I did not say yes and I did not say no. I said I would think about it, and I let the silence sit on that terrace the way theirs had sat on me my whole childhood. Then I asked my mother one question. I asked her to name the game.
She could not. She had flown to Charleston to borrow three million dollars against a thing she had never once bothered to learn the title of, the thing she had ordered me to delete, the thing that had built the house she was sitting in. My father knew it. He had read the Forbes piece closely enough to find the number and not closely enough to find the name. That told me everything the lunch was actually about.
