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purge all but two of the original employees, several of the people today present in the Torres-Thompson backyard were not speaking to one another. But time had a way of making those bad feelings a mere seasoning floating atop the sweeter narrative of possibility that had once bound them all together.
    “Hey, it’s the head of research!”
    Tyler Smith had arrived, with his three children and his wife, an immigrant from Taiwan who was telling her charges, in Mandarin, to behave themselves and not jump in the pool without their mother.
    “Are they reading yet in Sierra Leone?” the Big Man called out, in an oft-repeated ribbing of the head of research, who had once traveled to West Africa to test MindWare software that was supposed to wipe out illiteracy.
    “You’re not taking those dialysis treatments anymore, are you, Tyler?” Maureen asked, because the project had left the head of research with a life-threatening kidney infection.
    “Stopped two years ago.”
    “Oh, thank God.”
    MindWare had been held together by Maureen’s concern for their daily well-being, and by Scott’s technical creativity and grounded common sense. Everyone liked Scott and Maureen, and the MindWare alumni who had moved away from California timed their annual summer vacations so they could be present at Keenan’s parties. Now Carla Wallace-Zuberi drew the group’s attention to Scott, who was standing by the humming pump that kept the castle filled with air, wearing khaki shorts, sandals, and an oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
    “Scott, the house looks great. The kids are so big.”
    “Yes, they don’t seem to stop growing, no matter what we do.”
Each birthday finds us a little heavier,
Scott observed,
a bit saggier, our eyes less bright.
The Big Man was the one member of their crew who lookedexactly the same: Sasha Avakian, a onetime fund-raiser for Armenian independence, who in his reincarnation as California entrepreneur had sweet-talked a trio of venture capitalists into funding MindWare and its many offshoots, including Virtual Classroom Solutions and Anytime Anywhere Gaming, some of which were still in business, though no longer under the control or guidance of the people gathering this afternoon in the Torres-Thompson backyard.
    “So, it’s a Roman theme, huh, Scott?” Avakian said. “A kid army of centurions—and their parents, the Huns!”
    “There’s always a theme. The party cannot be themeless.”
    “You had the wizard thing going on the last time I was here. And the astronaut thing a while back. My favorite was the safari theme, the explorer bit. That was a couple of years ago, right?”
    “Right,” Maureen interjected. She said this without looking at her guest—she was holding the baby Samantha over her shoulder, trying to get her to take her afternoon nap, and was at the same time keeping an eye on the still-empty swimming pool and the inflated castle, where two small centurions were trying to hit each other with their swords in between trampoline jumps.
    “How do you find the time to do these things, Maureen?” the wife of the Big Man said. “With three kids?”
    “Araceli,” Maureen said, turning to look back at her guests. “She’s a godsend.”
    Maureen watched Araceli walk toward her guests with a tray of drinks, and not for the first time felt comfort in her employee’s dependability. True, Guadalupe would be laughing and chatting up the guests in bad English if she were here, not scowling at them. But Maureen never needed to tell Araceli what to do more than once.
    Araceli’s tray contained a collection of blue glass tumblers filled with a sangria concoction that Maureen made for summer parties. Each drink was chilled with ice cubes Araceli had pried from a dozen trays, because Maureen wanted moon-crescent ice in her tumblers. Araceli watched each guest take a glass with the soon-t o-melt crescents and went back to the kitchen with the empty drink tray to retrieve more hors