“He’ll do.”
“Aunt Lisa,” Aspen scoffs, keeping eye contact with me like she’s sorry.
“He’ll do, sweetheart. Get your father to pour him a real drink. He looks parched.” And she’s gone, off toward the kitchen, verdict entered into the record.
Aspen turns back to me with the smallest mouth-corner lift on the planet. “Welcome to the family.”
“I was seen, judged, and processed in under fifteen seconds.”
“She liked you.”
“Stan.” My dad is already waving me over with a bourbon in his hand. “Get over here, son, come meet—”
“Coming, Dad.”
I look at her. For the first time since the staircase, she holds my eyes a full second.
“Go,” she says. “I’m fine.”
“You sure?”
“They flew in for you. Go.”
She turns and walks toward Beth, who’s just come out of the kitchen with a fresh glass of white wine, and she doesn’t look back at me.
I watch her go.
Then I walk over to my father. He’s got an arm around an older man I’ve never met — blazer, gray hair, a beer in his hand, and the exact look every adult in this house has been aiming at me since the driveway.
“Stan. Dr. Tremblay. He and I were at Cornell together.”
“Sir.”
“Robert’s been telling me about your year.”
“He oversells, sir.”
“He undersells. He undersells everything except you.”
My dad laughs — the laugh he uses when somebody’s being kind to me, and he’s accepting it on my behalf. My mother arrives at my other elbow with a small plate. Three crackers and a piece of cheese cut into a rectangle.
“Carolyn doesn’t sit anyone down before two-thirty. It’s just a snack.”
I take the cracker and eat it.
“Margaret. Did Stan hear what we’re getting out of Detroit?”
“Robert.”
“What? He should know.”
“The boy just walked in the door. Eat your own cheese.”
The men laugh. My mother laughs too. She hands me the second cracker.
My dad sets a hand on the back of my neck. “Stay a minute, Stan. Tremblay wants to hear about the kid from Western.”
I don’t want to talk about the kid from Western. I want to be in sightline of my fake girlfriend, who is somewhere across the foyer, talking to a woman holding a white wine.
