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his arm. “Bram, can you hear me?”
    Still nothing.
    “You can’t keep doing this, Bram,” Charley lectured. “You can’t keep fucking up and expecting people to rescue you. It’s getting old. And you’re not getting any younger,” she added, although at twenty-four, he was hardly a candidate for a retirement community. “It’s time to get a life.” She sighed. Her brother had pretty much given up on life a long time ago. “Our mother called this morning,” she continued, recalling that of the four children, her brother had seemed to adapt to their mother’s desertion the best. Maybe because he was only two at the time she’d left, and too young to realize what exactly was happening. He’d cried for his mommy for several days, then blithely crawled into the arms of the woman their father had hired to take her place. A needy child, he’d basically stayed there until the woman quit two years later in a salary dispute with their father. She, too, had left without saying good-bye. After that, there’d been a succession of housekeepers, as plentiful and as faceless as the bronze statues beyond Glen’s office door. No one ever stayed very long. Their father’s unyielding coldness saw to that. “She’s worried about you,” Charley told her brother now, thinking of her own children, and wondering, as she always did when she thought too long about her mother, how the woman could have walked out and left them the way she did.
    “I wanted to take you with me,” her mother had tried to explain when she’d reentered Charley’s life two years earlier. “But I knew your father would never let me take you out of the country. And I had to leave. If I’d stayed in that house any longer, I would have died.”
    “So you left us to die instead,” Charley told her, refusing to let her off the hook so easily.
    “Oh, but look at you,” came her mother’s instant response. “You’ve done so well. All my girls have done so amazingly well.”
    “And Bram? What about him?”
    To that question, Elizabeth Webb had no answer.
    “Bram,” Charley said now. “Bram, wake up. It’s time to go home.”
    She smelled the coffee even before she turned around to see Glen standing there. “Making any progress?” he asked from the doorway, his arm extended toward her.
    She shook her head. “That smells wonderful,” she acknowledged, taking the mug from his outstretched hand as the steam climbed toward her nose.
    “You got lucky. Paul just made a fresh pot.”
    Charley took a long, slow sip. “It’s very good. Thank you.”
    “You’re welcome.” He resumed his seat on the other sofa.
    “You’re not having any?”
    “I’m not much of a coffee drinker.”
    “Really? Why is that?”
    “I find it interferes with all the cocaine in my system,” he said with a straight face, and for an instant, Charley wasn’t sure whether or not he was serious. “That was a joke,” he qualified quickly. “Although, obviously not a very funny one. Especially under the circumstances.” He looked toward her brother.
    “You think he’s doing coke?”
    “I think he’s going to have one hell of a headache when he wakes up,” Glen said, without answering the question. “What’s his problem anyway?”
    Charley took another sip of coffee as another flash of lightning streaked across the sky. “You really think I’m going to discuss my brother’s problems with you?”
    “Problems?” Glen repeated, stressing the final s.
    “Figure of speech.”
    “Or a slip of the tongue.”
    “My brother’s a bit of a lost soul,” Charley admitted, another clap of thunder serving to underline her words.
    “How long has he been wandering?”
    Charley almost smiled. It appeared the “hoodlum wannabe” had a bit of a poet’s soul. “I’d really rather not talk about it,” she said, although the truth was she was suddenly desperate to talk about it. He’s been screwed up as long as I can remember, she wanted to shout. He’s been