary in Kentucky by an all-white jury. During the voir dire phase of the trial, when the jurors were being selected, the prosecutor used peremptory strikes against six potential jurors-four of whom were black. The defense tried to discharge the jury on the grounds that Batson was not being tried by a representative sample of the community, but the judge denied it, and Batson wound up being convicted. In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in Batson’s favor, stating that a prosecutor’s use of peremptory strikes in a criminal case could not be based solely on race.

Since then, any time a black person gets bounced from a jury, any defense attorney worth his or her salt will cry Batson.

“Your Honor,” I continue, “the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right of a defendant to be tried by a jury of his or her peers.”

“Thank you, Ms. McQuarrie, I know very well what the Sixth Amendment says.”

“I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. New Haven is a very diverse county, and the jury needs to reflect that diversity, and right now this gentleman is the only black juror in this pool of fourteen.”

“You have got to be kidding,” Odette says. “You’re saying I’m racist?”

“No, I’m saying that it’s a lot easier for you to stack a jury in the State’s favor without being called on it because of your race.”

The judge turns to Odette. “What’s your reason for exercising your peremptory strike, Counselor?”

“I found him argumentative,” she says.

“This is the first group of jurors,” Judge Thunder warns me. “Don’t get your knickers in a twist.”

Maybe it’s the fact that he is so blatantly favoring the prosecution right now. Maybe it is that I want to show Ruth I am going to bat for her. Maybe it’s just because he used the word knickers and it made me remember my steroid rant against him. For whatever reason, or maybe all of them, I straighten my spine and take this opportunity to unbalance Odette before we even get started. “I want a hearing on this,” I demand. “I want Odette to produce her notes. We had other argumentative people on this panel, and I want to know if she documented that characteristic for the other jurors.”

Rolling her eyes, Odette climbs into the witness box. I have to admit, there’s enough public defender pride in me to love seeing a prosecutor in there, effectively caged. She glares at me as I approach. “You indicated that juror number two was argumentative. Did you listen to the responses of juror number seven?”

“Of course I did.”

“How did you find his demeanor?” I ask.

“I found him friendly.”

I look down at Howard’s excellent notes. “Even when you asked him about African Americans and crime and he came out of his seat and said you were implying he was a racist? Is that not argumentative?”

Odette shrugs. “His tone was different than juror number two’s.”

“Coincidentally, so was his skin color,” I say. “Tell me, did you make any notes about juror number eleven being argumentative?”

She glances down at her chart. “We were moving quickly. I didn’t write down everything I was thinking, because it wasn’t important.”

“Because it wasn’t important,” I clarify, “or because that juror was white?” I turn to the judge. “Thank you, Your Honor.”

Judge Thunder turns to the prosecutor. “I’m not going to allow the peremptory challenge. You’re not getting me into a Batson situation this early in the game, Ms. Lawton. Juror number two remains on the panel.”

I slide into my seat beside Ruth, pretty damn pumped. Howard is blinking at me like I’m a goddess. It’s not every day you get to school a prosecutor. Suddenly Ruth passes a note to me. I unfold it, read the two simple words: Thank you.

–

WHEN THE JUDGE dismisses us for the day, I tell Howard to go home and get some sleep. Ruth and I leave the courthouse together; I peek outside first to make sure that the coast is clear of media. It is-but I know that will change as soon as we start the trial.

When we reach the parking lot, however, neither one of us seems to be in a great hurry to leave. Ruth keeps her head ducked, and I know her well enough by now to know that something’s on her mind. “You want to go grab a glass of wine? Or do you have to get back to Edison?”

She shakes her head. “He’s out more than I am these days.”

“You don’t sound thrilled about that.”

“Right now I’m not exactly his role model,” Ruth says.

We walk around the corner to a bar that I’ve been to many times before, celebrating victory or drowning defeat. It’s full of lawyers I know, so I squirrel us into a booth way in the back. We both order pinot noir, and when the glasses arrive, I toast. “Here’s to an acquittal.”

I notice that Ruth doesn’t lift her glass.

“Ruth,” I say gently, “I know this was the first time you’ve been in court. But trust me-today went really, really well.”

