“Go to her,” the woman suggested.

“I can’t stay here?”

“I’m sorry, no.”

Back in the car he took a deep breath. “Are you going to tell me about it, Joy? I know you called him back when I was in the shower.” He’d seen it listed on the phone’s recent calls list.

She didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about, and he was grateful for that. She wiped her tears on the back of her wrist, and for a moment they just sat there. The old woman had gone back to her weeding, though Griffin had the distinct impression she hadn’t forgotten about them.

Finally, Joy said, “We can talk about it if you want. But first call your mother back.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s your mother. Because you yelled at her. Because she’s old. Because you’ve only got one.”

That night Griffin ’s insomnia returned with a vengeance, payback, apparently, for the previous night’s blissful sleep. Joy, to her credit, had tried to head the argument off. “We don’t have to do this,” she said after he called his mother back, leaving a brief apology on her machine for barking at her and promising to call again later in the week to discuss a visit. “There’s no need. Nothing happened.”

But she seemed to know they’d quarrel, and that the argument would be the most intense and bitter and wounding of their marriage. They’d finally quit out of exhaustion sometime after midnight, and since then he’d lain awake listening for the clock on the nightstand, which buzzed faintly every time the minute hand changed over. Amazing, really, how many bad thoughts you could cram into the sixty seconds between buzzes.

The day he found Joy sobbing in the shower, some part of him had known Tommy had to be involved. Even back when he and Elaine were still married and they were a foursome traipsing off to Mexico, Griffin knew about his friend’s crush on Joy. Out on the balcony of their resort hotel, working through some crucial scene, he would look up from the typewriter and see Tommy staring down at the pool below, and he could tell it was Joy he was looking at, not his own wife. Nor was his partner much interested in disguising the fact. “Lucky fellow,” he’d say before they went back to work. It had been part of the narrative of their long friendship that Griffin was born fortunate. Raised by two college professors, he’d gone to good schools that without exception identified him as gifted. Tommy, who was several years older, had grown up in a series of foster homes, knocked around rough urban public schools, his dyslexia undiagnosed, and was thought by everybody, including himself, to be dumb and lazy. First the army, then the community college where he’d met Elaine, after that some studio gofer work. “We’re both lucky,” Griffin would respond with a sweeping gesture that included their lovely young wives, the pool deck below with its palm trees and swim-up bar, the ocean just beyond the pink patio walls, the portable typewriter that provided them with all of this. “Yeah, sure,” Tommy always replied, “but there’s luck and then there’s luck.”

At what point had his feelings for her been reciprocated? This Joy had refused to tell him, asking what difference could it possibly make, so he’d spent the long night scrolling back through their marriage, especially the times he’d behaved badly. There’d been a fair number, he had to admit. Had his wife already fallen for Tommy the day she told Griffin she hated jazz? Probably not, but the seed might well have been sown that early. It was also around this time, he recalled, that Tommy had been desperately trying to locate his birth mother. “Why, for Christ sake?” he’d asked him one drunken night, hoping to diminish his friend’s need for something that was bound to disappoint him. “Don’t you realize how fortunate you are?”

“Jack,” Joy said, cautioning him.

“No, look at the man.” Griffin appealed directly to her here. “He has no baggage. He moves about the world a free man. He possesses large, untapped reserves of the very ignorance that bliss was invented to reward.”

“Yeah,” Tommy said, “but the thing is, she’s out there somewhere. And she’s older now. Things change. What if she’s wishing she never gave me up? What if she wants to tell me how sorry she is?”

“That’s what you don’t understand about parents,” Griffin explained. “They don’t apologize. We apologize. Take this last weekend.” Again he turned to Joy, who, knowing what was coming, looked away. “We’re summoned to Sacramento, right? It’s the twins’ birthday. The rest of the family’s going to be there so of course we have to be there, too. It’s Momma Jill making the pitch. On and on. When she finally lets her voice fall, we explain that we can’t-”

“Who explained?” Joy interrupted.

“They’re your parents,” Griffin pointed out.

Tommy and Joy exchanged a suffering look.

“Explain,” Griffin continued, “that we’re under deadline on this script-”

“Yet again,” Joy added.

“So,” Griffin said. “End of discussion? Hardly. Now it’s Poppa Jarve’s turn-”

“You promised you weren’t going to do that anymore,” Joy said, still gazing off into the distance. Griffin had recently taken to calling him (never to his face) not Harve but Jarve, so he wouldn’t be the only one in the family whose name didn’t begin with a J. Joy had found that funny at first but quickly changed her mind, claiming it was mean-spirited.

“And we have to go through the whole thing all over again.”

“Who has to?”

“Because to Harve, what you and I do for a living isn’t real work.”

“He does have a point,” Tommy said, raising his margarita so they could clink glasses.

“But we stand firm and-”

Tommy and Joy, together, this time. “Who stands firm?”

“So now, because we can’t go to Sacramento, everybody’s feelings are hurt.”

“We could’ve gone,” Joy corrected. “We chose not to.”

“But that’s my point,” Griffin said. “We’re adults. Shouldn’t we be able to choose? Every night this week you’ve been on the phone apologizing. First to your father, then your mother, then your sisters, then your father again.” He turned his attention back to Tommy now. “This is why our ancestors came to America. To ditch their symbolic parents. To become grown-ups in their own right.”

“I’m not saying we’d start some heavy relationship, my mother and I,” Tommy tried to explain. “I’d just like to know if she’s alive or dead… if she’s, you know, okay.”

“Isn’t that her job?” Griffin said, getting worked up on his friend’s behalf. “To wonder if you’re okay?”

Now Tommy appealed to Joy. “Do you ever win an argument with this guy?”

“Let… me…think,” Joy said, leaning toward Tommy so he could rub her neck, pausing just a comic half beat before saying, as if it had never occurred to her before, “Why, no.”

Later that same night, though, when he and Joy were in bed, the discussion had turned more serious. “Why shouldn’t he yearn for his biological mother?”

Okay, Griffin conceded, it made perfect sense that he should. But what made such yearning possible was that he didn’t know the woman. He expected Joy to object to his cynicism, but instead she snuggled up against him and said, “We hurt their feelings, my parents’. That’s why I apologized.”

Who said she never won any arguments?

Another buzz, another minute.

Joy had known about Tommy’s crush on her, of course. How could she not? She just hadn’t expected ever to feel the same way about him, she told Griffin. One day she just woke up and realized she did. But what day? When?

After Laura, was Griffin ’s best guess. It was the birth of their daughter, together with Tommy’s divorce, that really changed the dynamic of their lives. It was then that he’d finally given in and accepted Harve and Jill’s offer of a loan. Which guaranteed, Griffin complained to Tommy, that he and Joy were now officially hitched to the parental sled. They’d have little choice but to obey every summons to Sacramento. Tommy took Joy’s side, of course. What could be more natural than for her to want their daughter to know her grandparents, her aunts and uncles and cousins? She simply wanted Laura to grow up with the kind of family memories she herself cherished. Who wouldn’t? (Griffin, for one, but he understood his orphan friend’s question to be rhetorical.) Tommy, who desperately wanted a family, and Joy, who had one-they’d made an effective tag team. “Look,” she said, “we’re talking about a weekend every other month. I’m no fonder of their gated community than you are, but taking their money doesn’t mean we have to start voting Republican or something. Sacramento ’s purely logistical. Where else is the family supposed to gather if not at my parents’? Our apartment?” Plus, she went on, the timing was right. Vietnam had been over for years. They were in their late twenties now, and it was time to start applying a salve to all those never-trust-anyone-over-thirty generational wounds.