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after her father’s death, the money scattered amid lawsuits. It eventually made its way to investors, unseen relatives, and Katherine. But Cally remained a name. Vivienne’s grandparents had invested grandly in the arts, and the city bore their stamp. Katherine sat on the boards of museums because her parents had purchased the privilege.
    Vivienne lived with Katherine in a three-bedroom townhome. It wasn’t modest, but it wasn’t lavish either. Whether this was because of Katherine’s Catholic temperance or because it was all they could afford, Vivienne had no idea. Whatever the estate really amounted to, Katherine had paid for Vivienne’s education, and Vivienne got free rent. She used this luxury to amass credit-card debt and spend what money she did earn on trying to maintain a lifestyle appropriate to the oil heiress everyone thought she was. Her name and face were enough to rouse the envy of her peers, even if her home was humble by the neighborhood standard.
    Vivienne decided to employ her cure-all mind-clearing ritual. She turned onto Memorial Drive instead of the freeway, opened the sunroof, and unrolled all the windows, even though the sun was getting hot. Each day that month had been slightly hotter than the last, foretelling the blistering summer to come. She stuck her Madonna mix in the CD player, turned up the volume on “Like a Prayer,” and sped through Memorial Park. As usual there was roadkill here and there—a couple of possums, an armadillo, and a raccoon—the blood and guts of which interfered with her ritual. The point of it was twofold: to rid her mind of annoying thoughts, and to reinstate her preferred sense of superiority and invincibility. It was hard to feel invincible looking at dead animals, but today she managed to forget the instant she passed them.
    At this hour the boulevard had little traffic. Joggers were jogging in packs on either side of the road, weaving in and out of the piney woods. Vivienne felt herself returning. She remembered that an oil heiress by the unfortunate name of Ima Hogg had donated this land to the city. Poor Ima had never married, but her grandfather was the first native-born governor of Texas, and she’d been rich, and look at all she’d left behind. The joggers seemed so glad. The sky above the park was a deep Texas blue. Vivienne wondered whether Ima had been sad about being alone or if she’d been too busy with philanthropy to care. She probably would have married if her name hadn’t been Ima Hogg. The thought of people remembering her as rich and magnanimous gave Vivienne the surge she’d been hoping for, and she flattened the pedal out of the park. Her hair lashed around in the warm car wind as she drove the miles-long stretch of mansions leading to her own neighborhood.
    A slow song came on next, the one where in the music video Madonna falls in love with a bullfighter who breaks her heart. Vivienne, now fortified, slowed to gaze down the long driveways of the mostly Tuscan, ranch, and Tudor-style mansions. There was even a plantation-style Buddhist temple with a marble elephant playing in a pond full of lily pads in the front yard. Next door an old low ranchburger, set back on several wooded acres, was being read its last rites. Orange tape hugged a couple dozen of the trees, and the house itself was boarded up and stripped. There was a big sign in place of the mailbox: BB DEVELOPMENT .
    The sight of Bracken Blank’s mark on yet another lot had no effect on Vivienne. It served only as a reminder that she was on her way to the Blanks’ house, and she kept on into more-commercial territory, past George Bush’s palatial office tower with its synthetic blue lake, past the St. Pius Academy for Girls, to which Katherine had often threatened to send her, and back into another wooded stretch of homes. By the time she’d made a left at Timber Knoll, waved at the Hispanic guy in the security