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to cook for yourself—”
    â€œIt’s an apartment, the kind set up for short-term corporate renters.” Cassandra anticipated her mother’s next protest: “It’s not that expensive.”
    â€œDid you sublet your place back in New York?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œSo you’re carrying two rents for three months. And you’ll need a car here.”
    â€œMom, I have my own car. I drove down. I drove here, it’s parked in your driveway.”
    â€œI don’t know what the point is of having a car if you live in New York.”
    â€œI like to be able to get away—visit friends upstate or at the…beach.” She used the generic, beach, instead of the specific, Hamptons, out of fear that the latter would provoke another spasm of worry.
    The reviews of the last book had been hard on her mother. Her mother’s e-mails had been hard on Cassandra. Until this winter, she hadn’t even known that her mother could initiate e-mail. She seemed to use the laptop that Cassandra had given her for nothing more than playing hearts and solitaire while depending on the reply-to function to answer Cassandra’s sporadic notes. Even then, she was extremely terse. “Thank you.” Or “That’s nice, dear.” Lennie Fallows seemed to think e-mail was the equivalent of a telegram or a long-distance call back in the seventies. It was a mode of communication to be limited to dire emergencies or special occasions, and even then brevity was required.
    Then, back in January, the e-mails had started, with no “RE:” in the subject headers, with no subject headers at all, which made them all the more terrifying, as Cassandra had no idea what conversation her mother was about to start.
    â€œI wouldn’t worry about the Kirkus.” “The PW is good, if you omit the dependent clause.” “Sorry about the New York Times.”
    Except she hadn’t written “the New York Times ” or even “NYT,” come to think of it, but the critic’s surname, as if the woman were a neighbor, an intimate. This detail saddened Cassandra most of all. All she had ever wanted was to give her mother a sense of ownership in Cassandra’s success. She had felt that way even as a teenager, back when Lennie was, in fact, a profound embarrassment, running around town in—oh, God, the memory still grated—painter’s pants or overalls, thathorrible cap on her head, tools sticking out of her pockets. Yet Lennie insisted on crediting Cassandra’s achievements to her ex-husband’s side of the DNA ledger. Even the book that had forged Cassandra’s reputation had been problematic for her mother, arriving with that title that slanted everything toward him.
    But the life that book brought Cassandra—ah, that her mother had loved and gloried in, and not because of the small material benefits that came her way. She adored turning on the radio and hearing Cassandra’s voice, basked in being in a store and having a neighbor comment on one of Cassandra’s television appearances. Once, in the Giant, Cassandra had seen how it worked: Her mother furrowed her brow at the mention of Cassandra’s most recent interview, as if it were impossible to keep track of her daughter’s media profile. Was it Today ? Charlie Rose ? That weird show on cable where everyone shouted?
    You must be very proud of her, the neighbor persisted.
    And Lennie Fallows—it had never occurred to her to drop the surname of the man she detested—said with steely joy, “I was always proud of her.” In her mother’s coded lexicon, this was the rough equivalent of Go fuck yourself.
    Cassandra opened the refrigerator to browse its contents, a daughter’s prerogative. It was huge, the kind of double-wide Sub-Zero one might find in a small restaurant. The kitchen had been Lennie’s latest project, and superficially, it looked great. But