“Not so bad, not so bad,” Vin Haven said when Walter called him at his home in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “We got our Warbler Park, nobody can take that away from us. You and your girl did good. As for the rest of it, you can see why I’ve never bothered talking to the press. It’s all downside and no upside.”

“I talked to Caperville for two hours,” Walter said. “I really thought he was with me on the main points.”

“Well, and your points are in there,” Vin said. “Albeit not too conspicuously. But don’t you worry about it.”

“I am worried about it! I mean, yes, we got the park, which is great for the warbler. But the whole thing’s supposed to be a model. This thing reads like a model of how not to do things.”

“It’ll blow over. Once we get the coal out and start reclaiming, people will see you were right. This Caperville fella will be writing obits by then.”

“But that’s going to be years!”

“You got other plans? Is that what this is about? You worried about your résumé?”

“No, Vin, I’m just frustrated with the media. The birds don’t count for anything, it’s all about the human interest.”

“And that’s the way it’ll stay until the birds control the media,” Vin said. “Am I going to see you in Whitmanville next month? I told Jim Elder I’d make an appearance at the armor-plant opening, provided I don’t have to pose for any pictures. I could pick you up in the jet on the way there.”

“Thanks, we’ll fly commercial,” Walter said. “Save some fuel.”

“Try to remember I make a living selling fuel.”

“Right, ha ha, good point.”

It was nice to have Vin’s fatherly approval, but it would have been nicer had Vin been seeming less dubious as a father. The worst thing about the Times piece-leaving aside the shame of looking like an asshole in a publication read and trusted by everyone Walter knew-was his fear that the Times was, in fact, right about the Cerulean Mountain Trust. He’d dreaded being slaughtered in the media, and now that he was being slaughtered he had to attend more seriously to his reasons for dreading it.

“I heard you doing that interview,” Lalitha said. “You nailed it. The only reason the Times can’t admit we’re right is they’d have to take back all their editorials against MTR.”

“That’s what they’re doing right now with Bush and Iraq, actually.”

“Well, you’ve paid your dues. And now you and I get our little reward. Did you tell Mr. Haven we’re going ahead with Free Space?”

“I was feeling lucky not to be fired,” Walter said. “It didn’t seem like the right moment to tell him I’m planning to spend the entire discretionary fund on something that’ll probably get even worse publicity.”

“Oh, my sweetheart,” she said, embracing him, resting her head against his heart. “Nobody else understands what good things you’re doing. I’m the only one.”

“That may actually be true,” he said.

He would have liked to just be held by her for a while, but her body had other ideas, and his own body agreed with them. They were spending their nights now on her too-small bed, since his own rooms were still full of Patty’s traces, which she’d given him no instructions for dealing with and he couldn’t begin to deal with on his own. It didn’t surprise him that Patty hadn’t been in touch, and yet it seemed tactical of her, adversarial, that she hadn’t. For a person who, by her own admission, made nothing but mistakes, she cast a daunting shadow as she did whatever she was doing out there in the world. Walter felt cowardly to be hiding from her in Lalitha’s room, but what else could he do? He was beset from all sides.

On his birthday, while Lalitha showed Connie the Trust offices, he took Joey into the kitchen and said he still didn’t know what course of action to recommend. “I really don’t think you should blow the whistle,” he said. “But I don’t trust my motives on that. I’ve sort of lost my moral bearings lately. The thing with your mother, and the thing in the New York Times-did you see that?”

“Yep,” Joey said. He had his hands in his pockets and was still dressing like a College Republican, in a blue blazer and shiny loafers. For all Walter knew, he was a College Republican.

“I didn’t come off very well, did I?”

“Nope,” Joey said. “But I think most people could see it wasn’t a fair article.”

Walter gratefully, no questions asked, accepted this reassurance from his son. He was feeling very small indeed. “So I have to go to this LBI event in West Virginia next week,” he said. “They’re opening a body-armor plant that all those displaced families are going to be working at. And so I’m not really the right person to ask about LBI, because I’m so implicated myself.”

“Why do you have to go to that?”

“I have to give a speech. I have to make grateful on behalf of the Trust.”

“But you’ve already got your Warbler Park. Why not just blow it off?”

“Because there’s this other big program Lalitha’s doing with overpopulation, and I have to stay on good terms with my boss. It’s his money we’re spending.”

“Sounds like you’d better go, then,” Joey said.

He sounded unpersuaded, and Walter hated looking so weak and small to him. As if to make himself look even weaker and smaller, he asked if he knew what was up with Jessica.

“I talked to her,” Joey said, hands in pockets, eyes on the floor. “I guess she’s a little mad at you.”

“I’ve left her like twenty phone messages!”

“You can probably stop doing that. I don’t think she’s listening to them. People don’t listen to every cellphone message anyway, they just look to see who’s called.”

“Well, did you tell her that there are two sides to this story?”

Joey shrugged. “I don’t know. Are there two sides?”

“Yes, there are! Your mother did a very bad thing to me. An incredibly painful thing.”

“I don’t really want any more information,” Joey said. “I think she probably already told me about it anyway. I don’t feel like taking sides.”

“She told you about it when? How long ago?”

“Last week.”

So Joey knew what Richard had done-what Walter had let his best friend, his rock-star friend, do. His smallening in his son’s eyes was now complete. “I’m going to have a beer,” he said. “Since it’s my birthday.”

“Can Connie and I have one, too?”

“Yes, that’s why we asked you here early. Actually, Connie can drink whatever she wants at the restaurant, too. She’s twenty-one, right?”

“Yep.”

“And this is not nagging, this is just a request for information: did you tell Mom you’re married?”

“Dad, I’m working on it,” Joey said with a tightening of his jaw. “Let me do this my way, OK?”

Walter had always liked Connie (had even, secretly, rather liked Connie’s mother, for how she’d flirted with him). She was wearing perilously high heels and heavy eye shadow for the occasion; she was still young enough to be trying to look much older. At La Chaumière, he observed with swelling heart how tenderly attentive Joey was to her, leaning over to read her menu with her and coordinate their selections, and how Connie, since Joey wasn’t of legal age, declined Walter’s offer of a cocktail and ordered a Diet Coke for herself. They had a tacit trusting way with each other, a way that reminded Walter of his and Patty’s way when they were very young, the way of a couple united as a front against the world; his eyes misted up at the sight of their wedding bands. Lalitha, ill at ease, trying to distance herself from the young people and align herself with a man nearly twice her age, ordered a martini and proceeded to fill the conversational vacuum with talk of Free Space and the world population crisis, to which Joey and Connie listened with the exquisite courtesy of a couple secure in their two-person world. Although Lalitha avoided proprietary references to Walter, he had no doubt that Joey knew that she was more than simply his assistant. As he drank his third beer of the evening, he became more and more ashamed of what he’d done and more and more grateful to Joey for being so cool about it. Nothing had enraged him more about Joey, over the years, than his shell of coolness; and now, how glad of it he was! His son had won that war, and he was glad of it.