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more than I do.”
    “I’m trying, Dad.”
    Ruben nods. “If that’s true, I’d hate to see what happens when you stop.”
    Silver is about to retort, something unnecessarily biting, and so he is relieved when his mother reenters, cutting off the conversation. She looks at them inquisitively, Silver sprawled on the couch, his father perched on the edge of the kitchen table, and can tell she’s interrupted something. “What are you boys talking about?”
    “Women,” Ruben says.
    Elaine nods meaningfully. “Any worth writing home about?”
    * * *
    When his parents leave here, they’ll swing by Chuck’s house for a barbecue. There, amid the aroma of homemade marinade, the shouting of boys and pissing of babies and dogs, life will reassert itself around them, and they will be whole again.
    When they leave here, Silver will go down to the Blitz and drink himself numb, then fall asleep in front of the comforting flicker of his television. Hopefully, he’ll remember to take off his shoes. There’s nothing more depressing than waking up in your shoes.

CHAPTER 9
    T he Lockwoods had been Casey and Denise’s neighbors for about ten years. Denise and Valerie played tennis together twice a week, and once Rich arrived on the scene, he and Steve Lockwood would sometimes sit out in the backyard in the evenings and have a scotch together. Casey, who had lettered in swim, was given carte blanche to swim her laps in the Lockwoods’ pool whenever she wanted, which was what she’d been doing on the night in question. She was feeling anxious about Princeton, and she’d always found something soothing about night swimming.
    Around fifteen laps in, she realized she was no longer alone. She looked up to see Jeremy Lockwood sitting on one of the lounge chairs, drinking from a silver flask as he watched her swim.
    “Hey,” he said when she stopped, waving to her with the flask. “Don’t stop on my account.”
    He was two years older, had just gotten back from Emory to work at his dad’s firm for the summer.
    “I heard you were back,” she said, climbing out of the pool. With anyone else, she might have been self-conscious in her bikini, but she’d known Jeremy long enough to have dared each other to show their privates in his basement back in second grade, and so the rules were different.
    Casey grabbed a towel and sat down at the foot of his chair. He leaned over to kiss her cheek, a method of greeting he’d picked up in college that still felt a little strange to her. “Look at you,” he said appreciatively.
    “What?”
    “You got hot.”
    “Shut up.”
    “I heard you got into Princeton.”
    “I heard you changed your major.”
    “I heard you were valedictorian.”
    “I heard you broke up with Hailey.”
    “Hadley.”
    “Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
    Jeremy smiled and took a sip from the flask. “With moms like ours, who needs Facebook?”
    “I know, right?”
    He offered her the flask, and she took a sip. He had filled it with some of his father’s scotch. The good stuff, Steve called it, even though to Casey it tasted like acid, burning her throat but warming her belly. When she handed it back, Jeremy took another long swallow.
    “She broke up with me, actually.”
    She looked at his face, trying to determine if he was starting a conversation or just stating a fact. In all the years their families had been friendly, she and Jeremy had never had a serious talk. They were more like cousins than friends.
    “I’m sorry,” she said.
    He shrugged. “It was just sex, anyway. And not even that good, really.”
    Something in the offhanded way he talked about sex thrilled her. In the booze, the sex talk, the kiss on the cheek, she sensed the ways in which her world would be expanding in a few months. When he passed her the flask, she drank two swallows.
    “Easy there, tiger,” he said, grinning.
    It was, quite suddenly, and for no real reason, a sexy grin.
    Jeremy had always been good-looking in a