“How would you feel if this was your daughter?”

Caught off guard by the question, Phillip felt a moment of panic. Who was this woman and what did she want?

“I didn’t catch your name,” he finally said.

“I didn’t throw it to you,” she replied. “Anyway, my name isn’t important. I’m here about the young girl who died because there was no neurosurgeon available to attend to her. What I want to understand,” she continued, “is this. While Jenny was riding around in the ambulance, what exactly prevented someone—anyone—from coming in to save her? You, for example, Dr. Neurosurgeon.”

Phillip said nothing.

“As if it isn’t awful enough to lose a child,” the woman added. “To know that the child didn’t need to die…” She glared at him. “You want to know my name? You can call me Concerned. Frustrated. Mad as Hell.”

The arrival of a security guard, apparently summoned by his receptionist, saved Phillip from having to respond.

“Brilliant solution,” the woman said as a blue-uniformed guard who probably outweighed her by two hundred pounds or so took her arm. “But you haven’t heard the last from me.”

Dear Reader,

I’ve often thought—perhaps not an original idea—that writing a book is somewhat akin to giving birth. There is the first germ of an idea that grows and develops and ultimately takes on a life of its own. Along Came Zoe, my sixth offspring, was one of those particularly difficult births, the kind where you groan, “Oh, never again.”

Fortunately, the joy of creation—books and babies alike—quickly dissolves the pain, leaving only a sense of wonder at what you’ve produced. I’m tempted here to carry on the analogy and talk about how the wonder only continues until your miraculous offspring gets its first report card—or review—but I think I’ve followed this thought far enough.

I hope you enjoy Along Came Zoe. I’d love to hear from you. Please visit my Web site at janicemacdonald.com, or write to me at PMB101, 136 E. 8th Street, Port Angeles, WA 98362.

Best wishes,

Janice Macdonald

Along Came Zoe
Janice Macdonald

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my editor, Zilla Soriano, for her patience and

understanding during the difficult times I had while writing

this book, and for her unfailing wisdom and guidance. I feel

very fortunate to have the privilege of working with her.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER ONE

JENNY DIXON WAS SIXTEEN.

Jenny Dixon was a cheerleader.

Jenny Dixon was driving home from practice when her Toyota was broadsided by a drunk driver.

Jenny Dixon is dead.

Dr. Phillip Barry, pulling into the underground garage of his Seacliff apartment, was stricken suddenly with exhaustion. He parked the car in its allotted space, climbed the stairs to the front door, unlocked it and threw himself on the sofa, where he fell asleep almost instantly.

Jenny Dixon is dead.

He sat up with a start, shook his head. The phone was ringing.

“Phillip?” His ex-wife, Deanna. “Were you sleeping?”

“No…yes.” He dug his knuckles into his eyes. “I’m fine. What’s up?”

“I was calling to talk about Molly. You said you’d have her this weekend, remember?” A pause. “Phillip. Are you okay? I ran into your brother at the market and he said you’ve been looking like hell lately—”

“I’m fine.” He tried to recall exactly when he’d agreed that Molly, their sixteen-year-old daughter, would spend the weekend; not that he didn’t want her, but things seemed to be getting away from him lately. Nothing big, nothing outside of the O.R., thank God, just conversations, appointments, things like that. He leaned his head against the couch back and closed his eyes. “So what’s the deal? I pick up Molly, or will you bring—”

“Phillip, we’ve already talked about this…I’m concerned about you. Joe is, too. It’s that damn…that Dixon case, isn’t it? Phillip, you’re human, for God’s sake. You go on burning the candle at both ends long enough and something’s going to give. Anyway, why should you blame yourself? I don’t see Stu going aroung wringing his hands—everyone deserves some time off once in a while, when was the last time—”

“So do you want me to pick up Molly?”

“Okay, you’re not going to listen to me, I might as well save my breath. I just want you to think about something. Molly needed you. Needs you. This girl’s death wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault a bus overturned. It wasn’t your fault the paramedics had to drive her around…”

With Deanna’s voice in his ear, Phillip got up from the couch and wandered over to the opened French doors. Straight ahead, the Pacific stretched endlessly. On either side he could see, in his peripheral vision, the balconies of his neighbors. Smoke from someone’s grill wafted briefly into the room.

“…I don’t mean to sound callous or anything,” Deanna was saying, “but instead of dwelling on the what-ifs, why don’t you just think about what it means to Molly that you’re available once in a while. Like her birthday, for example…”

Phillip came back inside, slid the doors shut and returned to the couch. The headline in that morning’s Tribune had asked, Did Jenny Have To Die? Maybe not, he was forced to admit. If he and Stu, his partner, hadn’t decided just weeks before Jenny Dixon’s accident to suspend emergency neurosurgical services to Seacliff’s trauma center…if a tourist bus hadn’t tumbled down a mountainous ravine just east of the city, swamping other local centers with injured passengers…if Jenny had been immediately airlifted instead of being driven around in an ambulance… If, if, if. An endless wheel of ifs circling unmercifully through his brain.

AS SOON AS SHE HEARD the morning weather report announcing a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, Zoe McCann knew that the winds traveling up from Baja wouldn’t be the day’s only storm. The announcer’s voice on the clock radio—specifically his mention of the words historic surf—had woken her from sleep.

Adrenaline coursing through her body, Zoe pulled on jeans and grabbed a flannel shirt from the pile of clean laundry that she’d intended to put away the night before and ran, barefoot, downstairs to the kitchen to grab her keys.

“That bastard,” she muttered to herself as she climbed into her truck. “I swear to God, I’ll kill him.”

Ten minutes later—it would have been five but for the morning commuter traffic—she drove her pickup south on Pacific Coast Highway, the car radio blaring something unintelligible. Jeez. She punched buttons, searching for something other than the punk rock that always screamed from the speakers after her son Brett had used the truck.

“…and the continued fallout from the tragic death of a local teenager has prompted a Seacliff city councilman to propose financial incentives ranging from five hundred to one thousand dollars or more a day to lure neurosurgeons back into providing on-call services.”

Financial rewards to lure neurosurgeons.

Disgusted, Zoe snapped off the radio. Money always took care of everything. A thousand dollars in Dr. Phillip Barry’s hot little hand and Jenny Dixon might be alive today.

She glanced out through the passenger window to the ocean where great feathery sprays of foam were shooting into the air. She’d lived her whole life in California, but she never took the ocean for granted. Whether it was that weird churning green it sometimes turned in winter, or the pale blue silk of early summer, the water inspired her. However cranky she might feel, twenty minutes or so watching the waves generally did the trick. Except, of course, if she happened to notice that another small beach cottage along the cliffs had been razed to make room for some hideous megamansion that blocked views for everyone except the self-absorbed morons who lived in them.

Like Dr. Phillip Barry.

The car ahead had Nebraska plates and the driver had slowed to a crawl while everyone in the vehicle rubbernecked at the view. Zoe moved them along with two quick bleeps on the horn. Fingers tapping the steering wheel, she drove past Diamond Beach—where distant black figures out in the breaking waves might, to the uninitiated, be frolicking dolphins—finally slowing down as she reached the bluffs.

The line of parked pickup trucks and battered cars with oxidized paint jobs started halfway up the hill and ended just opposite the power plant on the other side of the street.

