A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein

woodsmoke and eggnog but also something else — the vague but persistent smell of striving, of other people’s koi ponds. Round Hill isn’t New Canaan or even Bernardsville; for the most part it’s a new-money kind of place, more Jewish than those other chimneyed suburbs, more Korean and Italian, too. We’ve got more doctors here than socialites, more lawyers than casual investors, and many more outer-borough accents. Our children, who attend fancy colleges and decide to become oil painters (or set designers, animal behaviorists, poets) are not like we are, we who went to City College or Queens College or Pitt on scholarship. They take things for granted that we never will, talk casually about tennis and the Tate Modern in ways that give us secret, overweening pleasure. As for us, we like it here in Round Hill because we’re twenty-five minutes from the Old Country, because as Jews we’re always afraid of being run out — but at least from here it’s easy to get back home: the Bronx, Brooklyn, my own little Yonkers.
    “Dr. Dizinoff! We were just talking about you!” Shelly Sherman and the beauteous Christina were standing over the Crock-Pot of hot chocolate, and Ashley Sherman, now almost fourteen years old, was leaning shyly against her mother’s flank. Ashley, after a promising start as a toddler, had turned out to favor her father’s phenotype almost exactly: the same frizzy brown hair, the same owlish eyes, the same hooked Ashkenazi nose. I assumed, however, that she was as smart as her dad had been; she was our town’s reigning junior-levelchess champion and had been written up several times in the
Round Hill Robin.
    “What were you saying about me?” If I were the type, I would have muttered, Aw shucks. “Only good things?”
    “It’s the Nets you like, right? That’s the team?”
    “It is,” I confirmed, kissing Shelly and then Christina New Year’s hellos.
    “Oh, good,” Christina said, extending her cheek, “because my friend Harvey has some season tickets he’s just too darn busy to ever use. I thought you might want some.”
    “Why not?”
    “And not to brag,” she whispered, “but I think those tickets are very good.”
    After a decade and a half in the Northeast, Christina still had her loose-voweled Atlanta drawl, and for a minute I feared I was reddening under her close attention.
    “I don’t know the least thing about basketball, and this one here” — she tousled Ashley’s rough curls — “she’s too busy with her school-work to want to go all the way to the Meadowlands for a game.”
    “Well, that’s very nice of you. I’ll buy them from you.” Sports tickets were favored currency in Round Hill: tickets, time-shares, late-night medical advice.
    “Oh, don’t be silly, Pete. We wouldn’t do anything with them otherwise. You’ll take ’em for free.” She lay a beautiful hand on my arm for a minute, and I’ll admit it, I tingled right through my jacket. “Ashley, aren’t you going to say hi to Dr. Dizinoff?”
    “Hi,” the girl said, burying her mouth in her mother’s side.
    “Hi, sweetheart.”
    “Well, we should get going soon, but I wanted to ask you about the tickets. I’ll come by the office and drop them off.”
    “Or I’ll bring them,” Shelly said. “I have an appointment two weeks from now, a checkup.” Louis’s death had turned the two ladies into fast friends. I still saw all the Shermans regularly except Ashley. They still trusted me completely, despite the loss they had suffered under my watch, a loss that still caused me such shame.
    “Well, looking forward to it,” I said.
    And as the Shermans disappeared, my wife, whose presence I’d been completely unaware of, came up to me with a wry smile and powdered sugar on her sweater. She stuffed half a doughnut into my mouth and said, “Happy New Year, baby.”
    “Happy New Year to you,” I said, trying not to choke on the doughnut. Elaine laughed. She was in a good mood and, I think,