Treasure Island!!!

someone we know?”
    Adrianna looked stricken. I don’t know why she thought she could trust me. With pleasure my mind leaped ahead to the long ugly scene that was unfolding, the slow torturous way my parents would extract the mineral details from her granite psyche. But in fact, there was hardly time to relish the event. Adrianna was actually dying to unburden herself. No sooner had the question been asked than she collapsed in a heap and began telling my mother all about it. She seemed pretty oblivious to how much she was upsetting my mother in the telling. “Oh, he’s wonderful, Mom,” she said as she put her head into my mother’s lap and began to weep. “But it’s tearing me apart. All the secrecy and lies. It’s better that you know about us. You won’t be angry with him, will you? Promise me you won’t be angry, Daddy. Daddy?”
    She turned to my father, who—rare event—had been listening. He was also biting his spoon.
    “Who is it?” my father said.
    “Don,” Adrianna said with a shivery, hopeful smile. “Your colleague, Don Tatum.”
    My father stared stunned for a moment. He picked up his bowl and threw it against the electric range; it shattered instantly and fell in pieces onto the floor.
    “What?” Adrianna said.
    My mother pushed Adrianna’s head out of her lap and began to cry.
     

CHAPTER 19
     
    O ne of the reasons I kept index cards on
Treasure Island
—not that anybody in my family deserves to know—is that I was devising a system to cut like a machete through the book’s dense undergrowth. At the top of each index card, it was my habit to write a quotation, which encapsulated an important
lesson
. Beneath this line, in my own words, and in as succinct a sentence as possible, I wrote the lesson’s
distillation
; and beneath this, in a smaller hand, one or two notes about the lesson’s practical
application
. For instance, card #12 contained these helpful words from Jim Hawkins: “I began to be horribly frightened, but I kept my head, for all that.” So below that the lesson: “Keep your head, even when you’re scared or you think things are going haywire.” And then under that, I wrote my application: [but this part I always wrote in code in case the card should come into the wrong hands].
    “How many of those damn cards do you have anyway?” Adrianna asked me. It was one in the morning, of the same night in which The Affair Had Been Revealed, and we were just getting around to sweeping up the pieces of the broken applesauce bowl. My mother, with uncharacteristic neglect, had abandoned the kitchen, and my father had followed her into their bedroom and then into the garage, where they had been yelling and/or weeping for three hours straight.
    I crouched with the dustpan; Adrianna swept.
    “A hundred cards,” I said. “More or less.”
    “And they’re all about
Treasure Island
?”
    “Well, obviously.”
    “I read a few. What’s a gunwale?”
    I had forgotten.
    “What are rollers?”
    “I don’t know!”
    “Well, it’s your book. Don’t get mad at me!”
    “What do you think they’re screaming about?”
    “I don’t know. I left Don three messages.”
    “It’s one in the morning.”
    “I know,” she said, looking distraught. “Either he heard them and refused to pick up, or he went to bed early and hasn’t got them. He goes to bed at eight thirty sometimes.”
    “I’m sure he does,” I said. And then, as an afterthought, I added, “Well, I’m sure he’ll call in the morning then.” I was shocked by my niceness.
    We dumped the shards of the bowl into the trash and Adrianna went off to bed, looking like a zombie. Later she told me she had slept with her laptop on her stomach, in case Don got her messages and decided to email. But silent was the Don. About 2 A.M. my mother emerged from the garage and staggered past me, where I sat waiting at the breakfast bar, and began to wash her hands furiously. She looked like Lady Macbeth doing the sleepwalking scene, only she had the advantage of anti-bacterial soap.
    “Mom?”
    She jumped. “Oh. You. What?”
    “Um . . . where’s Dad?”
    “He wants to sleep tonight in the car.”
    “Oh. Okay.”
    There was a rather long pause during which I tried to decide if I should pretend that this was normal, or ingratiate myself to my mother by inquiring, more deeply, as to why.
    I decided to skip it.
    “And why are you up?” She put out a hand and absent-mindedly smoothed my hair behind my