“No,” she said, as Cynthia reappeared in the doorway behind him and beckoned with one finger.

They hit traffic getting on the FDR at that hour and again once they were over the Triborough. Cynthia started looking nervously at her watch. No way in hell they were missing this flight. Suddenly she felt a kind of shudder go through the seat beneath her, and when she turned she saw that Deborah was crying, and shaking with the effort not to make any noise while doing it.

“Oh please,” Cynthia said-not to Deborah, exactly, but that was how she took it.

“Please what?” Deborah said angrily, wiping her eyes on her borrowed shirt. “I’m sorry that unhappiness doesn’t fit in with your lifestyle. I know you don’t give a shit about me but I’d think I’d merit the sympathy a total stranger would, at least. Of course maybe the total stranger would get nothing from you either. I’d forgotten how easy everything’s always been for you. I just didn’t expect I’d ever feel so jealous of it.”

“As I understand it,” Cynthia said, “you banged some married professor and what do you know, it turns out he’s a liar. Wow, I’m sure you’re the first person that’s ever happened to. So you forget about it and you move forward. The rest of it is just drama, which should really be your middle name, by the way. You may not respect me but at least I’d respect myself enough not to wind up in the batshit ward.”

“What do you know about it? What do you know about anything? You have never suffered a day in your life. You’ve never not gotten anything you wanted. And now those kids of yours are growing up the same way. Like a little ruling class. It’s terrifying.”

“What did you say to them?” Cynthia said.

“Everything given to them. No idea how fortunate they are. Sweet and content and well bred. Everything as it should be and they have no idea how the other ninety-nine percent lives.”

“Hey, you’re right,” Cynthia said. “I really should try to ennoble them with some early suffering. I really should go back home and take some things away from them. Boy, it’s a mystery to me how someone as smart as you has never had a kid of her own.”

And when she said that, Deborah stiffened as if she’d been hit; she stopped talking and turned to look out the window; and just like that Cynthia had a pretty good idea what had really happened. They rode the rest of the way to LaGuardia in silence.

“Keep the meter running,” Cynthia said to the driver. Deborah, her hand on the door, turned to face her. “I know you only did this because you had to,” she said, “but thank you anyway.”

“I didn’t have to do it,” Cynthia said. “Why would I have to do it?”

“Because we’re quote-unquote family,” Deborah said.

But that’s what’s so fucked up about it, Cynthia thought when she was back in the city-bound traffic on the L.I.E. Everyone thought they could keep playing this family card with her to get her to do what they wanted; the irony was that they had no idea how deeply she bought into the idea they were so cynical about. She believed in it more than any of them. But you didn’t get to screw around with definitions, your own or anyone else’s. Just because Ruth found some rich guy to get old with, it didn’t follow that Cynthia was no longer an only child. And she hadn’t heard from her father in the last three years, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still her father, or that anybody else was. That was how you kept the whole idea meaningful, and powerful. You kept it small.

But the whole blowup stayed with her, particularly the indictment of her children, or at least of the way she was raising them. That was beyond the pale. Even if you’d spent the previous night in Bellevue, she thought, you should know better than to go there. It wasn’t the first time she’d reached the conclusion that, on the subject of children, most people were full of shit. What was supposed to be the point of denying them anything? Who decided that not having things that your parents hadn’t had either was character-building somehow? Narcissistic bullshit. Your children’s lives were supposed to be better than yours: that was the whole idea. And what was the point of getting hung up on how much things cost? You were expected to complain when things were, or seemed, more expensive than they should be: braces, for instance, which their dentist said both kids were eventually going to need. Fifteen grand, probably, before that was all over. But the fact was they could afford it. They spent sixty thousand dollars a year just to send their kids to school and they could afford that too. They knew or observed plenty of people-in their neighborhood, in their own building-richer than they were; still, they already had much more money than Cynthia had ever seen as a kid, even during the flush times. In fact the very notion of “flush times” was one that Cynthia did not care to revisit. And as far as the kids’ characters being shaped by money, it was clearly untrue because money itself was one area where you saw the fundamental differences between them. The two of them fought less and less as time went on; there was little ground for competition or envy because they just didn’t want the same things. April was a thoroughly social animal, obsessed with preteen perks and downright lawyerly when it came to the question of their early acquisition. She’d been given her own cell phone this year, because that was a safety issue; but just last week Cynthia had bought her a pair of Tory Burch shoes for Christmas-to be honest, it thrilled her somewhat, just on the level of pride in her daughter’s precociousness, that April had even asked for them-and before that there’d been a kind of mini-scandal at school when some kids she knew in the grade ahead of hers were caught trying to pay for lunch at Serendipity with a parent’s credit card. You could hold them off for a while, but any parent knew that it wasn’t about possessing all these things so much as it was about asking to be trusted, to be let into the world a little more, and in that light Cynthia couldn’t see the argument for saying no to very much. That the lines should stay open, that she should always be the first person April would come to about anything and everything-that was the important consideration, and she wasn’t going to risk losing her daughter’s confidence over something as stupid as other people’s bitchy judgments of her privileges. She knew April already had a bit of a mean-girl rep at school, but as far as Cynthia was concerned, wailing over that kind of natural social stratification was more about the mothers’ egos than the kids’. April could handle herself just fine. In truth Cynthia couldn’t help but be a little impressed by the fantastic amount of ingenuity April put into appearing two or three years older than she was. The great irony, of course, was that Jonas’s complete lack of interest in whatever his own peers were doing or buying or watching made him seem like he was about forty years old.

But there was no getting out of certain forms of sibling togetherness; she had to take them to see that dentist again before they left for Costa Rica, for instance, and even though April was furious about having to miss ballet, Cynthia had made this appointment six months ago and if they missed it this huckster was booked until summer. She picked them up at school, and even though they were running late they had to take the subway instead of a cab, because for the past three weeks Jonas’s homeroom teacher had been doing a unit about conservation and air pollution and if Cynthia had to hear another word about the fucking ozone layer she was going to scream. They crossed 87th and at the storefront gap that led to the subway entrance they found themselves converging with a guy pushing a baby in a stroller-actually not a baby at all, Cynthia saw, more like three years old, a kid who, by virtue of still being strollered around at that age, was clearly running the show. Beautiful boy, though. The father was a good-looking guy too, very expensively tousled. All four of them did that little no-you-go-first dance at the top step, and even though it only took a second, Cynthia was suddenly conscious of impatient people mustering behind them.