One

“I can't do it all. I'll be dead or in the loony bin before Christmas," Jane Jeffry whined. She and her best friend and next-door neighbor, Shelley Nowack, were sitting at Jane's kitchen table. The house smelled of freshly baked cookies and coffee and just a hint of wet dog. It was only five in the afternoon, but the clouds were low and heavy and it was as dark as midnight outside.

“Nonsense," Shelley said in the brisk tone that intimidated traffic cops, school principals, and bankers, but to which Jane had grown immune.

Jane put her head down on the table, face forward with her nose to a place mat. "No, no. My children will be given into custody of my mother-in-law," she mumbled into the quilted fabric. "And she'll tell them awful things about me and great things about their dead father and—"

“Jane," Shelley snapped, "get a grip. They're not babies anymore.”

Jane made a noise like a hippo pulling its foot out of the mud and continued her litany of woes. "Mel's mother's coming to town for Christmas and she's going to hate me—"

“She's not going to hate you and all that matters is what Mel himself thinks of you," Shelley persisted. Mel was Jane's "significant other," as her daughter Katie insisted on referring to him.

“—and I have new neighbors on the other side of my house I've never met but already don't like—”

Shelley reached out to pet Jane's head sympathetically, but drew back her hand when she realized Jane had streaks of cookie icing in her blond hair. "You need to get your roots touched up — and the green gunk washed out," Shelley said. "Maybe they'd clean Willard up, too. A nice family trip to the groomers.”