Zoe parked at the bottom of the hill, turned off the ignition and drew a deep breath. “Please,” she prayed, imagining Denny’s goofy grin, “just this once let him surprise me by not being a selfish, irresponsible idiot whose mental development was arrested sometime around the age of seventeen.”

She grabbed the key from the ignition, slid out of the truck and walked briskly along the line of vehicles. Breeze from the ocean tossed her hair around, blowing hunks of it across her face. She glanced at her reflection in the passenger window of a parked car and wished she hadn’t. On its rare good days, her hair had this long, curly, just-fallen-out-of-bed look about it; the rest of the time it was a dense, kinky uncombable mess that she usually controlled with combs and scrunchies or whatever else was on hand. Today, it looked vaguely like a collie’s coat.

Her ex-husband’s battered red pickup truck, surfboard sticking up like a dorsal fin from the truck bed, was right where she knew it would be. And so was her ex-husband. Burly—and that was charitable—wearing black-and-gray-flowered Bermudas and a white tank top, his feet encased in flip-flops. A pair of binoculars in hand, he gazed out at the water.

She took another breath. Everything about Denny McCann, from the black tufts of hair on his big toes to his stupid goatee, annoyed Zoe, but what was sending her out of the stratosphere right now was the confirmation of her suspicion. Standing there beside his father—both of them towering above her—was her sixteen-year-old son, Brett, a towel wrapped modestly around his waist as he shimmied into his black rubber wet suit. Neither of them saw her coming.

She noticed Denny had shaved his head, a pathetic attempt to cover a bald spot, but, to give him credit, better than a toupee or a comb-over. He had set his binoculars on the cab of the truck and was tugging at the zipper of Brett’s suit. Brett, adolescent skinny, had his back to her.

She tapped her son on the shoulder.

“School?” she inquired, and he whirled around, eyes wide.

“Mom, just let me explain, okay?”

“Get in the car,” she said. “Now.”

“I’ll handle this, son.” Denny eyed Zoe cautiously, as one might a rabid dog. “You gotta understand—”

“No, I don’t gotta understand anything.” She jerked her head in the direction of the parked cars. “In the car, Brett. Now.”

“But Mom, the surf is, like, historic. Tell her, Dad.” He looked at his father. “There haven’t been waves this big since—”

“In the car.” Zoe stared him down until he headed, slump shouldered and sighing noisily, toward her car. The sight of her son’s skinny brown back, knobby spine poking between the unzipped sides of the wet suit, swelled her heart. Brett lived to surf, a passion shared by his father. Slight difference though between a sixteen-year-old kid living for monster waves and a forty-year-old delayed adolescent whose failure to hold a steady job could be largely attributed to his practice of calling in sick whenever surfing conditions warranted it.

“This is the last time he stays with you on a school night,” she told his father. “Got it?”

Denny had his arms folded across his chest and a look on his face that said he’d be damned if he’d let his nutcase of an ex-wife dictate the way things were going to go. Still, his eyes lingered long enough on the front of her shirt that she thought maybe a breast had broken free. She was going through a Mother Earth phase, all hips and boobs—a side effect of some recent experimentation with bread baking and, of course, tasting. A quick glance confirmed nothing more revealing than a bunch of cleavage and some strained buttons, but it was vintage Denny to argue with her and ogle at the same time.

“Don’t go giving me a bunch of crap, Zoe,” he was saying. “I was going to take him to school. He said there was nothing much going on this morning, so I figured it was no big deal if he missed an hour or two.”

“Well, you figured wrong.” Zoe stabbed her index finger at his chest. “If you ever pull this again…if you ever keep him out of school—I don’t care if it’s for five minutes—without clearing it with me first I will personally shove that goddamned surfboard down your throat—and don’t think I couldn’t do it.”

“You need to get a life—”

“And you need to send me last month’s child-support check,” she shot back. “When can I expect it?”

“If you took him out of that goddamned snob school, you wouldn’t always be short of money.”

Zoe cupped a hand to her ear. “I can expect it when?”

“What the hell’s wrong with public schools?”

“I’m sorry.” Zoe smacked the side of her head. “My hearing must be going. You said you’re going to write me a check right now?”

“Damn it, Zoe.” He opened the passenger door and ducked his head inside. “You’re not the only one with expenses.”

“Need a pen?”

“Go to hell.” He fished a checkbook from the glove compartment and made a big performance out of writing the amount. “And while we’re talking about this, don’t think I’m footing the bill for some Ivy League university. No reason he can’t go to community college like I did.” He signed his name with a flourish, and held out the check. “Brett tell you about his girlfriend?”

Zoe took the check. “He doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

Denny smirked. “Like he’s going to tell mommy anyway.” Gotcha, his expression said. “He’s not gonna tell you nothing.”

“Well, that’s good news,” Zoe said. “That means he’ll be telling me something, right?”

The smirk faded. “Shut the hell up, Zoe. If you were half as damn smart as you think you are, you wouldn’t be selling vegetables.”

Zoe smiled. “If I were half as damn smart as I think I am, I obviously wouldn’t have married you in the first place.” She watched the color creep up the side of his neck. She could almost hear his brain whirring as he struggled to regain the upper hand— Let’s see, how can I really zap her?

“Me and him had a little talk last night,” he finally said. “Man to man, like. ‘Gotta use a condom,’ I told him, ‘or some girl’s going to trap you just like your mom trapped me.’”

BRETT’S MUFFIN POPPED out of the toaster and he spread peanut butter on it. His mom and Rhea were in the kitchen making soup and reading out loud from a cookbook that was propped up against a clay pot he’d made in some art class when he was a little kid. Rhea had been there when he got home from school.

“I don’t see why you couldn’t make this with fresh lima beans,” his mom was saying to Rhea. “Let’s just improvise, okay. I hate following recipes.”

Rhea laughed and winked at him. “Rules, recipes…your mom marches to her own drummer,” she said.

“Yeah,” Brett agreed. Whatever that meant. He screwed the lid back on the peanut butter, put the knife in the sink. His mom was wearing a long yellow skirt—that he’d heard her tell Rhea she’d made out of a tablecloth—and a tight black sweater and her hair was tied up with this Indian scarf. He knew what it was because she had Indian scarves pinned up all over her bedroom, on the ceiling and walls, along with dried roses and big velvet pillows everywhere. Old black-and-white pictures all over the place, lamps with scarves all over them, which drove his grandma crazy because she said it was a fire hazard and one of these days his mom was going to set the house on fire. His grandma said his mom’s room looked like a Gypsy caravan.

Everything his mom did drove his grandma crazy, but his mom said that wasn’t her problem. His mom was kinda different, the way she dressed and acted and everything, but he was used to it—except like this morning when she freaked out about him going surfing. He was still kinda mad about the way she made him feel like some stupid kid in front of his dad, but when his mom got some idea in her head, forget about anything else.

Rhea looked pretty much like everyone else’s mom. Sweats and jeans and normal hair. Rhea was Jenny’s mom. Jenny got hit on her way home from practice by a drunk driver and she died. It was about the worst thing that ever happened in his life. Afterward everyone started talking about how it shouldn’t have happened and taking sides not just about the drunk driver, although everyone including his mom got plently fired up about that, but how it shouldn’t be that kids died because they couldn’t get taken care of and everything. It happened, like about six months ago, but it seemed like there was always more stuff about it on TV or something.