She swirls the wine in her glass. “My mama used to tell a story about how, once, she was pushing me in a stroller in our neighborhood in Harlem, and two black ladies passed her. One of them said to the other, She walkin’ around like that her baby. That ain’t her baby. I hate when nannies do that. I was light-skinned, compared to Mama. She laughed it off, because she knew the truth-I was hers, through and through. But the thing is, growing up, it wasn’t the white kids who made me feel worst about myself. It was the black kids.” Ruth looks up at me. “That prosecutor made it all come flooding back today. Like, she was out to get me.”

“I don’t know if it’s all that personal for Odette. She just likes to win.”

It strikes me that this is a conversation I have never had with someone who is African American. Usually I am so conscious of not being seen as prejudiced that I would be paralyzed by the fear of saying something that would be offensive. I’ve had African American clients before, but in those cases I was very clearly setting myself up to be the one with all the answers. Ruth has seen that mask slip.

With Ruth, I know I can ask a stupid white girl question, and that she will answer me without judging my ignorance. Likewise, if I step on her toes, she’ll tell me so. I think about the time she explained to me the difference between weaves and extensions; or how she asked me about sunburn, and how long it takes for blistered skin to start peeling. It’s the difference between dancing along the eggshell crust of acquaintance and diving into the messy center of a relationship. It’s not always perfect; it’s not always pleasant-but because it is rooted in respect, it is unshakable.

“You surprised me today,” Ruth admits.

I laugh. “Because I’m actually good at what I do?”

“No. Because half the questions you asked were based on race.” She meets my gaze. “After all this time telling me that doesn’t happen in a courtroom.”

“It doesn’t,” I say bluntly. “Come Monday, when the trial starts, everything changes.”

“You’ll still let me speak?” Ruth confirms. “Because I need to say my piece.”

“I promise.” I set my wineglass down. “Ruth, you know, just because we pretend racism has nothing to do with a case doesn’t mean we aren’t aware of it.”

“Then why pretend?”

“Because it’s what lawyers do. I lie for a living. If I thought it was going to get you acquitted, I could tell the jury that Davis Bauer was a werewolf. And if they believe it, shame on them.”

Ruth’s eyes meet mine. “It’s a distraction. It’s a clown waving in your face, so you don’t notice the sleight of hand going on behind him.”

It’s strange to hear my work described that way, but it’s not entirely untrue. “Then I guess all we can do is drink to forget.” I lift my glass.

Ruth finally takes a sip of her wine. “There isn’t enough pinot noir in the world.”

I run my thumb around the edge of my cocktail napkin. “Do you think there will ever be a time when racism doesn’t exist?”

“No, because that means white people would have to buy into being equal. Who’d choose to dismantle the system that makes them special?”

Heat floods my neck. Is she talking about me? Is she suggesting that the reason I won’t buck the system is because I, personally, have something to lose?

“But then,” Ruth muses, “maybe I’m wrong.”

I lift my glass, clink it against hers. “To baby steps,” I toast.

–

AFTER ONE MORE day of jury selection, we have our twelve plus two alternates. I spend the weekend holed up in my home office preparing for Monday’s opening arguments of the trial, taking off only Sunday afternoon to meet the neonatologist. Micah met Ivan Kelly-Garcia in his freshman orgo class, when-during the midterm-Ivan rushed in with only a half hour left during the exam, dressed like a giant hot dog, grabbed an exam booklet, and aced the test. The previous night was Halloween, and he’d passed out drunk in a sorority house, and woke up to realize he was about to forgo his entire future as a doctor. Ivan not only went on to become Micah’s study partner in orgo but also to go to Harvard Med and become one of the best neonatologists in the tristate area.

He’s thrilled to hear from Micah after so many years, and he’s even outwardly thrilled to host his insane lawyer wife and one very crabby four-year-old who should not have been awakened from her car seat nap. Ivan lives in Westport, Connecticut, in a sedate colonial, with his wife-a woman who managed to make homemade guacamole and salsa for us after her fifteen-mile morning marathon training run. They don’t have any kids yet, but they do have a giant Bernese mountain dog, which is currently either babysitting Violet or licking her to death.

