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Dart wink at her. She had asked Davey what his old pal did for a living, and Davey had offered the surprising information that Dick was an attorney in his father’s firm.
    Now Davey said to his father what he had explained to Nora at Gilhoolie’s, that Dick Dart lived off the crumbs that fell from the tables of Dart, Morris’s wealthier clients” he took elderly widows to lunch in slow-moving French restaurants and assured them that Leland Dart was preserving their estates from the depredations of a socialist federal government.
    “Why does he stay on?”
    “He probably likes the lunches,” Davey said. “And I suppose he expects to inherit the firm.”
    “Don’t put any money on it,” Alden said. Nora felt a chill wind so clearly that it might have blown in off the Sound. “Old Leland is too smart for that. He’s been the back-room boy in Republican politics in this state since the days of Ernest Forrest Ernest, and he’s not going to let that kid anywhere near the rudder of Dart, Morris. You watch. When Leland steps down, he’ll tell Dick he needs more seasoning and pull in a distinguished old fraud just like himself.”
    “Why do you want Davey to know that?” asked Nora.
    “So he’ll understand our esteemed legal firm,” Alden said.
    “Maybe Leland’s wife will have her own ideas about what happens to Dick,” Nora said.
    Alden grinned luxuriantly. “Leland’s wife, well. I wonder what that lady makes of her son going around romancing the same women her husband seduced forty years ago. Leland took them to bed to get their legal business, and Dick sweet-talks them to keep it. Do you suppose our boy Dick climbs into bed with them, the same way his daddy used to do? It’d be a strange boy who did that, wouldn’t you think?”
    Davey stared out at the Sound without speaking.
    “I suppose you think the women are grateful,” said Nora.
    “Maybe the first time,” Alden said. “I don’t imagine Dick gives them much to be grateful for.”
    “We’ll never know,” Davey said, smiling strangely toward the Sound.
    Alden checked the empty places as if for leftover bits of lobster. “Are we all finished?”
    Davey nodded, and Alden glanced up at Jeffrey, who drifted sideways and opened the door. Nora thanked him as she walked past, but Jeffrey pretended not to hear. A few minutes later, Nora sat in Davey’s little red Audi, holding a Mason jar of homemade mayonnaise as he drove from Mount Avenue into Westerholm’s newer, less elegant interior.

10
    “ARE YOU UPSET?” she asked. Davey had traveled the entire mile and a half of Churchill Lane without speaking.
    It was a question she asked often during their marriage, and the answers she received, while not evasive, were never straightforward. As with many men, Davey’s feelings frequently came without labels.
    “I don’t know,” he said, which was better than a denial.
    “Were you surprised by what your father said?”
    He looked at her warily for about a quarter of a second. “If I was surprised by anybody, it was you.”
    “Why?”
    “My father gets a kick out of exaggerating his point of view. That doesn’t mean he should be attacked.”
    “You think I attacked him?”
    “Didn’t you say he was disgusting? That he cheapened every-thing?”
    “I was criticizing his ideas, not him. Besides, he enjoyed it. Alden gets a kick out of verbal brawls.”
    “The man is about to be seventy-five. I think he deserves more respect, especially from someone who doesn’t know the first thing about the publishing business. Not to mention the fact that he’s my father.”
    The light at the Post Road turned green, and Davey pulled away from the oaks beside the stone bridge at the end of Churchill Lane. Either because no traffic came toward them or because he had forgotten to do it, he did not signal the turn that would take them down the Post Road and home. Then she realized that he had not signaled a turn because he did not intend to take the Post