My ex-wife’s lawyer stood in family court, waved my pay stubs around, pointed at my Walmart shirt, and told the judge I couldn’t even afford half of my daughter’s tuiti…

The fluorescent lights in courtroom 4B buzzed with the particular persistence of something that cannot be turned off. I had been sitting under them for forty minutes, long enough that the sound had become part of the room’s texture, part of the air itself, part of the careful performance of diminishment that Gregory Hartwell was conducting at the plaintiff’s table while I sat with my hands folded and let him conduct it.

He held my last three pay stubs between two fingers. Not gripped, not clenched. Between two fingers, the way you hold something that carries risk of contamination. He let them hang there for a moment before speaking, which was a technique I recognized: let the audience absorb the visual before the words confirm what they are already being told to think.

I wore a blue button-down shirt from Walmart. I had known, getting dressed that morning in my one-bedroom apartment that smelled of mildew when it rained, that I was going to be wearing that shirt in this room today, and I had made the decision to wear it anyway, for reasons I had not shared with anyone, including Miguel Santos, who was my public defender and who had told me three times over the past two weeks that I should consider buying something better for the hearing. I had thanked him each time and changed the subject.

“Your Honor,” Hartwell said, “I’d like to enter Exhibit Fourteen.”

He turned just enough toward me that the gallery could see both of us at once: the navy suit and the Walmart shirt, the expensive watch and the grease that had worked permanently into the skin of my knuckles from eighteen months at Henderson’s Auto Repair. He was good at this. He had probably practiced the turn.

“Mr. Dalton earns one thousand nine hundred and forty-seven dollars per month, before taxes, working as a mechanic at Henderson’s Auto Repair.” He said mechanic with the neutrality of a man who has learned that outright contempt is less effective than careful factual recitation. “My client earns fourteen thousand five hundred dollars per month. Their daughter attends Riverside Academy, where annual tuition is thirty-eight thousand dollars.”

He paused.

“Mr. Dalton’s income would not cover half of one year’s tuition.”

From the gallery, Jessica’s mother made a sound. It was not quite a laugh. It was the sound of a person trying to suppress a laugh in a room where suppression is expected, but not trying especially hard.

I did not look back.

I had not looked at the gallery since I sat down. I had not looked at Jessica, who was at the plaintiff’s table in a cream-colored blouse with her dark hair professionally blown out and her hands resting on a yellow legal pad in a posture of composed suffering. I had looked, when I entered, at Judge Patricia Whitmore, who had silver hair pulled back severely and reading glasses she wore at the end of her nose and a face that gave nothing away, which I had been counting on.

Hartwell was still going.

“We are asking for nothing unreasonable. Primary custody to my client. Supervised visitation for Mr. Dalton, twice monthly. Child support calculated at the standard percentage of his income.”

He glanced at the papers as though he needed to check the number, though I suspected he had it memorized.

“Approximately four hundred and twenty-seven dollars per month.”

This time the sound from the gallery did not bother with suppression.

Miguel shifted beside me. He was twenty-nine, earnest, overworked, good at what he did within the limits of what he had to work with. He had looked at my case and seen a losing hand and had spent three weeks trying to figure out how to lose it less badly. I had not told him everything. I had told him enough to guide our strategy, which was: say nothing, wait for the question, answer it.