"What are you going to do with the hair?" the saleslady asked, as if it were a stray pet Tess had adopted, not part of her body.

"Shave it," Kitty said. "Mine, too. Everyone at the wedding is going to be bald. I saw it in InStyle magazine. Very chic, and it saves a fortune on hairdressers."

The saleslady backed away with a nervous smile, and Tess was reassured that her aunt had not completely lost her sense of humor.

"Can we break for lunch?"

"Just one more stop," Kitty said, using the soft, wheedling tone that had sold so many books and won so many men before she decided she could live with just one. "There's a place in Towson that carries Vera Wang."

"Vera Wang doesn't really do hips, which I have in abundance."

"But she does do cleavage, which you also have in abundance."

"I've never gone for that bosomy swell where you end up on nipple patrol the whole evening, worrying that an entire breast might pop out of the top of your dress and hit someone in the face."

"Good point," Kitty said, studying Tess's décolletage, which was fighting the red dress even harder than her hair and her skin. "We couldn't afford the liability insurance if those things got loose at the reception. High neck it is."

Gratefully, Tess jumped down from the footstool, knocking over her bag, which sent her gun skittering across the floor. Kitty lifted the hem of her ankle-length skirt, as if the Beretta were a rodent.

"Do you always carry that now?"

"Everywhere it's legal."

"Will you insist on bringing it to the wedding?" Kitty was striving for a light tone, but Tess could tell she was upset. She didn't like guns, and she didn't like being reminded that Tess would now be dead without one. Her aunt simply could not reconcile those two facts. Tess understood. She wasn't particularly fond of this reality either, but she was getting used to it. She tried to think of the Beretta as a paradoxical talisman: As long as she had it, she would never need it.

"Depends on whether the dress has a belt, so I can holster it. Of course, I also have a shoulder holster. Or maybe that fancy handbag designer, the one who does all those one-of-a-kind bags for Oscar night, could whip up something for an armed and dangerous bridesmaid."

"You know, I think we should break for lunch after all."

Chapter Nineteen

THE LITTLE BOY WAS LOOKING FOR HIS FATHER. He went from room to room in the old house, only vaguely aware of the flames in the windows, the heat building up around him. He was not scared. He is never scared. From somewhere outside the house, his mother screamed, telling him to turn around, to come back, to flee to safety, but he paid no heed. He knew that his father was in the house somewhere, and he would not leave without his father. He walked from the third floor to the second, from the second to the first. The house was his family's, the only house he had ever known. Yet it was unfamiliar-looking, with strange furniture he had never seen before. And the basement was still unfinished, not the playroom he used in the daytime, filled with toys and games and gadgets. This was a dark, creepy place with a cold stone floor, no furniture, and no electricity. Upstairs the fire crackled happily, making a sound like Jiffy Pop. He still was not afraid. Jiffy Pop was nothing to be afraid of. Maybe his father was making it for him. Only his father could make it right, so every kernel popped, just like it said on the bag.

And then he saw his father lying on the basement floor, dressed as if for work, his gray suit surrounded by a burgundy stain. Had Poppa spilled something? Cranberry juice or Hawaiian Punch? Would Mama be mad at Poppa for making a mess? There was a gun, his father's gun, which he had to carry for work. But the gun was in Poppa's right hand, and his father was left-handed, like him. Why was the gun in his right hand? Someone else must have killed him and tried to make it look like his father did it to himself.

The boy took the gun away and put it in his toy chest, which had suddenly materialized, and now the basement was the rec room he remembered, with the cast-off sofa and pine paneling and the old black-and-white RCA in the corner, because his father just bought a big color television for the den. Would they have to give the color television back, now that his father was dead?

Zeke willed himself awake, an essential trick to master for those prone to nightmares. He had thought the dream was the by-product of his old life and assumed it would end when he finally got out. But here it was again, more or less the same. Some details varied, but the fiery house remained constant. It always started off as a surreal approximation of the shingled Forest Park home his family had owned before his father's death, then reclaimed itself at the end, taking on its true contours in case Zeke ever made the mistake of thinking his father's suicide could be confined within the boundaries of a bad dream.

And the young Zeke always had some petty thought upon finding his father's body. Would they get to keep the color television? The new Cadillac? Strange, the one question the dreamworld Zeke never asked was the one Zeke had asked in real life: Did this mean they weren't going to the Orioles game? Zeke didn't beat himself up too much over that. He was only five when his father died-in the basement of what was left of his business, as a matter of fact, not at home. And he was discovered by an employee, not his son, so the event had seemed unreal to the little boy. After all the rabbi's vague talk about journeys and God's fate and being summoned by the Angel of Death, Zeke came to believe that his father had gone to a place from which he might return. So he had asked what a five-year-old boy would have asked in those years, the glory years of McNally and Palmer and Brooks: "Does this mean we're not going to the Orioles game?"

The rabbi took their tickets. Or so Zeke always assumed. At any rate, Zeke didn't go to the game that night.

He stared at the ceiling, taking in the sounds around him. Life on the outside was at once louder and quieter than he remembered, the sounds more varied and less predictable. Natalie didn't exactly snore, but she whistled a bit as she slept, curled into his side like a kitten. The children, who shared the other double bed, were mouth-breathers and snufflers. The twins slept in a tangled jumble, while Isaac hugged a narrow strip along the side. Once or twice so far, Zeke had awakened in the night and found Isaac's brown-black eyes boring into him in the dark, full of hate. The boy slept so far on the side of the bed that it was amazing to Zeke he didn't end up falling every night, but he had an unnatural rigidity. Again, just like his father. The Rubins were very rigid men.

Spoiled, too. At every stop Isaac asked if he could have a rollaway bed, but Zeke had said a motel double was big enough for three kids. The truth was that he just didn't want to draw attention to the fact that they were traveling with three kids. Bad enough that they sometimes drove with the luggage on the roof, although that sometimes worked as an optical illusion. Now you see it, now you don't.

"What makes you think motels even have rollaways?" he had asked Isaac once.

"The Waldorf-Astoria did," he said. "We had a suite, and I slept on the rollaway in the living room part, and the twins shared the other double bed."

"The Waldorf, huh?" Even when Zeke's father was alive and the business was thriving, Zeke had never taken material things for granted, never assumed the world was his oyster, never even understood that puzzling expression. If the world was your oyster, what were you? A grain of sand being pounded into a pearl? "You stay at the Waldorf a lot, Lord Fauntleroy?"