"Mother, I'm afraid I need a really big favor."

Dotty lowered her tea cup and sighed. "Let me guess – something to do with work?"

"Mmm-hmm. But I'll be gone less than a week – and I already talked to Joe and he said he'd pick Phillip and Jamie up from school on Friday and keep them for the weekend."

"You do remember that next week is the last week of school, don't you?"

"Yes, Mother, I do and I will absolutely be back by Monday night at the latest. I'm going with Jamie's class on the trip to Air and Space tomorrow and then I'm on the red-eye to Paris and I'll be there from Thursday to Sunday. I'll fly home on Monday and be here for dinner, I promise."

"Paris!" Now Dotty was intrigued. "You get to go on a four-day jaunt to Paris?"

"Well, not a jaunt, no – I'll be working." Amanda took a deep breath before going on, in a careful tone. "IFF is doing a training film for the Department of Health and they want to do some interviews with people at the IAS at the conference in Paris. I was asked if I'd go along and act as a sort of liaison since I went to Atlanta last summer for the first one."

There was silence for a moment, while Dotty stared at her with a wooden expression and then she finally asked, "They know you went last year?" going on when Amanda nodded, "You told the people you work with about J.C.?" as if she couldn't quite believe it.

"Yes, I did," said Amanda in her gentlest tone. "I had to list every family member on my security forms, and that included him." Even now she couldn't believe it had taken this long for anyone to question it, but on reflection, it shouldn't be a surprise – people see what they want to see. Look at how long Lee's double life had stayed hidden because no one wanted to see anything other than the handsome playboy.

"And it wasn't a problem? I suppose, I mean, the people you work with – they're film people, aren't they? So they're kind of in the artistic community… They'd understand better than most, I guess?" Dotty's voice trailed off on the question.

Amanda knew why she was asking. The months of nursing J.C. until his death had been difficult; no mother should outlive their child and the way they'd had to suffer almost silently had been hard on her. Dotty hadn't even been a widow that long when he'd first come home and they had to circle the wagons. That had been what precipitated her mother's move to Arlington to live with Amanda – the realization that they would need to provide full-time care and that it made no sense to have separate households when Amanda was already barely getting by on her small income from the temp agency she worked for part-time and Joe's child support. Too young to think it was anything but an adventure, the boys had been delighted to be moved to bunk beds in a shared room while J.C. had moved into Jamie's old room, and Dotty had shared Amanda's for six months. In retrospect, it had been almost – but not quite - a blessing that Joe had been gone by then; the house had seemed almost full to bursting, with all the adults on a knife's edge of emotion but trying not let the boys see it. When J.C. had no longer had the strength to climb the stairs, they'd set him up space in the living room and Dotty had taken over what would ultimately become her permanent bedroom.

There were still family members who didn't know what he'd really died of – family members who would have been thoughtless at best, cruel at worst. Aunt Lillian knew, but Amanda had certainly never told her in-laws and most of the West side of the family assumed it was cancer and hadn't been corrected. A few of them had asked in a roundabout way after seeing the obituary – "died from complications from pneumonia"; some of the younger ones had recognized the code words, but most of the older generation hadn't, which was just as well. Some of them wouldn't even have come for the funeral if they'd known. So when Dotty asked if her co-workers would understand, it was still the coded language they'd both learned to speak during those long months. Amanda took a moment to picture the reaction of most of the agents she knew, outside of her closest friends there, and knew why she'd never talked about it at work. "No, Mother," she answered finally. "I think most of them are just good people – that's why they understand."

And they were good people, she thought. Billy had been so kind, so worried about her feelings when he'd asked her to help them out, and while she'd been wary with Francine at first, as you learn to be, her fears had been unfounded. They hadn't stayed in the Agency that afternoon – they'd grabbed a coffee from the shop down the street and gone to the park where they could talk without being overheard and she'd girded herself for the usual brittle humor and jabs. Instead, Francine had been genuinely interested in hearing about J.C. – not in the ghoulish way Amanda had seen some people react when Rock Hudson had announced he was sick with it, but actually genuinely interested. It hadn't occurred to Amanda that the corridors of Washington politics had also been affected by the AIDS crisis or that Francine would have lost friends to it; it hadn't occurred to her because it was still something you didn't discuss, an invisible Black Plague that happened to Other People. It was somewhat surprising that Francine had no idea about Lee and Andy, but then again, if there was one thing these agents she worked with were good at, it was creating protective shells around themselves. Too much shared personal information could lead to trouble down the road in the intelligence game and even friendships as close as theirs had room for walls.

She looked up and realized her mother was staring off into space with that thousand-yard stare that said she was back in the past.

"He was a good person, too."

"Yes, he was, Mother, I miss him a lot."

"Me too," Dotty sighed deeply. "I still can't believe some days that he's gone, you know? He was always in motion – I swear he hardly slept until he was a teenager – and boy, then did he ever make up for it!"

"Phillip reminds me of him when he's like that – like a bouncing rubber ball and you don't know what he'll do next," Amanda was smiling sadly now.

"Oh I know what you mean, but I think Jamie is more like him most of the time. It's like he's taken on his personality a bit along with the name, don't you think?"

Amanda cast her mind back to what her brother had been like growing up – on every team, friends with everyone, just like Phillip, but all of his attention directed outward onto other people, volunteering for everything, standing up for the underdog – yes, that was more like Jamie. Jamie was quieter about it but he had the same contemplative nature and a way of empathizing with others that was just like his uncle. No one had been surprised when J.C. immediately signed up with the Red Cross after college; after all, he'd spent hours at family dinners talking about aid programs with Joe, debating the pros and cons of all the different groups. It seemed like a great fit – his endless energy and optimism had somewhere to go. And it was a job that gave him an excuse – a cover almost – for never settling down 'with a nice girl' the way his grandparents always encouraged him to do.

"Oh maybe someday I'll find love," he'd deflect them with a laugh. "But in the meantime, who'd have me with nothing to offer but a mud hut and a non-profit salary?"

He had found love, as it happened, not that his grandparents would ever know that; Samuel had accompanied him home when he'd gotten sick but it had been too late for both of them, infected with a disease no one wanted to discuss. Amanda had done her best to keep them together but it was Sammy who had taken her aside and explained that he needed to go home and make peace with his own family, to see out his days under his own sky. She'd always thought their separation had hastened death for both of them; they'd gotten word from Sammy's family less than six months later and J.C. had not lasted much longer after that.

"So you leave tomorrow night? You should get packing then," said Dotty. She paused and smiled at her daughter. "Maybe you'll find a romantic Frenchman to sweep you off your feet, like Louis Jourdan."

"Oh Mother, with my luck, I'd find Pepe LePew," Amanda chuckled.

"Well, promise me you'll at least look," Dotty reprimanded her with a smirk. "That conference will be full of doctors and if you can't get someone to be romantic with in Paris of all places, why even bother going?"

Amanda did feel a slight pang at that. Paris, the most romantic place in the world and she was going to be there for the first time with… Francine. She couldn't hold in the spurt of laughter that thought provoked.

"Mother, I can guarantee you the very last thing that's going to happen to me on this trip will be romance."