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off with a rear view of Mag at the window in a flimsy, mauve, night thing.
     
    “Look, a Pine Warbler,” she said, her face pressed to the glass.
     
    “I’m staying right here,” he said, clasping his hands behind his head.
     
    She crawled back in beside him and he began to rub her lower back, just the way she liked it; and if the alarm clock rang, they didn’t hear it. She delivered him to the station, panting.
     
    The eight-fifteen was nearly empty as its silver cars clacked into the station pushed by a solid black diesel. A mother and her toddler at the far end of the platform boarded at the same time he did. The horn was unique. Two short bla noises and a mournful wa wa wa sounded just as it passed Sterling Place where they lived, a block from the tracks.
     
    It was the tail end of the rush hour out of Bergen County, a milk run hitting all the stops to Hoboken, not the train favored by even the oldest veterans of Wall Street. You had to take the 8:07 Express if you wanted to be on the floor of the Exchange at the bell.
     
    The sprawl of Bergen County blurred through the window as they sped toward the Hudson River. The conductor rocked down the aisle of the lurching train, stopped, and then spread out to steady himself as he reached for Lou’s ticket, tucked into the seat in front of him. Lou had not had time to get a newspaper, so he sat idly and his thoughts went their own way.
     
    Something was missing . Whenever he talked with Mag about how this whole crummy deal came to be, they seemed to skip the main point. Well, he didn’t skip it. He chose to avoid it. It had to do with the boys. Mag could never understand. It was the paths they’d taken in life. Like it or not, he’d pushed them toward this crazy “follow your bliss” crap. He never had it as an option, but, by God, there was no reason why they wouldn’t. And so, in the end, the decision to “go brokerage” was a need-to-have-a-paycheck-right-away decision; and that was ultimately a complication of fatherhood, not career choices.
     
    Pete, their firstborn, was contemptuous of authority from his first breath. He had always been more interested in building a world acceptable to himself than in finding a place in the one everyone else inhabited. He knew how to take care of himself, that one. Pete had done a lot, including cocaine. He’d seen no reason for college until he hit twenty-seven, when he began to think that law was for him. All this after only eight years of marriage and two boys of his own. Quite a transformation. It had taken every ounce of character Pete had to come to him for money—even then, only under the threat of expulsion unless he paid up his tuition.
     
    In Hoboken, Lou squinted against the brilliant sun that knifed through the roof of the station platform and cut a diagonal plane of light through the dusty air. The diesel engine at the back of the train gave off a deafening roar. He made his way to the stairs leading to the tubes.
     
    One of the older Port Authority Trans Hudson cars sat beside the platform. As soon as Lou descended the final two stairs, the putrid odor of sulfur pushed against his face. He went to the change machine, then through the turnstile. There were only a couple of people sitting in the first car. The rotten-egg smell immediately took him back to the training commute. The memory had been locked away somewhere in his brain and now came rushing back like a flood. He braced for the train’s sudden, jerking start he knew would come.
     
    Oliver, his younger son, emerged from a different mold altogether. It wasn’t that he excelled in school; he just dominated schools and the people in them by the sheer force of his personality. From the time he was old enough to speak in sentences, he seemed to always be the center of attention.
     
    The train screeched to a halt and sat in total darkness until a train going in the opposite direction screamed by in a riot of sparks. The train lurched into motion