“Bob said this?” I asked.

“He says I’d be a natural. That I should be in one of his commercials.”

Hard to pick which would be more demeaning. Penthouse or hawking Bob’s used cars.

“What? You think he’s wrong?”

“He’s out of line,” I said.

“He’s not a perv or anything,” she said. “A douche, yes, but a perv, no. Mom and Evan even kind of agreed with him.”

“Evan?”

Now I was really getting steamed. Evan was Bob’s nineteen-year-old son. He had been living most of the time with his mother, Bob’s ex-wife, but now she was off to Europe for three months, so Evan had moved in with his dad. This meant he was now sleeping down the hall from Syd, who, by the way, liked her new bedroom very much and had pointed out several times that it was twice the size of the one she had in my house.

We’d had a bigger house, once.

The idea of some horny teenage boy living under the same roof with Syd had pissed me off from the get-go. I was surprised Susanne was going along with it, but once you moved out of your own house and into someone else’s, you lost a bit of leverage. What could she do? Make her boyfriend kick his own son out?

“Yeah, Evan,” Sydney said. “He was just commenting, is all.”

“He shouldn’t even be living there.”

“Jesus, Dad, do we have to get into this again?”

“A boy, a nineteen-year-old boy, unless he’s your actual brother, shouldn’t be living with you.”

I thought I saw her cheeks flush. “It’s not a big deal.”