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already in the shell. For a second, I see Tana and her classmates floating around campus in togas — togas and stone tablets chiseled with smart-aleck quips from Socrates and other robed wise guys. I lower my fork, for the breakfast is dangerously hot. I ask, “So what’s your school motto?”
    She picks up her fork. Smiling brightly, she says, “Sumus primi.”
    This means, I believe, “We are first.” Could there be any doubt? She and her classmates will probably attend Harvard when they graduate from high school — Yale or Harvard or Princeton or MIT , universities for those born to be successful.
    We stir our breakfast, releasing more engines of steam. When my napkin falls to the floor, it looks like litter. I pick it up un-prettily. It’s nothing but paper with brown chili smudges, while the napkin in Tana’s hand is a crinkled origami flower. How does that work? How does the same object in her grip seem dainty?
    She asks, “Did your high school have a motto?”
    The vapor between us has dispersed. We’re comfortable with each other. How did I get so lucky as to know a bright ninety-seven pound girl? “Yeah,” I answer, “it was in street Spanish, but I can translate it into English.”
    I let a few seconds pass while she waits, her body leaning forward as if to say, And? I stall, smile, then reveal our motto: “Run like you stole something.”
    She laughs, hand over her mouth, and the napkin falls to the floor again. I like how she does that — how she drops the napkin. Happiness leaps in my heart as I fetch it for her.

THE FAMILY FORTUNE
    The young man was named either Barclay or Basil. As he was from wealth, he most certainly kept a string of polo ponies and hunting horses, the noble profiles of the finest rendered in oils and hung above mantels. I came to know him — briefly — in a biography of an English writer who did his best work in the 1930s.
    Memory fails once again. Was his name Barclay or Basil? I imagine him with a mallet — is that what they call it? — clad in a wool hunting jacket, white britches, knee-high leather boots tooled in Bradford. His silver flask was etched with his name — Barclay or Basil? His family estate was near Knole in County Kent, not far from the Churchill estate, Chartwell. I’m thinking of him and his family’s friendship with Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, a notable couple of the 1930s, doers in literature and gardens, considered eccentrics by the neighboring landowner — and also, as I’ve learned, political conservatives.
    This young man, possibly the only son of a family that included five girls, became excited when he was named an assistant in a publishing firm near Fleet Street. Unattached and lighthearted, recently come into his inheritance, he accepted a job reading and responding to author queries. He arrived in late morning and left by four in the afternoon, part-time work when we consider the office scene these days.
    I recall tidbits of a biography, but of whom exactly? I see it like this: Basil or Barclay was at Oxford for two years before he was sent down; still, he wore his college’s tie and pin. His family’s fortune came from Jamaica and their five-hundred-acre plantation (a word they avoided) of sugar cane, crisp stalks rustling and sweetening the air. He had visited the island once and remembered that the sea, blue as the china in the breakfront at home, was almost never out of view. There also were tea and banana plantations in British Guiana, and investments in South Africa. On his mother’s side, they had land in Scotland. What worry could pleat his brow?
    He was called home by family for the weekend — something about the pending marriage of a distant cousin. He boarded a train at Waterloo station, then took a taxi to the family’s estate, where black bulls roamed on a far hill and lambs gathered by a fence. The sky