He still couldn’t believe Jenny wasn’t just going to show up one day, like she’d played some joke on them or something. He’d known Jenny practically forever. She’d been like his sister. Well, except she was always claiming he’d kissed her when they were in nursery school. Right. Girls always claimed they remembered dumb-ass stuff like that, but Jenny was cool. They’d been better friends when he was still going to the old high school. She said he was stuck-up now, which even she knew was a bunch of bull because he couldn’t stand stupid Country Day Academy.

Anyway, if it wasn’t Rhea in the kitchen with his mom, it would be someone else. People were always coming over to his house. Friends his mom hadn’t seen for years who just happened to stop by, neighbors he didn’t know but who knew his mom. Some crazy old woman she’d met at the grocery store who had been trying to pay for her stuff with play money. His mom ended up paying for the old lady’s stuff, then bringing her here till some relative could come and take her back home.

He and his mom lived in this big house that his dad said his mom should sell and buy a condominium or something, and it seemed like there was always someone sleeping in the guest bedroom until they got their act together. His mom was pretty cool that way, she’d leave them to themselves—sometimes he wished she’d do that with him, instead of making him feel like some bug under a microscope—listen to them, if they wanted to talk, make them food.

Everyone said his mom had a big heart. For everything. People. Dogs or cats that just showed up one day. A sheep. No kidding. Last year they’d gone to the county fair and she’d bought this sheep because some guy said it was going to be dog food. It wasn’t even like a cute little lamb or anything. It was this huge, woolly pillow-shaped thing that his mom said looked like Tony Bennett, whoever that was.

She called it Svetlana and sang this dumb song to it. “I left my heart,” she’d go, “in Baabaa Frisco.” And then she’d crack up at how funny she was and all her friends would be laughing, too. Except for his dad, who called his mom a head case, everyone thought his mom was really cool. People were always calling her a character and he guessed she was a pretty good mom, except that sometimes she was also kind of embarrassing the way she just said whatever she thought.

“So, Brett—” Rhea scooped onions up in both hands and dropped them into the frying pan “—are you beating the girls off with sticks?”

“He’d better be,” his mom said. “If he isn’t, I will.”

“Omigod, Zoe.” Rhea was looking at the little TV on the kitchen counter. “Look. It’s Phillip Barry. He’s—”

“Shh.” His mom flapped her hands at Rhea. “Listen.”

Brett watched the screen. Dr. Barry wasn’t really doing anything, just walking along some corridor, dressed in blue scrubs, like maybe he’d just come from surgery. His arms and face were tanned and he had bright blue eyes. It was weird knowing who he was because he looked kinda like an actor on ER or something. Now he was taking off this blue paper cap and he had brown hair that was cut way, way short, and some gray in the front. His mom had this thing about Phillip Barry. She knew him from when they were both little kids and she said the whole family was a bunch of snobs. He was some big-shot brain surgeon at Seacliff, and his mom claimed that if he’d been there to take care of Jenny, she wouldn’t have died. He had this truly weird daughter, Molly, who was in his class at Country Day and was always following him around and saying dumb things.

“Taking care of high-risk patients requires you to have a bit of an ego…” Dr. Barry was saying.

“No kidding,” his mom said, all sarcastic, like, duh.

“Mom, when’s dinner?”

“Uno momento, sweetie.”

His mom was still watching Dr. Barry. She had this vegetable in one hand, like a carrot but whitish-brown, and a knife in the other one.

“Idiot, jerk—”

“Shh,” Rhea put her finger over her mouth.

“I have a hot date with a cool babe,” Brett said, just to shake things up. Like what did he care about what Molly Barry’s dad was saying? “Be back around midnight.”

“What?” His mom swiveled around to look at him. “I’ll give you midnight.” She was trying not to laugh. “Go do your homework. Dinner will be ready when you’re through.”

“What are we having?”

“Lima bean and summer squash soup.” She was watching TV again. “Go. I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

Yech. Like he’d want to know.

Upstairs, he lay on the bed. His mom knew that Dr. Barry’s daughter Molly went to Country Day. What she didn’t know was how weird Molly was. Like how she was always following him around and saying she was his girlfriend and if he didn’t start liking her she was going to kill herself.

“ON MANY DAYS, by the time the staff arrives at the office,” the TV announcer was saying, “Dr. Barry and his partner have already performed two surgeries and started rounds at the hospital.”

“It’s hectic, no question about it.” Barry was sitting behind a desk now. “When I first decided to go into neurosurgery, someone I greatly respected said to me, “If you’re going to be a true professional, not just do the job, it’s really difficult to be a decent husband or a father, and you certainly can’t do anything else, like have any sort of social life. It’s a real struggle.”

“My heart bleeds.” Zoe poured away the water the lima beans had been soaking in, and melted butter in the bottom of a pan. “Turn it off if you want,” she told Rhea, now feeling kind of insensitive that she hadn’t turned it off as soon as Phillip Barry’s face appeared on the screen. That morning’s headline still haunted her. Did Jenny Have To Die? Imagine picking up the paper to read that. Like it’s not devastating enough to lose your child, but then you find out that she’s dead because some doctor wants to play golf. She watched as the onions turned transparent. Okay, she didn’t know for a fact that Phillip Barry wanted to play golf, but what doctor didn’t?

“Hey…” Rhea reached over Zoe’s shoulder to turn down the flame. “If you’re going to obsess, I’m gonna pack up my tent and leave.”

“I’m not obsessing.”

“You’ve burned the onions, you pulverized the carrots. Jenny was my daughter, Zoe. If I’m not angry—”

“Okay, okay.” Zoe shook her head. “I’m not angry.”

“I said if you’re going to obsess.”

“I’m not obsessing.”

“Yes, you are.”

“What am I obsessing about?”

“It happened, Zoe.” Her voice cracked. “Look, I know you wouldn’t purposely do anything to hurt me, but I’m trying very hard to deal with everything and your anger doesn’t exactly help, okay? I mean, God, it’s difficult enough—”

“Rhee, I’m so sorry.” Zoe set down the spoon she’d been using and wrapped her arms around Rhea. “I’m sorry, really, I just get on these rampages and…look at me. What can I do?”

Rhea gave a weary smile and shook her head. “Nothing. Just go on being Zoe, but…maybe a teensy bit less angry at the world?”

Later after Rhea left, Zoe cleaned the kitchen and set out cereal and bowls for Brett’s breakfast tomorrow. It was hard not to get angry. She and Rhea had gone over the whole thing so many times. Cried together over innumerable cups of herbal tea, wept over bowls of flax muffin mix, talked themselves hoarse into the wee hours. Rhea, Zoe could tell, was moving toward an acceptance of Jenny’s death that she personally couldn’t master. She was angry, furious. Did Jenny Have To Die? That was the title of the front page article in the paper today. No, she wanted to scream. Not if Dr. Phillip Barry had been there to do what doctors are supposed to do. Reason told her that this was flawed, simplistic thinking, but reason was no match for furious, impotent anger.

