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bedroom door the next morning at six and smothered a little shriek. Frank was on the floor in the hallway, staring at his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I wake you?”
    â€œNo, you just surprised me. I didn’t think anybody else would be up. I’m still on East Coast time. Have you been out here long?”
    â€œAbout an hour.”
    â€œWhere’s your mom?”
    â€œAsleep. Your door was locked.”
    â€œYou tried to come into my bedroom?”
    â€œI knocked first. You didn’t answer. I got worried.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œThe raccoons around here big enough to scramble over a ten-foot wall are notoriously acquisitive and sometimes rabid. Also, there are coyotes. Dangerous to pets and snack-sized people.”
    â€œI’m from the Midwest,” I said. “Nobody from the Midwest is snack-sized.”
    â€œThere are people out there, too,” he said. “Fanatics. One of them climbed the wall to get at my mother before I was born. Which explains its crown of razor-wire thorns.”
    â€œThese fanatics,” I said. “Are you talking about your mother’s fans?”
    â€œ Fan is a derivation of the word fanatic, ” Frank said. “An overzealous follower of a person or thing. She has millions. Maybe billions. My mother says she doesn’t like to drive because the fanatics used to rush the car every time she pulled out of the driveway. There aren’t as many now, but that doesn’t seem to provide her the comfort you would expect.”
    â€œI don’t think your mother’s fans would hurt her,” I said. “They probably just want to talk, or get her autograph.”
    That didn’t seem to provide him much comfort, either. Frank was wearing a straw boater tipped onto the back of his head, and two pieces of his hair had fallen forward on either side of his part, forming a parenthesis around a forehead gone rumpled with concern. An expression, I realized later, he’d borrowed from the tool kit of Jimmy Stewart, circa It’s a Wonderful Life . I could see his cuff links today were little green and silver shamrocks. The pants of his blue and white seersucker suit, also rumpled, were hiked up so that his yellow and blue argyle socks showed. A navy bow tie with white polka dots dangled untied from his buttoned shirt collar. He looked like he’d been up all night, either policing the perimeter with his yellow bat or hanging off the back of a streetcar with Judy Garland, singing.
    â€œI was probably sleeping,” I said. “I understand your concern. But no walking into my room uninvited. Ever. Got it?”
    At the private school where I’d taught third grade math after being kicked upstairs from kindergarten when the pretty teacher who’d preceded me ran off with the father of one of her students, I could never get over how many of the children I’d been put in charge of had never had anybody say no to them. One girl used to walk up to my desk during class to go into my purse looking for cough drops. At the age of eight some of them were cheating off other kids’ papers with a sense of entitlement that took my breath away. I could imagine any number of them ending up in the slam. A nice white-collar joint where, after getting over their surprise at being not only caught but also punished for stock fraud or fudging their incometaxes, they’d recast the whole jailbird experience as time well spent polishing their racquetball game and networking. I hadn’t been the least bit surprised to learn that the investment adviser who’d rooked Mimi had a grandchild at that school.
    I’m just saying, you have to set boundaries with these privileged kids or all is lost.
    â€œYes, ma’am,” Frank said. He sat up straight and tied his bow tie with impressive quickness and precision. Frank’s eyes couldn’t quite scale the heights to my face so they’d come