She lined up several loads of laundry, fielded a couple of phone calls wanting her to contribute to charities, buy siding, and take out a new credit card, and then she went down to her office in the basement to work on her book. Some months earlier her mother had come to visit and had wanted to take a course in writing an autobiography. Jane, not wanting to write her own, had made up a fictional person to write about and the teacher had encouraged her to continue. Jane wasn't sure it was even a real novel, or if it would ever leave her basement, but she was enjoying the experience enormously. Most of the time.

But today she found it hard to concentrate. Her mind kept going back to Shelley's classmates. She had dreaded this because she thought it would be so dull. But they hadn't proved dull at all. Scary, rather. All those emotions, presumably tucked away for years, boiling to the surface. But that wasn't fair. Some of them had seemed truly glad to see one another. When she left, Pooky and Avalon were deep in an animated discussion on the front porch. At least those two would enjoy catching up on the missing years. And perhaps others of them would have fun, too. Jane realized she was putting too much of her own spin on this reunion.

She plowed on with writing and laundry and three o'clock finally came. She'd put a casserole in the fridge with instructions to the children as to when to put it in the oven. There were chips out on the table and a saucepan with green beans (the only vegetable they all liked) sitting on top of the casserole, where it couldn't be missed. They'd probably have sodas with their meal instead of the milk she kept forcing on them, but it wouldn't kill them.