CHAPTER TWO

A SWOOSH OF THE AUTOMATIC DOORS announced Phillip’s arrival in the operating room. His hands and forearms dripping, he dried them with a sterile towel, unfolded a gown and slid both arms through the sleeves. Without a word, one of the circulating nurses tied the gown behind him; a scrub nurse removed a pair of gloves from their paper-wrapped package and held them out for him.

“Your handmaidens,” his ex-wife used to call them.

His first surgery of the day was an eight-year-old boy who had been sleeping in the back seat of his father’s pickup truck. The truck had stopped for a red light just as a couple of rival gang members were shooting at each other from opposite sides of the road. The stray bullet had torn through the side of the truck, ricocheted off the floorboard and penetrated the boy’s brain. In the blink of an eye, half of his right brain had been destroyed.

The human nervous system is an amazing, even elegant, structure, Phillip often pointed out to patients and their families. It allows us to feel, move, see, hear, smile and taste. It allows us to experience pleasure, as well as pain. It is essentially the organ system that defines us as human beings. And, by and large, we take it all for granted—until a bullet rips through it.

Or, as in the case of his daughter, Molly, something seems to go suddenly and inexplicably awry.

“I’m fine now, Daddy, really,” she was reassuring him as they walked along the beach below his Seacliff home that night. “I learned my lesson, I swear I’ll never be that stupid again. Why are you wearing shoes to walk on the beach?”

“Shoes?” Phillip glanced absently at his feet, sockless but in a pair of old Topsiders. “No idea.” He put his arm around her shoulder and squeezed her close. Molly had attempted suicide just over six months ago. Her second try in a little over a year.

“You really need to loosen up,” Molly said. “Quit working so hard. Go barefoot once in a while.”

Phillip took a moment to appreciate the irony of what his daughter had just said. And, briefly, to register the glint of orange light on the windows of the houses on the cliffs above them. The tide was out, the sun low in the sky. The evening was cool and gray—a California weather phenomenon TV weather people called June Gloom. Both he and Molly wore heavy sweaters and jeans. Molly, barefoot, held her sneakers in one hand.

By the time he’d arrived at the hospital, Molly was having her stomach pumped. A fleeting sense of relief that paramedics hadn’t taken her to Seacliff, where everyone knew him—her boarding school had been too far away for Seacliff to have been an option—left him with a dull guilt that still hadn’t entirely disappeared.

His ex-wife, Molly’s mother, had been similarly relieved. Ever since her latest self-help book, My Daughter, My Best Friend, had begun climbing into the lower reaches of the New York Times extended bestseller list, Deanna lived in constant fear of bad publicity.

“I’m serious, Daddy,” Molly was saying now. “When was the last time you had any fun?”

“I don’t know, Moll.” He heard the impatience in his voice. “Let’s talk about you first.”

“I’ve figured things out, I told you. I mean I can’t believe I tried to end my life just because some stupid boy made such a mess of his own life that he’d totally lost touch with reality,” Molly said. “I swear to God, never again. From now on, I’m taking charge of my own life.”

Phillip thought about the first boy to set Molly’s life adrift. Spirit, who Phillip had tracked down one bright summer morning, at work—the sidewalk spot where the kid drew whales and sea horses in pastel-colored chalk for the coins and occasional dollar bills dropped into the coffee can next to his box of art supplies—in the slim hope that he could shed some light on why Molly had set fire to the bed in her dormitory. Phillip had guessed that Spirit, who had green hair and wore a nose ring, was probably in his late twenties.

“I don’t know, man…” Spirit’s gaze had drifted somewhere beyond Phillip’s left shoulder. “No offense or anything, I mean I know she’s your daughter and all, but Molly is one seriously weird chick.”

Molly’s story had been that Spirit, with whom she was “like totally, totally in love,” had given her an ultimatum: sell everything she owned and take off with him to Belize, or the relationship was over. It was anger over the unfairness of his demand, she’d explained, that had caused her to set fire to her bed.

But Spirit had claimed at first that he didn’t even know Molly. Only after Phillip produced a picture from his billfold, did the kid remember that, “Yeah, I’ve seen her like a couple of times, hanging out at this coffee place.” Once she’d dropped a five-dollar bill into his coffee can and tried to give him her emerald ring, which Spirit, astoundingly and to his credit, had refused to accept.

“I figured she was, like, strung out on something,” he’d told Phillip, “and I didn’t want problems with, you know, like stolen merchandise or something.”

The ring had been handed down to Molly from her great-grandmother.

Molly had been on medication ever since and, until this latest attempt, had been doing fairly well. This time they’d taken her to see a psychiatrist in Santa Barbara. Far enough away from Seacliff to feel comfortable that they were unlikely to run into anyone they knew. The psychiatrist, who had Art Garfunkel hair and round eyeglasses, had offered Phillip a preliminary diagnosis. Affective schizophrenic disorder, the term set out there like a bomb.

“Bull,” Phillip had responded. Okay, she was going through a weird period, she had a tendency to overdramatize—as did her mother—but this was his daughter. Bright, pretty, resourceful, a great kid. Everyone loved Molly. She had her life ahead of her. The psychiatrist had leaned back in his chair, the faintest suspicion of a smirk on his face. So. How does it feel to be on the receiving end of bad news? Phillip remembered folding his arms across his chest, then unfolding them in case this was interpreted as resistance.

“Look, I’m ready to try anything that will help Molly,” he’d told the psychiatrist. “Frankly, though, I find it difficult to accept…” Hearing himself, he stopped and started over. “My own professional judgment tells me that Molly is going through a confused period and would certainly benefit from intensive therapy, but I absolutely refuse to accept this diagnosis. In fact, I find it patently absurd.” He’d heard his voice growing louder, felt his anger building. “You’re probably thinking, denial,” he’d said. “I run into the same response myself—no parent wants to hear that their child will never walk again—but Molly’s a different matter altogether and I refuse to allow her to be stigmatized by a hastily made diagnosis.”

As a consequence of this latest incident, and over Molly’s protests, they’d transferred their daughter to a small and expensive private school that promised “…a high degree of attention to each and every one of our student’s unique and special needs and abilities.” Deanna had agreed to cut down on book promotions that required extensive periods of out-of-town travel, and he’d suspended Seacliff’s emergency neurosurgical services.

And then a sixteen-year-old girl with head injuries had died in an ambulance.

He hadn’t slept through the night since.

ZOE LOVED EVERYTHING involved in growing and selling vegetables, but farmer’s market days were the best. Three times a week, she’d load fruit, vegetables and flowers into the back of the pickup truck and drive to whatever town was having their market. Today was market day in Seacliff, which, hands down, had to be the coolest site in California with all the stalls grouped around the perimeter of a grassy park overlooking the Pacific. From where she sat under a blue Cinzano umbrella, Zoe could see the white froth of waves breaking on the rocks below. The jingle of an ice-cream bell and the throb of rock music provided an audio backdrop to the green, blue and gold of grassy verges, cloudless sky and sun-dappled strollers. Artists sat on folding chairs, their paintings leaned and stacked, bright rectangles of color. Flags fluttered from the artisan stalls where some of her friends sold jewelry, pottery, leather belts and sandals.

