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your daughter.”
    “Bullshit!” Finch shouted. “That’s just pure evasive bullshit.”
    “It most certainly is not,” my mother said. She tossed her cigarette on the floor and mashed it out with the toe of her sandal. “I am not getting in the middle of this.” She brushed imaginary lint off the front of her black turtleneck.
    Hope said, “Dad, you’re overreacting. Leave Deirdre out of this. It’s between you and me.”
    “You,” he said, pointing at her, “stay the hell out of this.”
    Hope shrunk against the back of the sofa.
    “What do you think, young man?” he said, looking to me.
    “I think you’re all crazy,” I said.
    “That’s the spirit!” he said, with a chuckle. Then he turned to Hope. “Go back and mind the telephones, make fresh coffee. Do your job like a responsible woman. Just because you’re my daughter doesn’t mean you can take advantage of me, sleeping all day long.”
    Hope got up off the sofa. “Come on, Augusten,” she said, leading me out into the front room.
    “What was that all about?” I said, once Hope was sitting behind her receptionist’s desk. I leaned against the window ledge and looked out at the traffic eight stories below.
    “Dad’s just trying to help your mom,” she said. “He’s not really angry with me.”
    “It seemed like he was pretty angry with you.”
    “Nah. He’s just trying to help your mother get in touch with her anger. Your mother represses her anger and it makes her very sick.”
    The office was stuffy, hot. There was a fan in the window that was blowing out. I wanted to turn it so it blew into the room, but Hope insisted that it was better to blow the hot air out of the room, as opposed to sucking the warm air in. “I hate my life,” I said.
    “No you don’t,” Hope said, absently stacking a pile of insurance forms on her desk. She reached for the Wite-Out.
    “I do. It’s so stupid and pathetic.”
    “You’re a teenager. You’re supposed to feel your life is stupid and pathetic.”
    I walked over to the small table next to the sofa and made myself a cup of hot water with Cremora. My mother would be in there for hours. “Why aren’t you married?”
    Hope gently brushed Wite-Out onto one of the forms. She answered without looking up. “Because I haven’t met a guy that’s as great as my dad.”
    “What do you mean by that?” I said.
    Hope held the page up to the light and checked her work. “I mean that most guys are jerks. I haven’t met one yet that’s as emotionally and spiritually evolved as my father. I’m holding out.”
    “How old are you?” I asked her. Hope and I were becoming friends. I thought that even if her father wasn’t a psychiatrist and even if my mother wasn’t seeing him constantly, we’d still be friends.
    “I’m twenty-eight,” she answered. She blew on the page.
    “Oh.”
    For a while, we just sat in silence; me drinking my Cremora and Hope painting insurance forms with Wite-Out. Then I said, “He doesn’t really use that room for . . .”
    “Hmmm?” she said, glancing up.
    “Your father. That room of his. He doesn’t really . . . it’s not his Masturbatorium, is it?”
    Hope shrugged. “Probably, yeah.”
    “That’s so disgusting,” I said.
    “What’s disgusting about it? Don’t you masturbate?”
    “Huh?”
    “I said, don’t you masturbate?” She looked at me with her head tilted slightly to the side, waiting for my answer. As if she’d merely asked me the time.
    “Well, it’s different. It’s not . . . I don’t know.”
    “How is it different?” She was strangely intense.
    “I’m not a doctor .”
    “What? You don’t think doctors masturbate?”
    “That’s not what I mean. I just mean, it’s weird to have a room. You know, a Masturbatorium or whatever.”
    “I don’t think it’s so weird,” Hope shrugged.
    “So you’re not married because you’re waiting for a guy with a Masturbatorium?” I asked.
    “Very funny.”
    I tried to recall