Both of them.

And he came home that night and we watched two episodes of something and he made a joke about the dog next door.

His mother, Evelyn Lawson, is a woman of seventy-two in Paradise Valley who has organized her entire life around the Lawson name and its continuation.

For six years, at every family gathering, she asked me one question in one form or another, and I answered it politely every time, and in 2023 she stopped asking, which was much worse, because it meant she had reached a conclusion.

Part Four: Michelle