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of the deceased was 0.06 percent, equivalent to “moderate” intoxication.
    Louis covered up the document with a paperback and turned around. His mother was emerging from the bathroom.
    It was obvious that she’d been spending money. Spending money and (so it seemed to Louis) sleeping, for she looked approximately fifteen years younger than she’d looked at dinner on Sunday. The skin of her face was golden and glowing and so tautly attached to her jawline it seemed to pull her dark eyes open wide. She’d had her hair set in a short pageboy—and colored also? What Louis remembered as an even dark gray had been resolved into black and silver. She was wearing a pale "yellow linen dress with black velvet trim, the hem about an inch above the knee. The high collar was joined with a brooch that contained a nickel-sized pearl. At the mirror, nostrils flared in concentration, she touched invisible and possibly nonexistent hairs around her temples. Then she went to the closet and with the exact same fluidity of vertical motion that Eileen had inherited, dropped to her knees and drew a shoe box from a plastic Ferragamo bag.
    “You’re lookin’ nice there, Mom.”
    “Thank you, Louis. Isn’t your father back yet?”
    With raised eyebrows he watched her remove a pair of shoes from a bed of crimson tissue paper. He turned to Eileen, wondering if she too might raise her eyebrows at this spectacle of a mom transformed by sudden spending power. But Eileen was no less transformed. With eyes pinkened by hurt and hate and a face in which every muscle had gone dead she watched their mother slip her small feet into a pair of shoes as sleek as Jaguars. No way Louis could catch her eye. She needed to have her sorrows noticed by their mother, not by him. So while she suffered by the window (cold rain falling between her and the business school) and their mother complacently fitted a pair of white roses into the black band of a floppy white hat, he sat down on the bed and opened the sports section of a handy Globe . It could almost as easily have been he and not his sister suffering by the window, but what is a pack dog thinking, what’s going on behind its yellow eyes, when it sees one of its fellows taken aside by a polar explorer to have its throat slit and be made into supper for its siblings?
    “Your father’s going to have about three minutes to shower and dress,” their mother said. “Maybe one of you could—”
    “No,” Eileen said.
    “No,” Louis said. Their father swam in earplugs and goggles and had to be physically prodded to leave a pool.
    “Well.” Their mother stood up with her hat on, flattened her dress across her hips, and spun around once on her toes. “How do I look?”
    There was a silence, Eileen not even glancing.
    “Like a million bucks,” Louis said.
    “Ha ha ha!” Eileen cawed mirthlessly.
    Their mother, without expression, began to reload a new-looking black clutch. “Louis,” she said. “I’m going to have to talk to you.”
    “Yeah, well, I already heard it,” Eileen said, stamping across the room. “So I’ll see you guys at the service.” She pulled her raincoat from a hanger and opened the door and reeled back before their father, who, towel around his waist and goggles nestled in the sodden gray fluff below his throat, was advancing like an interested lobster, saying to Eileen, “Well, if it ain’t the Infanta Elena! Dark star of Aragon! Keepress of the emerald scepter!” She swung back into clothes hangers, her fingers splayed and rigid near her ears, while the lobster gathered her waist in the crook of its stout claw. She shied writhingly. “Don’t! Don’t! Don’t! Oh, you’re still wet!” Color was returning to her cheeks. Her father kissed one and released her, saluted across the room to Louis, and disappeared into the bathroom. Their mother had witnessed none of this.
    Fifteen minutes later the four Hollands were sitting in the parental rented two-door Mercury, Melanie