She gave him a disapproving look. ‘You don’t want to drink alone, is that it?’

‘I have no problem with drinking alone. You need to relax.’

‘I don’t like scotch.’

‘You want something else?’

She stared at the glass for a long time, then finally took a sip and grimaced. ‘This is horrible. How can you drink this?’

Marty shrugged. ‘You get used to it.’

Lily took another tentative sip. ‘Morey’s scotch is better. Still bad, but better than this. This is cheap, isn’t it?’

He smiled a little. ‘Yeah.’

Lily nodded, got up, and disappeared into the kitchen. A few moments later, she came out carrying a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Balvenie.

Marty gaped at the bottle. ‘My God, Lily, do you know how much that stuff costs?’

‘So we shouldn’t drink it? You think you can sell a half-empty bottle of scotch on eBay?’

Marty couldn’t decide which was more surprising – the fact that Lily had lugged out a two-hundred-dollar bottle of scotch, or that she knew about eBay.

They sat quietly together, drinking scotch and staring at the silent TV, and because the moment was so strangely comfortable, Marty was almost tempted to tell her everything. Just blurt it out, forget the consequences, let her do her worst.

Suddenly, he saw an image of Jack Gilbert smiling back at him from the TV. He blinked a few times, certain that he was hallucinating, but the smiling face didn’t go away. ‘Hey, that’s Jack. Turn it up.’

Lily snatched the remote from the table and turned the TV off.

‘Come on, Lily!’ He grabbed the remote, flipped the TV back on, and watched in amusement as the commercial cycled through a montage of touching scenes: Jack at a car accident, helping the victim, Jack at a construction site, talking to workers, Jack at a hospital bed, looking earnest and caring. A narrator’s voice spoke over the final shot of a dynamic, charismatic Jack in court: ‘You need a lawyer who cares about you. Call Jack Gilbert at 1-800-555-5225. That’s 1-800-555-J-A-C-K, Jack. Don’t let them jack you around.’

‘What a schlock,’ Lily muttered.

‘I don’t know. I thought it was pretty good.’

She grunted.

‘You never used to think he was a schlock. You used to be proud of him.’

‘He used to be my son,’ she said sharply.

Marty sighed. He had made the decision to put his own non-life on hold out of respect for Morey, and to do what he could to help Lily. Hannah would have wanted that. But he wasn’t going to do it forever, which meant this family feud nonsense had to end. Jack should be taking care of his own mother, goddamnit. ‘Jesus, Lily, you’re the most stubborn woman on the planet.’

‘Why do you do that? Why do you swear? You know I hate that.’

‘Oh, come on, we’re Jewish. Saying “Jesus” doesn’t mean anything.’

‘It means something to someone. You could show a little respect.’

Marty took a breath. ‘Fine. I’ll stop swearing, you stop changing the subject. We’re running out of Gilberts here, Lily. It’s just you and Jack now, and it’s about time you buried the hatchet. So he married out of the faith – why is that such a big deal? You and Morey never even went to temple. Why should you care if he married a Lutheran?’

Lily gave him an incredulous look. ‘You think that’s what this is about?’

‘Well, isn’t it?’

‘Pffft. Your head is filled with things you don’t know. Things you didn’t bother to find out because you’re such a busy retired person.’

Marty gritted his teeth until he could trust himself to speak. ‘Don’t even try the guilt thing with this one, Lily. We hadn’t seen Jack in a while, he kept blowing Hannah off when she called, so I asked Morey what was going on. He said Jack had married a Lutheran, and we weren’t going to talk about it. Period. A week or so after that Hannah was killed, and you can just goddamn excuse me for not following through.’

He took a breath and eyed the bottle of Balvenie. Ten bucks a shot, the way he figured it. Seemed a shame to waste that kind of money on the rapid journey into oblivion he was hoping for.

‘Go ahead, drink it,’ Lily said. ‘Better you should die from a diseased liver than holes in your stomach from that drain cleaner you drink.’

If she thought she was going to have to tell him twice, she was crazy. He snatched the bottle and filled his glass and dreamed of blackness.

Lily watched him take a long drink. ‘So you want to know about this thing with Jack or not?’

‘Sure. Why not.’

She nodded, then leaned against the back of the couch. Her feet didn’t touch the floor when she did that, and she looked like an old little girl with her legs sticking straight out.

‘Every day Jack would come for lunch, remember? This was before the schlocky ad, when I could still tell people my son was a lawyer and not worry about them seeing the clown on TV. And then one day, poof. He drops off the face of the earth. No lunching, no calling, no nothing. I call his office, I talk to a machine; I call his house, I talk to another machine. Morey said they argued.’

‘About what?’

‘Who knows? Fathers and sons argue. This happens. So they stay away from each other long enough to forget the stupid things they said when they were mad, and then it’s over. Except this time it wasn’t. This time Jack sent us a picture in the mail, and there in the picture are little girls in white dresses and little boys in suits and right in the middle is the big schlock himself, and they’re all kneeling in front of a cross with that poor, dead Jew hanging on it.’

Marty blinked at her, wondering if the last drink had finally fried his brain, because he was definitely missing something. ‘What are you talking about? What picture?’

Lily ignored his question. ‘And on the bottom of the picture it says: Jack Gilbert, First Communion, some Lutheran church.’

‘What? Jack converted?’

She sipped from her glass and said nothing.

‘That doesn’t make any sense at all. Jack never even believed in God.’

Lily looked at him like he was an idiot. ‘What are you thinking? This had nothing to do with God. This was Jack slapping our faces and turning his back on his family and who he was because he’d had some stupid fight with his father. And then a couple of weeks later we get a wedding picture. Same place, same cross, a bigger girl in a bigger white dress. Another slap, and the coward did it with pictures.’

Marty raked his fingers through his hair, as if that might stimulate some dormant brain cell that could help him make sense of what he’d just been told. Jack had his fair share of shortcomings, but he’d never struck him as the kind of guy who’d hurt anybody intentionally, least of all his parents. Besides, it made no sense at all for Jack to punish Lily for a fight he’d had with Morey. ‘I can’t figure this out.’

‘Big surprise. I’ve been trying for over a year, and I can’t figure it out either.’

‘You should have asked Jack.’

‘I told you, Jack wouldn’t talk to me. Morey wouldn’t talk to me. You men, you do these stupid things, and the women suffer and never know why.’

Marty watched her drink from her glass, foolish enough, even after all these years, to look for a flicker of emotion on the old woman’s face. He knew without a doubt that it was in there, but he also knew he would never see it. Probably if Lily Gilbert ever started crying, she’d never be able to stop.

‘Well, I’ll talk to the little bastard,’ he said.

‘Good.’

‘And I’m sorry he hurt you.’

Lily gave him a smug look. ‘And all this time, I’m the bad person. By the way, Sol called tonight while you were closing up the greenhouse. You’re a pallbearer, you know.’

‘I know.’

She smiled a little. ‘Morey picked out his casket years ago. He used to go to the funeral home and play poker with Sol, and one day, he comes home and says, “Lily, I picked out my casket today. It’s bronze and it’s heavy, and the pallbearers are going to pull out their backs carrying me. This will help out Harvey, the chiropractor, whose business has been bad.” ’