“In Manhattan, I wander at all hours. I like this time of night. I kind of miss work. I 
used to work summers in one of my dad’s stores. It was fun sometimes.”
  “Seems like more fun to run around the island all summer. Like you two.”
  “It gets old. I take that back. Yeah, it’s fun. I guess you want to be left alone.”
  “You guessed right,” Owen said, cricking his neck to the left a bit.
  “Your neck hurt?”
  “It gets stiff. Leaning over a mop half the time. On my knees cleaning up all kinds of 
shit.”
  “Here,” Jimmy said, and Owen felt hands at the back of his neck, gently massaging. 
“Better?”
  Owen let him continue. “This fog depresses me.”
  “I think it’s peaceful.”
  “You would.”
  “Mooncalf, you hate me, don’t you?”
  “Not really.”
  “How does this feel?” Jimmy pressed his thumbs into Owen’s shoulders.
  “Oh yeah,” Owen said. “Right there.”
  4
  Before dawn, he had gone to the pond. He knelt down beside it, and reached down among 
the algae and slimy rocks until he found it.
  He drew the statue up, and set it down on the wet grass.
  “I guess you’re just made up,” he said aloud. “I guess I’m just a screwed up guy who 
made you up. Maybe when I was twelve I was warped. But you're just some cheap souvenir 
someone lost. No one believes in gods.”
  But still, the itchy thought touched him somewhere between his eyes and scalp — he 
could practically feel the fire crawling on him.
  But if you’re not.
  If you’re real.
  I’ll do what needs to be done.
  5
  Mrs. M, in her own words:
  Here’s what I thought of it all: my daughter Jenna had been trouble from the day she 
was born. She was pretty and plain at the same time, and I say that as a loving mother. 
She inherited her father’s face, not much of mine, although I guess she got my eyes. 
Lucky her — my least favorite feature since my own mother always told me I had sad eyes. 
When Jenna was four years old, she told me that no man was going to do to her what her 
Daddy did to me.
  Definitely wise beyond her years, but just not special enough to handle what life would 
deliver to her, that’s for damn sure.
  It was her trust fund. It made her trouble.
  Look, there’s something that everyone pussyfoots around but no one ever talks about. 
That’s money. Pure and simple. Money. When a girl has some, she can be elevated to the 
status of goddess. The most ordinary — even homely — creature can become ravishing with 
just a portfolio or a trust fund.
  That island — in summer — is full of trust fund widows who should by all rights be 
considered blemishes, but instead are constantly sought out for parties and gatherings 
and literary events. For Jenna, there’s always been money. And I’ve watched it feed her 
in a way that can’t be healthy; but what could I do?
  She has access to money. Lots of money. Money clothes her.
  She was ruined because of it, basically. She could never learn how to survive. She 
could never learn how to rely on herself and her own character to get through a difficult 
or challenging situation.
  She could always buy her way out of things.
  This isn’t true of me. I was raised solidly middle-class. My father had died when I was 
six, and my mother didn’t have too many options, not back then. In many ways, I feel for 
Owen because of this. His life is a lot like mine was as a child. Yes, there was some 
inheritance later for me, but when you spend most of your childhood wanting things you 
never really get over it.
  And money becomes a prison, too. When you know what it’s like to live without it, and 
when it’s within your grasp, then you know what it’s like to not have it.
  So, you cling to it. Pure and simple. You hang on for dear life.
  I suppose people will say things about my marriage to Frank that reflect this, but my 
marriage is a different kettle of fish. We’ve got our way of living, and yes, you can 
assail it all you want, but it works for us nine times out of ten, and those times when 
it doesn’t quite work, well, we have places to go where he can live his life and I can 
live mine, and the breather is well-needed. On both our parts.
  I’m not the easiest woman in the world to live with.
  And he’s no saint.
  I sat down with my little girl when she was just learning about sex, and I told her 
that men have different ways of dealing with love, and usually it's through the one part 
of their body that seems to cause others the most damage.
  “But it’s just his body,” I told her. She cried over all of this. She cried when she 
found out her father had another woman. A mistress. But you have to cry at first, don’t 
you? To get all those little fairy tales out of your head about how life gets lived, 
about how there are a few good men, how some men don’t cheat.
  And it’s not true. All men cheat, and all women marry cheaters, and to not look at that 
square in the face is like not looking at the good side of marriage, too.
  So she cried off and on for a few years, and I held her sometimes; I was cold to her at 
times — I knew she needed to work this idea out in her mind.
  When she fell in love for the first time, she told me that she was grateful for what 
she’d had to go through with her father. “I don’t know why men do what they do,” she told 
me.
  “If you did, you’d have solved the greatest mystery of life,” I said to her.
  Or something like that.
  But for my money, she should’ve avoided that Jimmy McTeague. He was bad news. I know 
every little deb and sorority girl east of the Mississippi thought he was just the end of 
the world, but they were such goofy little virgins it was hard to have patience with them.
  Jimmy McTeague is the devil incarnate. I know that’s an over-the-top way of putting it. 
He wasn’t evil, but he was cold. I knew a little about his family, and none of it was 
very good. His father had some bad business deals going, and even if he had all the 
stores, Frank told me some things that alarmed me.
  With Jimmy, I felt it the first day I met him, which was sometime before summer. 
Perhaps some Easter break? She brought him by the house in Greenwich, and the first thing 
out of his mouth was, “Hello Catherine. I've heard so much about you, I almost feel like 
we’ve had an affair.”
  He thought that kind of thing was funny, that off-the- cuff jokiness.
  Within minutes, he’d given me some nick- name, which of course he had to repeat five or 
ten times to truly annoy me, and within an hour of chatting with him, I knew more about 
that boy than I cared to know.
  He is dangerous.