“They blamed Wendy?”

“I think it was more that they wanted to move on. To this day, though, I think Wendy blames herself. If they had stayed with their other friends and hadn’t taken that walk down the beach. If she had convinced Greta not to go in the water. Or if she’d gone into the water, too, maybe Greta would have been okay, or she could have saved her.”

All this had happened before I was born. Did any of it reflect on Wendy’s situation now? Had she learned to care less about other people because she’d seen how painful caring could be?

How much emotional damage lurked behind Wendy’s lovely smile? Was she using tranquilizers and sleeping pills to keep it at bay? Or worse, was she using tranquilizers and sleeping pills for respite from her children, who demanded so much of her? I couldn’t believe any of it.

“Please don’t ever tell her you know,” my mother said. “It’s not something we talk about. In fact, let’s talk about something else now.”

Not talking about things that mattered was another part of my family heritage. This time, though, I had to introduce another unpleasant subject. “I ran into Ella yesterday at the grocery store.”

“Oh.”

When nothing else was forthcoming, I capsulized the encounter. “I wish I’d known that she’s no longer working for Gracey Group. I made a fool of myself. What on earth happened?”

“I’d planned to tell you the next time you came home.”

Of course she’d never expected a homecoming under these circumstances. “So why was she fired?”

“She wasn’t. Fired, I mean. Your father arranged for her to take an early retirement. She left with her pension, and all her health benefits until she turns sixty-five.”

“Well, somebody thinks she’s got plenty of work left in her. She’s a part-time receptionist for a dentist.”

“Yes, Dr. Borgman. He’s an orthodontist. Part-time is probably a good idea. Ella was forgetting things, making mistakes and then insisting other people were at fault. Your father felt the job had become too complex and stressful for her. I promise you, everyone tried to help her, your sister most of all. She even volunteered to take some of Ella’s work if Dad just let her stay. But in the end he hired a young man to replace her, and Carl does his job without complaint and takes orders, something Ella wasn’t doing well.”

“She wasn’t taking orders from Dad?”

“No, the problem was taking orders from your sister. Ella had known Wendy since she was a little girl, and then suddenly, Wendy became the person Dad worked closest with, instead of her. Plus Wendy became her immediate supervisor. The reorganization made sense, steps to help Wendy take over Gracey Group one day. But Ella retaliated. She put off important projects Wendy assigned, then claimed Wendy’s requests had come in too late. Finally she missed a big deadline for a project with your father, too. He had no choice but to let her go.”