evenly, “I don’t care what you talk about or when you talk about it.”
“Does it make you mad that I saw him?”
That’s when Angus Addams came back out, just as Ruth’s father was saying, “I don’t care who you spend your time with, Ruth.”
“Who the hell is she spending her time with?” Angus asked.
“Lanford Ellis.”
“Dad. I don’t want to talk about it now.”
“Those goddamn bastards again,” Angus said.
“Ruth had a little meeting with him.”
“Dad—”
“We don’t have to keep secrets from our friends, Ruth.”
“Fine,” Ruth said, and she tossed her father the envelope Mr. Ellis had given her. He lifted the flap and peered at the bills inside. He set the envelope on the arm of his chair.
“What the hell is that?” Angus asked. “What is that, a load of cash? Mr. Ellis give you that money, Ruth?”
“Yes. Yes, he did.”
“Well, you fucking give it back to him.”
“I don’t think it’s any of your business, Angus. You want me to give the money back, Dad?”
“I don’t care how these people throw their money around, Ruth,” Stan Thomas said. But he picked up the envelope again, took out the bills, and counted them. There were fifteen bills. Fifteen twenty-dollar bills.
“What’s the goddamn money for?” Angus asked. “What the hell is that goddamn money for, anyhow?”
“Stay out of it, Angus,” Ruth’s father said.
“Mr. Ellis said it was fun money for me.”
“Funny money?” her father asked.
“Fun money.”
“Fun money? Fun money?”
She did not answer.
“This sure is fun so far,” her father said. “Are you having fun, Ruth?”
Again, she did not answer.
“Those Ellis people really know how to have fun.”
“I don’t know what it’s for, but you get your fanny over there and give it back,” Angus said.
The three sat there with the money looming between them.
“And another thing about that money,” Ruth said.
Ruth’s father passed his hand over his face, just once, as though he suddenly realized he was tired.
“Yes?”
“There’s another thing about that money. Mr. Ellis would really like it if I used some of it to go visit Mom. My mother.”
“Jesus Christ!” Angus Addams exploded. “Jesus Christ, you were gone all goddamn year, Ruth! You only just goddamn got back here, and they’re trying to send you away again!”
Ruth’s father said nothing.
“That goddamn Ellis family runs you all over the goddamn place, telling you what to do and where to go and who to see,” Angus continued. “You do every goddamn thing that goddamn family tells you to do. You’re getting to be just as bad as your goddamn mother.”
“Stay out of it, Angus!” Stan Thomas shouted.
“Would that be fine with you, Dad?” Ruth asked, gingerly.
“Jesus Christ, Stan!” Angus sputtered. “Tell your goddamn daughter to stay here, where she goddamn belongs.”
“First of all,” Ruth’s father said to Angus, “shut your goddamn mouth.”
There was no second of all.
“If you don’t want me to see her, I won’t go,” Ruth said. “If you want me to take the money back, I’ll take the money back.”
Ruth’s father fingered the envelope. After a brief silence, he said to his eighteen-year-old daughter, “I don’t care who you spend your time with.”
He tossed the envelope of money back to her.
“What’s the problem with you?” Angus Addams bellowed at his friend. “What’s the problem with all you goddamn people?”
As for Ruth Thomas’s mother, there was certainly a big problem with her.
The people of Fort Niles Island had always had problems with Ruth Thomas’s mother. The biggest problem was her ancestry. She was not like all the people on Fort Niles Island whose families had been in place there forever. She was not like all the people who knew exactly who their ancestors were. Ruth Thomas’s mother was born on Fort Niles, but she wasn’t exactly from there. Ruth Thomas’s mother was a problem because she was the daughter of an orphan and an immigrant.
Nobody knew the orphan’s real name; nobody knew anything at all about the immigrant. Ruth Thomas’s mother, therefore, had a genealogy that was cauterized at both ends—two dead ends of information. Ruth’s mother had no forefathers, no foremothers, no recorded family traits by which to define herself. While Ruth Thomas could trace back two centuries of her father’s ancestors without leaving the Fort Niles Island cemetery, there was no getting past the orphan and the immigrant who began and completed her mother’s blunt history. Her mother, unaccounted for as such, had always been looked at askance on Fort Niles Island. She’d been produced by two mysteries, and there were no mysteries in anyone else’s history. One should