That Old CapeMagic

“I didn’t know…,” he’d stammered.

“Yeah, well, now you do.”

And there’d been snickers, lots of them, to help propel him back up the stairs.

Poor kid, Griffin remembered thinking as he regarded Su

“Why don’t you go somewhere, then,” Joy told him. “You’re making me more nervous than he is.”

He’d gladly taken her advice and gone out for a drink with Tommy, returning just as the party was breaking up. Su

“What kind of thirteen-year-old says, ‘You have a lovely home’?” he asked Joy later, as they were cleaning up. In his mind’s eye he could see the poor kid practicing the line until his parents were sure he’d got it right.

“We do have a lovely home,” Joy pointed out. “And he did have a good time. Quit worrying. They’re just kids. They have to figure these things out.”

“That’s the problem,” he said. “They already have it all figured out. Who’s cool, who’s not, who’s in, who’s out. Nobody had to teach them, either.”

Su

“Yes,” his wife told him, clearly a

What was vague in Griffin ’s recollection was the exact chronology of all this. By that birthday party he and Joy must have already been making plans to leave L.A., hadn’t they? Was it that very night that had firmed his resolve to look seriously for a teaching position back East? No, that was a trick of memory, surely. Yet he did seem to remember not liking Laura’s friends, especially that cluster of boys, and one in particular who, smirking, had elbowed another and pointed to Su

Just as troubling, Joy seemed actually to be settling into their “lovely home.” Now he was the one reminding her of the Great Truro Accord, that the idea had always been to sell the Valley house and use the equity for a down payment back East. Finally, in the second decade of their marriage, he was begi

He’d described all this to his son-in-law on the phone with great enthusiasm. “What if you buy in and then change your mind?” Griffin asked.

“We won’t,” Harve said. “Not once it’s made up. Haven’t you figured this out about us yet?”

Actually, he had.

It was possible Griffin was misremembering, but it seemed to him now that the need to break free of Joy’s family, to make the Great Truro Accord work for him instead of against him, began to crystallize in his mind the night of Laura’s birthday party, when Su

What did it matter? They’d done what they’d done, and it was all a long time ago. Little Su

A few yards from the ceremonial arch, a perspiring string quartet stopped abruptly, mid-Pachelbel, on some invisible signal, and began a somnambulant rendition of the “Wedding March.” Everyone turned to watch the wedding party descend the porch, two by two, and wind down the sloping lawn. Andy, Laura’s boyfriend, had been commissioned to handle the photography, and he trotted halfway up to catch each bridesmaid and groomsman as they passed.

“Laura’s friend is nice,” Griffin overheard Su

“There she is,” she whispered to Griffin when Laura appeared on the porch, radiant and squinting into the sun, on the arm of a burly groomsman half a head shorter than she. Partway down the lawn she snagged a stiletto heel on the uneven ground, nearly rolling an ankle, and Griffin saw Su

When Kelsey emerged on her father’s arm, Joy took Griffin ’s hand and said, “Oh, my. Look how beautiful she is.”

“Yes,” Su