Joy warned him not to press the issue. Laura was old and smart enough to sift ideas, and his mother needn’t be treated like a venomous snake. He’d reluctantly given in, but when his mother suggested she be the one to accompany Laura on the Yale-Columbia-Cornell swing of what they all referred to as the Great American College Tour, he put his foot down. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said, managing, with great effort, not to raise his voice, but failing to keep the anger out of it, “but you don’t get to infect my daughter with your snobbery and bitterness. All that ends here, with me.”

It had been a horrible thing to say, full of the very bitterness he was accusing her of. He regretted the words as soon as they were spoken, but there was no taking them back, nor could he quite bring himself to apologize.

“You have to call her back,” Joy said when he confessed what he’d done.

But he hadn’t. Nor did he soften and allow her to take Laura on that trip, managing it all by himself. They never referred to the matter again, but he knew his mother too well to imagine she’d forgotten. She no doubt saw her granddaughter’s hospital visit as a kind of revenge, or so it had seemed to him, banished to the nurses’ lounge, where he willed the big clock on the wall to move, damn it. At the end of the hour, Laura seemed fine, and he felt relieved that nothing too terrible had transpired, but as soon as they were in the car Laura broke down and sobbed all the way to the airport. Though it probably shouldn’t have, the intensity of her grief had surprised Griffin. No doubt she was coming to terms with the likelihood that she’d never see her grandmother again, but there seemed to be more to it, as if she was also mourning that someone who should’ve been important to her had remained a stranger. And whose fault was that? His mother’s, for being completely disinterested until so late in the game? It was tempting to lay the full blame on her, but deep down Griffin knew that if she’d shown interest in Laura any earlier, he would have just stepped between them that much sooner. He’d behaved as if she were a serpent because, God help him, he believed her to be one.

“I thought she’d want to know all about the man I was going to marry,” Laura told him now, her eyes filling at the memory of that hour in the hospital, indeed their last visit, “but when I tried to tell her about him…”

Griffin waited, but when his daughter seemed unable to continue, he completed her thought. “She wasn’t very curious?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, wiping her eyes on her wrist. “When I talk about Andy, all my friends say their gag reflex kicks in. They say we’re nauseatingly in love.”

“Happiness sucks as a spectator sport, darlin’.”

“I guess. Anyway, after I told Grandma a few things about Andy, she interrupted, saying, ‘You need to get tougher.’ When I asked her why, she said marriage is combat. Somebody hurts, somebody gets hurt. One does, the other gets done to.”

“You know she was on morphine, right?”

“It wasn’t so much what she said that got under my skin. It was the funny way she was looking at me, like she could see deep down and knew I had it in me to be cruel. That if somebody had to get hurt, it’d be Andy, not me.”

“Sweetie, you say she was looking at you, looking into you, but I doubt it. Your grandmother was a narcissist, and they don’t really look outward. To them the world just reflects their own inner reality. She saw love as a trap. Therefore, you should, too.”

She sat up straight now. “All I know is I don’t ever want to break his heart.”

“You won’t.”

“Promise?”

“Absolutely.”

Had he been writing this scene in a script, the conversation wouldn’t have ended there. His fictional daughter would have asked the obvious questions. How could he possibly promise that she wouldn’t do the very thing he was doing? Wasn’t she his daughter? But it wasn’t a script, and his real-life daughter was too kind to say what she was thinking, maybe even too kind to think it.

“What I’ve been wondering is whether you’ll ever forgive me.”

“Oh, I already have,” she said, shouldering him hard but playfully, then getting to her feet. Apparently the father-daughter segment of the program was drawing to a close. “I’m still pretty mad at you, though,” she admitted.

“I know,” he said, rising as well. “Me too.”

When they emerged from the maze, she said, “Grandma told me one other thing, actually. About you.”

“What’s that?” he asked, though he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“She said you’d never admit it, but you’re just like her.”

Damn right you are, his mother said, agreeing with herself.

Everyone did seem to be on their best behavior, just as Joy had promised. He’d no sooner gotten himself a glass of wine than Jared-at least he was pretty sure it was Jared, given the shaved skull-came over and extended his hand, which Griffin saw no reason not to take. Whichever brother he was shaking hands with looked like what he was, a career marine: lantern jawed, thick necked, improbably muscled. “So,” he said, pumping Griffin ’s hand in his crushing grip, “no hard feelings?”

Jared, then. Note to self: Jared, skull; Jason, hair. Griffin said no, there were no hard feelings.

The twins were a family enigma, born nearly a decade after Joy (Jane and June were older, the girls all spaced in two-year intervals) and completely different in temperament. As boys they’d worried Harve and Jill by fighting constantly and ferociously, neither ever seeking parental redress or justice. They fought until they bled, then fought some more. But suddenly all of that was over. Instead of wanting to kill each other, they had each other’s backs. With the leftover energy they took to bodybuilding and making gentle, sometimes not so gentle, fun of their father, first behind his back, later to his face. Neither had married. Now in their forties, they still liked heavy-metal music, strip clubs and the kind of women one met there.

“Two sides to every story, I guess,” Jared said, a worm squiggling under the skin of one temple, evidence how costly, for him, such magnanimity actually was. “Push comes to shove, I have to side with my sister, but…”

“I’m kind of on her side myself,” Griffin told him, because it was true, but also because it seemed like a good idea to suggest to Jared that pushing really needn’t come to shoving. Or punching, or stomping, or castration. All of which had apparently been on the table at one point. Brother Jason (not hair so much as stubble, really) was watching them from across the room, Griffin noticed, his expression, well, murderous was probably too strong a word. “I hear your brother left the service,” Griffin ventured, genuinely curious that either twin should do something so brazenly individualistic.

Jared snorted, glancing over his shoulder at his brother and raising his voice enough to be sure he could hear him. “Yeah, well, Jason always was a pussy.”

“We’ll see, J.J.,” his brother called back. This was short for Jared the Jarhead, the nickname he’d immediately picked up when he joined the marines. As if there weren’t enough J’s in the family already. “You wait.”

Joy’s father was indeed in a wheelchair along the far wall. A tall, angular woman who Griffin assumed must be Dot stood sentry at his elbow, and when he approached, she bent at the waist to whisper, like a handler to a pol, in Harve’s ear. To remind him who Griffin was? That he and Joy had separated?

“What?” Harve barked at her, and then, when she repeated whatever she’d told him, said, “Hell, I know who it is.” He extended a feeble, palsied hand, and Griffin felt an unexpected surge of pity. His father-in-law had always been a robust man, but no more. His pale blue eyes were watery, their lids outlined in bright red, as if with a cosmetic pencil.