He had sobered up somewhat by the time Arch returned.

“Your mom’s looking for you, bud,” Arch said to me. “Folks are starting to leave.”

I set my game controller on the table.

“I better go,” I said.

Jamie paused his game but did not sit up from the couch.

“Thanks for chilling with me,” he said, as if it had been a typical evening. I suppose for him it was.

I followed Arch back across the lawn.

“Sorry for leaving you out there babysitting,” he said.

He stopped in his tracks and gazed across the lawn at the house.

“About sixty percent of the people in that house right now are complete assholes,” he said. “And about thirty-five percent are total imbeciles.”

“What about the other five percent?”

“Well, two of them are standing right here,” he said.

You can imagine how it felt to hear that.

We found my mother in the entrance hall with Mr. Haltom and Dr. Dodd. People were putting on their coats and heading out to their cars, talking and laughing and waving to one another. Everyone looked “a little tight,” as polite people liked to say.

“Thanks for letting us steal Charlie so often, Miss Boykin,” Arch said. “He’s a great kid.”

“You really are too kind, Arch,” my mother said.

Too kind.

My mother and I shook Dr. Dodd’s hand and waved to Mrs. Creigh and thanked the Haltoms. We walked silently down the driveway, passing out of the light into the shadows, the only sounds the crunch of our feet on the stone pebbles and the fading voices of partygoers. When we reached our car and climbed in and shut the doors, we both drew in a deep breath, as if the journey from the house to the car had been an underwater swim.

Driving home, my mother breathlessly chattered about the people she’d met, the things they talked about. I mentioned Miss Whitten; she said they’d spoken. She made a few dry remarks about Dalton, Miss Whitten’s date. She told me about Dodd, and the Haltoms, and Mrs. Creigh, who had been “just lovely.” She gushed about the house, and the food, and the general grandness of it all.

“You are so fortunate to have made these friends, Charlie,” she said. “So fortunate.”

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