Gerald’s doctor claimed the two of them were making progress, although it wasn’t clear to Jane how they were progressing or in what area. Gerald was still surly, haughty, and frequently hostile to Jane, Thomas, and his grandmother. School had begun last week and it looked as if they were getting ready for the same round of problems they’d been having with him since the first day of day care. He wasn’t a sociable boy, didn’t get along with his peers, and scoffed at almost everything the teacher said. At the end of the third day of classes, the teacher had called up Jane and told her Gerald had mocked her during a drawing lesson and had complained that he’d given up playing with crayons years ago. “I’d prefer to work with pastels,” he’d said. Where had he even heard the word? He was unusually bright for his age and astonishingly self-possessed, assets Jane supposed she should have been grateful for but which, in Gerald, seemed more like social liabilities.

“Is he on the parallel bars, all that?”

“Possibly,” she said. Thinking about Dr. Garitty made her feel as if she’d talked herself into a corner, and she lost interest in elaborating on this gymnastics fiction. If she was going to brag, she should have bragged about his brains or his cooking skills, something real. In the end, it didn’t matter what Dale thought.

The waitress came and set down their drinks. She batted her big, mascaraed eyes at Dale, playing up the gamine act. Hopefully the woman he was currently seeing was at least a couple of decades older than this one, someone who knew what she was getting into but was too old to care. “Anything else?” she lisped.

“Privacy,” Jane said.

Dale clinked her glass. The first sip of her drink burned through her body and sent a warm flush to her cheeks. Maybe if she just gave in to the effects instead of trying to fight them, she’d avoid the instant headache. She was afraid of alcohol. This was the result of having grown up with high-functioning drunks for parents and was, she had to confess, the only long-term ill effect she could point to. She sometimes wondered why she harbored so much resentment toward her parents’ drinking when they’d been successful and, in a sloppy, inconsistent way, cheerful. Initially, the resentment had to do with the fact that both parents had died of alcohol-related illnesses shortly after Jane graduated college, but after a few years of tending to her mother-in-law, she saw that there were worse things you could do to your children than die young.

“Do you watch our show regularly?” Jane asked.

“If I’m home at that time, which isn’t very often. Caroline watches. It was just luck I caught Rosemary.”

“What do you think of it, in general?”

“I don’t know how you keep it so consistent.”