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“We know, you turned down a new car for your twenty-first birthday, said the Rabbit was your baby.” My father smiled. “We’ll go over it all tomorrow.”

My mother looked at me across the table, and for once she didn’t seem to have an argument ready.

“I’m sorry too,” she said.

Those words from my mother were rarer than a good perm in August humidity.

I looked at her for a moment, then stood. She stood too, and for a moment neither of us moved.

We were terrible at this, the two of us, always more comfortable correcting each other than admitting we needed each other. So I crossed the small space between us and hugged her. She went rigid for half a second before her arms came around me. She smelled like Chanel, olives, and rain.

“I’m still angry,” I whispered.

“I know.”

“I love you, Mom.”

Her fingers tightened against my back. “I know that too.”

I pulled away before either of us did anything completely uncivilized.

My father was watching us with wet eyes and pretending he wasn’t.

I hugged him too. He held me longer than usual, one hand cupping the back of my head the way he had when I was little and had scraped my knee on the driveway.

Later, I changed into dry clothes in the pool house and sat for a while listening to the rain against the roof.

Across the lawn, lights glowed in the windows of my parents’ house.

For most of the week, money had seemed to be at the center of everything. Alan wanted it. My parents had hidden it from me. Dean wanted nothing to do with it, and Paul had known about it before I did. Yet when he finally had the chance to benefit from it, he’d walked away.

I wasn’t ready to forgive him. Hell, I wasn’t ready to forgive any of them. But I understood something I hadn’t earlier.

Tomorrow my parents would show me every piece of paper with my name on it. And this time, I intended to read them, to take responsibility for my own future.

21

Paul

Friday — August 24, 1984

By four o’clock Friday afternoon, my mother had called the club three times, rejected one flower arrangement by telephone, and asked me whether my shoes had been polished in the tone most people reserved for medical emergencies.

“They’re polished,” I said.

She looked down anyway. My mother trusted very few things on faith. Tailors, florists, and men under thirty were especially suspect.

She stood in the front hall wearing cream silk slacks and a pale blue blouse with pearl buttons, her hair sprayed into a smooth blond shape that probably could’ve survived a tornado, a long car ride, and possibly light artillery. A strand of pearls sat at her throat. Her lipstick was perfect. She looked exactly like a woman who had decided that if her son insisted on ruining her evening, she would at least look perfectly put-together.

A vase of white lilies stood on the entry table beside Mother’s gloves, filling the house with a smell so sweet it made the air feel expensive.

From my father’s study came the low murmur of his voice on the phone.

She glanced toward the closed door. “Your father is handling several calls before we leave.”

That was one way to put it. Another way was that my father had spent the afternoon trying to keep the firm, the Hales, and tonight’s dinner from turning into three different kinds of disaster, all while pretending none of them had anything to do with the others.

“Pierce again?” I asked.