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hands of you.”
    In any other place, Catherine would have risen now, too, and gone off with these last words from her father. But the library at Everly was a comfortable place in spite of its grandeur. Perhaps it was the presence of her grandmother’s cats and the cat hair that no amount of dusting could completely remove, or the worn spots on the sofas and chairs where people had curled, reading, and that had been rubbed by countless children’s hands as they had crouched behind the furniture, playing hide-and-seek. Perhaps it was the books themselves, which reminded her of different worlds beyond her own.
    “Well, Dad, where do you think I should apply?” Catherine asked. She caught her father’s look—he was on guard, expecting some smart-aleck reply from her. But now she pitched her voice as perfectly as she could to the register of civility—even servility. “There are so many colleges. It’s confusing. And I don’t know what to major in. I don’t know how to choose.”
    “Isn’t that what Mrs. Plaice is there for? Isn’t she supposed to help you choose colleges?”
    “Yes. But I want to know what you think.”
    She could feel her father’s impatience with her. He ran his hand over his forehead.
    “I’ve got a cracking headache,” he said. “If you need to talk more, let’s do it later.”
    “Well—all right, Dad.” Vaguely disappointed, Catherine left her father, shutting the door carefully so as not to aggravate his headache. She climbed the stairs to the second floor. The house was still quiet. Without thinking she went down the long carpeted hall to the left wing, where her parents had their bedrooms. She knocked on her mother’s door. When there was no answer, she turned the knob quietly. The door was unlocked. She stepped inside.
    “Mom?” she called. Then, remembering how her mother hated being called “Mom,” she said, “Mother?”
    A wicker bed tray sat on the floor with a silver pot of coffee and several stacks of emptied plates. The bedclothes were rumpled, and the room was overheated—how had her mother managed so much warmth in any one room at Everly? The heavy brocade drapes had been pulled shut against the winter cold and light, and the room was dim. Conflicting aromas hung drowsily in the warm room like a fog: her mother’s expensive perfume, the morning’s coffee and bacon and eggs, the sharp tang of alcohol, cigarette smoke.
    The bathroom door opened, and before her mother could appear another smell drifted out: the pungent, thin, familiar reek of vomit.
    The loud rush of water in the flushed toilet died down, and in the following silence, Marjorie Montgomery Eliot entered her bedroom. Her bronze hair hung around her head, released from its twist but still shaped by it, the thick ends of her hair curling up. Marjorie’s skin was pale and puffy, so puffy that the skin above her eyes and beneath her eyelids stood out in balloonlike ledges. Marjorie was holding the silk wrapper of her gown closed, one hand pressed against her stomach, as if she were holding her stomach in. She walked with caution to the chaise and gingerly settled her body on it.
    “What are you looking at?” she said to her daughter. “I’m just hung over.”
    Now Catherine could see the other signs—the golden edge of a large gift box of gourmet nuts and candied fruits protruding from under the chaise, the wastebasket brimming with crumpled emptied sacks of smuggled-in potato chips and pretzels, the serving tray from the kitchen set on the dresser, the silver dome hiding whatever remained of Marjorie’s late night or early morning snack. Old memories of similar smells and gagging sounds, of the sight of her mother’s head hanging into the toilet, her sun-streaked hair dank with sticky vomit, lurched through Catherine’s mind.
    Catherine shrugged. “Dad was telling me about your ultimatum,” she said. “About colleges. I thought I should talk it over with you.”
    Marjorie, with great effort,