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talk to you at your mom’s memorial.”
    “Oh!” she cried with a harsh laugh. “No problem. You’re just in time for my dad’s wedding.”
    I noticed Marcellus ebbing into his office and closing his door softly. “It does seem kind of soon,” I admitted.
    “Hell, Horst. It’s economical. All the caterers had to do was warm up the leftovers from the wake. I swear it’s like”—she looked at me through a crooked smile—“it’s like going to heaven and bumping smack into your worst enemy. Like what’s the point? Who cares if the quack toasted me? Maybe I don’t want people guzzling alcohol in my honor today.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “But give her credit. Did you see that crowd out there? Aunt Claudia—or should I say Mom —tells them to move on, and by God they grab that Dom Perignon and move on. No one could care less that she’s ruining the Foundation, the family, everything my mom and dad built. By the time I’m ready to work for it, it’ll be a joke. What has got hold of my dad?” she retched. “Six weeks ago he was my dad. Married to my mom. He took such care of her, he’d blow on her coffee so she wouldn’t burn her tongue. Horst, I swear he and I were half dead ourselves when she died, and then somehow overnight he got to his feet and ran away from me. In six weeks! Just so he could—I can’t even say it—with that bitch. That wannabe. And then I’m supposed to act all cheery about it and endorse my own abandonment. I couldn’t stand to go back to school. I couldn’t face anyone.” Her voice dropped to a rapid, pleading whisper. “What do they think of me? Such a loser my own dad doesn’t care about me.”
    Dana a loser. This is how crazy you get when your parents split up or leave, I thought.
    She was still talking. “I couldn’t go to graduation. I don’t even want to go to Stanford. It’ll be the stamp of approval on the whole thing, the whole stinking, weird—oh, it disgusts me. I don’t want to do anything.”
    “I’m sorry, dear.”
    “Six weeks. How do you go from zero to ‘I do’ in six weeks? Especially when the zero is that the wife and sister died.”
    “What did your dad tell you?”
    “What you heard out there,” she said, flinging a hand in the direction of the ballroom. “My aunt does all the talking now anyway.” She imitated Dr. Claudia’s saccharine reassurance: “We’re going forward. Thank you all for swallowing your Prozac and not rioting the way normal people would.”
    Sometimes Dana was too good a comic. “Don’t do that for anyone else, or they’ll laugh.”
    “And her. It took two of them. Two people that crazy at the same time. My dad and I were mourning and comforting each other, the two of us, and she raided our grief and broke it. What a joke, she thinks she can be my mom. My mom is the one who gave me answers when I was so ticked off about sex and hypocrisy and the stupid things they told us at Maroveus. And she can’t even tell me—I asked my aunt this, Horst, I got in her face and asked her and she won’t say— where she slept the night of my mom’s wake. The night of that very day when we scattered my mom’s ashes in the water, salt water, and it felt like we were floating on an ocean of our own tears, and my mom was dissolved in them. And she won’t tell me where she slept.”
    “Jesus, Dana.”
    “And she thinks she can be all that. No one can. Could. ” She bit down her tears. “I can see her, Horst.”
    I looked at Marcellus’s door. “Where?”
    “Here. There. Everywhere.” She kept talking through her wobbly voice. “God, I want her to talk. Tell my dad to get his head out of his…never mind.”
    “Dana, I’ve seen her.”
    She gave me a sad frown. “What do you mean?”
    “So did I,” said Marcellus. He was standing in his office door.
    She looked from him to me and back again. “When?”
    “Recently,” said Marcellus. “Today.”
    Dana backed towards the door, her eyes pinned on