One

“Horse blinders," Jane Jeffry said. "That's what I need when you're driving. Horse blinders. With a flap that comes down in front, too. So all I can see is my lap.”

Jane's best friend, Shelley Nowack, eased her foot off the gas pedal. The van slowed slightly. "I've never had an accident," Shelley said. "Not even one that wasn't my fault."

“I don't find that encouraging. It only means all your bad luck is being saved for a really big one. And as dear as you are to me, I don't want to be with you when you have it."

“Just play with your computer and don't look outside," Shelley said, swinging out around an eighteen-wheeler as if it were no more of an obstacle than a Honda.

Jane patted the top of the screen of her laptop. It was a recent gift from her parents. Her father was with the State Department, and they moved from country to country as frequently and easily as Jane went to the grocery store — and a lot more cheerfully.

Her father had called from Finland to tell her it was coming. "E-mail, Jane," he'd said. "I figure I'll save the cost of the computers in long-distance bills in a year."

“Computers, plural?" Jane had asked.

“Mike's getting one, too," he'd said.

Mike was Jane's son, in his freshman year at college. Since Jane was widowed several years earlier, Mike — who was one of the rarest elements in the universe, a relatively sensible teenager — had been a great support to her. Now that he was away, she was missing him like mad. But Mike didn't want to have his dorm-mates overhear him talking to his mother on the phone, and except for the obligatory thank-you notes and college applications she'd forced him to produce, he'd never spontaneously written a letter in his life. But E-mail, in the two weeks they'd had their laptops, had provided the solution. And Jane had also enjoyed more correspondence with her parents in that time than they'd had for years.