Jennifer had been the last child to move out, and that hadn’t happened until she’d left for medical school. In Jennifer’s mind, Maria was a saint whose own husband had abandoned her. Maria had not only allowed them all to live with her, she’d supported and nurtured them all while working as a nanny and housekeeper. Jennifer and her brothers helped with after-school jobs as they got older, but the main breadwinner had been Maria.

As for Juan, he had done nothing for as long as Jennifer could remember. Supposedly having suffered an old incapacitating back injury before Jennifer was born, he’d been unable to work. Before her death, Jennifer’s mother, Mariana, had been the only wage earner, a buyer for Bloomingdale’s. Now that Jennifer was nearing the end of medical school and knew something about psychosomatic illness and malingering, she had even more reason to question her father’s supposed disability and despise him even more.

As the lounge chair she was sitting in was low with high arms, Jennifer had to struggle to get to her feet. She couldn’t just sit there with the disturbing worry about her grandmother. She also knew that even the slight possibility that the news release involved her grandmother was going to make it near impossible to concentrate when she met her new preceptor. She had to find out for certain, which meant she was going to have to do something she was loath to do—call her hated, lazy-ass father.

Jennifer had barely spoken to her father since she was nine, preferring to pretend he didn’t exist, which was somewhat difficult, as they were all living together in such tight quarters. In that regard, it had been a relief since she’d come to L.A., as she hadn’t spoken to him at all. During her first year, if he ever happened to answer the phone when she’d called Maria, she just hung up and would try later when she was certain her grandmother would be home. But mostly she let her grandmother call her, which her grandmother did on a regular basis. Even the phone was no longer a problem when her grandmother, at Jennifer’s insistence, got a mobile phone and allocated the land line to Jennifer’s father. As far as Jennifer visiting New York was concerned, she hadn’t done it for four years. It was partly because of her father and partly because of the expense. Instead, she’d had her grandmother come out to the West Coast every six months or so. Maria had loved it. She’d told Jennifer that for her, coming to California to see Jennifer was the most exciting thing she’d done in her whole life.

Inside the women’s locker room, Jennifer undid the safety pin that held her locker key, opened her locker, and got out her cell phone. After walking around the room and searching, she was happy to find a hot spot with an adequate signal. She dialed, and as she waited for the call to go through, she gritted her teeth in anticipation of hearing her father’s voice. As it was seven-forty-five in L.A., she knew it would be ten-forty-five in New York, just the time Juan usually raised himself from the dead.