He and Van seemed to complement each other well: Harry enjoyed getting on the phone with analysts and the management of the companies they were researching, and Van relentlessly went through every contract, every earnings report, triple-checking the formulas in their models.

But without the bank salary, Harry needed investments to go well. That need wouldn’t let up, it often kept him from sleeping, and Van, who could tolerate the uncertainty more easily, began to set aside time to talk Harry through his second-guessing. Harry couldn’t let go of the times they had sold too soon or the times they had decided to pass on a good thing.

Then Van was recruited for the computer trading effort back at Morgan Stanley. Harry was happy for his friend. He began investing in real estate and mining and oil refining, assets he could see with his own eyes that Van had always vetoed as too hard to sell when the time came, and despite his anxiety Harry started borrowing to take advantage of a few opportunities too good to pass up. And then in 1990, when oil spiked and the economy went into recession, Harry was caught out. Russell meanwhile had timed the change perfectly.

Harry had to keep reminding himself that this was actually happening to him—every time the phone rang he expected good news but it was someone else he owed. And at the same time there was a sense of justice, that finally someone had put a finger straight into a gap in a wall that Harry had been trying to cover over since he was twelve years old at his father’s desk.

Now in the car Ben was asking a question. He asked it again: “What exactly is the thing out there?”

Harry waited to straighten out of a turn before he answered.

“It’s a series of retail areas.”

“Retail areas?”

“Some land outside of San Bernardino, in Southern California, became available in an estate sale. It’s not commercial land yet, but it’s being rezoned soon. So there’s a good opportunity to serve an existing demand for more retail.”

“Like shopping plazas?”

Ben’s dad didn’t answer immediately. “There’s a lot of demand.”

Ben thought of the way his mother stiffened subtly when they had to go to Turner’s Corner or Silver Way to rent videos or do the grocery shopping or find him a pair of pants. Always keeping part of herself elsewhere, always just getting through the shopping-center time, keeping her real self saved for the ocean and the dinner table. As though her contempt for these strips kept their family anchored into the correct order of things.