“Then when is?” she asks, her voice hot. “If no one ever talks about race in court, how is anything ever supposed to change?”

I don’t have the answer to that. The wheels of systemic justice are slow; but fortunately, there’s a little more oil in the machinery for personal justice, which throws cash at the victims to remove some of the indignity. “You file a civil lawsuit. I can’t do it for you, but I can call around and find you someone who works with employment discrimination.”

“But I can’t afford a lawyer—”

“They’ll take your case on contingency. They’ll get a third of whatever payout you win,” I explain. “To be honest, with that Post-it note, I think you’d be able to get compensatory damages for the salary you lost, as well as punitive damages for the idiotic decision your employer made.”

Her jaw drops. “You mean I’d get money?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a couple million,” I admit.

Ruth Jefferson is speechless.

“You’ve got one hundred and eighty days to file an EEOC complaint.”

“And then what?”

“Then, the EEOC will sit on it until the criminal trial is finished.”

“Why?”

“Because assigning a guilty verdict against a plaintiff is significant,” I say frankly. “It will change how your civil lawyer will draw up the complaint for you. A guilty finding is admissible as evidence, and would hurt your civil case.”

She turns this over in her mind. “Which is why you don’t want to talk about discrimination during this trial,” Ruth says. “So that guilty verdict won’t come to pass.” She folds her hands in her lap, silent. She shakes her head once, and then closes her eyes.

“You were kept from doing your job,” I say softly. “Don’t keep me from doing mine.”

Ruth takes a deep breath, opens her eyes, and meets my gaze. “All right,” she says. “What do you want to know?”

THE MORNING AFTER I AM released from jail I wake up and stare at the same old crack in the ceiling that I always say I’ll patch and never get around to doing. I feel the bar from the pullout couch digging into my back and give thanks for it. I close my eyes and listen to the sweet harmony of the garbage trucks on our street.

In my nightgown (a fresh one; I will donate the one I wore to the arraignment to Goodwill at the first opportunity) I start a pot of coffee and pad down the hall to Edison’s bedroom. My boy rests like the dead; even when I turn the knob and slip inside and sit down on the edge of the mattress, he doesn’t stir.

When Edison was little, my husband and I would watch him sleep. Sometimes Wesley would put his hand on Edison’s back, and we’d measure the rise and fall of his lungs. The science of creating another human is remarkable, and no matter how many times I’ve learned about cells and mitosis and neural tubes and all the rest that goes into forming a baby, I can’t help but think there’s a dash of miracle involved, too.

Edison rumbles deep in his chest, and he rubs his eyes. “Mama?” he says, sitting up, instantly awake. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I tell him. “Everything is right in the world.”

He exhales, then looks at his clock. “I have to get ready for school.”

I know, from our conversation in the car last night on the drive home, that Edison missed a whole day of classes in order to post bail for me, learning more about mortgages and real estate than I probably know myself. “I’ll call the school secretary. To explain about yesterday.”

But we both know there’s a difference between Please excuse Edison for being absent; he had a stomach bug and Please excuse Edison for being absent; he was bailing his mother out of jail. Edison shakes his head. “That’s okay. I’ll just talk to my teachers.”

He doesn’t meet my eye, and I feel a seismic shift between us.

“Thank you,” I say quietly. “Again.”

“You don’t have to thank me, Mama,” he murmurs.

“No, I do.” I realize, to my shock, that all the tears I managed to keep inside during the last twenty-four hours are suddenly swimming in my eyes.

“Hey,” Edison says, and he reaches out to hug me.

“I’m sorry,” I say, hiccuping against his shoulder. “I don’t know why I’m falling apart now.”

“It’s going to be okay.”

I feel it again, that movement of the earth beneath my feet, the resettling of my bones against the backdrop of my soul. It takes me a second to realize that for the first time in our lives, Edison is the one comforting me, instead of the other way around.

I used to wonder if a mother could see the shift when her child became an adult. I wondered if it was clinical, like at the onset of puberty; or emotional, like the first time his heart was broken; or temporal, like the moment he said I do. I used to wonder if maybe it was a critical mass of life experiences—graduation, first job, first baby—that tipped the balance; if it was the sort of thing you noticed immediately when you saw it, like a port-wine stain of sudden gravitas, or if it crept up slowly, like age in a mirror.