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screwed that up. All he had to do was hit the brakes, leave some skid marks, but no—”
    “Shut up, Tim,” Sean says, joining them.
    “It’s just Gwen.”
    The words are at once warm and vaguely insulting, conferring a privilege while making it sound as if Gwen is a person of no consequence.
    “Gordon did not commit suicide.”
    “Look, we’re not going to rat him out to the church, keep him from being buried in consecrated ground. And I’m not going to break Mom’s heart. But among the three of us, can’t we at least drop the bullshit?”
    “He was drunk. He called me an hour before, wasn’t making any sense.”
    “Probably.”
    “If he was drunk, then he didn’t know what he was doing. He was drag racing, like in the old days, and he miscalculated.”
    “OK, but—we lived here all our lives. We all learned to drive on that patch of dead-end highway. Drunk or asleep or dead, he couldn’t have forgotten that there were barricades, that it ended.”
    “Let it go, Tim.”
    “Speaking of drinking—anyone want to?”
    They end up at the Point, once a reliably sleazy dive on Franklintown Road. To their horror, it has been yuppified. Live music on the weekends, a decent wine list. The bar food is traditional but prepared with care. It isn’t the kind of experience Gwen—or most Baltimoreans with money, or even the city’s pseudohipsters—are inclined to seek out on Franklintown Road, although Gwen realizes she might find it a handy retreat as long as she’s staying in her father’s house.
    The boys drink Rolling Rock on tap, while she has a microbrew.
    “Raison D’Être.” Tim pronounces the name of her beer with great disdain. Ray-zohn Det-ruh. “Faggot beer.”
    Sean winces at his un-PC brother, but Tim isn’t shamed: “Any beer with a French name has to suck.”
    “It’s very good,” Gwen says. “And it’s made in Delaware. Taste it.”
    Tim refuses, but Sean is polite enough to try it and say nice things, although he clearly doesn’t care for it.
    “You are such a fucking yuppie,” Tim says. A new insult, but in the same vein of all the insults heaped on her when they were children. Gwennie the Whale. Gwen the Goody Two-shoes. Yet Gwen was never as proper as Sean. She wonders if Tim knows that.
    She responds, because Tim wants her to and his brother is dead, so she owes him a little good-humored argument. “That term is incredibly dated to the point of being meaningless. When did it come into vogue? The eighties? And who isn’t an urban professional among the three of us? Young we’re clearly not.”
    “But you work at that stupid magazine—”
    “I edit it, yes.”
    “And it’s all about what to buy and what to eat and what to wear.”
    “We do a lot of substantive journalism. More than ever, given how the Beacon-Light has been gutted. I’d love to commission an article on the trial you’ve got going, Mr. State’s Attorney. We also still make money. You know why? Because we are business friendly, which kept our advertising stable when the economy bottomed out. And we don’t give all our content away.”
    “Best doctors. Best restaurants. Best neighborhoods. Best of the best. Why not—best places to pick up hookers? Hey—why not best hookers? That’s news I could use.”
    “I didn’t know you had to pay for it, Tim.”
    “I don’t. I prefer to pay for it.”
    “He’s kidding,” Sean puts in, ever the PR man, worried that Gwen is going to run off and write a headline : ASSISTANT STATE’S ATTORNEY PREFERS HOOKERS . “Tim’s so straight he doesn’t even drive over the speed limit. And he’s still stupid-in-love with Arlene.”
    It’s funny, how quickly they revert to their roles—their roles as they first were, when they functioned as a group with no relationships within the relationships. The only thing different about their interaction is the alcohol. And that they are three, instead of five. They can never be five—the starfish, as Mickey called