Ruth has shut the door of the den behind her in an attempt to sequester herself with her busywork; she has to pay the household bills, and she has to order tickets for the theater for sometime during the week after Christmas, though she has left this so late she suspects that they might be unable to get seats this year. She has to balance her checkbook and organize her receipts, of which there are so many she cannot close her wallet anymore; she’s stuffed receipts in pockets and left them floating in her pocketbook, and she knows she’ll never find them all. Somehow, she finds it harder to stay organized now that she’s not working than she did when she worked full-time. While she was working, she knew the issues she was working with: Zeke Meuller, the nightclub owner who was sued every time a fight broke out in one of his clubs; Anastasia Koeppel, the Latvian landlady in the Bronx who demanded unreasonably detailed contracts for her tenants to sign; Cecilia Mirran, whose long-term care insurance Ruth arranged at the very last minute before she was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s—though it was Marcel, her son, whom she always dealt with most. She shakes her head. Marcel, who called over his mother’s every last toothbrush and hairpin. He’s a little crazy, maybe, as Wilson’s always said, but he’s got a good heart, she thinks. And he’s lonely; no matter how many times she reminds him, still he calls as if she were his mother’s lawyer, though probably she’s the closest thing to a friend he has. Last Christmas—Marcel’s first since his mother had moved out of the house they shared and into the home—Ruth had invited him to spend the day with them, because, as he’d said to her and she said to Wilson, he had no one else. And he’s not the first of her clients to become attached. Zeke Mueller invites them to his Halloween party every year—though they never go. Before he died, Sandy Lubbock, for whom Ruth won six figures for his severed finger, sent Isabelle a small stuffed animal on the first of every month. Probably that closeness came from working at home—her clients saw her in clogs instead of heels, were dribbled and drooled on by Maggie, had to tiptoe around Isabelle’s train track set up in the foyer. Ruth has never been one to do things conventionally.