“Nothing warms the cockles of my heart like the words tax deductible,” my dad says, and this time my mom delivers her on-camera version of a laugh, which sounds like a box opened, an explosion of confetti. I can picture how she must look too—her eyes wide, white teeth gleaming, her neck pale and exposed, the delight of a mom seeing her toddler after a long day of work. A magazine once remarked that my mother had a Katharine Hepburn laugh, and I know back in New Jersey, when she was a waitress-slash-actress, she’d watch old movies and re-recite the lines because she couldn’t afford acting classes. I bet she sat in front of a mirror and perfected that laugh, just as she perfected crying on cue, and the one-two punch line on sitcoms.

I think: What the hell is going on?

I think: Maybe there are some things I don’t need to know.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Now

Isla watches cable news on the television in the playroom, vacuuming up the new information. The headline JOY FIELDS FACING UP TO FORTY YEARS BEHIND BARS scrolls endlessly across the bottom of the screen.

“What would putting Joy Fields in jail actually accomplish? She’s not dangerous. Wouldn’t it be better for society if she were severely fined or forced to endow a scholarship for underprivileged kids? That seems more commensurate with the crime, surely,” a talking head, a bald white guy with square tortoiseshell glasses argues. “Force her to turn that so-called charitable donation into an actual charity.”

“First of all, in this country, it’s supposed to be a fact that if you break the law, you suffer the consequences. But because Joy Fields is a white actress with a pretty smile, she doesn’t have to serve time? No. Literally hundreds of thousands of people of color have been put away for so much longer for so much less. There’s a mom of four kids in Oklahoma who is currently serving twelve years for marijuana possession,” a white woman, with a Drybar blowout, argues back.

“But then isn’t the argument that we should have less incarceration generally, not that we should put Joy Fields in prison?” the man argues.

“Maybe, but my point is that not until we see equal administration of the law, not until I see the mass release of African Americans from our nation’s prison, will I start losing sleep over whether this overly entitled, overly privileged, cheating—”

Isla clicks the TV off.

“What were you watching?” I ask.

“You guys have lawyers to explain stuff to you. I have MSNBC,” she says, matter-of-factly.

“How bad do you think—”

“Bad,” she says, fast, unblinking.

“Do you agree with that woman? That Mom deserves to go to prison?” I don’t add what we both are thinking. That if she thinks Mom does, then she probably thinks I do too.