Deckie and Celie were assigned to that table, too, but they ducked off into thekitchen to eat there, and bad as it was with the brats, Paulie knew it would beworse in the kitchen where he hadn't been invited. So he had to sit there andtry to listen over the noise of the brats as Uncle Howie at the other tablebragged about Deckie's tennis playing and how he could turn pro if he wanted,but of course he was going to Harvard and he'd simply use his tennis toterrorize his employees when he was running some company. "His employees won'thave to try to lose in order to suck up to Deckie," Uncle Howie said. "They'llhave to be such damn good tennis players that they can give him a good game. Andthat means his best executives will all be in top physical shape, which keepsthe health costs down."

"Till one of them drops dead of a heart attack on the tennis court and the widowsues Deckie for making him play."

The whole table fell silent except for one person, who was laughing uproariouslybecause after all, he made the joke. Mubbie, naturally. Paulie wanted to die.

After the dead silence, punctuated only by the laughter of one social corpse,Mother turned the conversation back to the achievements of the other children.It was a cruel thing for her to do, since naturally the others asked her aboutwhat Paulie was doing, and naturally she answered with offhand good humor, "Oh,you know, he gets along well enough. No psychiatrists' bills yet, and no bailmoney, so we're content." The others laughed at this, except Paulie. He wonderedif maybe some of the older cousins had been to shrinks or had to be bailed outof jail, so that maybe Mom's little joke had a barb to it just like Father'sdid, only she knew how to do it subtly, so that even the victims had to laugh.But most likely nobody in this scrupulously correct family had ever been in aposition where either a shrink or a bail bondsman was required.

Paulie ate as quickly as possible and excused himself and went to the room thathad Deckie's stuff in it too, piled on the other twin bed, but mercifully Deckiehimself was off somewhere else being perfect and Paulie had some peace. Hismother made him bring some books so when he was off by himself she could tellthe others he was reading, and Paulie was smart enough to have packed books healready read at school so that when the adults asked him what he was reading hecould tell them what the story was about, as if they cared. But the truth wasthat Paulie didn't like to read, it all seemed pretty thin to him, he couldthink up better stuff just lying around with his eyes closed.

They must have thought he was asleep, must have peered in the door and decidedhe was dead to the world, or they probably wouldn't have held their littleconfab out in the hall, Mother and her brothers and sister. The subject wasNana. "She's already got all her money in a trust that we administer," Motherwas saying, "and she can afford a round-the-clock nurse, so what's the problem?"

But the others had all kinds of other arguments; which in Paulie's mind allboiled down to one: Nana was an embarrassment and as long as she remained in theBride mansion in Richmond their family could never return to their rightfulplace among the finest families of Virginia. Paulie wanted to speak up and askthem why they didn't just put her in a bag, weight it down with rocks, and dropit into the James River, but he didn't. He just listened as every one of Nana'sgrandchildren except Mother made it plain that they had less filial affectionthan the average housecat. And even Mother, Paulie suspected, was opposing thembecause whoever ended up in that mansion would be established for all time asthe leading branch of the family, and Mother couldn't stomach that, even thoughby marrying Mubbie she had removed herself from all possibility of occupyingthat position herself. At home she talked all the time about how her brothersand sisters put on airs as if they were all real Brides but the spunk was gonefrom the family after Mother and Father died when they went out sailing on theChesapeake and got caught in the fringes of a spent hurricane. "Nana is the onlyremnant left of the old vigor," she would say.

"Drooling and grunting like a baboon," Father would always answer, then laugh asMother ignored him.

"She still understands what's going on around her," Mother would say. "You cansee it in her eyes. She can't talk or eat because Parkinson's has her, but it'snot Alzheimer's, she's sharp as a tack and I have no doubt that if she couldwrite or speak, she'd wipe my brothers and sisters right out of the will. Andsince she can't do that, she does the only thing she can do. She refrains fromdying. I admire her for that."

"I refrain from dying every day," Mubbie would say, every time as if he hoped itwould be funny if he just got to the right number of repetitions. "But you neveradmire me for that." At which Mother always changed the subject.

The conversation in the hall went the rounds until finally Aunt Rosie said, "Oh,never mind. Weedie's never going to bend" -- Weedie was Mother, who preferredthe nickname to Winifred -- "and Nana can't live forever so we'll just go on."

They went away and Paulie wondered how Nana would feel if she could hear the waythey talked about her. Didn't it ever occur to any of them that maybe she wouldbe just as happy to be rid of them as they would be to be rid of her? Paulietried to imagine what it would be like, to be trapped in a body that wouldn't doanything, to have to have somebody wipe your butt whenever you relievedyourself, to have to have somebody feed you every bite you ate, and know thatthey hated you for not being dead, or at least wished with some impatience thatyou'd just get on with it.

And then, drowning in self-pity, Paulie wondered whether it was really differentfrom his own life. If Nana died, at least it would make a difference tosomebody. They'd get a house. Somebody would move. People would have more money.But if I died, who'd notice? Hell, I probably wouldn't even notice. Not till itwas time to eat and I couldn't pick up a fork.

It was dark by now but there was a full moon and anyway the parking lot aroundthe so-called cabin was flooded with light, especially the tennis courts wherethe thwang, thunk, thwang, thunk, thwang of a ball being hit and bouncing offthe court and getting hit again rang out in the night's stillness. Paulie got upfrom his bed where maybe he had fallen asleep for a while and maybe not. Hewalked through the upstairs hall and quietly down the stairs. Adults weregathered in the living room and the kitchen, talking and sometimes laughing, butnobody noticed him as he went outside.

He expected to see Deckie and Celie playing tennis, but it was Uncle Howie andAunt Sissie, Deckie's parents, playing with intense grimaces on their faces asif this were the final battle in a lifelong war. They both dripped with sweateven though the night air here in the Great Smokies was fairly cool.

So where were Deckie and Celie? Not that it mattered. Not that they'd welcomePaulie's company if he found them. Not that he could even be sure they weretogether. He knew Deckie was out somewhere because his stuff was still piled onhis bed. And the sounds of tennis had made Paulie assume he was playing withCelie. But for all he knew, Celie was in bed with the little girl cousins in thebig attic dormitory. Still, he looked for them because at some level he knewthey would be together, and for some perverse reason he always had to push andpush until he forced people to tell him outright that they didn't want himaround. The school counselor had told him this about himself, but hadn't toldhim how to stop doing it. In fact, Paulie was half-convinced that the counselorhad only told him that as an oblique way of letting him know that he, too,didn't want Paulie around anymore.