“Look at us, bro,” Ivan says. “Married. Employed. Sober. Remember that time we dropped acid and I decided to climb a tree but forgot I’m scared of heights?”

I look at Micah. “You dropped acid?”

“You probably didn’t tell her about Sweden, either,” Ivan muses.

“Sweden?” I look between the two men.

“Cone of silence,” Ivan says. “Bro code.”

The thought of Micah-who prefers his boxer shorts ironed-as a bro makes me stifle a laugh.

“My wife’s trying her first murder case,” Micah segues smoothly, “so I apologize in advance if she asks you ten thousand questions.”

Under my breath I whisper, “I’m totally getting that whole story from you later.” Then I smile at Ivan. “I was hoping you could explain newborn screening.”

“Well, basically, it was a game changer for infant mortality. Thanks to something called tandem mass spectrometry, which is done at the state lab, we can identify a handful of congenital diseases that can be treated or managed. I’m sure your daughter had it done, and you probably were never the wiser.”

“What kinds of diseases?” I ask.

“Oh, a whole science nerd dictionary: biotinidase deficiency-that’s when the body can’t reuse and recycle enough free biotin. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia and congenital hypothyroidism, which are hormone deficiencies. Galactosemia, which prevents an infant from processing a certain sugar that’s in milk, breast milk, and formula. Hemoglobinopathies, which are problems with red blood cells. Amino acid disorders, which cause amino acids to build up in the blood or the urine; and fatty acid oxidation disorders, which keep bodies from turning fat into energy; and organic aciduria disorders, which are sort of a hybrid between the two. You’ve probably heard of some of them, like sickle cell, which affects a lot of African Americans. Or PKU,” Ivan says. “Babies who have that one can’t break down certain types of amino acids, and they build up in the blood or the urine. If you don’t know your kid has the disease, it leads to cognitive impairment and seizures. But if it’s flagged right after birth, it can be managed with a special diet and prognosis is excellent.”

I hand him the lab results. “The lab says there was an abnormality in this patient’s newborn screening.”

He flips through the first few pages. “Bingo-this kid has MCADD. You can tell by the spikes on the mass spectrometry graph here at C-six and C-eight-that’s the acylcarnitine profile.” Ivan looks up at us. “Oh, okay, yeah. English. Well, the acronym is short for medium-chain acyl-coenzyme A dehydrogenase deficiency. It’s an autosomal recessive disorder of fatty acid oxidation. Your body needs energy to do stuff-move, function, digest, even breathe. We get our fuel from food, and store it in our tissues as fatty acids until we need it. At that point, we oxidize those fatty acids to create energy for bodily functions. But a baby with a fatty acid oxidation disorder can’t do that, because he’s missing a key enzyme-in this case, MCADD. That means once his energy stores are depleted, he’s in trouble.”

“Meaning…?”

He hands me back the packet. “His blood sugar will tank, and he’ll be tired, sluggish.”

Those words trigger a flag in my mind. Davis Bauer’s low blood sugar was blamed on his mother’s gestational diabetes. But what if that wasn’t the case? “Could it cause death?”

“If it’s not diagnosed early. A lot of these kids are asymptomatic until something acts like a trigger-an infection, or an immunization, or fasting. Then, you get a rapid decline that looks an awful lot like sudden infant death syndrome-basically the baby goes into arrest.”

“Could a baby who arrests still be saved, if he has MCADD?”

“It really depends on the situation. Maybe. Maybe not.”

Maybe, I think, is an excellent word for a jury.

Ivan looks at me. “I’m guessing, if there’s a lawsuit involved, that the patient didn’t make it?”

I shake my head. “He died when he was three days old.”

“What day was the kid born?”

“Thursday. The heel stick was done on a Friday.”

“What time was it sent off to the state lab?” Ivan asks.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “Does that make a difference?”

“Yeah.” He leans back in his chair, eyeing Violet, who is now trying to ride the dog. “The lab in Connecticut is closed on Saturday and Sunday. If the screening sample was sent out from the hospital after, say, midday on Friday, it didn’t reach the lab till after the weekend.” Ivan looks at me. “Which means if this kid had been born on a Monday instead, he would have had a fighting chance.”