“Mom, it's just not Fair!" Katie whined. Jane gave her a look.

“Yeah, yeah," Katie said. She raised her hands like a conductor and the boys joined in the chorus of Jane's oft-repeated line, " 'Life isn't fair.' “

The argument sputtered on throughout the evening and became more wide-ranging. Jane was accused of being an insensitive mother, obsessive about meaningless academic considerations at the cost of her children's social and intellectual development. Not that Todd had the vocabulary to put it that way, but that was the point.

Katie tried a pity ploy, not having caught on yet that crying didn't dissolve her mother's hard heart, but merely drove her to a frenzy of irritation. Then Katie moved on to guilt, working up an imaginary scenario in which Jane, unreasonably favoring her firstborn, had somehow suborned the school district in advance to let the high school be off for the exact day filming was to start, therefore deliberately slighting her two youngest children, whom she probably never wanted to have anyway.

Jane found herself actually wondering what had made her think it was a good idea to have three children. But she held firm, not because she believed that missing school would have been such a bad thing, but because she knew they'd inch closer and closer to the production if they were allowed to stayhome and eventually get in trouble for which she'd be held responsible.

It didn't help that Mike was really being insufferably smug and adult about the fact that he'd been promised some kind of job, however menial, on the set.

Jane finally escaped her bickering progeny by pleading mending that needed to be done so that she could go hide from them in the minuscule guest room where she kept the sewing machine. When she looked out that window around ten-thirty, the floodlights had been turned off, vans full of workers were just pulling away, and a security guard was standing in her backyard talking on a mobile phone.