“Oh, Anne, you know how I hate leaving the island.”

  “I do know that. But this is urgent, Mother. You must understand. I could lose custody of Tessa.”

  “I don’t actually see why that would be so bad, Anne.” At the explosive sputtering from the other end of the line, Sarah cried, “Wait a minute, would you please? Hear me out! I’m thinking of you, Anne. I know you think I’m dotty, but I’m not really, and I do love you in my own way, and what’s more, Anne, I know you, probably better than anyone else does. Probably better than you do. I know what you were like as a little girl. I know how much you hate disorder. I know—”

  “Mother. I have Carmen.”

  “I’m not talking about keeping the house clean! I’m talking about relationships. I’m talking about dealing with a young woman! Adolescence is fraught with tensions, animosities, hormonal explosions. This is when daughters start rebelling against their mothers. They can’t help it. It’s like the course of the seasons. They pull away.”

  “Tessa and I—”

  “Read the literature, Anne. Please. As a favor to me. There will be all sorts of hell breaking loose in the next few years, Oedipal stuff, Electra stuff. Tessa won’t be a little sweetheart anymore. She’ll be hostile and secretive and emotional. You’ll try to help and she’ll shut you out. It will be very hard on you.”

  “Other mothers survive it. I’m sure I can. Anyway, I can always—”

  “Always what? Take more Valium?”

  “I don’t take Valium.”

  “Xanax, then. Or something. Be honest. Don’t you take tranquilizers?”

  “My work is very demanding, Mother. I get nervous, and with the election coming up I get anxious.”

  “Then you should let Tessa live with Randall.”

  “I can’t believe you said that to me! I can’t believe you feel that way! What kind of mother are you?”

  “One who loves you, Anne.” Sarah gripped the phone. She could feel her daughter listening. “One who loves you and admires you enormously. And sees you clearly. Anne, I wish you’d think about why you want Tessa living with you. Your gifts are many. You have the chance to make vast, significant changes that will better the lives of thousands of people. Why tie your hands with the responsibility for one adolescent?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Please hear me out. It’s not as if Randall is vindictive. You know that if Tessa lives with him, he’ll let you see Tessa any time. Let him deal with the exhausting daily stuff. Then you’d be free to travel—what was that conference you were asked to speak at last spring? In San Francisco? About public transportation and working parents?”

  Interesting, Sarah thought, how something as ineffable as a telephone connection—was it actually bouncing off a satellite in space?—could convey so much anger and despair in nothing but silence.

  “Anne? Darling?”

  Her daughter’s voice was flat. “So I can’t tell the guardian ad litem that you’ll speak with him.”

  “Right. It won’t matter, I’m sure. Just tell him we live on an island and seldom see you or Tessa. That’s the truth.”

  “Fine. I’ve got to go. I won’t say it’s been a pleasure talking to you.”

  “Oh, my dear.”

  “Good-bye, Mother.”

  Sarah clicked off the phone. Looking down, she saw Brownie sitting at her feet, adoration and gluttony in her eyes.

  “They say chocolate’s bad for dogs,” she told her.

  Brownie wagged her tail hopefully.

  “Although I’ve always fed my dogs chocolate with no ill effect.”

  Brownie shivered all over in ecstatic expectancy.

  Why couldn’t people be more like dogs? Sarah wondered. Bending, she fed Brownie just the tiniest sliver of cake. Mostly white icing, really.

  Anne stood in her shower, weeping. What an awful day today was! Rejected and insulted by her own mother!

  She soaped herself all over, for the tenth time. The water sluiced over her, swirling down the drain, and still she felt unclean.

  Sarah had always liked Randall best, right from the moment Anne brought him home to meet her parents. They were so much alike, warm, openly, even flamboyantly affectionate, humorous, given to spells of silliness. They behaved almost flirtatiously with each other. Sometimes when they were together, they made Anne feel like she was their parent. Randall didn’t mind the chaos of the Franklin household. He even seemed comfortable in it. Of course, he would.

  Still, Sarah was Anne’s mother, not Randall’s!

