“I tried writing him too. After all, who said men got God’s gift of initiating things? But no response. I thought of going to Michigan. We’d made promises. We said it had never been this way before. But what would happen, huh? I’d catch him with another girl? I’d be made a fool? He didn’t want me—clear as day.

“Every day I used to roller-skate around the neighborhood. It was sort of the way I’d get out my sadness. And, well, your dad lived next door. I used to see him, and we’d catch up, casual, really. He’d just finished law school and was studying for the bar. G and Grandfather adored him. He’d asked me out over the years. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him, but just, he seemed like the boy you’d be serious about, not the boy you’d have fun with.”

“Well, it seems like you got to have a lot of fun,” Joey said, but even as it came out she was wincing at her cruelty.

Her mother gazed at her nails again. “Not long after I got home, a few weeks maybe, a month, with no word from Rand, I was roller-skating and bumped into your father. He said he’d gotten two tickets to an art show at the Miami Art Museum. You know your father. He only goes to art shows to appease me.”

“Dad was pulling out the stops.” Joey had heard this version of the story before. “I know where we’re headed now—unexpected pregnancy. Me.”

“Yes, well, so you know then.”

“No, I don’t know! I don’t know, Mom.” A sob caught in her throat. “I don’t know how our adulterous family vacations originated.”

“Well…that part was unexpected.”

“Unexpected.” Joey grimaced. An ice cream truck outside began to chime.

“When you were nine,” her mother said, “I gave a few guest lectures at a college in Carmel. They paid to fly me out, even hosted me at a gallery opening. It was really flattering at a point in my career when I felt I was floundering. It felt like I was just this, well, mother…. I was at this tiny airport in Monterey. I was eating cheese fries of all things when I saw Rand. I felt, well, my heart stopped. I considered not saying anything—”

“That would have been the right answer.”

“I can’t reinvent history now, darling, can I?” Bea said it almost wistfully. “I said his name, and he broke into the biggest smile. I felt so happy. He’d been in San Francisco for a real estate conference and had driven down the coast to check out a property. The first thing he said was how sad he’d been that I never answered his letters.