Taking him outside might not have had anything to do with it, but they’ll never know.

“Guess your old man’s finally got the money to move out,” Barry says.

“What are you talking about?”

“That school Alan goes to? It’s like a college tuition. And your father’s been paying it since, what? Since Alan was four? And your mom’s Park Avenue shrink? Two times a week? How much do you think that costs?”

Alan is fourteen. The paterfamilias has been paying for that school for ten years. But Mom has a shrink? I knew she’d gone to see someone at some point. I didn’t think she was still . . .

Barry must see the surprise in my eyes. “Man, you don’t know anything, do you? All these years that your mom’s been taking Alan to the city twice a week? What do you think she does all day while she waits for him?”

I thought she shopped and went to galleries and museums.

Do I have blind spots? Or am I completely blind? All these years, all the paterfamilias’s schemes. Was that what being golden meant to him? Being able to make enough money to buy his freedom? Was the frustration of having to wait until he had enough money the source of his anger? But if all he’d wanted to do was get out, then why didn’t he? It’s not like he has expensive tastes. How much could it cost to play tennis, exercise, and buy natural peanut butter?

So why didn’t he cut out years ago?

And it hits me. Maybe because that’s what his father did to him?

So he stayed . . . because he felt obligated to pay for Alan’s school and Mom’s shrink (not to mention my tennis lessons and giving us a comfortable home), even though he probably felt that he wasn’t responsible for the crappy way things turned out.

Holy shit. Is that why, even when she knew about his cheating, Mom continued to defend him? Because despite all the wrong things he did, he also did the one right thing that she, Alan, and I needed more than anything else?

Raindrops plop onto the tarp over us. The sound of a guitar drifts over from one of the hippie school buses. I feel Barry’s eyes.

“Man, I don’t know what you were just thinking,” he says with a grin, “but I do believe I watched a mind get completely blown right before my very eyes.”

That you did, dear cousin. That you did.

Monday, August 18

“License and registration.”

In a service station in Wayne, I can see two miniatures of myself in the reflective shades of a New Jersey state trooper.