Zoe never thought of herself as an artist, or, as her mother would say, an artiste, but some early, misty mornings, as she arranged her produce she’d feel like a painter contemplating a palette: lemon-colored squash, like little bananas, tiny burgundy beets all cunningly arranged in a bed of bright green parsley. In adjacent baskets, plump green butter lettuce just picked from the garden; huge bunches of red-stemmed Swiss chard, feathery bronze fennel, and silver-blue heads of cabbage. Miniature eggplants that tasted like melon and sweet thumbnail-sized golden tomatoes.

On either side, were the stalls of her friends Roz and Sandy. Sandy grew and sold herbs and different kinds of lavender. Roz made honey—clover, wild-flower and lavender, courtesy of hives from Sandy’s fields—and always had some hilarious story about bee-related mishaps. Rhea, the fourth member of the group they called Market Mamas, sold bread that she baked herself—intricately braided glossy brown baguettes, soft floury loaves. Rhea hadn’t been back to the market since Jenny died, but Zoe had started selling home-baked bread and donating the money to a fund established in Jenny’s name.

“Brett wishes I’d sell bread instead of vegetables,” she said now. “But check this out.” She grabbed the roll of flesh between the dirndl waist of her paisley skirt and the bottom of her white peasant blouse. “Molasses, oatmeal, raisin. I’ve got a pumpernickel loaf on each hip.”

“Jeez, I could have sworn that was the jelly doughnuts you talked us into eating this morning,” Sandy said.

“I talked you into eating jelly doughnuts?” Zoe scoffed. “My arm still has marks from your fingernails.”

“Just trying to get my share.” Sandy gestured with her coffee cup at a blond surfer type browsing at a nearby stall. “Thirty? Thirty-five?”

“Try nineteen,” Zoe said, taking a closer look. Checking out the passersby, specifically the reasonably attractive male passersby on this side of fifty—although they kept pushing up the age limit—was a favorite pastime. They were all divorced and, if not actively looking, at least appreciative. They all had kids, too, teenagers—which was mostly what they yakked about. Sandy’s oldest son, Brian, had just gone off to medical school where, according to his mother, he spent as much time chasing babes as he did earning his degree. Dr. Biff, Sandy called him— Biff, the nickname Zoe had always known him by. God, time flies, they were always saying. Before long, her own son would be going off to medical school. The thought always gave her a thrill—she’d be even more thrilled when Brett started getting serious about it, too, but that day would come.

Roz’s daughter had, according to Roz, little ambition other than to get married and have babies. Rhea’s Jenny had shared her mother’s passion for cooking and had been planning to attend culinary school. One of Zoe’s favorite memories was of walking into Rhea’s kitchen and seeing mother and daughter, their two dark heads almost touching, poring over a recipe, or giggling together over some culinary mishap. Since Jenny’s death, so many white hairs had sprouted in Rhea’s wiry dark hair that, from a distance, she seemed to have gone completely gray.

No one had confessed to it, of course, but Zoe had detected an almost palpable sense of relief when she’d told the others that Rhea wouldn’t be coming to the market for a while. They loved her like a sister and would do anything for her, but it sometimes seemed as though Rhea had contracted a contagious disease.

Would there ever be a time, Zoe wondered, when their thoughts wouldn’t inevitably end up with Jenny? For her own part, as soon as she started thinking about Rhea, her mind immediately turned to trying to figure out some way to prevent the same thing from happening to someone else. And there was only one solution: the trauma center had to reopen. Everyone knew neurosurgeons made megabucks—more in a year than she’d make in a dozen, so how hard could it be to find a replacement? It seemed all wrong just to sit back and think, God, I hope nothing happens to my family.

“How much is the lettuce?” A woman in a straw hat and a diaphanous turquoise pantsuit interrupted Zoe’s reverie. Like a crane in a fun fair machine, one fat beringed hand swooped down on the lettuce, lifted it and dangled it between thumb and forefinger under Zoe’s nose.

“Seventy-five cents,” Zoe said.

“They’re selling iceberg three for a dollar at the stall down there.”

Zoe looked at her. “These aren’t iceberg.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Taste.” Zoe offered the woman the ice-chilled bowl of samples, and watched her nibble gingerly at a single lettuce leaf. Dying, Zoe just knew, to ask if it had been washed. “Pretty good, huh?”

The woman sniffed. “Can’t tell the difference, personally.”

“Then you should get the iceberg,” Zoe said.

The woman set the lettuce down and reached for another one. Holding it aloft, she inspected it from all angles.

It’s a damn lettuce, lady. “Picked just this morning,” she told the woman.

“So it’s two for a dollar-fifty?” the woman asked.

“Yep.” Zoe smiled at a couple of teenage girls who had stopped to sniff the pots of basil at the end of the table. “You like pesto?” she asked. “I’ve got a killer recipe.”

“Cool.” One of the girls picked up a pot and fished in the bulging straw bag she was carrying. “How much?”

“Dollar-fifty.” Zoe took the bills the girl handed her, made change and handed over a recipe card.

“They’re not all the same size.” The lettuce woman was still checking things out. “You should charge less for the smaller ones.”

“Or more for the bigger ones.” Zoe imagined hurling an overripe tomato. Splaat. Like a caste mark, right in the middle of the woman’s forehead

“Typical Seacliff,” Roz muttered as the woman walked away.

Zoe grinned. Seacliff might be one of the most picturesquely located farmer’s markets, but it had the lion’s share of patronizing, demanding customers. Not surprising, really. Seacliff was one of those chichi California coastal communities where you either were very rich, or you worked for the very rich. Phillip Barry’s family was very rich, old family money. Until they were thirteen and fifteen respectively, Zoe and her sister Courtney had grown up in a cottage on the Barry family’s oceanfront Seacliff estate, where their mother, Janna, worked as the housekeeper for Phillip Barry’s family.

These days, Phillip, the oldest of the four Barry sons, was a hotshot surgeon at Seacliff Medical Center, while she grew vegetables that she sold at farmers’ markets and occasionally delivered in fancy wicker baskets to oceanfront houses where people like Phillip Barry lived.

Although she didn’t live in Seacliff anymore—wouldn’t want to even if she could afford to—her son Brett…trumpets and fanfare please…attended school there, the same elite private academy that Phillip Barry’s daughter, Molly, now attended. Brett hadn’t been thrilled about changing schools, but the classrooms at the high school were overcrowded, the teaching impersonal and his grades had been dropping. After one semester at Country Day, Zoe had seen enough improvement that, in her mind at least, it justified the expense.

To her way of thinking, Brett himself justified the expense. Not to be overdramatic or anything, but Brett was her life. Plus, he was a terrific kid—bright, popular and destined for big things. And she’d do anything to make them happen. It took endless scrimping and saving, but if sending him to a good school meant starving herself, which, God knows, she never had, or dressing in thrift-shop clothing—which, no problem at all, she did—her son would never, ever have to settle for second best.

She’d never met Molly Barry, but Brett said she had been kicked out of the last fancy school she’d attended and only got into Country Day because her parents were big shots in the community. That’s what drove Zoe crazy about the excuse Phillip Barry had given for closing emergency services. “We have to protect our families.” Huh, if his family came first, she was Mother Teresa.