  No use torturing herself. She hadn’t counted on her mother. Long ago she’d learned not to do that. She still had Carmen to support her at the psychiatrist’s and, of course, Reverend Christopher. Still, she hated it that she had to demean herself by asking them to speak to Dr. Lawrence. How could her mother chastise her for using the occasional tranquilizer? It was a wonder Anne wasn’t using more, what with the election coming up at the same time as her divorce, and Randall, once her husband, suddenly her enemy. And it didn’t help at all that Tessa’s personality was changing. Randall said it was normal, and Anne supposed it was. Tessa wasn’t a child anymore. She was almost a teenager. God, she’d probably start her period any day now, poor child. She’d be even more difficult to deal with then. The subject of boys would arise—it was all too disgusting to dwell on.

  “Mom?” Tessa’s voice broke into her thoughts, startling Anne so that she dropped the soap on her foot.

  “What?”

  “Carmen’s going to drive me to camp now.”

  Anne turned off the water, grabbed a thick white bath sheet from the heated drying rack and wrapped it around her. When she opened the door, steam billowed out around her into the bedroom.

  Tessa stood there in her white shorts and navy T-shirt, her backpack slung over one shoulder, her long blond hair neatly plaited and tied with a plaid grosgrain ribbon. Lovely innocent child, Anne thought, smiling, although over the past few weeks as Tessa had grown taller, it appeared that her waist was thinning and her chest developing, making the sight of her bittersweet.

  “Have fun, then,” Anne said. “I’ll be here when you get back this afternoon.”

  “Okay. Bye, Mom.” Tessa skipped from the room and down the stairs. The front door slammed.

  Anne dressed in an empire-waisted dress of violet linen and slipped a matching headband on to hold her blond hair away from her face.

  The house as she walked down the stairs and through the hall to her office hummed steadfastly around her: air conditioner, refrigerator, clocks, computer—all the machines that so reliably, more reliably than human beings, attended to her needs.

  Carmen had dusted and vacuumed her office while Anne showered, and now it waited in immaculate serenity for Anne’s presence. Anne’s assistant, Rebecca, had today off. Anne would be blissfully alone while she worked at her desk, making phone calls, dictating letters into her tape recorder, catching up on her mail.

  Anne seated herself at her desk. Folding her hands, she took a deep breath: then with the tips of her perfectly manicured fingernails, touched her white telephone, the small caller ID box, the thick Rolodex, and delicately moved her daily calendar a fraction of an inch, so that it was exactly in the center of her desk. She touched her tape dispenser, her stapler, the malachite box where she kept her stamps. She touched the pastel Lucite in and out boxes. Last, she set both hands on the silver and amethyst tray where her pens lay. Her blotter was centered perfectly on her desk.

  She opened her appointment book and began to work.

  After taking the oath of office, all new judges spent a month in training at four different courts around the state. Tuesday morning Kelly began her training at the Middlesex County Courthouse—the largest court in the state, serving over one and a half million people—the courthouse where at the end of the month she would preside.

  Today she sat with Judge Marjorie Spriggs, a wiry, tiny African-American woman in her fifties. Kelly had argued cases before Judge Spriggs before and had been impressed by the woman’s astuteness and compassion, a dynamite mixture.

  When Kelly entered Judge Spriggs’s chambers at 8:45 on Tuesday morning, she found the office already bustling.

  “Good morning, Kelly,” Judge Spriggs called from behind her desk, barely looking up from the piles of folders she was plowing through. “Welcome to the madhouse.”

  “Good morning.”

  “Arlene, meet Kelly, Kelly, Arlene.”

  Judge Spriggs’s secretary rose briefly to shake Kelly’s hand before diving back into the papers on her desk. “We can’t find a file. We have to manually file all our cases, and it’s time-consuming and confusing. We need to be computerized.”

  “We need a whole new courthouse,” Judge Spriggs barked.

  “But it’s a beautiful building,” Kelly protested.

