“You have no idea,” Chrissie drawls. Neither of us laughs, but the mood softens a bit.

Taking warmth from that, I watch Exit 84 come and go. I’m sorry, my dovish self wants to say, sorry that you had to confront her because of me. Only, I wasn’t the one who caused their rift. It happened before Chrissie and I ever met. She didn’t talk about her mother often, I realize, but thinking back on the times she did, I recall little things she told me the woman had said. They weren’t pretty.

“How can a mother be like that?” I ask. “It’s not like she has four other daughters.”

“If she did,” says Chrissie, “I’d be off the hook. Since I’m the only one, she expects me to be her clone. My daring to deviate is a cardinal offense. She wrote me out of her life.”

She had said this of her mother before, but having now seen the woman in the flesh, not to mention in my family’s employ, I am particularly aggrieved. “Because your husband is Hispanic?”

“Because he isn’t Italian or Catholic or from Rhode Island. Because I choose to live in New York. Because she assumes I’m crazy rich and not insisting she live with me, which is ridiculous given her distaste for my husband, my child, and New York, but that’s how looney she is.”

If anyone can deal with looneys, it’s Chrissie. “You couldn’t talk her down on Wednesday?”

“Hell, no. She’s as bullheaded as ever. She says—get this—that I publicly humiliated her. Like anyone recognized me before she approached?”

“I’m sorry, Chrissie. Is she any better to Danny?” He left home, too, which is an interesting fact in this new light.

“Danny is male. The rules are different. Whatever he decides to do is considered upward mobility. I’m the one who’s supposed to preserve the heritage. I’m the one who’s supposed to take care of my mother the way she took care of hers. She considers me a traitor for not doing it.”

Not even Jack being put on his mother’s back burner seems as bad as Chrissie being shoved into the fire. I’m thinking about the miracle of her having such a happy marriage and raising such a normal child in spite of all that, when a car veers in front of me from the left lane and takes the Exit 83 off-ramp.

I’m in New London now, thirty-seven minutes gone from Bay Bluff.

“Do you?” Chrissie asks. “Think me a traitor?”