I closed the March reconciliations.

At lunchtime I called Evelyn.

Part Five: Evelyn

Evelyn Ochoa has been my friend since we were nineteen, and in the spring of that year she was the general manager of the restaurant on the harbor where my mother-in-law had booked the private floor.

I had known that.

Everybody in the family had known that Evelyn worked there — Gertrude had asked me, twice, over the years, whether I could get a discount, in the tone of somebody who considers this the useful part of a friendship.

What Gertrude had not thought about, because Gertrude does not think about staff, was what it means to book a private event at a restaurant managed by your daughter-in-law’s oldest friend.