Maybe that’s what got under her skin. Parents should put their children first, all the time, and not just after the kids had run so far off the rails that their school expelled them. Maybe she’d organize a protest group. Parents Putting Kids First. PAPUKIFI. Sounded like some exotic Hawaiian fruit.

She grabbed a tube of sunblock from her purse under the counter and dabbed the cream on her nose, which had an annoying habit of turning crimson in the sun. Her shoulders and arms were beginning to freckle, and the tops of her breasts were getting a little toasty, too.

Tonight, she suddenly remembered, was her mother’s barbecue. These days Janna was a high-powered real-estate broker. She was also about to become engaged to her boss, Arnie. Zoe had quickly discovered that Arnie knew everything, including what Zoe needed to do to go from growing and selling vegetables as a part-time hobby, his definition, to a dynamic business. Last week Janna had complained that Zoe didn’t like Arnie.

“I adore Arnie,” Zoe had said. “I worship the ground he walks on.”

“You don’t like him and he knows it,” Janna shot back. “And I don’t appreciate your sarcasm. Arnie doesn’t understand why he can’t…connect with you. He and Courtney get along beautifully. She had us over for cocktails last week and we all had a wonderful time. Arnie gets such a kick out of Brett.”

This had prompted Zoe to ask her mother what exactly she’d meant by the remark. Janna had laughed and reached forward to squeeze Zoe’s chin. “Oh, honey, you should see your face. I mention Brett’s name and you’re immediately on the defensive.” She’d laughed some more. “It’s so cute, you’re like a little terrier sniffing out injustice.”

“I am not.” Her face had gone hot. “I just asked what Arnie found so funny about Brett.”

“I didn’t say that,” Janna had corrected her. “I said Arnie got a kick out of him.” Her hand shot out again, but this time Zoe ducked. “See what I mean about you being defensive,” Janna said.

Thinking of Arnie now, Zoe decided that what she’d really get a kick out of would be shoving Arnie and his Mercedes off the cliff. For good measure she’d send fancy-schmancy Phillip Barry along for the ride. She felt hot and disgruntled and tired of people in general.

A woman who was inspecting the bunches of blue delphinium that Zoe had picked that morning selected a bouquet and handed her a ten-dollar bill. Zoe forced herself to smile. She knew she should be focusing on her customers, but her thoughts kept wandering to that conversation with her mother.

“Don’t tell Arnie that I used to be a housekeeper,” Janna had reminded her. Janna’s pretensions drove her crazy. What the hell did it matter if Janna had once been a housekeeper? In fact, sometimes she imagined herself walking into Phillip Barry’s office and cashing in on the family connection as a way to get a discussion started about the trauma services. Hi, I used to be the housekeeper’s daughter…

“Parsnip,” she said aloud to a surfer type a few years older than Brett as he slowed down by her stall to inspect the cartons of fruit and vegetables. “Here.” She handed him a recipe card. “You’ve probably never cooked them, right?”

He grinned. “I thought they were albino carrots.”

“Gotta grate ’em, though, that’s the trick.”

“I’ll remember that,” he said.

“And don’t forget the honey,” Roz said, “which I just happen to have on sale at the next stall.”

“Cool.”

Zoe watched his face. The kid was about as likely to go home and cook parsnips as she was to invite Phillip Barry to join her in a cup of coffee, just for old times’ sake. And, while I’m here, not to get personal or anything, but how could you just let a girl die?

She shook her head. “So, how many pounds you want?” Focus, she told herself. On the customer, not on Phillip Barry.

“Uh…”

“How about a pound to start with?” She grabbed a plastic bag and delved into the crate of parsnips, picked out a couple, inspected them briefly, then discarded them. “Gonna find you some real good ones,” she told him.

“He’s going to find the nearest bin and dump them,” Sandy said a few moments later. “Cute buns though.” She eased herself up from the chair. “Guess I better go troll for a while.”

“IT’S THAT DAMN farmer’s market,” the real estate agent was explaining to Phillip as she tried to find a spot to park her Mercedes. “Not that I don’t like fresh vegetables, but I swear to God, every Wednesday, the parking is a nightmare. And the worse thing is, it brings in the hordes from all around. Let them go to their own markets, for God’s sake. Now this first house I’m going to show you is right on the bluffs. You can sip a martini on the balcony and watch the sun set.”

“Sounds good.” He decided it wasn’t worth mentioning that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been home in time to watch the sun set. “It’s on Neptune, you said?”

She turned to smile at him. “You know Neptune?”

“My family’s place was—”

“Oh, of course.” She shook her head. “Silly me. When you told me your last name, I remembered thinking that you were probably one of those Barrys. Well good.” She expertly maneuvered the Mercedes between a landscaper’s truck and a sports car. “I always say, if you can afford Seacliff, why would you ever leave?”

CHAPTER THREE

“YOU’RE LOOKING in Seacliff, of course,” Phillip’s ex-wife said when she called from New York to ask about his house-hunting search.

“Seacliff and Seacliff Heights.” He’d eaten a dinner of microwaved bean soup and had been dozing off over a pile of catch-up reading when the phone rang. “There was a house in the Heights—”

“God, Phillip. The Heights is awful. No ocean view and it’s full of those hideous new places that they get away with charging millions for just because of the name. I don’t want Molly living there.”

Phillip picked up the journal he’d been reading when he fell asleep, realized he was still hungry and wandered into the kitchen. “I’m still looking,” he said ambiguously. In fact the apartment he’d lived in since their divorce suited him just fine, but if Molly was going to live part-time with him, as he and Deanna had agreed, he needed something with more room. Which reminded him that his ex-wife had agreed to cut down on her traveling.

“Who is with Molly?” he asked. “I thought you weren’t going to New York until next month.”

“My mother is staying at the house…much to Molly’s chagrin. ‘I am not a child, I don’t need a baby-sitter.’ Anyway, I wasn’t supposed to be here, but they’re having a reception for me. I thought it might seem churlish not to show up.”

Deanna would never change, he decided, giving up and switching the subject to one that might be more productive. “So what’s this about her charging up your credit cards?” he asked. Deanna had mentioned this in an earlier call to him at the hospital, but he hadn’t had time to discuss it then.

“The new woman who’s handling all of my business affairs called to question some purchases,” Deanna said. “Specifically a three-hundred-dollar surfboard. She said she didn’t think I was the surfing type.”

Phillip carried the phone out to the balcony. The ocean was dark and calm. He sat down, leaned his head back against the glass of the French door. “Did you talk to Molly about it?”

“I’m in New York, Phillip. And, quite honestly, I’m losing patience for all this. What more could we possibly do for the girl? I haven’t had a minute and I don’t expect things to get better. You have no idea how completely exhausting these tours are. I’ve said I’ll cut back and I will, but for now if you could take care of things—maybe have her for a few weeks, just to give my mother a break—I’d really appreciate it. I told you, didn’t I, that I think it’s a boy again?”

“Specifically, why do you think there’s a boy this time?”

“Call it a mother’s intuition.”

Silence, Phillip decided, was the only tactful response.

“And, I just know it’s one of those damn scholarship kids,” she went on. “She gets these goofy ideas that it’s up to her to save the world. I think she may have pawned my tennis bracelet. Before I left, I turned my room upside down—”

“Did you ask her?”

