It was hard not to smile. It was perhaps the first time I’d allowed the corners of my mouth to go up since coming home several hours earlier from the Metropolitan. Although there had been no “family meeting” to fill in Angie and her brother Paul on what had happened, it didn’t take long for them to put it all together. I’d told Paul a couple of things, Angie had spoken to her mother, then the kids compared notes, went back to me and Sarah individually to try to fill in some of the gaps, and they more or less had it. They’d been so good at information gathering, I couldn’t help but wonder whether they didn’t have a more promising future in the newspaper business than Sarah or I, certainly the way things were at the moment.

Paul, freed of work obligations by me, had gone off to a friend’s house, and Sarah had vanished as well, telling Angie she had errands to run at the mall. I doubted that. She just didn’t want to have to keep avoiding me in the house. She needed more space. We hadn’t said a word to each other since Sarah blasted me in the middle of the newsroom for everyone to hear. I wished I could have been one of the people in the audience, rather than one of the featured players. It would have been the greatest bit of office gossip to chew on in years.

Now I was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of me, staring at the wall.

I had fucked up, and didn’t know what to do.

Then Angie came in, sat down across from me with a cup of coffee of her own, and asked her question.

“I don’t really have a plan,” I said.

Angie stirred her coffee, took out the spoon, and licked it. She and I had been through a pretty traumatic set of circumstances a little over a year ago, and that shared experience had given us a special kind of bond since. She’d grown up a hell of a lot since then. She was in her second year at Mackenzie University, and taking, among other things, some psychology courses. But it hadn’t been her classes that had given her insights into human relationships. She had an instinctive feel about those.

“This is not what it’s supposed to be like around here,” Angie said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Has it ever been this bad between you and Mom?” she asked.

I thought a moment, shook my head. “No. That thing, a couple of years ago, with the purse?”

Angie nodded. It was not an easily forgettable episode in our lives.