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She stuck a few more pins in, and stood up. “There. Go take a look. Try the mirror in the bedroom, only promise not to look at anything else. The room’s a mess. I haven’t even made the bed.”

The whole house, in fact, was a mess. Laurel looked about her, at Adam’s Legos and Lincoln Logs strewn across the unvacuumed rug, the cushions scattered with crumbled saltines, and the sticky ring a juice glass had left on the drop-leaf table. Since she’d gotten back from Joe’s restaurant yesterday, she hadn’t wanted to do a thing except sleep.

Then Laurel realized that Annie had made no move to leave, and was staring at her with her I-know-somethingis-wrong look.

“I don’t give a shit about the bed,” she said sternly. “It’s you I’m worried about. Laurey, you look like hell. What’s wrong?”

Laurel felt as if there were sandbags tied to her arms and legs. She was so tired. How could she ever have thought talking things over with Annie would be a good idea?

“Nothing,” she said, trying to make herself sound brisk. “I took a nap before you came. That’s why the bed isn’t made.”

Annie peered at her with new sharpness. “You’re not sick … or anything?”

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“You mean am I pregnant?” Laurel snapped.

“Are you?”

Laurel sucked her breath in and blew it out. “God! Does everything have to mean I’m pregnant?” She thought of Joe sleeping beside her, not touching her, night after night. “If you want to know the truth, it’d be quite a miracle.”

For a small moment Annie stood silent. She looked shocked.

Then she said, “Is something going on between you and Joe?”

“Nothing a good faith healer couldn’t fix.” Laurel gave a short, dry laugh. “Listen, do you want some coffee or something? I made some banana bread the other day … there’s still some left, I think.”

Ignoring the offer, Annie sank onto the maple rocker by the fireplace, her dress settling into shimmery little pools around her, pins sticking up from the fabric like tiny antennae. Her eyes never left Laurel’s face.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, not really.”

“Have you and Joe been fighting?”

“No … nothing like that. Look, can we talk about something else? I’m really not in the mood to be crossexamined.”

“You look tired.”

“I told you I was.”

“Is it something he did?”

Laurel felt as if she were clinging to a narrow precipice, and she was slowly losing her grip. It would be easy, so easy, just to let go. To let herself fall right into Annie’s lap, and have Annie comfort her. But no, better not …

“I’m glad you like the dress,” she said brightly. “I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. Velvet is harder than silk to work with. You have to match up the nap, and then it slides all over the place so the seams come out puckered. I don’t know how many times I had to rip out that left seam and do it over. And forget about the zipper … that’s-“

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“Joe loves you,” Annie persisted. “You have to know that.”

“-why I scooped the back. But I like it better this way, don’t you?” But then her control broke, and a sob slipped out. “Oh, Annie, he’s having an affair.”

She told Annie about the woman at the restaurant, how awful it had been … and how she’d wanted to die. Even now, just talking about it, with each word she felt some little piece of her shrivel up. She looked down at the pincushion she was holding; it was in the shape of a heart, stuck full of pins and needles, and when she realized how maudlin she must look-like a bad metaphor-she began to giggle, tears rolling down her cheeks.

Stop it, she commanded herself. But she couldn’t. She began to feel panicky. Any second now Annie would come rushing over to her. God, she didn’t want that. Annie would take what little bit of dignity she had left and smother it.

But Annie wasn’t moving. She was just sitting there. Frozen. And then she started to laugh. She was laughing.

Laurel’s face stung as if she’d been slapped.

But then Annie was coming over to comfort her.

“God, you had me worried there. I thought-” She grabbed Laurel’s hand and wrung it, still laughing, sounding relieved, breathless almost. “Laurey, oh sweetie, you’ve got it all wrong. Joe isn’t having an affair. That woman you saw, she had to be the same one Joe told me about-she’s some kind of counselor. He told me the whole story, about his father not being able to manage any more with just a nurse … about Naomi-I think that’s her name-recommending a nursing home. Well, it is awful for Marcus to have to be put in a home. So you can imagine how upset Joe must have been. Naomi had to have been comforting him, don’t you see? Don’t you see?”

Oh, yes … Laurel saw. Everything, clear as day.

