“Your son’s an ambitious boy.” “Oh, he always had an ambition, if that’s what you want to call it. Is that what he learned in college, how to cheat people?” “He learned that someplace else.” Perhaps in this room, I thought, where Culligan spun his fantasies and laid a long-shot bet on an accidental resemblance to a dead man. The room had Culligan’s taint on it. The woman stirred uncomfortably, as if I’d made a subtle accusation: “I don’t claim we were good parents to him. He wanted more than we could give him. He always had a dream of himself, like.”
