His voice was so commanding that Chip immediately went over and sat down. The golden retriever, who’d been dozing in a bed near the fireplace until the yelling woke him, got up and jingled out of the room as if leaving them to their dysfunction.
Carver leaned over and whispered in Conway’s ear. “What’s that dog’s name?”
She looked at him in befuddlement. “Ralph!”
“Ralph, right. Thanks.”
Doug took a piece of paper and his reading glasses from his pocket. “I have some notes from Nora.”
“Maybe he killed her,” Carver stage-whispered. To his delight, his siblings laughed hard at this while Doug actually cracked a smile.
“I did not kill your mother,” he said, perching his glasses on his nose and unfolding the paper. “Okay. First, she would like to acknowledge that mistakes were made, for which we are sincerely and profoundly apologetic.”
He paused to let this rest, but shouldn’t have.
“Mistakes were made,” Chip repeated. “Who is she, Richard Nixon?”
“That kind of works,” Carver said, “because Dad looks like Gerald Ford.”
“Oh my God, he does,” Conway said.
“Kids,” Doug interrupted.
“Who made the mistakes?” Chip said.
“Both of us,” Doug said. “And we’re not going to sit here and weigh them out. As our resident marriage expert, you must know that keeping score isn’t actually useful.”
Chip looked a little stung by this, but said nothing.
“Okay,” Doug said. “Moving on. We know we’ve been old-fashioned in the way we communicate with you. We’ve never wanted you to think of us as your friends or peers, we’ve always wanted you to be certain of our authority and feel like you could rely on us. But we understand now that we made a very large error which has undermined our authority, and our failure to communicate honestly with you about this has compounded the error.”
The three of them nodded in agreement.
“So going forward we’re going to try to respect all three of you more, as adults and people, by giving you more privacy and being less private about ourselves,” Doug said, his eyes moving down the page.
“How?” Chip said.
Doug glanced up at him. “Excuse me?”
“How are you going to respect our privacy and be less private?”
“Well, we agreed we should ask you fewer questions about your, uh, plans regarding children, for instance.”
“Dad, not to throw you under the bus, but you were asking me some pretty personal questions earlier,” Carver said.
Doug looked caught. “I was worried about you.”
“Yeah, don’t muddy the waters, here, Carver,” Chip said. “We’re all worried about you, that’s different.”
“Worried about what?”
“I don’t know,” Chip said, throwing his hands in the air. “How many fucking pills you take?”
“Okay, well, Dad was asking me about my affair with Scott,” Carver snapped.
Chip reacted with a comical, almost cartoonish look of astonishment. “Yourwhat?”
Conway looked over at him. “Did I not tell you about this?”
