Dad was the one who worried Marshall, though. For one thing, he was hard to snow. For another, he wrote the checks. He eyed Marshall the way he would have looked at someone he’d busted for running a Ponzi scheme. “I told you I’d support you till you got your bachelor’s,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” Marshall had just nodded. Sometimes the less you said, the better off you ended uWith Dad, anything that came out of your mouth could be used against you.

“I didn’t figure the sheepskin would take twelve or fifteen years,” Dad went on, an ominous mumble in his voice.

“Yeah, well-” Marshall spread his hands. But that wasn’t good enough. Dad kept staring at him, willing words out of him. He had to be a hell of an interrogator. Marshall found himself saying, “I didn’t exactly expect it would work out like this, either.” That held… some truth, anyway.

Dad grunted. “I don’t like to go back on my word. I’ll keep footing the bills-for a while. But I don’t like getting taken for a ride, either. I’m getting tired of these new majors. You hear me?”

“Sure, Dad,” Marshall said. Arguing with his father was a losing proposition, and not just because Dad wrote the checks. Colin Ferguson had never smoked, but owned a deep, raspy voice that suggested two packs a day for thirty years. Marshall had a tenor-nothing even close to a baritone. His mom’s voice was high and thin, and so was his. Hard to sound serious about stuff when you squeaked.

It wasn’t that Marshall didn’t or wouldn’t work. He’d glommed on to the usual part-time jobs at groceries and fast-food places and retail outlets. Those were great for pocket money and gas money and the like. They didn’t come within miles of making him self-supporting, not in Santa Barbara. It had some of the highest real-estate prices in the country, which made apartments similarly scream-worthy.