“Noooo,” Abby said in a plaintive voice. She hated their art-buying explorations, which usually entailed hours of searching small-town backstreets, and sometimes waiting in the car. “You won’t be playing golf, Mom. You can take me to the beach.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Will echoed.

Karen cut her eyes at him. Full of repressed anger, they flashed like green warning beacons. “I agreed to chair this flower show two years ago. It’s the sixtieth anniversary of the Junior League, and I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to have a flower show, but it’s officially my problem. I’ve put off everything until the last minute, and there are over four hundred exhibitors.”

“You got everything nailed down day before yesterday,” Will told her. There wasn’t much use in pressing the issue, but he felt he should try. Things had been tense for the past six months, and this would be the first trip he had made without Karen in a long time. It seemed symbolic, somehow. “You’re just going to agonize until the whole circus starts on Monday. Four nights of hell. Why not blow it off until then?”

“I can’t do it,” she said with a note of finality. “Drop it.”

Will sighed and watched a 727 lift over the tree line to his left.

Karen leaned forward and switched on the CD player, which began to thump out the teen dance groove of Britney Spears. Abby immediately began to sing along. “Hit me baby one more time…”

“Now, if you want to take Abby by yourself,” Karen said, “you can certainly do that.”

“What did you say, Mom?”

“You know I can’t,” Will said with exasperation.

“You mean you can’t do that and play golf with your med school buddies. Right?”

Will felt the old weight tighten across his chest. “This is once a year, Karen. I’m giving the keynote speech, and the whole thing is very political. You know that. With the new drug venture, I’ll have to spend hours with the Klein-Adams people-”