The Corrections

if hers were the head he’d swung for when he brained Rick Flamburg.
    Before the trial she asked her father if he’d told Billy that Brian had sold Eigenmelody to W——. She didn’t want to ask him, but she couldn’t not. Nick, because he gave Billy money, was the only person in the family still in regular communication with him. (Uncle Jimmy had promised to shoot the desecrator of his shrine, the little prick nephew, if he ever showed his little prick Elvis-hating face again, and eventually Billy had stolen once too often from everybody else; even Nick’s parents, Fazio and Carolina, who had long insisted that there was nothing wrong with Billy but, in Fazio’s words, “attentive deficiency disorder,” no longer let their grandson inside their Sea Isle City house.)
    Nick unfortunately grasped the import of Robin’s question right away. Choosing his words carefully, he replied that, no, he didn’t recall saying anything to Billy.
    “It’s better if you just tell me the truth, Dad,” Robin said.
    “Well … I … I don’t think there’s any connection there … uh, Robin.”
    “Maybe it wouldn’t make me feel guilty. Maybe it would just piss me off.”
    “Well … Robin … those … those feelings often amount to the same thing anyway. Guilt, anger, same thing … right? But don’t you worry about Billy.”
    She hung up wondering whether Nick was trying to protect her from her guilt, trying to protect Billy from her anger, or simply spacing out under the strain. She suspected it was a combination of all three. She suspected that during the summer her father had mentioned Brian’s windfall to Billy and that father and son had then traded snidenesses and bitternesses about the W——Corporation and bourgeois Robin and leisure-class Brian. She suspected this, if nothing else, because of how badly Brian and her father got along. Brian was never as outspoken with his wife as he was with Denise (“Nick’s the worst kind of coward,” he remarked to her once), but he made no secret of hating Nick’s bad-boy disquisitions on the uses of violence and his teeth-sucking satisfaction with his so-called socialism. Brian liked Colleen well enough (“She sure got a raw deal in that marriage,” he remarked to Denise) but shook his head and left the room whenever Nick began holding forth. Robin didn’t let herself imagine what her father and Billy had said about her and Brian. But she was pretty sure that things were said and that Rick Flamburg had paid the price. Nick’s response to the trial photographs of Flamburg lent further credence to this view.
    During the trial, as her father fell apart, Robin studied the catechism at St. Dymphna’s and made two further claims on Brian’s new money. First she quit her job at the experimental school. She was no longer satisfied to work for parents paying $23,000 a year per child (although, of course, she and Brian were paying nearly that much to school Sinéad andErin). And then she embarked on a philanthropic project. In a badly blighted section of Point Breeze, less than a mile south of their new house, she bought a vacant city block with a single derelict row house standing on one corner. She also bought five truckloads of humus and good liability insurance. Her plan was to hire local teenagers at minimum wage, teach them the rudiments of organic gardening, and let them share the profits from whatever vegetables they could sell. She threw herself into her Garden Project with a manic intensity that was scary even by Robin standards. Brian found her awake at her Global Desktop at 4 a.m., tapping both feet and comparing varieties of turnip.
    With a different contractor coming to Panama Street every week to make improvements, and with Robin disappearing into a utopist sink of time and energy, Brian reconciled himself to remaining in the dismal city of his childhood. He decided to have some fun of his own. He began eating lunch at the good restaurants of Philadelphia, one after another, and comparing each to his current favorite, Mare Scuro. When he was sure that he still liked Mare Scuro best, he called the chef and made a proposal.
    “The first truly cool restaurant in Philly,” he said. “The kind of place that makes a person say, ‘Hey, I could live in Philly—if I had to.’ I don’t care if anybody else actually feels that way. I just want a place that makes me feel that way. So whatever they’re paying you now, I will double. And then you go to