No affair with a stranger … something worse in a way. More of a betrayal. Joe … Joe had made this momentous d้cision about his father … and he hadn’t once

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mentioned it to her. And it was Annie he’d confided in, not her, his wife. Annie.

Joe and Annie, all along, from the very start.

Now it was Annie who looked ill, the color draining from her face, her olive skin a pasty yellow. She grabbed Laurel and shook her, her fingers digging into Laurel’s arms.

“Laurey? What’s wrong? You’re white as a sheet! My God, you don’t think I’d lie about something like this, do you? Is that it? Do you think I’m making this up just so you’ll feel better?”

“No, of course not.”

Laurel’s voice seemed to come from far away, a distant mountaintop, while little background noises became sharply focused-the sound of Adam singing in the next room, his clear, high-pitched voice wandering in and out of key. Oh, can you tell meeeee … can you tell me how to get tooooo Sesame Streeeeet. The rat-tat-tat of a woodpecker in the mulberry tree just outside the front window. The slow, ponderous ticking of the old regulator clock on the mantel.

“Laurey … what is it?” Annie sounded frantic.

Laurel turned, her movements jerky, as if she were held together with hinges and springs, like those ventriloquists’ puppets she used to watch when she was little, on the Ed Sullivan Show. Charlie McCarthy, or was it Edgar Bergen? No, Bergen had been the ventriloquist. He—

She stared at Annie as if she’d never seen her before, feeling as if all her insides were flowing downhill, an avalanche of love, grief, sorrow, resentment.

“You,” she said, the rushing in her ears so great she had to shout to be heard over it. “You’re what’s wrong.”

Annie jerked, a hand flying to her mouth. “What?”

“You sit there smiling as if I should be glad.” She took a blind step backwards, the sole of her Weejun corning down on a Lincoln Log, her ankle turning with a painful wrench. She glared at Annie. “How can you? How can you pretend when we both know it’s you he wants? At least have the decency to admit it. And you want him, too. Isn’t that why you’ve been stringing Emmett along all

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these years? Stop being so goddamn noble, and admit it.” She felt herself unravelling. “Admit you want him for yourself!”

A thundering silence filled the room. Laurel stood trembling on the edge of the precipice. Annie stared, her huge dark eyes like two charcoal smudges on a blank sheet of drawing paper.

“Mommy?”

Laurel jumped as if she’d been struck. She looked over at Adam, standing frozen at the bottom of the stairs, wearing an old button-down shirt of Joe’s with the arms rolled up and the tail dragging on the floor. The front of it was streaked with paint, and he held a fat paintbrush in one fist. His eyes were huge and scared. God, oh God. How long had he been standing there? How much had he heard?

She wanted to run to him, cover him with kisses, fill him with reassurances, but she couldn’t seem to move. She stood glued to the floor, while Annie, in her shimmery velvet dress, its unfinished hem fluttering about her ankles, pins winking in the fading light, swooped across the room like a brilliant bird and took Adam by the hand.

“My goodness, look at you! I think more paint must’ve gotten on that shirt than on the paper. Do you want to show me what you’ve done? I’d love to see it.” She was upset too, her voice ragged, but she was hiding it well. She was protecting Adam, just as she’d once protected little Laurey.

With a quick, sharp glance over her shoulder at Laurel, Annie steered Adam up the stairs. Laurel stared after them for a moment, then sank down on the sofa, wanting desperately to cry, but determined not to.

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Joe swung his Volvo into the driveway, crunching over a blanket of fallen leaves, his headlights cutting a swath of green through the privet hedge alongside the garage. The house was dark, he saw, except for a light in the upstairs hall. Nearly midnight. Laurel and Adam were probably fast asleep by now. And that’s where he longed to be. Jesus, what a night. With orders stacking up, and everyone working double-time, the dishwasher had to go hinky, flooding the kitchen floor. And at the same time, twenty-eight bachelor-party Yalies were upstairs, drunk and pitching dinner rolls at each other. He’d had to post two waiters he couldn’t spare from downstairs to keep them from destroying the place … and then, at dessert, eight more of the groom’s good buddies showed up, demanding to be fed.

