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there that the theory of evolution is wrong.” Then she would laugh, so pleased that she was lucky enough to be Betty’s daughter. I liked beautiful women as much as anyone, and I had seen quite a few over the years who possessed a more perfect surface than Betty, but she had a thoughtful and yet entirely untormented quality that I had never seen in another person that made her beauty open, contented, and unsullied. Of Betty, my mother always said, “She’s a very nice woman, Joey. Between you and me, he’s lucky to have her.” That was my mother’s highest compliment.
    She came right over and kissed me, put the beer in my hand, closed my fingers around it with her own fingers, and said, “Here’s Joey! Aren’t you looking handsome, Joey! I’ve been missing you,” and even though Felicity did not look like Betty, in Betty’s presence I felt it as a physical jolt that Betty and Gordon would not in the least appreciate the new turn my relationship with their family had taken; Gordon might understand it as a general feature of male behavior, though he wouldn’t like it, but Betty, I thought, wouldn’t understand it at all. Nevertheless, I returned her kiss, and maybe I did so with more enthusiasm than usual. I had always appreciated Sally; now I appreciated Felicity too.
    Betty said she was going to the supermarket, so Gordon came over and danced her to the door of his office. She looked back at me over his shoulder; her smile and her wave were sophisticated but intimate, implying that while nothing much surprised her, she was happy anyway.
    Then he propelled me toward the plans. “Now here it is, Joe. Good American-style townhouses, nothing fancy. Three buildings, thirty units in all, eighteen two-bedrooms, twelve three-bedrooms. Look at this elevation, now: simple pitched roof, clapboard siding, white trim, cream siding, black doors, and black shutters. They’re going to go along the street like this, but a little set back. You know, when we went down to South Carolina at Christmas, I went over to this plantation they had outside of Charleston, it was called Forbes Plantation, one of those big old places, but it hadn’t been burned down by Sherman, you know. Even so, one guy couldn’t afford to keep it, not in this day and age, so they turned the whole thing into condos, did a nice job too, didn’t change the exterior at all. I think they got eight units into the main building and then maybe four or five into the outbuildings and the slave quarters. Anyway, here was the great part.” He moved his finger across the bottom of the elevation. “They made sure to keep the old gardens, front and back, and I’m telling you, these folks who live in this place, it’s like living in a park. So that was what made me think it was time to get on with Phase Four up there, because just a bunch of townhouses is nothing; I wasn’t interested; but now I see we can retain control of the property and have beautiful gardens all around. That piece there faces southeast, so they’d have flowering trees and roses. Don’t you love it? Little playgrounds for the grandkids, and some gardening areas for the old Italian guys who want to put in a few tomatoes. I’d live there myself if Betty could stand it. But she can design the garden. Or Hank could. He does that sort of thing.”
    I said, “Hmm,” self-consciously.
    “So! Here we go! What day is today, March what? Oh, yeah, twenty-ninth. Now, see, we got all the roads and sewers and everything here, from the other three phases. They staked it out last week, so we just got to wait a couple of weeks to break ground.”
    I said, “What sort of price range are you thinking, Gordon?”
    “Something nice, you know, something friendly. Forty-nine-nine for the two bedrooms, seventy-nine-nine for the threes. But they’ve got an association fee, of course. Fee simple once you’re inside the house, but got to pay an association fee as soon as you step down off your bottom step