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something out of a bantering 1940s comedy. I’d never seen the bucket before, but it was a big house, and Oliver owned a lot of things. All day I’d had the feeling that I was outside whatever room I was in, watching the action on a movie screen.
    Ruth stood in the center of the room, surrounded by an endless flow of people kissing her cheek and pressing her hand. Ruth had Oliver’s big, sharp nose, without his plump mouth to offset its haughtiness. Her lips were thin. In old pictures she had a severe, spinsterish look, but age had softened her face. And she wasn’t a spinster—she’d been married for forty-two years to a sweet, quiet man named Bill, who seemed an odd choice for a woman raised by Oliver. Ruth’s mother, Oliver’s wife, had died in her late thirties. She had been pretty, with large eyes and a baby-doll mouth, which Ruth did not inherit.
    Ruth had gone to the beauty parlor to have her hair fluffed into a cloud of white curls. Over the other conversations I heard her say, “Daddy would have been so happy you were all here,” and I thought that if she believed that, she didn’t know her father very well. I also thought how strange it was for a sixty-year-old woman to call her father Daddy.
    Ruth glanced over at me and then looked away. She hadn’t bothered to introduce me to anyone, and so I’d spoken only to the handful of people I already knew. I’d caught several of the others staring at me with expressions that said, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” Now, listening to Ruth use the words
Daddy
and
my father
from her position at the center of the room, it struck me that to the world at large Oliver was not anything to me but my boss. It was unfair. Perhaps he was not my father, but he was my something. I couldn’t find a word that measured both our relationship and my grief.
    A large man in a black suit appeared next to me, a plate piled high with food in his hand. He was sweating, and he mopped at his brow with a cocktail napkin. “Hot in here, isn’t it?”
    I agreed that it was.
    “He was a great man,” he said. “I’m a cousin.”
    I wondered if he was one of the cousins Oliver had meant for me to marry.
    He sighed. “I wish I’d been able to see more of him,” he said. “I’ll miss him.”
    At the sorrow in his voice, my own throat tightened. “Me, too,” I managed to say.
    The man looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time. “So what’s your story, anyway?” he asked. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
    After that I finished my glass of wine and drank two more in rapid succession. I had just gone back to my corner with my fourth glass when a woman I knew from Square Books squeezed my arm. I’d seen her just a few days before, when I went to pick up a book Oliver had ordered. “Give him a kiss for me,” she’d said. Now she asked me what I was going to do next. The truth was, I had no idea, and when I thought too hard about it I felt blank, empty, and scared.
    “Bartending school,” I said.
    She laughed. “Will you finish Oliver’s memoirs?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Why not? Don’t you have lots of material?”
    “Not really.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because most of what he told me wasn’t true.”
    “Like what?”
    “Let’s see,” I said. “He used to say that he had his first harem at the age of five. Every little girl in town followed him around, and he put them in order—first wife, second wife, and so on. He said his nickname was Beau, and they used to fight over him, screaming, He’s my beau, he’s my beau.”
    The woman laughed again. “I love it,” she said. “What else?”
    I was drunk. I didn’t want to use Oliver to entertain. “He told me he’d live to be a hundred,” I said. I looked into my empty wineglass until she moved away.
    I threaded my way through the crowd, avoiding Ruth. I passed through the library, swallowing the urge to tell the couple pawing Oliver’s precious books that he didn’t like