Jane paced around a minute to see if Shelley would come right back out. Willard had inhaled his breakfast, and she shoved him out the back door into the fenced yard. He looked around cautiously to see if anyone was lurking there to get him. Willard, whose life's ambition was to escape into the front yard, was terrified of the back.

Going back in the kitchen, Jane found that the cats were still eyeing each other over their food bowl in a stare-off to determine who would eat first. "Get on with it, you dopes!" she said, giving them ear scritches they didn't appreciate.

Why didn't Shelley go? She didn't dare make a grocery-store run while there was a danger o Shelley catching her and asking where she was going. She found it was impossible to lie convincingly to her, even on small matters like tangerine juice. Jane would have to wait her out. It was like being in a castle under siege.

To kill the time, she occupied herself with one of her least favorite duties. She checked on the hamsters in Todd's room, which were living in precisely the kind of filth she'd imagined. "You are rats in disguise," she said to them. "You may fool children, but not mothers.”

Popping the fuzzy creatures into a shoe box, she dumped the contents of their cage into a plastic trash bag — checking carefully just what she was throwing away. Once she'd tossed out their newborns not realizing what those repulsive little pink lumps were. She'd assumed they were evidence of some nasty digestive process she was better off not knowing anything about. Todd had been crushed, and had put no credence in Jane's statement that if he'd cleaned it himself as he was supposed to it wouldn't have happened. Sooner or later Todd would run out of friends to give the frequent offspring to, and they'd have to move out and abandon the house to the little rodents.