  “Beautiful, schmutiful—this place is a dump. Found it!” Yanking a folder out, Judge Spriggs flipped through it, scribbling her signature on various documents, talking to Kelly as she worked. “It’s unsafe and impossible to organize. The staff has to run all over the place to get anything done. Ask the probation officers about ‘beauty.’ Hah! Judges and registers and staff have to ride the same elevator as the people we’ve just ordered to give their wives their life savings. Security’s impossible here. You’ll be getting your own key for the back entrance of the courthouse. Don’t lose it. You can ask a court officer to escort you from your car and back, and you ought to do it. Don’t forget that attorney, what’s his name—”

  “Barton,” Arlene said.

  “Barton—a few years ago, leaving the courthouse with the woman he’d represented in a divorce, the ex-husband shot and killed both the woman and the lawyer. Don’t forget you’re dealing with people in states of terrible emotional distress. Men hate letting someone else tell them what to do. I predict in the next few years we’re going to see our court officers carrying guns. And I need another cup of coffee. Where’s my mug? Arlene, have you seen my mug?”

  “Here you are, Judge. Would you like some, Judge MacLeod?”

  “No, thanks.” Kelly felt she was absorbing all the adrenaline she could handle just by being in the same room with Judge Spriggs.

  Judge Spriggs’s register opened the door from the courtroom. “Ready, Judge.”

  “Come in here a minute. Judge MacLeod, this is Merry Wickes, my register. The registers are our guard dogs—remember that. Merry’s bright and thorough. You need anything, ask her. Okay, let’s go.”

  Merry went out. Judge Spriggs chugged down her coffee like a frat boy draining a bottle of beer, grabbed her robe from the closet, nodded to Kelly to don a robe as well, and announced, “Show time.”

  Judge Spriggs led the way into the courtroom and up behind the judge’s bench. The court officer had already brought up another chair for Kelly, placed next to Spriggs’s. In a baritone voice that would part waters, he announced, “Hear ye, Hear ye, Hear ye. All rise. Court’s in session. The Honorable Marjorie Spriggs presiding. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Turn off your cell phones and pagers.”

  Kelly sat looking out at the courtroom, for the first time behind the judge’s bench rather than before it. The large, beautiful room with its high ceilings, brass lamps, blue and gold walls, was packed.

  “Good morning,” Judge Spriggs greeted the courtroom. “We’ve got a new judge with us this morning. Judge MacLeod. She’ll be helping me out, so you’ll get double your money. Let’s go. Who’s up first?”

  The clerk reached up to hand Judge Spriggs a folder and then read the docket number, the name of the case: Hodges vs. Hodges, and the cause of action: contempt.

  “They’re both pro se, Your Honor,” the clerk said.

  “Okay, come up here,” Judge Spriggs directed, waving her hands toward her chest.

  The couple who approached the witness stand made Kelly think of the old nursery rhyme about Jack Sprat who could eat no fat and his wife who could eat no lean. The moon-faced woman covered her nearly three hundred pounds with a shapeless gray garment. Her ex-husband creaked up on toothpick legs encased in worn but clean jeans and a short-sleeved white shirt from which his thin arms protruded like twigs.

  Register Wickes swore them in.

  “Okay,” Judge Spriggs said. “What’s going on?”

  “Your Honor, when my wife and I were divorced two months ago, I was given weekly visitation rights so I could see our son. Well, it’s been two months, and I haven’t been able to have him over at my place yet. That’s not right.”

  The judge peered down at the woman. “Mrs. Hodges?”

  The young woman wrung her hands together. “Judge, Keanu is just a little baby. He’s too young to be away from his mother.”

  Judge Spriggs flipped through the papers in her folder. “How old is this child?”

  “He’s eighteen months old, Your Honor,” Mr. Hodges replied. “He’s walking.”

  “Tell me about your home situation, Mr. Hodges.”

  “I work five days a week at the Mobil station, but I get weekends off, and I could take care of my little boy in my house then. I’ve got a room set up for him, his own little bed. New sheets. Toys and everything. Also, I’ve got a girlfriend now, and she could help me with Keanu.”

  At the mention of the girlfriend, Mrs. Hodges burst into tears. “Don’t take my baby away from me, Judge! He shouldn’t be separated from his mother!”

  Judge Spriggs looked down at Mrs. Hodges. “Tell me about your situation, Mrs. Hodges.”

