“You just know the food’s going to be vulgar in this kind of amusement park,” Gloria Abrams said. She took off her glasses and let them fall against her chest on their leather cord, folded up the menu, and tossed it into the middle of the table. “Not that I expected anything else. Morganthal said the dinner they had here last night was ‘pretty good,’ so I should have known it would be a disaster. I couldn’t believe the paper she delivered this afternoon. Complete drivel from start to finish. I was so enraged by the end of it, I could barely stay seated.”

Desmond felt Russell grab his thigh under the table and squeeze tightly, his usual signal that he was trying to control the anger he felt toward his mother’s scathing disapproval of everything, each shred of which he took personally. Yet, given the current state of things, it felt like a vestige of their former intimacy rather than intimacy itself. Desmond reached down and put his hand over Russell’s. “We could have gone somewhere else,” Russell said.

“Unfortunately,” Gloria said, “we’re staying in this hideous hotel, so it was too convenient to resist the temptation to crawl down here and get a table.” She gazed at Russell as if she were looking at him for the first time. “Interesting sideburns, darling. I hadn’t noticed that look as a new trend.”

“I’m trying to start one. My goal is to get photographed for the Style pages of the Times: ‘Son of infamous child psychologist wearing childish facial hair.’”

“Well, bonne chance. You always were ambitious.”

Gloria had her long white hair pulled off her face and woven into a complicated braid that she wore draped across her shoulder as if it were a pet snake. She was an attractive woman who frequented hairdressers and manicurists and dance classes but seemed to be preserving the beauty of her face and figure mainly through sheer force of will. She was in her late sixties, and the sunken appearance of her cheeks and hazy pallor of her green eyes gave her an intimidating elegance. If only, Desmond had often thought, Gloria weren’t Russell’s mother, the two would have been great pals. She was exactly the kind of confident, intelligent, belligerent woman Russell found irresistibly glamorous.

“Oh, no!” she whispered. “There’s that Simmons woman. She isn’t coming this way, is she? Check for me, will you, Leon?”

Without lowering his menu, Leon said, “She walked past.”

“You see how they all avoid me? They’re terrified of me, as if I’m strolling around with a bomb in my briefcase. Which, by the way, I am, and plan to deliver at eleven tomorrow morning.”