“No, Phillip, I didn’t ask her. I’m striving for tranquility in my life and confronting Molly would be counterproductive—”

“Of course. Hell of a lot easier to let her pawn your jewelry.”

“I didn’t say she was pawning it, Phillip, I just said…oh, never mind. I don’t know why I even try to discuss anything with you. All I know is I’m sick to death of it all…I don’t care how politically incorrect it sounds, we’re paying God knows how much to send her to the best damn school in the area and she’s hanging out with…gardeners—”

“Gardeners?”

“I don’t know,” she said irritably. “The mother’s a gardener or something. Molly said something about her selling vegetables. Hold on a second…okay, the boy’s name is Brett. He’s called several times. Here’s his number.”

Phillip took a deep breath. “What am I supposed to say? Leave my daughter alone because you’re the son of a gardener?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Phillip. You’re the brain surgeon, you figure something out. I’ve got a book due at the end of next month and my agent is pressing me for updates. I really don’t have time for around-the-clock monitoring, nor, quite frankly, the inclination.”

“Give me the number again.” He took the phone back inside, jotted the number on the cover of last month’s New England Journal of Medicine, ended the call and, with no idea what he was going to say, dialed the boy’s number before he could talk himself out of calling altogether.

An answering machine.

“Hi, there, you’ve reached Zany Zoe at Growing My Way,” the recording said. “Asparagus and apples, beets and broccoli, carrots and cauliflower…well, you get the idea. Leave a message if you want to place an order, or drop by our stall at the Seacliff Farmer’s Market.

He hung up without leaving a message.

“OH, THESE ARE LOVELY, honey.” Janna, at the door of Arnie’s Seacliff Heights condo, took the bunch of mauve and pale blue larkspur Zoe handed her. “Hi, Brett, sweetie.” She embraced her grandson in a quick hug. “God, you get more handsome every time I see you. Got a girlfriend yet?”

Brett grinned. “Can’t talk about it,” he said with a sly glance at Zoe.

“Tell Grandma,” Janna said in a conspiratorial whisper. She’d evidently just come from the nail salon. Her nails—French tip—glistened in the sun-light, the aroma of fresh polish wafting all about her. Janna was fifty-eight but told everyone she was forty-five. A stretch, but on a good day, in the right lighting she could maybe pass. Tonight, she wore a cream linen pantsuit that flattered her curves and her hair was short, blond and artlessly unkempt, as though she didn’t drop big bucks to keep it looking that way. People were always telling Janna that she looked more like Zoe’s older sister than her mother and this thrilled Janna to no end.

“Come on.” Janna cocked her head at Brett. “Don’t be coy.”

“Three,” Brett whispered back. “But don’t tell mom.”

“You little devil,” Janna chuckled.

Zoe folded her arms across her chest. “Maybe you can get some of them to help out about the place. Weed the flower beds, clean out the animal pens, stuff like that.”

“You’re no fun.” Janna swiped at Zoe’s arm. “Your cousins are in the den watching videos,” she told Brett. “And Arnie’s barbecuing salmon steaks out on the patio.” She waited until Brett left, then brought her face close to Zoe’s. “Sweetie, please, please remember, don’t get into…you know, the housekeeper thing. Arnie thinks I lived for years in England.”

“Was I born there?”

Janna eyed her for a moment. “Please don’t be difficult, honey. This means a lot to me.”

“I’m not. If we’re going to have a revisionist history night, I just need to have my facts straight.”

“You know, Courtney was perfectly fine with this. I don’t understand—”

“Was Courtney born in England?”

Janna sighed. “Oh, just forget it, Zoe. I’m sorry I mentioned it. I didn’t think it was that much to ask. Your skin’s broken out, by the way,” she said as she carried the flowers into the kitchen. “A big blotch on your neck.”

Zoe’s fingers moved automatically to her neck. Eczema. An irritating—literally—skin rash that appeared if she ate anything with fish in it, or got stressed about something, like whenever she dealt with her ex-husband. Of course, it was a whole lot easier not to eat fish than it was to avoid dealing with Denny.

Just as she was leaving the house, he’d called to say that he wanted to take Brett to the desert over the July Fourth weekend. She’d said no. One, it wasn’t his weekend to have Brett, and two, the idea of Brett tearing around on his father’s dune buggy terrified her. Brett, of course, wanted to go. “You never let me do anything fun,” he’d complained as they drove over to the barbecue. “It’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair, honey,” she’d said. At that moment, her left arm had started itching. By the time they got to Arnie’s place, she had tracks up and down both arms, and the backs of her legs were burning like crazy.

Now she could smell the fish Arnie was cooking on the patio. Had it even occurred to Janna to mention her daughter’s allergies? Probably not.

Her sister, Courtney, came into the kitchen, cell phone at her ear. Courtney’s two kids from her first marriage, a boy and a girl, were several years older than Brett. The boy, Eric, parked cars at a Seacliff steak house, where his sister, Ellen, was a cocktail waitress. “They’re both working in the service industry,” Courtney was always explaining, “while they decide upon their future directions.”

Translation, they’d both dropped out of junior college after a few semesters, and Ellen had moved in with her boyfriend. Not that Courtney would readily admit that: she’d recently remarried and worked as a receptionist in a travel agency, prompting Janna to describe her—without a trace of irony—as “my ambitious daughter.”

“Okay, bye,” Courtney said into the phone. “Love you, too. Big smooches, I won’t be late.” She hung up and gave Zoe a quick hug. “Hey, your skin’s all broken out.”

“I know.”

“Arnie’s cooking fish,” Courtney said sotto voce, as she adjusted her pistachio-colored sarong and white halter top. To ensure that they showed off her figure to best advantage, Zoe thought. Tall, wheat-colored hair and thin, that was Courtney.

“I’ll eat salad.”

“Oh, my God.” Janna, arranging the larkspur in a vase, clapped a hand to her mouth. “I forgot all about you, Zoe. Arnie wanted salmon and—”

“Don’t worry about it, Mom.” Janna would self-flagellate for the rest of the evening, and Zoe didn’t want to hear it, especially since nine times out of ten Janna served fish when she invited them to dinner.

“Ever tried Benadryl?” Arnie appeared in the kitchen, carrying a platter of salmon. “That would clear it right up.”

“Yep.” She looked at Arnie, who was wearing white pants, the stretchy waist kind that older men played golf in, and a yellow polo-neck shirt with, naturally, Seacliff Country Club embroidered in discreet small lettering above the breast pocket. “Doesn’t help.”

“I could always keep it under control.” Janna had started assembling a salad, overlapping circles of cucumbers, radishes and tomato on a bed of finely chopped lettuce. “I just didn’t have time to be constantly after you to do it.” She stood back to survey her handiwork. “That’s the best I can do with iceberg. I meant to ask you to bring some of your little lettuces, Zoe.” She turned to look at her daughter, frowned and leaned over to lightly stroke the top of Zoe’s head, much as she might have petted a small dog.

“Woof,” Zoe said

“Did you have it cut again?”

“Just the bangs. Did it myself. Attractive, huh?”

“Honey.” Janna’s expression was strained. “Why do you do this sort of thing? I’d give you the money for a decent haircut.”

Zoe raked her fingers through her hair. She’d paid last month’s overdue feed-store bill with the forty dollars—or however much haircuts cost these days—she’d saved by not going to the beauty shop.

