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them, but at times it almost felt as though we were speaking different languages. We had our studies to fall back on, though, and because Ariel was such a sharp legal mind I enjoyed talking to him without the competitive pressure I felt from my go-getter classmates.
    After he graduated Ariel went to work for a five-person personal-injury firm in northwest Miami; the firm was housed in a one-story ramshackle building owned by one of the partners. Ariel took me there one day when I was home for Christmas vacation my second year at Duke. I remember that I had to hide my shock—I always envisioned lawyers working in glamorous offices, and this was anything but. The building was wedged between a mom-and-pop grocery and a tire store painted the most garish yellow ever imagined. Ariel’s office would have had a terrific view of the Orange Bowl, if it weren’t for the thick iron bars over his window. At the time Ariel was living in a garage apartment a block from the office; I visited there once and actually considered calling the health inspector on the landlord.
    For a couple of years Ariel’s clients were mostly neighborhood types; they’d come in and tell him about getting hurt or incapacitated on the job in falls, burns, electrocutions, car crashes—all sorts of accidents and assorted malice. Ariel helped them with their workmen’s comp cases and took his fee from a percentage of recovery. Since he worked steadily and methodically, his client list grew until he was a trusted presence in the community.
    As the top student in his class, Ariel would have had his pick of white-shoe law firms in Miami. But his instincts had sent him elsewhere, to get experience with the people he knew and who needed him most. A lot of people questioned his judgment and I have to admit I was one of them. But then The Case walked into his office. Ariel was proved right, silencing his critics forever.
    I looked around Marti’s room. It was decorated with Disney characters and the best baby furniture available. Probably none of it would have been there if not for an August day when Señora Matos walked into the firm’s office and described Ariel’s appearance, saying he was the lawyer she wanted. Once Ariel was produced she sat down across from him and explained that she had a personal-injury case involving her son. Ariel’s office was on Señora Matos’s daily route to her job as a seamstress at a dry cleaner; many times she’d walked home late at night and seen Ariel at his desk through the security bars on the window. She figured anyone who worked as hard as Ariel would do a good job for her son. And her instincts could not have been more sound.
    A truck owned by one of the biggest private construction firms in Dade County had jumped a curb on Flagler Street—one of the busiest thoroughfares in Miami—and struck Señora Matos’s son. Alfredo Matos was a married father of five, and the accident had paralyzed him permanently from the neck down. This might have been considered a tragic but unavoidable accident, were it not for the fact that the driver of the truck was legally drunk with three prior offenses on his record. The construction company knew about the driver’s history, but he had kept his job because his brother-in-law was the home office dispatcher. Alfredo Matos was a pillar of his neighborhood, a bookkeeper for his church, and an active volunteer along with his wife, Esmeralda.
    Ariel took the case like a dog takes to a bone, and in the end the jury couldn’t award the Matos family enough money to compensate for their loss. The award was the largest ever granted by a Dade County jury for a personal-injury case. A year later the ruling held up on appeal; Ariel, with his thirty percent of recovery, was set for life. He was twenty-seven years old, and he could have retired then and there.
    The standard recovery for attorney’s fees was forty percent, but Ariel declined to take that much—he thought a lower figure was more