I nodded happily. “I have my mother’s chariot for the evening. It’s at your disposal.”

“Well, that’s settled,” said Mike. “I’m sorry to watch you graduate and then run, but I’ve got another engagement. Will you be home tonight, Susan?”

“Probably not.” She kissed her father on the cheek. “I’ll call you this weekend, though, about that other thing.”

“Gotcha,” he said. “Good night.”

We waved to him as he walked out the door.

“What’s that other thing?” I whispered.

“My mother,” she said. “Another detox. He’s found a place down in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He’s taking her there weekend after next. It’s a forty-five day treatment, no family contact. She won’t like it.”

“What if she refuses to go?”

“She can’t. This is an ultimatum. Dry out, or else.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said, “What did my father say to you? You know, when they called my row to come up and get our diplomas. I saw him lean over.”

“It was nothing.”

“You lie. What was it?”

“He said—as your class walked by—he said there were a lot of hot girls out there. He said he wouldn’t mind meeting a few.”

“Gross but typical. What did you say?”

“I said that one of them was his daughter, and that perhaps he should pay more attention to the solemnity of the occasion.”

I laughed. “If we weren’t in public, I’d kiss you.”

“The Cat’s Cradle,” she said. “That was public.”

I didn’t know what coming out was, so I couldn’t consider whether or not I was going to do it at that moment on that night in the lobby of the Raleigh Civic Center. We stared at one another, and I felt my breathing grow shallow.

In the next moment, the moment was lost. When I’d walked away to join Mike and Susan, Lucky Eddie had descended on the hapless Kim. Now he said loudly, “Hey, a party. Great idea! Poppy can ride with Shirley and me and show us the way.”

I was speechless, so Susan spoke for me.

“Oh, fuck,” she said quietly.

And so it was that we wound up sitting in the DiMarco’s basement rec room with my father and his girlfriend, listening to a tape of the Doobie Brothers that Eddie insisted on bringing in from the car.

I said, “I wish I were dead.”

“Me, too,” Susan replied.

“Me, three,” added Abby.

Eddie was holding court on the sofa, with the spaced-out Shirley sitting quietly by his side. Kim didn’t seem particularly bothered by their presence. She’d discovered Jack Leinweber, and they were ensconced in the far corner, talking intently. John, Joe, and Alan were playing pool. Dave Wilson had brought his younger brother, Tom, and they were taking turns shot-gunning cans of Diet Coke. Nick was stuck on the sofa next to my father, nodding politely like the nice Polish boy he was. There were several other people milling about the room, girls from the volleyball team, friends of Kim’s from the neighborhood, and people from high school that I scarcely knew.

Abby, Susan, and I propped up the far wall, as far away from Lucky Eddie as we could get without actually leaving the room—though Abby had suggested that leaving might be the better part of valor.

“Didn’t you say someone else from the volleyball team was having a party?”

“Lisa Branch. Two girls from the basketball team are having one as well, but it doesn’t matter. We can’t leave.”

“Why not?” Abby asked.

“Look around.” I gestured vaguely at the room in general rather than at my father. I didn’t want to draw his attention at all if I could avoid it. “I can’t leave him here. God knows what he’ll do. I can’t stick Kim with that.”

“And again I say, why not? She was the idiot who told him about the party.”

“She couldn’t know that he’d invite himself.”

“So now what?”

“We pray for a snarl in that Doobie Brothers tape,” Susan suggested. I leaned my head on her shoulder.

Abby reached over and patted me kindly on the leg. “High school graduation,” she said. “Glory days.”

Eddie was gesturing broadly, describing something to Nick that was apparently enormous. His idiocy, perhaps. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a Ziploc bag.

“Hey,” Abby said, tapping me on the arm. “What’s he doing?”

From the bag, Eddie extracted the largest joint I’d ever seen, not that my experience was especially broad. My crowd of nerds did little more than drink beer, and precious little of that. I’d never been drunk. I’d never been more than slightly tipsy. My father’s joint looked like something Bob Marley might smoke in Rastafarian heaven.

He pulled out a lighter and fired it up. Time seemed to stop.

“Here,” he said, passing it to the bemused Nick. “Have a hit.

“Oh, fuck,” Abby, Susan, and I said in unison.

Chapter Twenty-Four

My grandfather claimed that he’d never read a book. He read the newspaper but only because he liked the cartoons. He hated Bermuda shorts, Elvis, and men in sandals. He’d grown a mustache once but never a beard. He wouldn’t eat tacos. He said they looked like something somebody already ate.