The wheel of birthday photos on my mirror has only one with the three of us together — me, Daddy, and Ma. I’m standing between my parents. We’re hugging each other, smiling, and because the picture is the only picture I have of the whole family, I consider it a treasure. The photo is from last year, when I turned thirteen.

It was taken by Nora Walsh. She wasn’t our lawyer yet. In fact, her taking the picture was the first contact we had with her. But we didn’t just get a family photo from that first meeting. The whole thing led to her becoming Daddy’s lawyer. Here’s how:

Ma and me were with Daddy having my birthday party at one of the prison tables when I noticed Daddy looking across the room. The visiting room was real crowded that Saturday, more crowded than usual. I’m not sure why, but it was jammed with small clusters of girlfriends and relatives, hunched over the small tables trying to get some kind of privacy even though privacy was impossible.

“Daddy, what you trying to see?” I finally asked.

Daddy pointed halfway across the room to a young woman seated at a table with an older prisoner. She was dressed in a gray pinstriped pantsuit and had a black canvas briefcase with her, and while she looked all put together in a slick, businesswoman kind of way, there was also something hard-looking about her. Her hair was cut pretty short and spiky, with a frosted silver tint, which I guess was her way of trying to look older, but it didn’t work. Her face was too creamy-smooth and unwrinkled for that, so the hairdo ended up giving her an edgy look. Plus her lipstick was bright rose. It was like she was in a struggle, the business suit giving her some kind of professional look, but the hair and lipstick making it look like she couldn’t wait to get home and change into blue jeans.

Daddy said her name was Nora Walsh. She’s a lawyer, he said, here to meet one of her clients, the man seated with her. Daddy said the man had worked on the outside as an “enforcer” for a big-time outfit in Boston called the Winter Hill Gang.

“Like the Mafia,” Daddy said, “except they’re Irish, not Italian.”

The enforcer was serving a life sentence for murder. He and Daddy were friendly, and the enforcer had told Daddy about Nora Walsh. How she’d paid her own way through Suffolk Law School. Just like she’d paid her way through an all-Catholic private high school, which was where the enforcer had come to know her. The enforcer’s daughter had attended the same school, and the two girls were close friends. So when Nora Walsh graduated recently from Suffolk Law and then passed the bar exam, it was as a courtesy to the enforcer’s family that she took him on as a client. “She’s a fighter,” the enforcer told Daddy.

Daddy said that after the enforcer told him this, he had started watching Nora Walsh whenever she came to the prison. Daddy learned that she might be new, but she quickly got herself a reputation. She worked for an old-time Boston criminal defense lawyer, and, being the rookie, she was given the firm’s grunt work. That meant handling the disciplinary cases for inmates before a board made up of prison officials. They were called D-Board cases. Nothing glamorous, that’s for sure, but Daddy said Nora defended prisoners before the D-Board as if she were appearing before the United States Supreme Court. Daddy heard stories how she was loud and gruff and impossible to intimidate. Daddy said her eyes even seemed to catch fire when she got mad at the board, and he said the enforcer told him the reason Nora was so tough was that she grew up poor in a housing project. Most people think only black people live in housing projects, but in Boston some projects are filled with poor white people, and Daddy told us Nora Walsh grew up in one of those. She was the third of six girls, all close in age, whose mother had divorced their father, a hopeless drunk, soon after the sixth was born.

“She never had it easy,” Daddy said to Ma and me while looking over at Nora Walsh. “She’s a fighter. It’s what I need.”

The enforcer began telling Daddy he should get Nora Walsh to be his lawyer, too. The two of them decided that while the enforcer was meeting with Nora Walsh during a Saturday visiting hour, my daddy would drift over.

“That’s the plan,” Daddy said. He stood up. “Trell,” he said, “come with me.”

Holding hands, Daddy and I walked across the room. I could see the enforcer talking quietly to Nora Walsh and tilting his head in our direction, so I knew he was explaining the situation the same way Daddy had just done. The enforcer got up and, as if on cue, excused himself. “I’m gonna get a candy bar,” he said.

While the enforcer walked away toward the vending machine along the far wall, Daddy put out his hand. “My name is Romero Taylor,” he said. “This is my daughter, Trell.”

Nora Walsh studied Daddy first. Then she looked at me. I thought I saw a tiny smile on her face come and go quickly when her eye caught the new neon-yellow Reebok 500s that I had gotten for my thirteenth birthday.

“I’d like to talk to you about my case.” Daddy’s voice was wavering, and I realized he was nervous and pumped up, both at the same time.

Nora Walsh looked over in the direction of the two guards at the desk on an elevated platform at the front of the room. She looked back at Daddy and reminded him that Walpole Correctional Institute had strict rules about attorneys speaking to anyone other than the prisoner they’d signed in to see.

