A woman greets me and introduces herself as Suh Jung, Attorney Koppleman's paralegal assistant. She's a tiny, pleasant Asian woman with jet black hair brutally cropped above her ears, a helmet, she'll explain later, necessary to protect herself from the cliche of submissiveness, the china-doll stereotype people immediately had applied when they saw a thick rope of hair hanging past her waist, hair that her father insisted must be uncut and worn twisted into a single braid in public, her mother combing, brushing, oiling her hair endlessly till shiny pounds of it lopped off the day the father died, and then, strangely, she'd wanted to save the hair she had hated, wanted to glue it back together strand by strand and drape it over one of those pedestalled heads you see in beauty shops so she and her mother could continue forever the grooming rituals that had been one of the few ways they could relate in a household her father relentlessly, meticulously hammered into an exquisitely lifelike, flawless representation of his will, like those sailing ships in bottles or glass butterflies in the museum, so close to the real thing you stare and stare waiting for them to flutter away, a household the father shattered in a fit of pique or rage or boredom the day she opened the garage door after school and found him barefoot, shitty-pantsed, dangling from a rafter, beside the green family Buick.