“It’s been happening for a little while.”

Ben waited.

“Some investments he made started to go bad—the parking garages, and there was some mining, I think. And so he tried to bail a couple things out with inheritance money, hoping they would turn around? But that didn’t work, I guess. And now I’m learning we’ve been living on the rest of the inheritance, sort of putting things off, hoping some real estate investments were going to get going. So he’s been…sort of stuck for the last little while.”

Ben flushed with the pleasure of these adult confidences. But the information also demanded that he know what to do with it, and he had utterly no idea.

“He’s still working, though?”

“He works in his office at home, but the partnership dissolved a few years ago.”

“A few years?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Are you going to have to drop out of the program?”

“At this point in a PhD it’s mostly grants. But I’m not exactly a help. And anthropology isn’t the most lucrative field to have chosen.”

“Fuck.”

She didn’t reprimand him.

“And the squash courts?”

“He contributed some, but almost all of it he raised from other squash alumni.” She stopped, and they each heard the hum of the connected phone line.

“But he’s been talking about this new opportunity on the West Coast. He’s invested in a piece of property out there and waiting for the right time to sell it. Which would be soon. It’s a big investment, a fairly big risk, but he’s excited about it. So let’s let him concentrate on that. He’s worrying about all this, he’s trying to plan. But he’s embarrassed, too, obviously.”

Ben tried to hear where her patience with his dad ended, that closing off that always seemed available to her. Ben remembered a long drive to Cape Cod when his father had the flu, had to stop every few minutes and dry heave with his head out the back door, and even though no one could blame him for being sick, Ben’s mom seethed nevertheless and drove with ruthless consistency. But Ben didn’t know if he could sense it now; maybe that impatience had become a luxury.

Ben stayed quiet for a few moments, and he wondered whether his dad was telling his mom the truth about whatever it was on the West Coast. He had never considered the possibility that his dad could lie. Dads in movies who acted slippery seemed as fictional as cat burglars.