  “I live with my mother and father. I don’t work because I want to take care of my little boy twenty-four/seven. I told Harry if he wants to come see Keanu he can come to my house.”

  “Well, Mrs. Hodges, it does say here in the divorce papers that Mr. Hodges gets twenty-four hours a week to have his son at his house. That’s only fair.”

  “But Keanu is only a little baby!”

  “No, he’s a toddler, and he needs to spend some time with his father. And you know what, Mrs. Hodges?” Judge Spriggs lowered her voice seductively. “You need some time off. If you’ve been taking care of your baby twenty-four/seven for eighteen months, you’ve got to be exhausted. You need some time for yourself. You can go out and see a movie, go shopping with a friend, or just use the time to kick back and relax. It would be good for all of you.”

  Mrs. Hodges sniffled.

  “Now Mr. Hodges is way behind in his time with this child, so I’m going to order that he have the child every Wednesday night for the next month. Does that suit you, Mr. Hodges?”

  “That’s fine, Your Honor.”

  Mrs. Hodges wailed.

  “Mrs. Hodges,” Judge Spriggs said, “I hope you understand how lucky you are to have the father interested in your little boy. I can’t tell you how many cases I see where the child has a father who won’t pay child support or even see the child. I want you to think about something: Do you hate your ex-husband more than you love your child?”

  Mrs. Hodges swayed on her tiny feet as she contemplated the question. It seemed almost beyond her comprehension. At last she whimpered tentatively, “No?”

  “That’s the right answer.” Judge Spriggs looked over at the scrawny father. “Mr. Hodges, I hope you will be as helpful as possible in making this situation comfortable for Mother.”

  “Yes, Your Honor, I will.”

  “Mrs. Hodges,” Judge Spriggs said, steel entering her voice, “I don’t want to see the two of you back in my courtroom because you haven’t let your husband have access to his son. I don’t want to have to fine you or put you in jail for contempt of court. You understand?”

  Pouting, the woman nodded.

  “All right,” Judge Spriggs said. “Now I hope the two of you can go off and cooperate. You’ve got the best interest of your little boy to keep in the forefront of your thoughts. Okay, good luck.”

  As the couple went off, Judge Spriggs leaned over to Kelly. “If they come back, they’ll have to go to the court clinic. But sometimes they really need to hear it from a judge. No matter how trivial or tiresome it might seem, especially at the end of a long day, each case has to be heard as if it’s the most important one around.”

  Kelly nodded.

  “Okay,” Judge Spriggs snapped. “What’s next?”

  The day ripped past. They dealt with matters of motions to compel production of documents, motions for temporary orders, and uncontested divorces which, as “amicable” as divorces could be, still aroused powerful emotions. One woman stood before the bench in taut, fiercely controlled dignity, while tears streamed down her ashen face. Another time, the husband standing before them seemed to age years within minutes as he acknowledged in a strained voice that yes, their marriage was irretrievably broken. His face turned gray, his lips blue, and his shoulders slumped forward—his entire body seemed to cave in as his married life crumbled and officially, legally, dissolved.

  This was not a new sight to Kelly, but it was always hard. Sitting on the bench provided her with quite a different picture of the proceedings than representing a client on a case had done. She could witness a defendant blushing, or cringing; she could see a plaintiff drop his eyes, bite his nails, or attempt to hide all traces of emotion, only to give it away by the muscle that clenched and unclenched along his jaw.

  After one day on the bench she realized that even the wisest, most sympathetic person couldn’t solve all the problems that came before them. An impoverished mother, divorced, with three small children, came to ask the court to give custody of those children to her ex-husband, their father, because she was ill with cancer and would not have the energy, with various treatments, to care for the children. But the father was a drug addict and an alcoholic, barely capable of taking care of himself. He pleaded with the court not to be given custody; he was afraid the stress of having to care for three small children in his straitened circumstances, in his small apartment over a sporting-goods store, would drive him back to drink and drugs. Neither party had parents or siblings who could help out. “Let’s ease into this with baby steps,” Judge Spriggs decided, ordering the father to take care of the children two days and one night a week for the next month, after which they’d review the situation again. Kelly didn’t think she could have come up with a wiser ruling.