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paneled den. Olivia’s brothers—both of them sanitation workers for the township, single and still living at home as they glided through their twenties—were perched on the front edges of, respectively, the sofa and the BarcaLounger. They had bright yellow dishtowels in their back pockets; whenever they spotted bad behavior on the part of the opposing team, they leapt up to throw down penalty flags on the play.
    “Fun in Wisconsin” was the category Nick had come up with to cover this sort of activity. Fun in Wisconsin was also the old car the townspeople parked out on the ice of the lake in winter, then took bets on the date in spring when it would fall through. There was even more fun to be had in Wisconsin, activities Nick had so far successfully avoided—Friday fish fries, a card game called Sheepshead. Nick liked to say—but not to Olivia or her family, of course—that Wisconsin was an argument for Einstein’s general relativity theory, for there being masses so densethey caused depressions in the space-time fabric, places where the fabric warped. He knew he was being a snob, but it was a private snobbery—his fun in Wisconsin. He realized some people had fun in Illinois.
    He spent more time with Olivia’s family than he would have expected. This time he came up to spend last night at Yerkes, the University of Chicago’s crumbling observatory near Lake Geneva. He and his old professor, Bernie Cato, sometimes got together to talk shop—their shop being all of creation. Then, if the sky was clear, as it was last night, they got on the platform and raised it, opened the roof and spent some time searching for supernovas, puzzling out the gorgeous, operatic deaths of stars.
    This morning, he had headed over to the Lisowskis’. He could have just driven straight to the prison, but he usually stopped here first, then rode the rest of the way up with them. He had never known the family under ordinary circumstances. The first time he met them was at Olivia’s sentencing.
    “Time to go, boys,” Olivia’s mother said, clicking off the TV. The brothers went sullen, but rose and hovered out to find their jackets.
    In the visitors’ room, the brothers whiled away the dead time doing Travis Bickle impersonations at each other. They loved Taxi Driver . They had the collector’s edition of the tape, with special features and outtakes.
    “You talkin’ to me?”
    “You talkin’ to me?”
    And then Olivia entered from beyond a heavily painted metal door. She had changed in prison, but it wasn’t really prison that had changed her. She was whittling herself out of hardwood, remaking herself with only planes and edges. She looked more severe, more adult. She had lost that breathy way of speaking he used to think was sexy; that was gone. She had used her time inside to reformulate herself in opposition to the person she used to be—that is, someone who would smoke a day’s worth of hash, then eat some mushrooms, then do a little coke to balance off,then get behind the wheel of a car and kill a kid. She took a dim view of this person. Nick envied her. Prison was forcing her to atone. And eventually she would be released.
    She’d been in almost two years now, and was going to be in for a while longer. She most likely would have been out by now if the matter had gone to trial. But she went down for the whole mess, pleaded guilty to all of it. She wanted to pay, not just for her crimes, but also for her sins. At this point, she was not in for the reckless driving or the drugs; she was in for the undelivered mail in the trunk, a federal offense.
    The extreme order of prison life seemed to calm her. She worked breakfast and lunch in the cafeteria. She mixed vats of powdered eggs and water; ladled canned peach halves into tiny, battered, plastic dishes; slapped slices of bologna between slices of white bread. There were nearly three hundred inmates, so there was a lot of mixing and ladling and slapping to be done every