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yesterday?”
    “Of course.”
    “Use two of the words in a sentence,” she commanded.
    “I felt a certain need to regurgitate when I cogitated on the works of James Joyce.”
    My father laughed, but the laughter was stifled when my mother cut her pale eyes toward him. “You heard your father. This is my special day. Bloomsday, a day celebrated all over the world by aficionados of James Joyce.”
    “The three of you ought to get together sometime,” I said.
    “His admirers are legion,” she said. “Even if I walk alone in my own household.”
    “Leo and I are cooking you a special meal tonight,” my father told her. “The menu is taken directly from the text of Ulysses . It was Leo’s idea.”
    “Thank you, Leo. That’s very thoughtful of you.”
    “I’m not going to eat it. Just cook it,” I said. Although I meant it as a joke, my mother took instant offense. She could freeze me with a gaze that made the dead of winter seem like the best time for planting. From the time I could talk, I heard the men and women of Charleston praise my mother’s physical attractiveness, her immaculate grooming, her stylish carriage. I could always see what they were talking about, but could never fully partake in their pleasure over her textured beauty. For me, her prettiness was easy to admire, but difficult to love. Since the death of Steve, she had rarely kissed me. Hugged me, yes, again and again. But kissed me like she used to do when I was a small boy, no. She had taken little pleasure in my childhood, and I could read her disapproval like a page of newsprint whenever she looked at me. We played hard at looking the part of a happy family, and as far as I knew we succeeded admirably. Only three people in the world knew of our deep and hopeless despair in the company of one another.
    The waitress refilled our coffee cups at the same time.
    My father’s face was baffled and amused and anxious as he witnessed the chilly interplay between me and my mother. He got dizzy with the goofiest kind of love whenever he was with the two of us, yet his solicitousness and kindness to me always remained a red flag, an arena of sudden warfare between them. My brother’s death had almost killed both my parents, but it did not change my father’s fundamental good nature and graceful optimism. He turned his full attention to me and tried to love me harder because I was not Steve. Unlike my mother, who handled his death in the only way she knew how, so I feared that she could never love anyone again who was not Steve.
    “So,” Mother said as she adjusted her lipstick in a compact mirror. That gesture was a signal to the waitress that our breakfast had ended and she was free to clear the dishes. “Your father knows the orders of the day. Leo, I want you to bake two dozen chocolate chip cookies for the new neighbors who are moving in today across the street from us, a set of twins. Your age, exactly, and they’ll be your classmates at Peninsula.”
    “Okay. What else?” I asked.
    “I got a call from Sister Mary Polycarp at the orphanage. They received two new orphans from Atlanta. Both runaways. They too are brother and sister. You will welcome them to Charleston. Then you will bird-dog them all year. Watch over them. They’ve had a terrible life.”
    “They’ve had great lives. Wait till they spend a year with Polycarp. What a monster! I thought they threw her out of the convent.”
    “Wasn’t she the nun who hit that Wallace girl across the eye with a ruler?” Father asked.
    “An unfortunate accident,” said my mother.
    “I was there,” I said. “She cut her eyeball. Severed the optic nerve. Blinded her.”
    “She’s no longer allowed to teach. The order almost expelled her,” Mother explained.
    “In the third grade, she hit so many boys in the face and made so many of us bleed that I nicknamed her the Red Cross.”
    My father chuckled, but was stopped cold by a sudden glitter in Mother’s eye.
    “Very witty,