“Your mother was pretty irritable for a while. My family, of course, wouldn’t speak to him again. They wanted him to give it back to them, but he didn’t think it was theirs any more than it was his. None of us earned it. He was the oldest son, and the way trusts work, the rules were written a long time ago. The money owns you more than you own the money, and that’s not what your father was about.” Hugh’s voice thickened when he said that, and he had to stop talking for a few minutes. Then he cleared his throat. “So he had a lot more than the rest of us. The girls got the silver, and the house. The stuff. He got the cash. I’m the youngest, of course, so I got the good looks. And the charm.” He laughs.

“The silver? Like … monogrammed silver?”

“That’s right.”

“You mean there are lots of little V’s somewhere, on sugar bowls and teaspoons?”

“That’s the idea, yes, only they’re little P’s. My mother’s name was Pond. His father wasn’t around long enough to leave an impression on the silver.”

“Where—”

“She married five times.”

“Do you think he did the right thing?”

“Yes, I do, in the end. But he could have done it differently, I think. There was a way to handle it better than he did.”

“Was it a lot of money?” I ask.

“It was a fortune.”

“Wow.”

“It was after you kids were born. He didn’t want it to land on you three.”

“I don’t know what it would have done for us, anyway.”

“Well,” he says. “Money is opportunity. It could have sent you guys to boarding school, gotten you the hell out of—what’s the name again, the town you live in?”

Suddenly, I can’t speak around the huge lump in my throat. I have to swallow a couple of times. “Colchis,” I whisper.

“Right,” he says. “Not much to work with there. You could have made friends with people who had more going for them.”

Then we talk about my graduation from high school and the beginning of adulthood and what I want as a present. He asks me if I want to come out to where he lives. “I come and go,” he says. “You could hang out, do some thinking, figure out what your next step is.”

He tells me his plan is to be in Maine in the early part of the summer, so I can meet him there and go to Europe with him, if nothing better comes along, and after that he’ll be in Europe, and I can check that out, too, if I want. Just like that, a future opens up. Easy. I thank him for his offer and then stand there on the front lawn for a long time after we hang up.