Object lessons by Anna Quindlen

who had money. “Mag, are you rich?” Debbie had asked her once when they had ridden up the long driveway on their bicycles, the lawn stretching away on either side. Maggie had answered, honest as always, “They are. We aren’t.”
    Now the brocade furniture in the living room was full of people. Her mother was sitting in the corner of the couch, Joseph slumped against her, his eyes half closed as he sucked his middle fingers. Next to her mother was her aunt Cass, Monica’s mother. Uncle James was sitting next to his wife.
    “Delivered twins last night, Concerta,” James said with a grin.
    “Oh, God,” Connie said, her stomach fighting the martini her father-in-law had pressed upon her. “That poor woman.”
    “No, no,” said James, waving his left hand, his wedding band sunk a little into the flesh of his finger, “Very easy delivery. Just popped right out, one after another.”
    “For God’s sake,” said Mary Frances Scanlan, putting her drink down on a coaster on the coffee table. “It’s bad enough, shop talk, but your shop talk is the worst, Jimmy.”
    “Sorry,” said James pleasantly. “All part of life, Mother. No sense denying it.”
    “No sense discussing it,” said Mary Frances as Maggie came in with another tray of drinks. “Maggie, here’s your cherry. Come quick or I’ll give it to one of your brothers.”
    Her grandmother held a maraschino cherry by the stem, dangling it, dripping, over her whiskey sour. Maggie always ate the cherry from her grandmother’s drink, trying not to feel the bite of the liquor before she got to the syrupy taste of the fruit. Like so many other customs in her family, it had continued long past the time that those involved enjoyed it. In fact, Maggie could not remember that she had ever enjoyed it; it had simply become tradition and could not be tampered with. By the time she had eaten the thing, the back of her tongue was usually numb. For a moment she thought of refusing, but instead she took the cherry and held it over her cupped hand, hoping for a chance to throw it away. She looked across the room and saw Monica smiling at her, and she opened her mouth and popped the whole thing in, stem and all. When she wiped her hands on her skirt, Monica laughed.
    “Well, gentlemen,” said her grandfather, coming up behind Maggie and lifting his Scotch from amid the martinis on the tray, “The Roman Catholic church is going to hell in a handbasket.” John Scanlan had a tendency to choose phrases and stick with them. “Hell in a handbasket” was one of his favorites.
    “Shop talk,” said Mary Frances, crossing her legs and pulling at a stray thread on the brocade chair with her index finger and thumb.
    “It’s shop talk that pays for this house,” her husband said. “It’s shop talk that pays for that Lincoln Continental and the private schools for all these children.”
    Maggie heard a sigh from the hallway. Monica had moved back into the shadows.
    “And for your orthodontia, miss,” John Scanlan said without turning around to look at Monica, whose teeth as a child, before she became perfect, had been as crooked as the tombstones in an old cemetery.
    John Scanlan said it nice and evenly, the way he said almost everything else. The oldtimers at the factory always said that it took a man a couple of hours after he’d been fired to take it all in, because John Scanlan said “You’re fired” in the afternoon in exactly the voice in which he said “Good morning” each morning. Maggie had noticed lately that it was a good bit like the voice in which she answered catechism questions: Why did God make me? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
    “Today in church I see four women without hats,” he continued. “Without anything on their heads. Never mind those flimsy little black veils that all you girls are wearing”—her grandfather looked over at Maggie, whose rayon mantilla