“No one thinks you’re a monster —”
Nora gave him a grim smile. “You weren’t there for my conversation with Preston.”
“He said you’re amonster?”
“In so many words. I don’t want to rehash it with you. Just take this, do what you want with it, I understand I owe it to you.”
“Mom — look, I don’t want this because you feel like you need to prove something to us —”
Nora heaved a sigh and closed her eyes, making the dark circles underneath them more visible. “Carver, I have a headache.”
“Just listen to me,” he said sharply, and she opened her eyes in surprise. “Do you realize what you did today? Do you realize how you fucked this up?”
“Excuse me? Don’t swear at me.”
“You are in charge of this family, Mom! You are the leader of this family, and you completely failed in that role today!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Nora said. “Your father is the head of this family, or he and I are equals, pick one. I am not the head of this family.”
“Yes, you are! You always have been! You have always set the agenda for us, and today when we needed you to take accountability, you vanished and sent in your number two!”
“Don’t talk about your father with such disrespect,” she spat. “Good God. My number two, are you insane?”
“Areyou?” Carver exclaimed, exasperated. “What reality do you live in, because it’s not the same one I’m in!”
“What do you want from me?” Nora said, spreading her hands. “There are things I owe to you, yes. You were lied to. I understand how angry you are. But what do you want me to do for Chip? Do you understand the resentment he’s thrown at us over the last fifteen years? And why? Because he can’t pass the bar? Do you understand how humiliating that is for us? And he blamesus?”
“He shouldn’t blame you, but you never should have pushed him to go to law school.”
“We didn’t push him, we encouraged him! The interest was his!”
“He has a mental block, do you get that? I think hecouldpass it, but he goes in there and chokes, because he knows it means the world to you both but nothing to him other than pressure!”
“These are excuses,” Nora said, tapping the desk. “Do you think your father and I weren’t under pressure? Your father was underimmensepressure. He was the first person in his family to go to college!”
“That’s less pressure! No one expected him to do what he did!”
“Which means he had no support. No social capital. No financial backing. You three…” Nora shook her head, scoffing. “You have no idea how lucky you are. None. It’s actually appalling. My mother almost slapped me in the face when I told her I was going to law school. They only paid for me to go to college so I could meet a man and get married. They had the money, but they made me pay for my law degree myself. Your father and I weredrowningin loans as first-year associates. He only took that position with the project finance group because it paid so well, because of all the petrodollar recycling going on then. We were very lucky that he has that incredible skill for picking up languages.”
Carver absorbed this. “So I exist because of petrodollar recycling,” he said.
To his surprise, his mother laughed at this. “In a way! In a way. No, you exist because of my weakness, unfortunately.”
Carver froze, shocked.
“And I’m sorry about that,” Nora continued, spinning gently in the desk chair. “I really am. It’s not a good reason to exist, I do know that.”
“I… it’s fine, Mom.”
She gave him another one of those grim smiles. “Something terrible about all this mess is knowing how much Isaac would hate it. He abhorred a mess.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t blame you,” Carver said. He realized he’d been digging his fingernails into the arm of the chair, and stopped. “He was equally responsible for this situation. He shouldn’t have slept with another man’s wife.”
“Oh, but I’ve handled it poorly. The idea was either for you to know early on or never find out, you know?” She stared into middle distance and shook her head, as if thinking about something she still found hard to believe. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
“It’s fine. I’m glad I know.”
“When he was alive, Doug and I discussed the possibility of telling you once you got to a certain age,” Nora said. “We did consider it. But then he died. And we thought, what would the point be? Just to devastate you?”