And every day this week, chasing back and forth from Morton Street to the new Joe’s Place he was building at Third Avenue and Eighty-second. The December first opening, even with the menus now printed and the waiters hired, would never happen. The more he busted his ass, the bigger the delays. Not a single piece of the kitchen equipment had come when it was promised. The plumber had performed a vanishing act. And then Jorge, his head chef, had to go mouth off in Spanish to that city inspector, never suspecting that a paunchy Brooklyn type with a name like Jaretsky would understand him. So, bingo, three big code violations.

But none of the restaurant headaches compared with what he had tomorrow-a two o’clock meeting with the director of the St. Francis Center. And then he’d have to do what he’d been putting off for days: break the rotten news about Dad to Laurel. She was crazy about Marcus. She’d probably insist they take the old man in, and he’d

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end up sounding like a grade-A bastard for saying no. Christ, what a mess.

But as he got out of the car and started along the little concrete path by the side of the house, Joe began to feel calmer, less dragged down. He could feel the night air against his cheeks, cool and tartly crisp, and he could see his breath puffing out in wispy plumes. He found his way easily in the dark to the side door that opened into the kitchen. And then looking up, he saw why everything was so clearly visible-a full moon, huge and orange, perched atop his roof like an enormous pumpkin awaiting Halloween. Breathing in, he caught the sharp, smoky scent of someone’s fire, and the faint smell of cooked food that made him think of a foil-wrapped plate left warming in the oven.

But at the back of his mind something was tugging … something he sensed was out of place. Then it hit him. On nights when she knew he’d be getting home late, Laurel always left on the light over the little wooden porch he was now standing on. The light wasn’t on.

Could she have forgotten? Not likely. She was sometimes distracted, but never about that damn light. And if she’d gone and taken Adam to Burger King, say, or to see The Muppet Movie for the umpteenth time, they wouldn’t have stayed out this late.

Had something happened to her? He remembered last year around this time, getting up early one morning and finding Laurel, four months pregnant, passed out on the bathroom floor, her nightgown soaked with blood. Their daughter’s blood. At the hospital, they’d told him it was a girl. Those other babies … lost before he’d fully gotten used to the idea of Laurel being pregnant. But this one … Laurel had been showing … a girl. Now, as he had then, Joe felt tears well up in him. Sadness, but relief too. Because what if he hadn’t found Laurel in time? What if she’d bled to death before he could get her to the hospital?

She could have died.

But Laurel wasn’t pregnant now. Even so, as he turned his key in the lock and stepped inside, he could

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feel his stomach tightening, a vague unease seeping through him. In the dark of the tiny laundry porch just off the kitchen, he breathed in the reassuring smells of detergent and clean clothes. He had an urge to call out to Laurel, but he held back. She and Adam had to be fast asleep.

But something was wrong; he could feel it. He could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stiffening, and there was that queer tightness in his gut.

He cut through the kitchen, which, with the moonlight washing in, he could see hadn’t been cleaned up. Dishes piled on the counter, toast scraps and crumpled napkins scattered over the pine table in the breakfast nook. Even the African violets lining the windowsill looked neglected, droopy. And that wasn’t like Laurel … usually when he got home this place was spotless. She was so proud of this house, saying she liked doing even the stupid little jobs most women hated: polishing furniture, vacuuming, dusting every little knickknack; she refused to let him hire her even a part-time cleaning lady. She liked having her privacy. And besides, she claimed that housework helped clear her mind so she could think up ideas for illustrations.

Joe made his way through the dining room with its round oak table and carved breakfront filled, not with fine bone china, but with Mexican pottery in bright, primary colors, and Laurel’s precious knickknacks, what Rivka called chachkes-brass elephants, each one smaller than the next, arranged trunk-to-tail as if they were all walking in a line; lopsided clay animals Adam had made; an intricately painted Russian box; a pair of pewter candlesticks; a bank in the shape of a dog whose tail wagged when you dropped in a penny; a small basket heaped with bright marbles. On the narrow wall space to the left of the doorway, framed in a square of moonlight, he could see clearly the fans Laurel had arranged there-delicately painted Japanese fans, an antique one made of lace and bone, and some that were shaped like inverted teardrops.