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pool and a bathhouse, an automatic sprinkler system—”
    “The price?” Father said politely.
    “Eighty thousand five hundred,” Mr. Hansom said rapidly and went on in a louder, flatter voice, “and a tax you won't believe, and a neighborhood absolutely unparalleled …”
    I caught up to Nada and we walked ahead of the two men. I could see what they couldn't, that her cheeks were a little flushed and her nose looked as if it were sniffing at something forbidden. I knew that look. She glanced down at me and said, “Be sure to wipe your feet,” and it was just nothing, not even an insult, just words for her to say to show that she remembered me and that she had power over me. And she reached out to rub my head, once, hard, to let me know that everything would turn out well. Behind us Father was striding up like a hunter, and Howie Hansom was puffing from the hill.
    Mr. Hansom unlocked the front door and we stepped into a brick-lined area, and he opened another double door, French doors, and we were in an entrance foyer, quite large, oval. Need I describe this? You know the usual black-and-white tile, the French Provincial mirror with its pressed fake gold frame that gives you a face sooner than you might want it, and a staircase rearing up to a phantom second floor, and a crystal chandelier descending from heaven itself. Very nice.
    “Hm, uh-hmmm,” Father said, clapping his hands as if he'd discovered something suspicious. My father made brief, explosive, meaningless noises all the time. Or were they meaningless? Every grunt of Father's made Howie Hansom lick his pale lips and Nada's eyes swing around to a new object. “Well, might as well see it through. Interesting. Very clean, at least,” Father said impassively.
    We were shown through the house. It was empty and echoed our footsteps, Father's blustering words, and Mr. Hansom's enthusiastic, pale words. I felt my eyes begin to close: this was all so familiar to me. God, so familiar! We had seen ten, eleven, fourteen houses in the last two days. Nada hadn't liked any of them. Now we trudged through this house, which was neither more nor less impressive than the others, and Father shook his cigar ashes on the shining, maid-cleaned floor. I noticed how he glanced at Nada, at her expressionless face and those black-rimmed sunglasses of hers, which must have annoyed Father as much as they annoyed me. I wanted to snatch them off and break them in two and say, “Now will you look at me?” Then a crumbled, coy, shrewd look came over my father's face and he said tentatively to Mr. Hansom, “Would you, uh, say that this price is inflated?”
    “Inflated?” Mr. Hansom said, meek and overly surprised. “Why, indeed not. Inflated?
This
marvelous property?”
    Father never talked about money matters in such an abrupt, surreptitious way, and my mother turned in alarm. She stared at him. She could become pale as wax, her lips pursed in that fake-prudish look; any mention of money embarrassed and outraged her. She took off her sunglasses and held them in her gloved hands, waiting.
    “Inflated, Mr. Everett? Certainly not,” Mr. Hansom was saying with more assurance now, as if he'd groped and found the right trail again. “The house on Windsor Crescent, which we just saw, for seventy thousand cannot begin to compare with this, cannot
begin
to compare …”
    “Ah—ah-ah,” Father said. “What is that smell? That musty odor?”
    “What musty odor?”
    “Mr. Hansom,” Nada said, “my husband is not serious. He's testing you.”
    “Honey, eighty thousand dollars is a lot of money,” Father said. He was using his flat, serious, husband-to-wife voice, which always unnerved Nada. “There are matters I haven't discussed with you, matters of a personal nature concerning my promotion, and … of course … these things are precarious in today's economy.” And he winked at me past Nada's stiffened shoulder. I turned away, embarrassed for both of them and humiliated by