The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan Page B

children covered in snow and, of course, basset hounds. The walls had borders of stenciled tulips and balloons.
    Sheila was a large woman who appeared to have given up on her looks. Her shoulder-length brown hair was run through with streaks of gray, like the fat that marbles a steak. She wore it pulled back with a plastic clip. She had given birth to five boys in fourteen years, always holding out hope for a girl. She was done with childbearing now, but her stomach would never return to its original shape. Her arms were wide and fleshy. She wore baggy jeans and a Red Sox sweatshirt around the house. You could tell she had once been very pretty. She had big blue eyes and a warm smile. But she worked forty hours a week as a nurse, and still had three children living under her roof, ages ten, thirteen, and sixteen. The boys were loud and wild. The screen porch through which they entered the house was full of hockey equipment and smelled of sweat and mold.
    Her husband, James, was a slim man, much shorter than P.J. He did something with ambulances, working as a dispatcher for a fleet of medics in the city. He didn’t have a college degree. No one in the family did, other than P.J. and some uncle whom they all seemed to hate.
    James’s mother, a frail woman in her eighties, lived with them. For most of the weekend, she sat on the sunporch alone watching religious programs on television.
    “How’s Nana?” P.J. whispered to Sheila, looking at his grandmother through the open door.
    Sheila shrugged. “Same old. Every morning when she wakes up, she has six months to live.”
    Delphine wasn’t sure what she meant. It sounded serious, but Sheila laughed as she said it.
    On Friday night before dinner, they sat in the formal living room. Sheila set down a tray of tiny hot dogs wrapped in pastry.
    “I’ve got some mini quiches in the freezer too if you want,” she said. “They just take five minutes to heat up.”
    “We’re good,” P.J. said.
    The room was like a shrine to him. There was a big table crammed with snow globes he had sent from all over the world. Framed posters highlighting his accomplishments crowded the walls: the Providence.
    Limited Engagement: SOLD OUT
printed in red, and newspaper reviews with the most complimentary sentences highlighted in bright yellow marker. “McKeen drew everything from his instrument that a human being is capable of drawing. His playing was masterful, brilliant, otherworldly.”—
The New York Times
. “Tonight McKeen was not only a master fiddler but also a full chorus ofsingers, from an operatic soprano to a honky-tonk belter. An outrageous talent.”—
The Dallas Morning News
.
    Sheila asked P.J. dozens of questions about his work, which Delphine could tell made him uncomfortable. James remained strangely silent through most of the night, as if he too were hoping for a subject change.
    P.J. had told her his parents didn’t get that though his fame was an exciting topic to be bragged about for them, for him it had become just a job. He said they didn’t see him the way they used to, as their son. Now he was an idea to them, not a person. He was the thing they had done right, the promise they had built their world around, and he resented them for it.
    Delphine wondered if they knew how much money he made. He was generous with them—for Christmas, he had sent Sheila a pair of sapphire earrings and James a big-screen TV. She thought he had probably helped them buy the house. P.J. had mentioned once that they were deeply in debt, like everyone else in America, but to her knowledge he had never tried to get them out of it.
    Clearly he was their pride and joy. Their only other grown son, Danny, was a plumber living in Columbus. He made a decent salary, but he couldn’t compare to P.J.
    They called him by his full first name, Parker. Apparently the initials were something he had adopted in middle school, when the kids at a summer music camp made fun of him for having a fake preppy