That Old Cape Magic

stammered.
    “Yeah, well, now you do.”
    And there’d been snickers, lots of them, to help propel him back up the stairs.
    Poor kid
, Griffin remembered thinking as he regarded Sunny.
He must be suffering just like that
.
    “Why don’t you go somewhere, then,” Joy told him. “You’re making me more nervous than he is.”
    He’d gladly taken her advice and gone out for a drink with Tommy, returning just as the party was breaking up. Sunny Kim, still smiling, was among the last to leave, and he shook Griffin’s hand solemnly. “It was a wonderful party,” he said. “You have a lovely home.”
    “What kind of thirteen-year-old says, ‘You have a lovely home’?” he asked Joy later, as they were cleaning up. In his mind’s eye he could see the poor kid practicing the line until his parents were sure he’d got it right.
    “We
do
have a lovely home,” Joy pointed out. “And he
did
have a good time. Quit worrying. They’re just kids. They have to figure these things out.”
    “That’s the problem,” he said. “They already have it all figured out. Who’s cool, who’s not, who’s in, who’s out. Nobody had to teach them, either.”
    Sunny’s parents lived in a modest stucco ranch on the other side of Shoreham Drive, in a mixed-race neighborhood where single-level houses, wedged in tightly together, were cheaper and sported carports rather than garages. On the Griffins’ side of Shoreham, the homes, while not extravagant, were more likely to be larger split-levels with attached garages, with real lawns instead of what on the other side was euphemistically described as “desert landscaping.” Every second or third house on Griffin’s block had a pool. And the neighborhood was white, of course. How much of this had Sunny’s mother prepared him for before allowing him to attend Laura’s party? How, he now wondered, had he been invited in the first place? Had Joy insisted, or had Laura done it on her own? He was the smartest kid in her class, and had been since grade school. His name was always coming up in conversation, though usually the subject was honors and awards, not romance. “Did somebody dance with him at least?”
    “Yes,” his wife told him, clearly annoyed now. “Laura did. And Kelsey.”
    What was vague in Griffin’s recollection was the exact chronology of all this. By that birthday party he and Joy must have already been making plans to leave L.A., hadn’t they? Was it that very night that had firmed his resolve to look seriously for a teaching position back East? No, that was a trick of memory, surely. Yet he did seem to remember not liking Laura’s friends, especially that cluster of boys, and one in particular who, smirking, had elbowed another and pointed to Sunny Kim standing alone on the patio. But there’d been other factors. The old days, wild and free, finally seemed to be over. Even Griffin had to admit it. Laura’s birth was part of that, but by then he’d begun to suspect there was something wrong with Tommy, whose second, short-lived marriage had quickly ended up on the rocks and who now was drinking more heavily. Griffin was pretty sure the drinking was more effect than cause, and Tommyadmitted as much but claimed it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. All of which put a strain on their writing partnership. They’d always been good at different things. Tommy, smooth and personable and quick-witted, loved to pitch ideas. He always saw a story in terms of its overall structure, leaving Griffin to write the dialogue, make sure the scenes were alive and the narrative tracked. But now, with Tommy viewing things through a prism of empty vodka bottles, Griffin found himself doing more and more of the work, not really even trusting Tommy to do the pitch without him.
    Just as troubling, Joy seemed actually to be settling into their “lovely home.” Now
he
was the one reminding
her
of the Great Truro Accord, that the idea had always been to sell the Valley house and use the equity for a down payment back East. Finally, in the second decade of their marriage, he was beginning to understand that his wife’s natural inclination was toward contentment. Their present house and their life in L.A. had grown on her. She adored Laura so completely that their daughter seemed like the only thing that had ever been missing from their lives. And though she never said so, he also suspected she wasn’t sure she wanted to be so far away from her family, on the