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voice, behind him. She speaks just the one word. A verbalized clearing of the throat. Michael takes his hands from his pockets, and he turns to face her. Laurie is framed in the doorway from the dining room. She is wearing her white silk hoop-skirted gown and her shoulders are bare and she has her hands demurely clasped before her at the waist. She smiles a small-scale, self-satisfied smile, and her hands separate and float out beside her, and as they do, her smile expands, calibrates itself for a multitude. She steps into the room and does a slow, elegant twirl.And Michael is standing in the central reception hall in his house, and behind him he hears the rustle of his daughter’s expected descent from the second floor. She makes a sound to let him know she is there. Perhaps even a single, simple word: So. He turns. Samantha is seventeen and she is going to the prom. She poses near the bottom of the staircase, her hands clasped before her at the waist. Her shoulders are bare. They shouldn’t be bare, he thinks, though when she swims, they are bare—at the pool far more of his teenage daughter is also bare—and he has come to accept that, but he can’t help thinking her shoulders shouldn’t be bare in a dress like this, worn for a seventeen-year-old boy as dumbshittedly hormonal as the boy who is soon to arrive, and Michael knows that he has to let all this go, that inside his head—even in there, where he should know how to be reasonable and controlled—he is being a foolish cliché of a father. What does not occur to him is that he should be saying something to Sam now about how beautiful she looks. He stands looking at her and the standing part becomes a bit unsteady, for her beauty actually staggers him. But he does not know how to put that into words—does not have the emotional mechanism to put that into words—so he shoves his hands into his pockets. Sam waits and then she steps forward and she twirls forhim, slowly. Kelly arrives from the back of the house. “Sam!” she cries. “You’re so beautiful!” And though Kelly is also in the room, Sam ends her twirl facing Michael. “You’ll be the Queen of the Prom!” Kelly cries. Sam waits for her father. He pulls his hands out of his pockets and he tilts his head slightly to the side and he is certain he is smiling his approval, he feels certain that he is smiling and that smiling is enough. Sam steps closer to him and he opens his arms and she presses against him and he hugs her. And this is more than enough. He is proud of himself for not saying anything about her shoulders. And Sam lets go of him and moves off to her mother and wordful hugs, and he does not realize he has disappointed her—he has no idea whatsoever—and she does not know how to ask for what she needs from him and so she does not understand that her beauty has truly registered on him, registered so powerfully, indeed, that six years later, in the presence of this other young beautiful woman, he is spontaneously filled with a vision of his daughter’s beauty even though that is the last thing he wants in his head right now, a reminder that the woman he will have sex with in a few hours is—as he expects will be murmured about in a room full of strangers tonight—young enough to be his daughter.
    “Is the jury still out?” Laurie says.
    Michael doesn’t understand. “What?”
    “The verdict, counselor. I’m awaiting the verdict.” Laurie’s voice is keeping it light, but she is realizing she has some work to do with this man, and if she hadn’t just dressed herself up and if he weren’t looking so soothingly sturdily handsomely fine in his high collar and white marcella tie, she’d start right now. Some loosening spade work. But his reticent stiffness still has a certain charm for her, and it certainly feels antebellum, so she waits for a long moment with her smile turned indulgent and then says, “Am I stunningly beautiful?”
    The question actually surprises Michael. His