The hotel was near the Boston Common; it was the fanciest hotel I’d ever been inside, but by then, this fact did not surprise me. Corinthian columns flanked the lobby, and green marble lined the floor and ceilings. Conchita approached the concierge’s desk to ask where the restaurant was, and Martha and I followed her, all of us still giddy from the ride, and I could feel that the hotel staff and other guests in the lobby were looking at us and that we were three girls to them, we were ordinary, and in this moment, our ordinariness was not a bad thing. On the contrary-in being underdressed and a little loud, in traveling in a pack, we were fulfilling their idea of teenagers, and I felt proud of us.

In the dining room, Conchita cried out, “Mama!” and hurled herself into the arms of a woman who was both very pretty and very fat. Mrs. Maxwell kissed Conchita all over her cheeks and chin, and then they both were crying and speaking to each other in Spanish and turning to us to apologize for crying. Mrs. Maxwell was seated and did not rise to greet us, though she did extend her arm. It was tan, and many gold bracelets hung from her wrist. “I am delighted to meet my daughter’s friends,” she said. When Conchita introduced me, Mrs. Maxwell said, “Ah, the Bob Dylan fan.” She wore loose pale green silk pants and a shirt of the same fabric, with a plain neck and wide sleeves; even from several feet away, I could smell her perfume. Her skin was smooth and brown, darker than Conchita’s, and her dark hair was pulled into a loose bun.

“Thank you for having us to lunch,” Martha said, and I said, “Yeah, it’s really nice of you.”

In the whole dining room, only a few tables besides ours were occupied; near us, a beefy man sat by himself. A waiter brought us menus, tall leather rectangles with the descriptions of the food written in calligraphy. Only one of the entrées was under twenty dollars and it was grilled vegetables. It was oddly liberating to realize I had only fifteen dollars in my pocket-I wouldn’t be paying, I wouldn’t even try, because I couldn’t. The bottom of the menu featured the date, and when I realized they must have printed a new menu daily, the idea seemed remarkable. I had suspected before, and the whole day only reinforced the suspicion, that money could make your life nice, that you could want it not for reasons of greed but for reasons of comfort, because it allowed you to send for your daughter and her friends in a limousine, to eat food that tasted good in a pretty setting, to be heavy and still wear nice clothes. One of my mother’s friends was about as fat as Mrs. Maxwell, but she wore sweatpants and flowered smocks.

Mrs. Maxwell said, “I would like each of you to tell me your life story. Lee, you will go first.”

I laughed. But then I did it-I started with my mother going into labor in a swimming pool, told about how in kindergarten I’d insisted on wearing the same pair of brown rubber cowboy boots for the entire year, how I’d had an imaginary friend named Pig, what ages I’d been when my brothers were born. I got all the way up to Ault. They asked questions, but not cornering questions, and then our appetizers came-we’d all ordered appetizers, it had seemed to be expected-and then Martha told her story: how she’d thought she was dying when she lost her first tooth, how she’d won the spelling bee in second grade, all the snow days she’d had growing up in Vermont. The main courses arrived, and mine was roast chicken with mashed potatoes and cranberry relish; it felt like Thanksgiving.

We had dessert, too, all of us ordering different tortes and mousses and sticking our forks and spoons into each other’s food. Conchita’s mother was talking about things at home, people they knew, a wedding she and Conchita’s father had attended the previous weekend. “And here is a funny story for you, mi hija,” she said. “We have hired a new worker to help Miguel in the garden, and his name is Burro.”

“That’s his nickname or his real name?” Conchita said, and I caught Martha’s eye. A new worker to help Miguel in the garden? we repeated to each other.

We all had coffee, even me, though I never drank coffee at school, and then we kept talking, and another hour had passed, and it was the time we’d arranged for the limo driver to retrieve Martha and me; Conchita would stay overnight at the hotel with her mother. We stood and hugged Mrs. Maxwell before we left. Smashed against her enormous breasts, inhaling her perfume, I felt a kind of love for her; how lucky I was to have stumbled into this world.

In the limousine, as soon as the driver shut our door, Martha and I turned to each other. “Isn’t Mrs. Maxwell cool?” Martha said.

“It’s like she actually really wanted to know about our lives.”

“I’m so full right now. The lime mousse was incredible.”

“And that chocolate thing-if I’d eaten another bite, I’d have had to unbutton my pants.”

“How about the bodyguard?” Martha said. “That was wild.”

“What do you mean?”

“That guy at the next table. With the earpiece.”

I hadn’t noticed an earpiece, but it was true that the man had stayed as long as we had; I’d imagined that he’d stayed because he was entertained by our conversation. “Why does Conchita’s mom need a bodyguard?” I asked.

“I don’t know if she needs a bodyguard, but she definitely has one. Do you not know who the Maxwells are?”

I shook my head.

“Conchita’s dad is the CEO of Tanico.”

There was a Tanico station three blocks from my parents’ house in South Bend-long before we’d met, apparently, a piece of Conchita’s life had touched a piece of mine.

“There’s tons of stories about the Maxwells,” Martha said. “Starting with, I guess her parents’ marriage was a big scandal. Her mom had been the cleaning lady in her dad’s office. That’s how they met.”

“No way.”

“Yep. He was married at the time to another woman. Conchita’s mom was, like, nineteen, and she’d just emigrated from Mexico and hardly spoke English. This was big news back in the early seventies-when I mentioned Conchita to my parents the first time, they were like, ‘Not the daughter of Ernie Maxwell?’ ”

“Why? What’s her dad like?”

“There was a profile of him recently in Fortune. It used to be in the library until someone took it. But, apparently, his nickname is the Oil King. He comes from this family that’s been in the business for a while and they’d already made a lot of money, but he’s supposed to be ruthless and really successful. He’s really old, too. In the pictures in the magazine, he looks at least seventy, and he’s short and bald. He and Conchita actually look alike. Plus, he was wearing orange leg warmers.”

“Really?”

Martha laughed. “No, Lee. He was wearing a suit.”

“I’ve never heard Conchita talk about any of this.”

“She says stuff sometimes, but she plays it down. I think that’s why she came to Ault, to try to fit in. But it hasn’t been exactly like she imagined.”

Again, I felt the impatience with Conchita I’d felt when I’d seen the limousine. She could fit in if she wanted to.

“She misses her mom a lot,” Martha was saying. “No one here coddles her, which is probably the reason for all her hypochondria.”

“She’s a hypochondriac?”

“Well, she definitely doesn’t have insomnia-my room is right next to hers, and she snores like a trucker. I’m not saying she lies, though. Her reality is different from other people’s, but that’s why I get a kick out of her.”

“If she doesn’t have health problems, how come they let her have the phone and the big room and all that stuff?”

“Lee,” Martha said. “Come on.” She held out one hand and rubbed her thumb up and down against the other fingers. “Ault is probably salivating at the thought of all the science wings and art studios the Maxwells can build.”

At the time, it surprised me how openly Martha referred to the Maxwells’ money, and later, when I went to Martha’s family’s house in Vermont the first time, I could see that they, too, clearly were wealthy. But there were different kinds of rich, I eventually realized. There was normal rich, dignified rich, which you didn’t talk about, and then there was extreme, comical, unsubtle rich-like having your dorm room professionally decorated, or riding a limousine into Boston to meet your mother-and that was permissible to discuss.