Ben couldn’t have named the brands Ahmed was wearing, but he felt a mixture of tenderness and disdain that Ahmed was so flagrantly overdressing. Ben had a sense of proportion. Things were abundant with his family and their friends—houses with wide terraces or a folly cupola, tennis courts, a swimming pool here and there—but there was always a sense that they were minor-nice, that Greenwich and New York City were serious fancy in a way that Sudbury, Connecticut, would always be looking up to. But there was also pride in this, the pride of understatement, of the just-less-than-shiny genteel. Some important connection needed to be maintained to the Calvinist Yankee, the reuser of tea bags and the constant lowerer of the thermostat. His uncle Russell was a little too much. Caviar and good wine were correct for Ben’s family once or twice a year as a celebration, but besides that there was intentionality in Triscuits and Cabot cheddar.

Ben’s family had rented a house on Nantucket for decades, but the bigger and bigger houses that had started to grow there were bad, vulgar; even the idea of owning a thing that you only used for three weeks a year was dangerously wasteful.

And still, it had been important for Ben and Teddy to experience London and Paris and Rome and Athens, and so they went. It was important for Ben to learn the piano, and so they had a Steinway and weekly lessons before he let serious piano fade away. Even if you were able to afford a Mercedes or a BMW, anything more than a Volvo or maybe an Audi was gauche. It was important to the Weekses to have their sons know the difference, for Teddy to go to Gold & Silver if he wanted to, but also for Teddy to work as a landscaper in the summers to learn the value of an education. The Weekses ate Ben & Jerry’s Heath Bar Crunch, cooked from The Silver Palate. They had a cleaning lady, but the idea of live-in help was from an earlier time; it would be a bad error now. Ben’s day school had put off repairing the roof of the auditorium for two years, but they still insisted on a semiformal dress code every day including Fridays, and so Ben now tied his tie with hasty facility.

When Ben slid its knot lightly against his collar button and pulled on his blazer, Ahmed was still standing in bare feet with each sleeve of his French-cuff shirt extending past his hand like a neutered dog’s plastic cone. He used a lint roller to remove specks of sawdust from the charcoal pinstripe suit jacket he had hung over the back of his desk chair.

“We’ve got to go, Ahmed.”

“Yes—I will just button these”—he raised both cuffs—“and I will be down.”