Daddy nodded. “I know, I know,” he said, talking fast. He asked her if she would come back to see him. Daddy was rushing his words.

“I didn’t do it,” he told Nora Walsh.

The guards had taken notice of the unauthorized encounter. One of them began walking over. We didn’t have much time.

“What’s this, Ms. Lawyer?” the guard asked firmly.

Daddy spoke first, and his voice was different now, no longer tense but casual and cool. “Oh, Officer, jeez, I was just asking this nice lady if she wouldn’t mind taking a picture for us.” Daddy nodded over to Ma back at the table with the disposable camera in her hands. Daddy told the guard we never had a picture of the three of us, that it was always just him and me because Ma was the one who had to take the picture. Daddy was hoping just this once we could get a family photo, it being my thirteenth, a milestone — I was a teenager now.

“I figured you definitely wouldn’t want me to be asking one of the guys,” Daddy said. “I figured no way. Then I spotted the lawyer.”

“You shouldn’t be figuring nothing,” the guard interrupted.

“Sorry.”

Daddy’s apology hung there.

Nora Walsh said, “I have no problem with it.”

The guard stood still, thinking. I looked around for Officer White. I didn’t see him, which I took as a good sign.

Nora spoke again. “It’s her birthday, Officer.”

“Okay, okay,” the guard said. “Be quick.”

We were. Nora Walsh took the camera from Ma. The three of us smiled and hugged, like it shows in the photograph on the mirror in my room, and Nora Walsh snapped the picture. It was when she was handing the camera back to my daddy that he held her gaze and whispered, “Please, come back?”

Nora Walsh pursed her lips. “Let me think about it.”

She turned and walked away.

During the ride home afterward, Ma explained we had some work to do, and so on Monday after school, Ma was waiting for me outside our house. She marched me over to Blue Hill Avenue, where we caught the bus downtown. When we got off, she kept looking at a slip of paper she gripped in her fist, and she led me past a bunch of stores that included the famous Filene’s Basement, where Ma always took me shopping ever since I was little and she bought me my first birthday dress there. We made our way up to Tremont Street across from the Boston Common and near the Park Street T station, where a dozen or more panhandlers shuffled around like zombies, unnoticed by the crowds of men and women dressed up in suits hurrying to get home. Ma stopped and looked up to check the number on an old office building against the one scribbled on the piece of paper.

“C’mon,” she said.

The narrow brick building seemed invisible the way it stood, tired and old, between a pair of gleaming glass office towers. You could easily have walked right past it. Inside the empty lobby, littered with dust balls, candy, and empty cigarette packs, Ma looked at the office directory on the wall and then headed downstairs. I followed her, and we found the law office. There were no windows in the basement, and the air smelled stale. Inside the office an old lady with gray hair cut in a bowl shape sat at a desk with a cigarette hanging from her mouth. Her desk was piled with papers and files, and her ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts.

Ma asked for Nora Walsh.

“She’s in court,” the lady said. Then her telephone rang.

Ma led me back out into the hallway.

“Out here we can at least breathe.”

We waited. I pulled out my homework, and then, after a little while, we heard footsteps on the cement stairs. We looked up. Nora Walsh marched out of the stairwell with a canvas briefcase hanging from one shoulder and a stack of manila folders in her arms. Ma walked toward her.

“Ms. Walsh?”

“Yes?”

“Shey Taylor, and this is Trell — from the prison the other day?”

“I know who you are.”

“Romero was railroaded, Ms. Walsh.”

The way Nora Walsh just stood there without making any movement reminded me of the prison guards, how they always stood stiff, with blank expressions, like statues.

Ma continued. “Trell was just three months old, Ms. Walsh. The three of us were upstairs in our apartment above the Humboldt Superette when police came. Ms. Walsh, Romero would never do anything like what they said.”

“Listen,” Nora Walsh finally said, “I’ve got thirty minutes to get a motion filed or my case is toast.” She kicked open the office door and disappeared inside.

The next afternoon Ma and I returned to 178 Tremont Street. That’s one thing about Ma — she’s stubborn. The word no is not in her vocabulary. So we came back a second time. We were expecting to be told Nora Walsh was again over at the courthouse six blocks away. But the secretary surprised us. She said Nora Walsh was working at her desk. Except Nora was too busy to meet with us, the secretary said between drags on the cigarette that seemed attached to her lips.

The same thing happened to us Wednesday afternoon, and also on Thursday. The secretary told us each time that Nora Walsh was too busy for walk-ins off the street. On Friday I got smart. I brought along True Grit, and I was enjoying reading about Mattie Ross so much I forgot I was seated on a cold basement floor. Mattie’s only fourteen, but she hunts down the man who killed her father. She gets a lawman to help her, a mean and crusty-faced cowboy with a name you never forget: Rooster Cogburn. The story gets scary at times. There’s skeletons and snakes galore, for one thing. Mattie even loses part of her left arm. But I don’t want to give too much away.

