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all,” Aly said, entering and heading for the silver coffeepot on the sideboard. Nothing was yet on the table. She wondered if Annie Jo had charred the bacon, burned the toast, and overcooked the eggs before or after she had been told about Willy. Probably before, Aly judged, as Annie Jo came through the swinging door with breakfast platters showing congealed grease.
    “Willy has left us, Aly,” said her brother, Lorne Junior. “The nerve of that guy. After all we’ve done for him.”
    “Nobody believes in gratitude or loyalty anymore,” complained Eleanor at her head of the table. At fifty, she was still a beautiful and stylish woman with a head-turning figure. Her delicate features and blond hair, long-lashed blue eyes and full breasts had been inherited by her first daughter, Victoria, who was away finishing her last semester of college.
    Aly sipped her coffee. “It was precisely gratitude and loyalty that caused Willy to leave. Sy Wayne is his friend. He could never work for someone who had pulled the rug out from under his buddy.”
    “As usual, you’re allowing sentiment to cloud the facts, Aly,” Lorne Junior remonstrated. “Dad didn’t pull the rug out from under Sy Wayne. Foreclosure happens when money lent in good faith is not repaid.”
    “If you say so, Lorne Junior,” said Aly, glancing at her father, who was reading the paper with an air of unconcern. She rather liked her brother, an amiable soul whose only drawbacks were his slow intellect and blind devotion to their father. Eight years older than she, Lorne Junior had managed, just barely, to graduate from college with a degree in banking. Being groomed to take over his father’s position as president and chairman when he retired, he lived at home, content with his room on the top floor of the family’s impressive three-story house, his private entrance, and the lack of responsibility for his own meals, laundry, and housekeeping. He drove a Porsche, which he had ordered in a conservative gray, and planned to marry in due time the daughter of a local insurance man. The pathway before him he saw as wide, straight, and unimpeded. If he had a worry, it was simply that he lacked the perspicacity of his father in banking matters, but experience and time would make up for that. In thirteen years when his father planned to retire, he would be ready to step into his shoes.
    “It’s not every family,” he reminded his sister, “who would hire a cripple.”
    “Certainly not for what we paid Willy,” Aly agreed. “The law would come after them.”
    “Aly, sit down and eat your breakfast,” Eleanor ordered, pressing delicate, rose-tipped fingers to her temples. “I have a headache from all this.”
    “Sorry, Mother,” Aly apologized lightly, taking a seat near her father, who, she knew, had missed not a word.
    Drinking her orange juice and swallowing the vitamins that probably prevented what would later come to be known as anorexia, she nibbled indifferently at a piece of cold toast. Because she seemed healthy enough at her yearly physicals, her mother never badgered her to gain weight, blaming Aly’s extreme thinness on a chemical disposition inherited from her husband’s side of the family. “Food doesn’t take with you, Aly, because you have the Kingston metabolism. Like your father, you will always be thin.” Such had not been the lot of the other children, who took after Eleanor in their tendency to gain weight. Eleanor never seemed to notice that Aly simply could not force down Annie Jo’s meals and complaints about the cafeteria food fell on deaf ears. Mass-produced snack and fast foods held no appeal either, so Aly subsisted on vitamins, juice, fruit, and milk. Her father and brother, she knew, managed their nutritional requirements by dining daily on the home-cooked lunch specials at Willard’s Cafe down from the bank.
    “Have you thought any more about where you will keep Sampson when you buy him?” Lorne asked, folding the