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I’d been looking out toward the yard, watching subsets of staff
ready it for the flood of people. “Have you seen Jess?”
    “She’s out with my sisters getting her
feet and fingers done. Something tasteful, I’m sure. No need to worry.”
    Mom slipped her hands over my shoulders,
her hands brushing the fabric free of some imaginary lint. “Are you happy?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    “You’ve seemed down. Is it Jessica?”
    “No.”
    “The thing with your father?” Mom didn’t
look concerned as much as benign. She’d perfected that look of harmlessness
over forty years, and she wore it well under light makeup and a strawberry
blonde chignon.
    “Yes.”
    “He’s come to terms with it.”
    “Is the bar up? I need a drink.”
    She looped her arm into mine and we
walked outside.
    ***
    My father hadn’t ever actually come to
terms with anything in his life, ever. He sat and waited until opportunities
presented themselves. He was utterly non-aggressive in the way a cat is utterly
still outside a mouse hole, waiting for the rodent to either forget he was
trapped or get hungry enough to risk everything and leave.
    The party setup was going smoothly,
people in tuxedos and black dresses gadding about with purpose. The hedges had
been trimmed, the tennis court locked. The pool had been cleaned, repainted and
decorated with floating flowers. No one asked me a goddamn thing about anything
and I liked it that way. The bartender, an actor from the looks of him, was
setting up glasses in neat rows. Behind him, the majesty of the Pacific Ocean
stretched into a haze where sea met sky.
    “He told me he understood,” Mom said,
continuing a conversation she assumed I wanted to have. “Business deals
sometimes go bad and someone gets hurt.”
    “It’s fine, ma.”
    “You should talk to him about it.”
    “Hey,” I said to the bartender. “Two
Jameson’s, rocks.”
    “I’m not having any,” Mom said.
    “They’re both for me.”
    She smiled and punched my arm. “Jon.
Always the joker. Listen to me. This radio silence with your father isn’t
productive. I mean, he did agree to have the engagement here.”
    “You insisted.”
    “To save him embarrassment. This thing
with him has put me in the middle and to be truthful, it’s stressful.”
    She knew how to feel stress, my mother.
The management of anxiety was an art form with her, necessitating the use of a
cocktail of medications and hospitalizations when she misjudged her secret
alcohol intake. Poor Mom. Really. A willing captive in a house as big as an
island nation.
    It was my turn to flick an imaginary
piece of lint off her shoulder. “He took my future in-laws for everything, blew
a chunk of it and passed a few million back to them. Not enough for them to get
a decent lawyer.”
    “It was twelve years ago and it was a
legitimate business deal.”
    “Legal. It was legal. Not legitimate.”
    Despite earlier denials, she took the
glass of whiskey, holding it but not putting it to her lips, as if it was a
prop. I remembered she drank wine in public and whiskey in private. I was
getting muddled already.
    “I know they’re your family now, the Carneses . But don’t forget where you came from, young man.”
    As if I ever could.
    ***
    The last family party my father and I
had attended together had been seven years earlier. Sheila’s birthday had an
unfortunate proximity to Christmas, so every one of her birthday parties became
Christmas parties. Her house in Palos Verdes perched on the edge of a sheer
drop to the ocean. For a mile in each direction, a beach as wide as a sidestreet ribboned at the base
of the cliff. But toward the end of that year, the beach disappeared under
rushing tides as it rained for twenty days straight.
    Children toddled underfoot, with nannies
running bent-kneed behind them. Extended family on top of extended family, most
drunk or on their way there, myself included, even at sixteen. I did what I
wanted, like all my friends. Nothing