That Old Cape Magic

brother out of jail. The story had been in the newspaper, the family disgraced.Sunny was afraid his father, his health precarious as always, might now take his life for the shame of it. His mother was talking about moving back to Korea. She wanted Sunny to leave Stanford immediately and come home.
    Your brother has disgraced himself, not you, not your family
, Laura wrote.
If you leave Stanford I’ll never forgive you
.
    Again, she watched the blinking cursor for a long time. Finally, he came back.
You are right, of course. May I tell my mother you said this?
    I hope you will
.
    Please don’t tell Kelsey
    Of course I won’t
, she promised.
Hey, you know what? I’m proud of you. You wrote a spontaneous message. It contained actual mistakes, a misspelling, even. You can rest easy, though. You didn’t say anything foolish
.
    He wrote back,
The thing I wanted to write but did not… that was the foolish thing
.
    Laura didn’t have to ask what that thing was.
    “I’ll tell you, but only if you promise not to judge me too harshly,” Sunny told Joy when she asked what he was doing in D.C. The day had turned hot, and Griffin took off his sport coat and loosened his tie. Guests were now gathered on the lawn, waiting for the wedding party to emerge from the hotel. Sunny had walked with them to the last row of folding chairs when Joy waved him over, giving her a graceful kiss on the cheek and shaking Griffin’s hand with firm forthrightness, though neither gesture should have been particularly surprising. The kid had graduated from Stanford, after all, then gone to law school at Georgetown, so there was no reason for him to be shy or awkward anymore. “I’ve become two terrible things,” he said with a wry grin. “A lawyer and a lobbyist.”
    Though not so very terrible, of course. Under cross-examination Sunny confessed that he worked for a liberal law firm that handled public-interest litigation. He himself was one of its immigration specialists.
    “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you at the restaurant last night,” Griffin said.
    “I should’ve introduced myself,” Sunny told him. “I was pretty sure it was you, but when I didn’t see Mrs. Griffin …”
    The last time Griffin had seen him was at Laura’s thirteenth birthday party. Joy had had to banish him from the kitchen, where he wanted to be put to work. “You’re a guest,” she told him. “Join the others and have fun.” The one thing the poor boy had no clue how to do.
    “I wish it would get dark,” Griffin recalled telling Joy. “I can’t bear to watch this.”
    As instructed, Sunny had joined the others on the patio but seemed to have little in common with the other boys, who’d congregated, as boys will, near the food, strutting and joking and pushing and checking out the giggling girls who’d cleverly staked out the punch bowl. Sunny had positioned himself in the middle, as if he represented a third gender, smiling broadly at nothing in particular, his head bobbing arrhythmically to the horrible boy-band music, pretending, Griffin was sure, to enjoy himself.
    In fact, watching the kid reminded Griffin of his first boy-girl party at a similar age. He should’ve known how to behave, since his parents were forever throwing parties back then, though of course those were for adults only. He was expected to make a brief appearance after the guests started arriving and then to disappear, which was why, he supposed, he never learned the requisite skills. His first junior-high party had been a nightmare. Not only did all the other kids know one another, it also seemed like they’d been going to parties like this for years. Griffin remembered positioning himself where he could see the clock and will it to move. At one point, afterhe and the others had filled their paper plates with food at the buffet table and eaten standing up, a few parents hovering around, everyone, it seemed, began trooping downstairs into the rec room, where music was playing on a portable record player. Griffin was still on the stairs when the lights went out. It had taken his eyes a minute or two to adjust, and when they finally did he discovered, to his mortification, that all the other kids were couples necking in the dark. One boy he knew had his hand under a girl’s shirt. “What are
you
doing down here?” came a voice in the dark, and he’d known with terrible certainty that he was the one being addressed.
    “I didn’t know …,” he’d