Page 16 of Pucking My Biggest Fan

It’s from the old house. Nora is on the couch with Margot tucked under her arm, four years old, and Teddy a fat baby asleep on her chest. She’s reading the first girl-detective book to them, doing a different voice for the librarian. Partway through she looks up at the camera, says, “Gus. Enough,” laughs, and goes back to the page.

Teddy watches the whole thing without blinking. When it ends he says, “Again,” so we watch it again. The third time through, he leans back against my arm.

“She sounds regular,” he says.

“She sounds exactly regular.”

“The baby is me.”

“The baby is you.”

He thinks about it. “Play the part where she says your name.”

We play the part where she says my name. Out in the hallway, floorboards. Margot’s door, when I pass it later, is open an inch, and her light is off, and I don’t knock. June has Teddy’s dinner going downstairs like this is any Thursday. When Teddy pounds down and announces, “I heard Mom and she sounds regular,” she says, “That’s a good way to say it,” and hands him his fork. Nothing in her face says the videos were her idea. They were her idea.

* * *

Saturday is the Foundation dinner, and the Foundation dinner is three hours of being Augustus Vaughn in a ballroom with Nora’s name on the screens.

Getting out the door takes all four of us. Teddy comes downstairs in his little jacket with his hair combed flat and announces, “I look like a waiter.”

“You look sharp,” I say.

“Waiters look sharp,” June says, straightening his collar. “Waiters are the sharpest people at any party. Go find your shoes.”

Margot comes down in the green dress with her hands already in the pockets, watching every face for a verdict. Nobody makes it a moment. June just says, “Good call on the pockets.” Margot says, “I know.” That’s all anybody says about the dress, which is exactly how Margot wanted it.

Then Margot looks at me and says, “Your tie is crooked.”

It isn’t, I’d swear it isn’t, but June sets down the shoe she’s holding, crosses over, and redoes it in about four seconds flat. I spend all four of them looking at a point on the ceiling. “There,” she says, already gone again. I decide not to think about it. I think about it at every red light on the way downtown.

The kids come for the first hour — that’s tradition, the donors expect it, and Teddy considers it his event. Carol meets us at the doors, looks at the dress, and says, “It’s very simple.”

“She chose it,” June says, pleasant as anything, and that is somehow the end of the conversation.

For an hour I do the rounds with a kid on each side. Teddy charms a table of bankers by teaching them the rules of wall-ball, including the parts he knows are wrong.

“—and if it hits your head, you’re out of the whole recess,” he tells a man who runs half the banks in the Northwest.

“That seems harsh,” the man says.

“Wyatt made it up,” Teddy says. “We follow it anyway.” The table decides he’s the best thing at the party, which he is. Margot stands with her hands in her pockets and shakes whatever gets offered, polite as a diplomat’s kid. June stays one step outside every photograph and every circle, close enough that Margot never has to look for her. When the crowd gets loud around the auction tables, Margot drifts to her, and June hands her the seating cards to guard, which gives her somewhere official to stand. My daughter won’t take a hug from anyone alive, but she’ll take a job. June knows that. The Foundation photographer works the tables, same as every year. Two hundred people, Nora’s name on everything, my kids in the middle of it, and I do the thing I do. I’m good at it. That used to be a fact I liked about myself.

At eight, Carol collects the kids — her privilege, her night too. She claimed the drive home on Tuesday, over the phone, in a voice that wasn’t asking, and June’s job quietly became the first hour instead. Teddy falls asleep against her shoulder in the coat line. Which leaves June at the staff table for the speeches, because we came in one car and I’m her ride home.

“You could wait in the car,” I tell her on my way past. “This part runs long.”

“I’m fine. I have a book and unlimited rolls.” She holds up the book as evidence. “Go. They’re waving at you.”

She reads through the auction. She doesn’t perform interest, doesn’t check her phone, doesn’t watch me. Somehow that’s the most restful thing in the room.

Mitch finds me between courses with two glasses and hands me one. “Good crowd. You’re on after the auction.”

“I know the order, Mitch. I built the order.”

“You did.” He looks at me a moment too long, the way he’s been doing lately. “You sound better, you know. Since the summer.”

“I sleep now.”