Brian’s mother, Zoe, had a couple of long stony-faced discussions with her husband. By the end of the second one the divorce had been set in motion. A couple of weeks later the last traces of Darryl McDonald had been removed. Within a month, the house where Brian had been carried home from the hospital after his birth and where he’d been brought up—the place he’d imagined he might inherit someday and retire to after a long successful career—had a big FOR SALE BY COLDWELL BANKER sign erected on its front lawn.
His father, Darryl, was living in a small sublet condo with Steffie, who had not only been promoted from secret mistress to fiancée, but also artificially matured by being redubbed Stephanie. Because the incident that had precipitated all of this, when Brian had walked into the den, had not dimmed or lost any of its visual clarity for either Brian or Stephanie, their meetings were rare and uncomfortable after that.
In the years since then, Brian had managed to maintain cordial relations with both of his parents. At first he’d considered himself to be closest to his mother, who represented home, love, and childhood memories. She was the wronged party, and she had always been much more important in Brian’s life than his father, who had been largely a figurehead, absent most of the time. Even in the very uncomfortable and treacherous topic of sex that loomed unmentioned but enormous in the background while the family crumbled, she seemed to be in the right. Zoe had always, at least in his presence, been kind and affectionate to her husband. She wasn’t exactly an ingénue when this happened, but she had taken good care of herself. She hadn’t deserved such outright rejection.
But he could also feel sympathy for the temptation Darryl had felt around Steffie. In the terrible incident, Brian had not been able to take his eyes off her, and he recalled that she was like a ripe fruit, all plump, perfect, rounded curves and sugary succulence. Even as she had charged into him to push through the doorway, he recalled, her face had been beautiful, like a blushing angel. Brian decided it was a sign of his own maturity to concede that his father was only a weak, mortal human being, and that being tempted did not make him worse than most.
There was also the fact that the hand that signed the checks to Stanford, and after that MIT, was his father’s. After the initial shock of the divorce wore off, Brian sometimes thought that it was too bad his mother couldn’t have done what millions of other women had done and given her husband time to get over Steffie without doing anything overtly unpleasant and destroying the rest of the family’s sense of well-being.
The message he’d received from Sarah a couple of hours ago had compelled him to rethink the whole tawdry story. He was beginning to think his mother had lost her mind like a cast-off woman in a Greek tragedy that he couldn’t quite place. She had run off with a man who was practically a stranger, and before she went away to God knew where she wanted to bring this man to see him. It was clear that Sarah was taking this thing seriously, because she hadn’t called, e-mailed, or sent a text. She had hired a process server from the law firm where she had interned to deliver it.
Brian’s relationship with Sarah had been one of the things that the fall of the house of McDonald had brought down. They had been close as children. She was his little sister, and she had looked up to him. But when the breakup had come, they’d argued. She had sided with their mother and expressed contempt for Brian because he had not gone out of his way to be rude to Stephanie. He had told her that she was a na?ve, knee-jerk feminist who, paradoxically, hated women, and was incapable of appreciating the complexity of human behavior. After that they had both been busy with graduate school and law school. And there was no longer a home where they would be forced to see each other on holidays.
The letter she had sent him by messenger was their first communication in at least two years. As soon as Brian received it he had closed his office door and read it with dread, and then with alarm, and finally despair. Since Sarah had entered law school she had adopted a measured, seemingly reasonable style of discourse. Reading a letter from her was like watching a philosopher walk calmly up a mountain and step off a cliff. Mom has found love. For the first time since we were children, she’s happy. But powerful criminals have a grudge against him, so they have to go away for a while.