“She probably told half the neighborhood! She’s probably been spreading that one around for years.”

He drops the green marker back into the tackle box, takes out a yellow highlighter, then changes his mind and selects a red grease pencil instead. “It doesn’t matter, it’s not true.”

“That’s what doesn’t matter,” she says. “People believe what they want to believe.”

“Until something drops out of the sky and tells them different.” He blows on the tip of the pencil, then leans into the poster board.

He’s the oddest of her four children, by far. But he’s the only one who never completely drifted away.

Matt’s in Las Vegas, as far as she knows, doing who knows what for a living. Karen’s in Savannah working as a church secretary and is so secretive about her life that Teresa suspects she’s joined a cult. Joe’s a reporter at a small Chicago newspaper. He calls now and then—mostly to talk to Frankie—but he doesn’t come home anymore, and she’ll probably never meet his partner, an architect named … is it Brian? Brendan? All because, when Joe finally came out to her (over the phone on his thirtieth birthday), she foolishly blurted out, “Do you all despise me so much that you’ll never give me a grandchild?”

Frankie moved to Jacksonville after college. He drove down the coast to see her every couple of months, was there at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and for a week or so in the summers. Then, abruptly, he stopped coming home. Car trouble, he told her over the phone. On the eve of one planned visit after another, something was wrong with the car. Then his phone calls dwindled, and he became harder and harder to reach. She thought, He’s pulling away from me, like the rest of them; he’s just taking a little longer to do it.

Twelve months went by.

Then the phone rang one afternoon, and she heard a small, distant voice say, “Mom?”

“Frankie?”

“Can I come home?”

“Of course you can! Anytime. Whenever you want.”

“Okay.” He hung up. She tried calling him back, but the number he’d dialed from, the operator told her, belonged to a pay phone.

Two days later she was collecting the mail when she heard what sounded like the sputtering of an old prop plane. She looked overhead, and when she lowered her eyes she caught sight of his light blue VW bug rolling toward her down Bel Air Drive. Its engine was racing and its tailpipe was spitting smoke. As she watched, the car clopped over the gutter, cut across the driveway at a diagonal, and rolled to a stop with its front tires in the grass.

Maybe it was car trouble, she thought.