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said. “Ah, Joe … I don’t—”
    “That’s what New Jersey wants, since she’s only ten months shy of eighteen. So they try her as an adult, and they win, she gets life in an adult prison. No possibility of parole for thirty years.”
    He closed his eyes, then opened them and looked straight at me with his bleak, bloodshot gaze. “Can you believe that, Pete? My little girl, in jail for the rest of her life?”
    “That won’t happen.” Although why wouldn’t it?
    “But what do we do? What can we do?” His eyes trapped me. “Pete, we’ll bankrupt ourselves before that happens. We’ll spirit her to Mexico. We’ll figure it out. I’m not kidding.”
    “Joe, that won’t happen.”
    “Thirty years in medium-security prison. Do you know what those places are
like
? Do you know what can happen to a girl like Laura in a place like that?”
    “Listen—”
    “She’ll be in confinement, no community, no visits except behind bars, plate glass, no future, her company is murderers and gang members, she’s alone, she grows old, we die, and she’s still behind bars.”
    “Come on—”
    But he waved me off.
    “Come on,” I said again. I don’t know why.
    Laura was born our first year out of college, when we were all just twenty-three. Joe and Iris were in Philly together, Iris for an MBA at Wharton, and Joe at Temple for medical school; they’d spent the summer before they started school trying to figure out if they should get engaged or move on to less familiar horizons, since they’d been dating for three years already, after all. Then, during her first week of school and Joe’s third, Iris found herself throwing up between classes, exhausted in the afternoons. Joe proposed, they were married over winter break, Laura was born in early spring. A redhead, just like Iris.
    I remember those days with fondness, although of course I wasn’t the one trying to juggle an MBA course load with a newborn, or living with my parents and sisters and brand-new wife in the one-bathroom North Philly row house where I’d grown up. In those days, I was comfortably stationed in a dorm at Mount Sinai, and Elaine shared a big two-bedroom on Columbus with two roommates; what did we know about cramped and broke? What did we know about mastitis, no privacy, kid sisters taking forty-five-minute baths and the baby needing to be changed and the diapers in the bathroom vanity and everyone in the house screaming? Elaine and I knew nothing — in fact, the cheeriness of home-cooked meals and little babies appealed to us, so we took weekend drives to see Joe and Iris whenever we could tear ourselves away from New York. We liked to walk Laura, in her little stroller, to the zoo or Fairmount Park, let Joe and Iris take in a movie by themselves. Elaine and I were engaged but planned to marry only after I finished medical school. When we visited Joe and Iris for the weekend, Mrs. Stern made us sleep in separate rooms.
    After their graduate degrees, the Sterns moved to Baltimore; Joe did his training at Hopkins, and Iris took a job in the corporate services division at First Mariner Bank. They put Laura in nursery school and day care and worked long hours, but despite their benign neglect, the girl seemed to be growing into a well-behaved and intelligent little person. She was fond of finger painting—well, all children are — but Iris treated Laura’s finger paintings as if they were real masterpieces, getting them nicely framed and hanging them above the mantel. And you know, all dressed up like that, the paintings sort of looked like modern art. Elaine cooed about them; we all did.
    “And I’m not surprised they’re blaming us, you know?” Joe said, putting down the salt shaker he’d been fiddling with. “If it were someone else’s kid, I’d blame the parents, too.”
    “You wouldn’t—”
    “I mean, I think I
want
to be blamed. I want it to be my fault. I don’t want it to be hers. It was us, we were shitty parents, we