“My oldest, Mark, is a C.P.A. up in Los Gatos, used to be comptroller for a dot-com, he’s doing fantastic as an independent consultant. Sandy, the baby, is in grad school at the University of Minnesota. Sociology. It’s kind of endless for her— school; she already has one master’s. But she never gave me a lick of trouble.”

She took an ice cube in her mouth, sloshed it, crushed it. “Lara was the wild one. It’s only now I’m able to get in touch with how pissed-off I am at her.”

“For marrying Barnett?”

“For that, for everything— for killing herself.” Her hand began to shake and she placed her rattling glass on an end table. “My therapist told me suicide’s the ultimate aggressive act. Lara didn’t need to do that, she really didn’t. She could have talked to someone. I told her to talk to someone.”

“Get some therapy,” said Milo.

“I’m a big fan of therapy.” She picked up the glass. “Therapy and Tanqueray and tonic and Prozac.”

I said, “So Lara was the rebellious one.”

“Even when she was little, you’d tell her black, she’d say white. In high school, she got in with a bad crowd— that’s what messed up her grades. Of the three, she was the smartest, all she had to do was a little work. Instead, she marries him. Vegas, for God’s sake. It was like a bad movie. He was— have you ever seen his teeth?”

During the few seconds Malley had faced us, he had never opened his mouth.

Milo said, “Not in good shape?”

“Trailer trash teeth,” said Nina Balquin. “You can imagine what Ralph thought of that.” Illustrating the contrast, she flashed a full set of porcelain jackets. “He was lowlife, didn’t have a family.”

“No family at all?”

“Every time I asked him about where he grew up, who his parents were, he changed the subject. I mean, here was this new person in our lives, doesn’t it seem reasonable to ask? Forget it. Strong and silent. Except he wasn’t strong enough to make a decent living.”

She drained her glass, steadied one hand with the other. “We’re an educated, sophisticated family— I have a degree in design and my husband was one of the best endodontists in the Valley. So who walks in? The Beverly Hillbilly.”

“Lara met him at a dude ranch,” said Milo.

“Lara’s earth-shattering summer job.” Balquin grimaced. “Here she never made up her bed, but there she could clean rooms for minimum wage. She claimed she wanted to earn her own money so she could buy a more expensive car than Ralph wanted to get for her.”

“Claimed?”