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the house, but Ber nie has already cleared and washed the pots and pans and wiped down the counter. He cleans out the refrigerator instead, pull ing out leftovers from Bernie’s birthday two days ago: barbecued meat, dried and rubbery by now, old potato salad, and beer, a can of which he drinks standing up, holding open the door to the fridge. He burps and reaches for another to kill his lingering headache. He finishes the second beer standing over his stereo, flipping through his LPs, trying to find just the right one. He picks out an Otis record, his favorite, and sets the needle down on track number five.
    I want security, yeah, and I want it at any cost.
    Finally, he sits down with the mail, the bills he’s been avoiding, the kitchen calculator, and his checkbook. He runs the numbers two and three times and comes up short every time. He rear ranges the bills, deciding which ones he has to pay now and which ones can wait. What’s left in the register seems hardly enough to eat on, let alone raise a family. He looks around their tiny onebedroom apartment, cramped as it is with mismatched furniture, law books, and borrowed clothes for the baby, and worries that they’ll never get out of here. Back against the sofa, his financial life spread across the worn carpet, he thinks through his caseload, the open files on his desk, like running lottery numbers in his head, trying to guess which cases to play, where to put his money and time.
    It’s become a game for him, a gamble.
    It didn’t start out this way. One of his first cases out of law school was a police brutality lawsuit against the city. A rookie cop had allegedly roughed up a sixteen-year-old black kid who was nervous and fumbling for his license. The way the boy told it, the cop dragged him from the car, yelled a few epithets, and knocked him to the ground, hard enough that it left bruises and a scar that was still showing by the time they made it to trial. Jay took the case pro bono, going head to head with the city attorney, a white man who had at least a decade of litigation experience over Jay. But Jay had, in so many ways, been preparing for that trial his whole life. His own legal troubles were not so far from his mind. He remembered what it was to sit at a defense table, remembered what it felt like to have his basic civil liberties up for debate. The anger was still with him then. And he let it guide him the whole way. He went after the cop with a vengeance, making the poor man stand in for everything that was wrong with a country and a government that applied the law willy-nilly. By closing argu ments, half the jury was nodding along to his every other word, and Jay won the case.
    But it was a moral victory, not an economic one. What he made off the city’s meager settlement wasn’t enough to cover his expenses or to make up for money he lost by ignoring his other cases during the trial. His performance in the courtroom got his name in the papers, for the second time in his life, and before he knew it, he had folks lined up in his office, all asking for his help. They’d heard he took that boy’s case for free and wanted to know what he could do for them. Their problems were low rent, the stuff you find in any black neighborhood in the country: a son in jail or a cousin who’d been let go on his job or an ex-husband who wasn’t making his child-support payments on time. They never had any money, and Jay could hardly make his own rent. Practicing law, he would soon find out, is like running any other small business. Most days he’s just trying to make his overhead: insurance and filing fees, Eddie Mae’s meager salary, plus $500 a month to lease the furnished office space on West Gray.
    He, quite frankly, can’t afford his principles.
    He needs a win, a jackpot.
    And if it comes in the form of a prostitute with a neck ache, then so be it.
    He shoves the bills together into a messy pile, stuffing them inside his checkbook, and decides on another