Ma brought along some reading, too. She leaned against one wall, looking at the test-prep book she’d been lugging around for a few months. The book covered rules and regulations for buying and selling property. Ma had a new idea she was going to get her real estate license, which Ma’s friend Claudette thought was pretty funny. Not that Ma couldn’t study and pass a test. But real estate in Roxbury? “Shey, my dear girl,” Claudette had said, “who but a crazy person would ever want to buy into our neighborhood?”

We were both reading when the law firm’s solid wood door suddenly swung open. The hard sound it made snapped me to attention. I climbed to my feet. Ma, still leaning against the wall, straightened up. Nora Walsh strode out into the hall. I stood next to Ma. Nora Walsh had her arms folded.

“Ms. Walsh,” I blurted out, “you have to —”

Ma interrupted me. “Trell, stop.”

Nora Walsh maintained that all-business look she had.

“You can go home,” she said.

“Go home?” Ma said.

“I’ve got a ton of work,” Nora Walsh said.

I couldn’t keep quiet. “Go home? We can’t go home, Ms. Walsh.”

“Yes, you can,” she said.

Then her blank face cracked — that tiny smile I’d seen at the prison when she spotted my running shoes. “I made an appointment. It’s next Monday. I have business at the prison, but I’ve arranged to meet with Romero first.”

“Thank you, Ms. Walsh, thank you!”

Nora Walsh turned to go back into her office.

“Ms. Walsh?” I said.

She stopped and looked back. “Yes?”

“My daddy? He didn’t do it, Ms. Walsh. He’s innocent.”

Nora Walsh looked at me. “That’s what they all say.”

The next day, during our weekly Saturday visit, all we talked about was how Nora had agreed to see Daddy. Daddy wanted to keep us from getting carried away. “C’mon, it’s just a meeting,” he kept saying. “Who knows what’s going to come of it?” Besides, he said, there’s a chance the meeting would never even happen. Lawyers were always canceling for one reason or another, and the prisoners themselves at times couldn’t keep an appointment, like if they got into trouble.

But Monday came, and Daddy got word to us afterward that he and Nora Walsh had met. Ma and I felt this big rush to race through the week. We couldn’t wait to get to the prison when Saturday finally came to hear how things had gone. During the bus ride, I was more frustrated than usual with Big Vinnie’s slowpoke ways and his Vinnie-isms.

And when we got to the visiting room, Daddy said he wanted to tell us the whole story, starting from the beginning. “Remember how nice it was on Monday?” he asked. It had been a dry and sunny spring day, and Daddy said sometimes on nice days the prison lets lawyers meet with their prisoner clients in the fenced-in courtyard off the visiting room. “We sat outside at that picnic table there,” Daddy said, pointing to the table that was empty now. I tried imagining Daddy and Nora Walsh seated there as Daddy talked. “It felt good in the sun,” he said.

Daddy said, “I didn’t want to waste her time. I got right to the point.” He said he asked Nora Walsh to take up his legal appeal, to be what Daddy called his appellate attorney.

Daddy said, “She shook her head, looked at me, and said, ‘No way.’”

Daddy said he asked, “Why not, Ms. Walsh? Why not?”

She told Daddy, “First thing, my name is Nora. Stop calling me Ms. Walsh.” She then told Daddy that challenging a murder conviction required an experienced appellate attorney, not one just out of law school. “The ink on my bar exam’s barely dry,” she said.

But Daddy pushed. He told Nora he’d heard from the enforcer about her battles with prison officials over the D-Board cases. That she was a woman elbowing her way around and not taking any guff from the guys who run the courts and the prisons, and that’s exactly who he needed — a fighter.

Nora practically laughed out loud at Daddy. D-Board cases? She said the difference between an administrative hearing inside the prison and a murder appeal in the Superior Court was as big as the difference between sandlot baseball and the big leagues. “You get that?” she said. “I haven’t done a trial yet — not even for a misdemeanor — never mind working up an appeal for a murder of this magnitude.”

Daddy said, “I don’t care about no experience. The thing is, you don’t owe anybody anything.” Daddy looked straight at Nora. “I’m doing life,” he said. “Life! Without the possibility of parole! It’s a death sentence,” he said.

“Do me one favor, please,” Daddy asked. “Read the transcript from my murder trial.” He said if she read the transcript, she would learn a lot about him, some of it being not very nice — and pretty dark, actually. She would find out he was a high-school dropout who got caught up in cocaine and saw easy money dealing drugs in Roxbury. “I had this line I was known for,” Daddy told her. “I’d be standin’ on my corner and when someone came along my pitch was, ‘If you pass me by, you won’t get high.’”

