“This is a public train,” the girl said. “You should take a private jet if you can’t deal with other people.”

“Yeah, I’ll try to remember to do that next time.”

The rest of the way to Washington, the couple kept lunging against their seat backs, attempting to push them past their limits and farther into his space. They didn’t seem to have recognized him, but, if they had, they would surely soon be blogging about what an asshole Richard Katz was.

Although he’d played D.C. often enough over the years, its horizontality and vexing diagonal avenues never ceased to freak him out. He felt like a rat in a governmental maze here. For all he could tell from the back seat of his taxi, the driver was taking him not to Georgetown but to the Israeli embassy for enhanced interrogation. The pedestrians in every neighborhood all seemed to have taken the same dowdiness pills. As if individual style were a volatile substance that evaporated in the vacuity of D.C.’s sidewalks and infernally wide squares. The whole city was a monosyllabic imperative directed at Katz in his beat-up biker jacket. Saying: die.

The mansion in Georgetown had some character, however. As Katz understood it, Walter and Patty hadn’t personally chosen this house, but it nevertheless reflected the excellent urbangentry taste he’d come to expect of them. It had a slate roof and multiple dormers and high ground-floor windows looking out on something resembling an actual small lawn. Above the doorbell was a brass plate discreetly conceding the presence of THE CERULEAN MOUNTAIN TRUST.

Jessica Berglund opened the door. Katz hadn’t seen her since she was in high school, and he smiled with pleasure at the sight of her all grown up and womanly. She seemed cross and distracted, however, and barely greeted him. “Hi, um,” she said, “just come on back to the kitchen, OK?”

She glanced over her shoulder at a long parquet-floored hallway. The Indian girl was standing at the end of it. “Hi, Richard,” she called, waving to him nervously.

“Just give me one second,” Jessica said. She stalked down the hall, and Katz followed with his overnight bag, passing a large room full of desks and file cabinets and a smaller room with a conference table. The place smelled like warm semiconductors and fresh paper products. In the kitchen was a big French farmer’s table that he recognized from St. Paul. “Excuse me for one second,” Jessica said as she pursued Lalitha into a more executive-looking suite at the back of the house.

“I’m a young person,” he heard her say there. “OK? I’m the young person here. Do you get it?”

Lalitha: “Yes! Of course. That’s why it’s so wonderful you came down. All I’m saying is I’m not so old myself, you know.”

“You’re twenty-seven!”

“That’s not young?”

“How old were you when you got your first cell phone? When did you start going online?”

“I was in college. But, Jessica, listen-”

“There’s a big difference between college and high school. There’s an entirely different way that people communicate now. A way that people my age started learning much earlier than you did.”

“I know that. We don’t disagree about that. I really don’t see why you’re so angry at me.”

“Why I’m angry? Because you have my dad thinking you’re this great expert on young people, but you’re not the great expert, as you just totally demonstrated.”

“Jessica, I know the difference between a text and an e-mail. I misspoke because I’m tired. I hardly slept all week. It’s not fair of you to make so much of this.”

“Do you even send texts?”

“I don’t have to. We have BlackBerrys, which do the same thing, only better.”

“It is not the same thing! God. This is what I’m talking about! If you didn’t grow up with cell phones in high school, you don’t understand that your phone is very, very different from your e-mail. It’s a totally different way of being in touch with people. I have friends who hardly even check their e-mail anymore. And if you and Dad are going to be targeting kids in college, it’s really important that you understand that.”

“OK, then. Be mad at me. Go ahead and be mad. But I still have work to do tonight, and you need to leave me alone now.”

Jessica returned to the kitchen, shaking her head, her jaw set. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You probably want to take a shower and have some dinner. There’s a dining room upstairs that I think it’s nice to actually use now and then. I got a, um.” She looked around in great distraction. “I made a big dinner salad and some pasta I’ll reheat. I also got some nice bread, the proverbial loaf of bread that my mother is apparently incapable of buying when a house full of people is coming for the weekend.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Katz said. “I’ve still got part of a sandwich in my bag.”

“No, I’ll come up and sit with you. It’s just that things are a little disorganized around here. This house is just… just… just…” She clenched her fingers and shook her hands. “Unnhh! This house!”

“Calm down,” Katz said. “It’s great to see you.”

“How do they even live when I’m not here? That’s what I don’t understand. How the whole thing even functions at the basic level of taking the trash out.” Jessica shut the kitchen door and lowered her voice. “God only knows what she eats. Apparently, from what my mom says, she subsists on Cheerios, milk, and cheese sandwiches. And bananas. But where are these foods? There’s not even any milk in the fridge.”

Katz made a vague gesture with his hands, to suggest that he could not be held responsible.

“And, you know, as it happens,” Jessica said, “I know quite a bit about Indian regional cooking. Because a lot of my friends in college were Indian? And years ago, when I first came down here, I asked her if she could teach me how to do some regional cooking, like from Bengal, where she was born. I’m very respectful of people’s traditions, and I thought we could make this nice big meal together, her and me, and actually sit down at the dining-room table like a family. I thought that might be cool, since she’s Indian and I’m interested in food. And she laughed at me and said she couldn’t even cook an egg. Apparently both her parents were engineers and never made a real meal in their lives. So there went that plan.”

Katz was smiling at her, enjoying the seamless way that she combined and blended, in her compact unitary person, the personalities of her parents. She sounded like Patty and was outraged like Walter, and yet she was entirely herself. Her blond hair was pulled back and tied with a severity that seemed to stretch her eyebrows into the raised position, contributing to her expression of appalled surprise and irony. He wasn’t the least bit attracted to her, and he liked her all the more for this.

“So where is everybody?” he said.

“Mom is at the gym, ‘working.’ And Dad, I don’t actually know. Some meeting in Virginia. He told me to tell you he’ll see you in the morning-he’d meant to be here tonight, but something came up.”

“When’s your mom getting home?”

“Late, I’m sure. You know, it’s not at all obvious now, but she was actually a fairly great mom when I was growing up. You know, like, cooked? Made people feel welcome? Put flowers in a vase by the bed? Apparently that’s all a thing of the past now.”

In her capacity as emergency hostess, Jessica led Katz up a narrow rear staircase and showed him the big second-floor bedrooms that had been converted to living and dining and family rooms, the small room in which Patty had a computer and a foldout sofa, and then, on the third floor, the equally small room where he would sleep. “This is officially my brother’s room,” she said, “but I bet he hasn’t spent ten nights in it since they moved here.”

There was, indeed, no trace of Joey, just more of Walter and Patty’s very tasteful furniture.

“How are things with Joey anyway?”