He gestured at the TV, a little Samsung panel at least twenty years old, and said, “All this shit going on.”

“Anything new?”

“Is there ever? Bullshit threats from one side, bullshit threats from the other. Now and then a bomb goes off. Only difference this time is, the bombs are getting bigger. I guess I won’t live to see who’s left standing. I can’t bring myself to feel much regret about that.” He raised his hand—it shook a little—and smoothed the wing of graying hair that was supposed to disguise his baldness. The expression in his eyes grew vague. “I want to tell you something. While I’m thinking of it, before I forget. That’s a problem these days, forgetting things.”

“Okay. What is it?”

“You know I sold the business. Couldn’t stand up to those chain-store bastards forever. So there’s money. Enough to pay for my dying, enough to support Laura. And plenty left over. I had my lawyer draft a final will. Most of the money’s going to Aaron. I’m sorry if you feel insulted by that. The thing is, Aaron has been around when you weren’t. He doesn’t need the cash, but he’ll be a good custodian. I set up a trust fund for Geddy, and Aaron agreed to manage it. If it ever happens you fall on hard times, talk to Aaron—I told him to let you have whatever you need, if you really need it.”

“Okay.”

“Like I said, it’s not an insult. I’m thinking of you. It’s just that…” His words faded; maybe he lost track of the thought.

But I wasn’t insulted, and I understood perfectly. The family was a hierarchy. My father had always been the indisputable boss. Aaron had never openly challenged that presumption, though I suspected he honored it only when he was within spitting distance of the old man. He performed the part of the dutiful son impeccably, whereas I had left Schuyler at the first opportunity and found myself a more congenial sort of family. That was the sin my father could never forgive.

“Okay,” I said again.

“What?”

“It’s fine. Whatever you want to do about your will, I’m okay with it.”

“You just don’t give a shit, huh?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But it’s what you meant.”

“No.” I took a step closer. Close enough to smell the illness on him. His body was starting to burn fatty acids as his illness advanced. The chemical products of the process included acetone, exhaled through the lungs. His breath smelled like nail polish remover. “What I meant was that you don’t need to worry about me, and you aren’t obliged to take care of me, and I don’t expect anything from you.”

“You haven’t expected anything from me since you left this town.”

Which was about absolutely true but not worth acknowledging. “I think I’ll head on downstairs now. Will you be joining us for dinner?”

“I’ll sit with you,” he said. “I don’t promise to eat.”

*   *   *

As I approached the kitchen I heard Geddy talking with Mama Laura, a flow of happy conversation I was reluctant to interrupt. So I turned the opposite way and opened the door to the basement, where Geddy had said his friend Rebecca was sorting through boxes.

She looked up as I came down the steps. She was sitting on a pea-green folding chair, one of the set Mama Laura had retired from the backyard a decade ago, and she had her hands in a cardboard carton on which GEDDY’S THINGS was scrawled in enthusiastic black letters—Geddy’s own printing, years old. The basement was as gloomy as it had ever been, raw drywall and exposed cinderblock, an elderly washer/dryer vented to the exterior world through a dusty aluminum port. Rebecca Drabinsky looked tiny, perched among the boxes in what we called “the storage corner.” She stood up when she saw me. I said, “I’m Adam.”

“Hi, yes!” Small body, small face, a pair of oval glasses that magnified her eyes, dark wirebrush hair that reminded me of a fox terrier one of my tranchemates owned. Off-brand sneakers, jeans, a black t-shirt under an unbuttoned flannel shirt. She would have looked at home in the cafeteria of any American university, sitting at a table with a book or tablet propped in front of her. “I didn’t hear you at the door.”

“I was just upstairs saying hello to my father. Geddy was going to introduce us, but he’s busy in the kitchen. You’re going through his old stuff?”

She nodded, a decisive bob of her head. “Geddy asked me to. To set aside anything I think is important and maybe organize it a little bit. He wants to take the best stuff back home. He’ll go through it himself, of course. I just think he wanted me to see what he left here. Like, pieces of his life before he knew me.”

I saw what she had selected and set aside on a yellow blanket thrown over the dusty concrete floor. Paperback books, including some I had given Geddy. Staff paper and practice sheets from when he was first learning to play the saxophone, plus some unused Vandoren reeds in their original boxes. A stack of Grammy Fisk’s old LPs. What Rebecca was going through at the moment was a box of childhood drawings. I remembered Geddy’s drawings: mainly fire trucks, tall buildings, and airplanes, meticulous as blueprints.

But she had a particular drawing in her hand, and she held it out to me. “You must have done this one.”

I took it from her. It was a pencil sketch of Geddy when he was about ten years old, executed on yellowing printer paper. It was mine, but I barely remembered it. I must have drawn it out at the quarry, by the suggestion of trees and water in the background. Amateur as hell, but it caught a little of Geddy’s wide-eyed gaze and big toothy grin.

“You must have said something funny, to get that smile out of him.”

“It’s a good smile. I used to tell him jokes, just to see him laugh.”

“I know what you mean. When he’s happy, it’s just so—wholehearted.”

I liked her for using the word. “How did you guys meet?”

“Well, that’s kind of a story. I tell people I first saw Geddy when he was busking in the MBTA. Which is true, in a way. I must have passed him dozens of times on my way through Davis Station. But that’s not really how I met him. You’re a Tau, right?”

It wasn’t exactly a polite question in the current social climate. But of course Geddy would have told her about me. “Yeah,” I said warily. “Why?”

“No offense. I like Taus. I think they’re the best Affinity. You know Geddy took the test, back when InterAlia was running it? He was really disappointed when he didn’t qualify. Deep down, I think he wanted to be a Tau like you.”

“It’s not a question of failing, Rebecca. It’s not that kind of test. I mean, it’s too bad Geddy doesn’t have an Affinity, but—”

“No, I know all about that; that’s not my point. He envied what you found in Tau. He wanted what you had, and he never stopped looking for his own version of it. He bought a test kit when they came out, one of the old clunky ones with the scalp sensors. Just to make sure. He recorded his own teleodynamic profile. And that’s how we met.”

“I don’t understand.”

“New Socionome.”

“Ah.”

“An algorithm hooked us up.” She watched my face. “You don’t approve?”

“No, I just—I don’t know a whole lot about it.”

Which wasn’t entirely true. I understood the general concept. Hackers and activist math geeks were trying to find new, non-Affinity ways of linking people together. Maybe that was useful for people like Geddy, who couldn’t be sorted into a proper Affinity. But it had no relevance for me and I had pretty much ignored the phenomenon.

“Anyway, that’s how we met. Geddy submitted his teleo profile to New Socionome. I was already registered. His name popped up on my linklist and we got in touch. He invited me to one of his weekend gigs. So that’s how we really met—I was at a table in South End bar and Geddy was up on stage with a singer and a drummer and bass player and a rhythm guitarist. Under the lights he looked…” She laughed, a high happy sound. “Earnest and goofy and, I guess you know how he gets, kind of outside of himself. He came over after the set and we started to talk.”