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"Your parents were killed in a house fire," he repeated. "Was that supposed to be funny?" Thomas asked. He took a step toward me, removed his right hand from his armpit, and clenched it, and for a second I thought he was going to hit me, but he didn't. Maybe Thomas had learned from my mistake earlier, when I'd hit him. When we hit someone, we want that to be the final word. But it never is. And if a blow to the face wasn't the final word, then what was? Are we wrong for wanting there to be any such thing as a final word? Was there any such thing as a final word? And where, oh, where could we find someone to speak it?

"Wasn't it enough that you killed my parents?" Thomas said. "Did you have to kill your own parents in the same way?"

"I didn't kill my parents at all," I said. "Thomas, it was just a story."

"Shut the fuck up," he said. "In the story you killed your parents in the same way you killed my parents in real life."

"OK, I get your point," I said, his point being that once something bad happens to you, once you become tragic, you have rights to that tragedy, you own it ― not just the tragedy, but the story of that tragedy, too ― and then you and only you can do what you want with it. You could write a memoir about it, for instance. Yes, I had plagiarized Thomas's grief, the way the bond analysts thought they'd plagiarized mine. "I'm sorry," I said.

"You're damn right you're sorry," he said. "You're always sorry."

That was so obviously true that I didn't feel the need to confirm it. "And then I'm guessing Anne Marie told her parents what you told me," I said. "And that's when Mr. Mirabelli started following me."

"And then you kissed a woman who wasn't your wife with your father-in-law watching," Thomas said. "I didn't really have to do any work at all."

"My mother saw me do it, too," I admitted.

"That poor woman," he said.

"I know you know my father," I said. "Do you know my mother, too?"

"I've known them both for a long time, Sam," he said. His anger had turned to sadness now, meaning not that anger is fleeting, but that when anger melts away, then sadness is always there in its middle.

"From my father's parties," I said.

"No," Thomas said. "Your mother has never been at the parties, not that I know of."

"My father said she didn't like his guests."

"Just one guest, really," Thomas said, and finally I was starting to understand. My parents had something like an agreement: every Tuesday my father would have a party at the house with Deirdre among the guests, and my mother would know to stay away. As long as my father remembered what day of the week it was, my mother wouldn't have to see Deirdre, and as long as she didn't see her, she didn't have to admit she existed. She would go to her apartment that night, and Deirdre would come over to the house; when my mother came back to the house the next day, Deirdre would be gone. She did and she didn't know about Deirdre; now I knew what my father meant when he said things were complicated.

"So you know that my father has a Deirdre."

Thomas nodded. "It's complicated," he said.

"My father has been cheating on my mother for thirty years," I said. "That's not complicated."

"They're not bad people, Sam, not any of them." I recognized immediately what he'd said and the way he said it: this was a rationalization a son might make about his parents. It occurred to me that my mother and father had become his parents as much as they'd stayed mine. Or was it my father and Deirdre whom he considered his parents? How many parents might a person have in this life? Was there an infinite supply? And supposing there was, did this infinite supply of parents mean an infinite supply of comfort, or of heartbreak?

"How do you know my mother if she wasn't at the parties?"

"Your mother came and found me after my parents died," he said. "She wanted to say how sorry she was. She's the only one in your family to say that. I used to come around and see her in her apartment once in a while, but I had a feeling she didn't want me there."

"Why?"

"I don't think she