He told her she would learn from the trial transcript how much he enjoyed buying nice things with the drug money, kept a wardrobe of new sneakers and Adidas running suits, and began shaping his Afro to look like actor Jim Kelly’s bowl-shaped hairdo. “You know Jim ‘the Dragon’ Kelly?” he asked her. “Kung-fu dude with Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon and Black Samurai? I wanted to be him, so bad. Two crazy-good movies.”

She would also learn the 1980s was a different time, that Romero Taylor was a bit player in a bigger crazy thing going on around crack cocaine, not just in Boston but in New York and Detroit, and in any city, really, where instead of using fists to settle beefs everyone was starting to settle scores with handguns. “Got to be when a car backfired in Roxbury, people dropped to the sidewalk thinking they were being shot at,” Daddy explained. “Families on their porches just doing their thing? They had to keep one eye rovin’ up and down the street, ready to rush inside for cover if they spotted one of the gangbangers comin’ down the lane.”

But, Daddy insisted, if she dug into the transcript, she would also learn about a time before he gave in to the easy money and before he dropped out of school, a time when he was taking the bus every morning to school in Wayland, one of the wealthy “W towns” outside Boston — Wellesley and Weston being the other two. They and a bunch of other towns surrounding Boston were part of a program where kids from the city got a better chance by attending schools in better-off communities. It’s like what the Weld School does, except the Weld is private and the town schools in Daddy’s program were all public. My daddy’s host family had a boy his age, and they were all really nice to him. Daddy would spend time after school at their house, eat over, and sometimes sleep over. He and his friend, when they were in the eighth grade, even got jobs together at a local Star Market as bag boys, and for a while Daddy was proud of returning home to the neighborhood with a paycheck.

But he also carried this feeling he didn’t really fit in, a feeling that grew bigger as he did. Eventually, when he was fifteen, whatever was happening in Wayland, especially the minimum wage he earned at the supermarket, could not compete with the cash he saw on the streets of Roxbury. He began stealing cars and selling weed. He was making bad choices. But it was hard, so very, very hard, to resist the world that, just by chance, was his, compared to a world beyond that was not.

There was more, he told Nora Walsh. He and Ma may not have been married when I was born, but they always tried to be a family, the best they could be, even after his arrest. Daddy and Ma were even able to work it out so they could marry during his time at Walpole. The day they picked — February 11, 1990 — happened to be the same day Nelson Mandela was released from prison in South Africa. So their wedding turned into a family story that brought a smile every time Daddy told it. Daddy was late for his Walpole wedding — kept Ma waiting in the visiting room — because he was glued to a TV in his cellblock tuned in to special news from across the ocean: Mandela, free at last, walking hand in hand with his wife, Winnie.

But most of all, if Nora Walsh studied the record, she would learn that while Roxbury was carved up into street gangs back in the 1980s, gangs with names like the Humboldt Raiders and the Castlegate Boys, the one thing my daddy Romero Taylor was not was a gangbanger and killer the way the government made him out to be. He might have been a drug dealer who tried to get along with everyone, and who loved the feeling of wads of cash in his pocket, but he was no way like Thumper Parish and some others who were born to be bad.

“Just do me that favor,” Daddy said once more to Nora Walsh. “Just read the transcript, and after, if you think I’m guilty, I’ll never bother you again.”

Daddy stopped. He looked across at Ma and me. He took a deep breath. But no words came out. He took another breath. It was like torture.

“Daddy! Then what happened?”

Daddy smiled. “So that was on Monday. She left, said she was making no promises. Then yesterday I got a call in the cellblock. It was her. When I took hold of the receiver, my hand was actually shaking. Nora Walsh started out saying she first had a confession to make — which was to say the only reason she agreed to look over the transcript was to get you two to quit stalking her. She said she figured if she read the material, she could then say to us, ‘Okay, I’ve read it, now that’s it. Leave me alone.’ But once she started reading, she said it didn’t pass what she called her smell test. ‘Something stinks’ is what she said. ‘I don’t see how the jury came back with a guilty verdict on the basis of a bunch of kids saying they saw you at the scene. No gun, no forensics, nothing. Cops still haven’t found the gun. It stinks.’

“I told her I sure do agree — it stinks, and always has.”

So, Nora Walsh told Daddy she’d be his lawyer.

When Daddy finished, you’d think I’d be on my feet jumping up and down, the way I usually do when I am excited. But I wasn’t. I don’t know if I was in shock or what. But I just sat there feeling serious, letting the news sink in. Nora Walsh had agreed to be Daddy’s lawyer. I saw time was running out on our visit, and suddenly a thought popped into my head. For the longest time I had said good-bye the same way, with a question: “Daddy, when you comin’ home?” Well, this was the day one year ago — the day Nora Walsh became Daddy’s lawyer — when that changed. When a little girl’s question turned into a bigger girl’s promise.

I said, “Daddy, I’m gonna get you outta here.”