HERE’S MY QUESTION: What age are you when you’re in Heaven? I mean, if it’s Heaven, you should be atyour beauty-queen best, and I doubt that all the people who die of old age are wandering around toothlessand bald. It opens up a whole additional realm of questions, too. If you hang yourself, do you walk around allgross and blue, with your tongue spitting out of your mouth? If you are killed in a war, do you spend eternityminus the leg that got blown up by a mine?

I figure that maybe you get a choice. You fill out the application form that asks you if you want a star view ora cloud view, if you like chicken or fish or manna for dinner, what age you’d like to be seen as by everyoneelse. Like me, for example, I might pick seventeen, in the hopes I grow boobs by then, and even if I’m apruny centegenarian by the time I die, in Heaven I’d be young and pretty.

Once at a dinner party I heard my father say that even though he was old old old, in his heart he was twenty-one. So maybe there is a place in your life you wear out like a rut, or even better, like the soft spot on thecouch. And no matter what else happens to you, you come back to that.

The problem, I suppose, is that everyone’s different. What happens in Heaven when all these people aretrying to find each other after so many years spent apart? Say that you die and start looking around for yourhusband, who died five years ago. What if you’re picturing him at seventy, but he hit his groove at sixteenand is wandering around suave as can be?

Or what if you’re Kate, and you die at sixteen, but in Heaven you choose to look thirty-five, an age you nevergot to be here on Earth. How would anyone ever be able to find you?

Campbell calls my father at the station when we’re having lunch, and says that opposing counsel wants totalk about the case. Which is a really stupid way to put it, since we all know he’s talking about my mother.

He says we have to meet at three o’clock in his office, no matter that it’s Sunday.

I sit on the floor with Judge’s head in my lap. Campbell is so busy he doesn’t even tell me not to do it. Mymother arrives right on the dot and (since Kerri the secretary is off today) walks in by herself. She has made aspecial effort to pull her hair back into a neat bun. She’s put on some makeup. But unlike Campbell, whowears this room like an overcoat he can shrug on and off, my mom looks completely out of place in a lawfirm. It is hard to believe that my mother used to do this for a living. I guess she used to be someone else,once. I suppose we all were.

“Hello,” she says quietly.

“Ms. Fitzgerald,” Campbell replies. Ice.

My mother’s eyes move from my father, at the conference table, to me, on the floor. “Hi,” she says again.

She steps forward, like she is going to hug me, but she stops.

“You called this meeting, Counselor,” Campbell prompts.

My mother sits down. “I know. I was…well, I’m hoping that we can clear this up. I want us to make adecision, together.”

Campbell raps his fingers on the table. “Are you offering us a deal?”

He makes it sound so businesslike. My mother blinks at him. “Yes, I guess I am.” She turns her chair towardme, as if only the............