Ben’s mom met him at the Connecticut bus drop-off Sunday afternoon and he clunked down the steps in his heavy gray-plastic boot. The leg still throbbed off and on but it wasn’t terrible. His slice of a face looked happy to see her, and they hugged tightly for what became longer than usual.

She smelled the unfamiliar school detergent from his clothes, and his torso was a little longer but still as thin. She felt retroactively even more protective of him, unsure how she could let him go back to school after break. Teddy was arriving the following day. When they got home, Harry was driving in at the same time, and he honked the horn and jumped out to hug Ben.

The house, his room, it was all exactly the same, but it seemed to him that he’d been away for a year. His parents realized they didn’t have what they needed for dinner—steak and celery for stir-fry—and Ben’s mom asked him and his dad to go to the supermarket.

Ben waited until they were driving back from the Waldbaum’s to say it.

“Dad.”

“Yeah?” he said, as though he had no idea. Ben came up to the edge, and pushed himself over. “I know about the tuition situation. My advisor told me.” Ben outlined what they had discussed, but he didn’t ask how this could have happened.

After he finished they were quiet. Ben saw weather traveling across his father’s face.

“Hey,” said Ben, “maybe we’ll just say I didn’t like it up there. It wasn’t for me. We could say I wanted to be home, didn’t like being so far away, and I could go to Leaford High. We could do it that way.”

Ben’s dad kept his eyes on the road. He cleared his throat to speak but wasn’t able to start.

“Really,” Ben continued, “the family wouldn’t have to know, and maybe we could think about it again in a year or a couple years—”

“This thing on the West Coast,” Harry suddenly began. “There’s been a lot of buyer interest in this land, and the sale should happen before the end of the year. This is a good one. We’ll be back on course.” Harry checked Ben’s eyes for an instant but it was an instant when he was looking forward. Ben wore the same fixated frown that Russell so often had.

Harry remembered looking into the study when he was eight or ten, seeing Russell in there with their father on a late-fall afternoon, the desk lamp on. The two of them sat leaning over the desk, and Russell lifted and turned the thin, gray page of what they were reading. Harry would learn later that it was the Value Line Investment Survey. With the light shining through you could see the print from the other side of the page.