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night when he and two friends decided to go after a drug dealer who didn’t bring them enough pot. They got high, hog-tied the guy, and threw him in the trunk. Loomis whacked the dealer over the head with a baseball bat, cracking his skull and sending him into convulsions. When he started choking on his own blood, Loomis turned him over so that he could breathe.
    “I can’t believe they’re charging me with assault,” Loomis told Alex through the bars of the holding cell. “I saved the guy’s life.”
    “Well,” Alex said. “We might have been able to use that-if you hadn’t been the one who inflicted the injury in the first place.”
    “You gotta plead me out for less than a year. I don’t want to get sent down to the prison in Concord…”
    “You could have been charged with attempted murder, you know.”
    Loomis scowled. “I was doing the cops a favor, getting a lowlife like that off the streets.”
    The same, Alex knew, could be said for Loomis Bronchetti, if he was convicted and sent to the state prison. But her job was not about judging Loomis. It was about working hard, in spite of her personal opinions about a client. It was about showing one face to Loomis, and knowing she had another one masked away. It was about not letting her feelings interfere with her ability to get Loomis Bronchetti acquitted.
    “Let me see what I can do,” she said.
    Lacy understood that all infants were different-tiny little creatures with their own quirks and habits and peeves and desires. But somehow, she’d expected that this second foray into motherhood would produce a child like her first-Joey, a golden boy who would make passersby turn their heads, stop her as she pushed the stroller to tell her what a beautiful child she had. Peter was just as beautiful, but he was definitely a more challenging baby. He’d cry, colicky, and have to be soothed by putting his car seat on the vibrating clothes dryer. He’d be nursing, and suddenly arch away from her.
    It was two in the morning, and Lacy was trying to get Peter to settle back to sleep. Unlike Joey, who fell into slumber like taking a giant step off a cliff, Peter fought it every step of the way. She patted his back and rubbed small circles between his tiny shoulder blades as he hiccuped and wailed. Frankly, she felt like doing that, too. For the past two hours, she’d watched the same infomercial on Ginsu knives. She had counted the ticking stripes on the elephantine arm of the sofa until they blurred. She was so exhausted that everything ached. “What’s the matter, little man,” she sighed. “What can I do to make you happy?”
    Happiness was relative, according to her husband. Although most people laughed when Lacy told them her husband’s job involved putting a price on joy, it was simply what economists did-find value for the intangibles in life. Lewis’s colleagues at Sterling College had presented papers on the relative push an education could provide, or universal health care, or job satisfaction. Lewis’s discipline was no less important, if unorthodox. It made him a popular guest on NPR, on Larry King, at corporate seminars-somehow, number crunching seemed sexier when you began talking about the dollar amount a belly laugh was worth, or a dumb blonde joke, for that matter. Regular sex, for example, was equivalent (happinesswise) to getting a $50,000 raise. However, getting a $50,000 raise wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if everyone else was getting a $50,000 raise, too. By the same token, what made you happy once might not make you happy now. Five years ago, Lacy would have given anything for a dozen roses brought home by her husband; now, if he offered her the chance to take a ten-minute nap, she would fall to the ground in paroxysms of delight.
    Statistics aside, Lewis would go down in history as being the economist who’d conceived a mathematical formula for happiness: R/E, or, Reality divided by Expectations. There were two ways to be happy: