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backstepping toward the courtroom, picking up things, offering them to Melanie for her purse, no doubt wishing he’d been looking the other way when this started. Inside, behind louvered blinds and enclosed glass, Hemple gives me the news.
    Laurel is still too angry to talk. “It’s Julie’s school,” says the lawyer. “They caught another girl with drugs. The kid claims she got them from Julie.” To the extent that anything involving adolescents can surprise me, I am startled by this. From every appearance my niece’s only narcotic to date is the adulation of her peers. To this she is heavily addicted. I wonder if it has led to heavier things. “Crack cocaine,” says Hemple. “The other girl, her friend, had enough for personal use, not dealing.” Thank God for little favors. “Are they bringing charges?” I ask.
    Hemple makes a face likes she’s not sure. “They caught the kid three days ago. They’re still investigating.”
    “How did Jack find out so fast?”
    “What I’m wondering,” says Hemple, like maybe there’s some artful device going down here, Jack and Melanie engaged in creative self-help. A kid caught on charges might be willing to fabricate a story, implicate some innocent for a price. The rules of commerce. Jack is not above seeing the social problems of his children’s school as an ocean of opportunity, a place with more substances of abuse than the average pharmacist’s shelf. “It gets worse,” says Hemple. “It’s a lie,” says Laurel. She looks at me stone cold, an edge to the expression in her eyes. We have reached bottom, like the thump of an elevator in the basement. To Laurel this is now something fundamental, a tenet I must believe. Still, denials are the small talk of the lawyer’s venue, more common than discussions of the weather, and Hemple ignores her. “According to the kid,” she says, “Julie made admissions.”
    “What kind of admissions?”
    “The kid says Julie told her the stuff came from home, a stash her mother kept in the house. What’s worse, Melanie has confirmed this. She says Julie also told her the same thing, that her mother used drugs.”
    “It’s not true,” says Laurel. “She’s a lying bitch.”
    I might expect her to fold, to be fighting back tears, driven to the edges of the glass enclosure by the charge. Instead she is standing, head erect, shoulders squared, shaking her head, and in clear unassailable language telling us that this is crap. Laurel came to the divorce with a schoolgirl’s faith in the justice of courts. It has been rocked by the slow recognition that money speaks here as clearly as anywhere in life. If I believe her, and I do, she is now getting a cynic’s first taste of how the scales can tip with the preponderance of perjury. As I stand and study her, at the opposite end of the small conference table, standing in the glare of fluorescence, there is a cold recognition, like a dark cloud, that passes across her face. “I’m gonna lose the kids,” she says. “Aren’t I?”
    “Wake up, kiddo.” I whisper softly into my daughter’s ear, not enough to rouse her. The TV has gone white with snow, a local station that signs off the cable at the witching hour. Sarah is dressed like some fairy princess a Halloween party earlier in the evening with some kids from her school. I’m sprawled in the recliner in the family room, my feet up on the pop-up footrest.
    We’ve fallen asleep, Sarah in my lap. We have done this now three nights running. Without Nikki to impose a regimen on our lives, it seems we are adrift, anchorless, without the hale habits of life. I shift in the chair and Sarah clings to me, her little fingers digging into my shirt like the claws of a kitten. As I move she gives off a feckless moan, then little mewings. I look at the clock. It is after one in the morning. There is no chance of waking her. I lift her, dead weight in my arms, and carry her off to her bedroom. She will sleep in the chiffon of