8-27-01 M 8:30 AM EDT 5:30 AM PDT

We're heading back west, coach. The gate agent used the dress code to bump Rochelle from first class. The last I wrote, 15 minutes on the laptop, we were consulting with Mac's lawyer, Fern, in her office. I'm going to do fifteen minutes here in this travel notebook, too, to try to fill the book. I'm exhausted. A week ago today, we saw Mac in the DCDC (District of Columbia Detention Center). Fern drove us from her office. We parked on a residential street near the historic home of Frederick Douglas. We filled out some forms and handed them to a woman behind a glass window. After a while, we were buzzed into a wire cage where we were frisked. I had to leave behind my pen and the baby's book (Forgot them when we left). The clock in that room in the prison did not move its hands. We were buzzed through another cage door. The elevator was broken, so we had to go up the stairs. We waited in another room lined with glass windows and phones where the prisoners talk to their visitors. Ada made friends with everyone there. Everyone there was black. After about an hour, Mac came in wearing an orange jumpsuit, hair cropped short.

7:55 AM MDT 30,000 ft

Over the Rockies, flying home: the last I wrote, we were visiting my brother. I had hoped we might sit around a table or something, that he could hold the baby, I could give him some I had bought for him, but we had to talk on phones through a glass window. I thought it would be hard to talk like that, that there would be any awkward silences, but we talked the full hour without any pauses. He has bronchitis, which sucks, but he didn't talk too much about how shitty it must be. We mostly talked about sports and the clowns we know back home. Then a guard came and took him away. Fern took Rochelle, Ada, and me back to the hotel around four o'clock. The girls fell asleep. We needed diapers, so I went out to get diapers. I stopped at a bar, the Capitol Hill Lounge and had two beers and a quesadilla. I got diapers at CVS, but they didn't have any breast pads. A downpour broke on the way back, so I stepped into another tavern and wrote in this notebook. When I got back, I read some more Lord Jim. Then, we went back out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, and Rochelle got a pizza. The baby attracted many fans to the sidewalk table where we ate. We were to jagged out to stroll over to any memorials or anything, so we just went to bed.

We met Fern again early the next morning so she could depose me. She said I would be a witness during Mac's trial. I don't know too much about it. Just that he told me he was repo-ing cars. The second day's visit to the DCDC was pretty much a repeat of the first. though I felt a little bit worse knowing I wouldn't be seeing him the again the next day. We left DC straight from the jail. Horrendous traffic knotted up the expressway to Baltimore. Rochelle drove while I played with Ada, but I typed a page, too. We got to Jim's and Meredith's in Highland, New Jersey around eight. They grilled steak and chicken, served it with corn, and pasta salad, and kept the beer coming. Jim told a funny story about driving to upstate New York to ask Meredith's dad for her hand in marriage. He drove all the way up, and her dad wasn't there. He waited in the car in while it snowed, practicing what he would say. When Meredith's dad came driving back, he was in a pickup with two other guys. All of them got out of the truck carrying rifles.