“I like it,” she said.

Janna shook her head. “You have absolutely no vanity.”

“Is that a good thing?”

Arnie was banging around, opening cabinets, setting out glasses. “Pay a million dollars for a place, and the damn doors don’t shut properly. Say Zoe, d’you check out that entrepreneur site I told you about?”

Zoe ate a cherry tomato from the salad. “No.” Through the tomato, it came out dlo. “Hey, did anyone catch Phillip Barry on TV?”

“Zoe’s content to just muddle along,” Janna told Arnie apologetically. “Courtney’s my ambitious one. She takes after me. She knows that success doesn’t come seeking you out, you have to actively pursue it.”

“They might put me on commission,” Courtney explained as she leaned against the counter. “I saw him, Zoe. Phillip Barry. Actually, I often see him around Seacliff.” She looked at Arnie. “We know the Barrys from way back.”

Janna loudly cleared her throat.

Courtney grinned. “Oops.”

“The Barrys were neighbors of ours,” Janna said. “For a while.”

“We used to play with their kids,” Courtney said. “Phillip was…what, three or four years older than me?” She looked at Zoe. “Remember cannibal?”

“Vaguely.” Zoe turned to look out of the window. Brett and his cousins sat on the edge of a frothing hot tub. Brett was saying something and the other two were laughing. Ellen lifted a leg and splashed hard, showering Brett with a spray of water. The scene, obviously full of good-natured fun, seemed light-years away from her childhood memories.

One year, it seemed the Barry kids and Courtney had spent the entire summer playing cannibal in this great big metal bathtub. She could still see Phillip Barry’s hateful smirk. He’d looked straight at her arms with their big red blotches and said, “You’ll poison the pot.”

And then the other kids had all laughed, even Courtney. “Screw you,” Zoe had said. “I wouldn’t go in there for a million dollars. I don’t like Barry cooties in my food.”

Zoe stayed at the window, watching Brett, who had moved to sit next to Ellen. They were all laughing now. She wondered what they were talking about. Had Brett told them about this girlfriend his father had mentioned? Probably. She suddenly felt shut out, and somehow extraneous.

“The other kids wouldn’t let Zoe play cannibal,” Courtney was telling Arnie. “They thought her rash was contagious. Remember that, Zoe? How you got so mad?”

“Not really,” Zoe lied. Even now, she ached for the fierce little kid she’d been then. Locked in the bathroom, crying and scratching her legs and arms until she drew blood. Maybe Phillip Barry was God’s gift to medicine, but she could only think of him as a grown-up version of a horrible, snobby boy with a knack for cruelty.

“Oh, her skin wasn’t that bad,” Janna said. “It just flared up now and then because she forgot to put stuff on it. Remember all those salves I used to buy? If you’d just used them the way you were supposed to, you wouldn’t have had the flare-ups.”

Zoe turned from the window to stare at Janna. The scaly, oozing outbreaks at the backs of her knees had been so bad that it hurt to walk. Every day had been like that. Sitting on her bike, gears disengaged, a hand against the wall to keep her stationary, frantically pedaling around and around to unstick her legs. Had her mother really forgotten all that?

“Well, let’s talk about something else,” Janna said brightly. “Arnie, hon, what do you think Zoe could get for that house of hers if she put it on the market?”

“PAM SAID you should take Saint-John’s-wort,” Brett told Zoe the next morning as she was sweeping up the shards of a coffee cup she’d accidentally knocked off the counter. “She said it helped her when she was getting mad about everything.”

Zoe practiced deep breathing. Okay, breaking the coffee mug hadn’t been an accident. It was more like leftover anger from the night before. And hearing Pam’s name this morning did nothing to improve her mood. Pam, Denny’s twenty-eight-year-old surfer-chick bride. Pam wore neon-colored bikinis and bodysurfed. Last week in a late-night phone call Denny had asked Zoe if she could get by with half of the monthly child-support check because he wanted to surprise Pam with a trip to Hawaii to celebrate their three-month anniversary. Zoe had sweetly suggested that he do something anatomically impossible with his surfboard.

After Brett went off to school, Zoe slipped on her gardening clogs and went outside to augment the soil in the flower beds. Physical work to shake the surly, disgruntled aftertaste that family matters tended to leave in her mouth. An hour or so later, she looked up to see a guy in bib overalls and a straw hat pulling down the steep driveway towing a horse trailer behind a battered white truck. By the time she reached him, he’d unloaded a tan-and-white Shetland pony from the trailer and was leading it toward her.

“Heard from the feed-store guy that you keep a few animals.” He patted the pony’s neck. “This one here’s looking for a home. Used to give kids rides in a petting zoo, but she’s getting along in years. Ready for retirement,” he said with a laugh. “Know exactly how she feels.”

“Hold on.” Zoe ran into the house, grabbed a carrot from the refrigerator bin and brought it back for the horse who accepted it eagerly. She watched it, chewing contentedly with big square teeth, orange goo oozing from the side of its mouth. Cute, she thought. Blond bangs like a schoolgirl’s hanging over big brown eyes.

“You already have four goats, a sheep, three dogs and a litter of feral cats that you need to get fixed,” the voice of reason pointed out.

Kenna, Brett’s black Lab, was at her side doing some exploratory sniffing around the horse’s hind-quarters. At the bottom of the property, she could hear the two other dogs—Domino, part wolf according to Brett, and Lucy, a big shepherd mix she’d rescued from the animal shelter—barking at the goats. Last weekend, she and Brett had spent three hours stringing up an electric fence around the goats’ pen. The dogs were curious more than anything, but they alarmed the goats, which Zoe didn’t think could be good for their milk or the cheese she eventually wanted to produce. All those stress hormones.

“Gentle, too.” The guy wanted her to make a decision. “Loves kids.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Zoe said. “Warn the neighbors.”

The guy gave her a look—the same look her sister Courtney always gave her when she figured Zoe had to be joking but she didn’t find it especially funny. The horse finished the carrot and Zoe extended her fingers for it to lick.

“Got into some poison ivy?” The guy gestured at tracks that ran down her left arm and bloomed into a red cluster on the back of her hand. A new crop had appeared in the aftermath of Janna’s dinner.

“Yeah.” She shrugged. Easier than explaining what it really was. Without thinking, she began to scratch and then caught herself. She studied the horse. She was bony, her sides caving with each breath, but her perky cream mane was curiously touching. As if the horse was doing her best to be cute. Zoe realized she was hooked.

“Don’t horses need a lot of grooming?” She gestured around at the overgrown lawn, the roses sprouting bright red hips, the vigorous crop of dandelions. Brett was supposed to keep the grass cut, but constantly getting after him to do it was sometimes more trouble than dragging out the mower herself. “I’ve got more than I can do just to keep up with all this.”

He shrugged. “Get someone to help, why don’t you?”

Zoe eyed him briefly. “Money?”

“Oh, that.” His teeth, when he grinned, were roughly the size and color of the pony’s. “Yeah, what’s it they say? A necessary evil.”

She stroked the pony’s nose. “What does she eat?”

“Alfalfa, Bermuda. Some feed. Nothing fancy.”

“Expensive?”

“Nah.”

“What d’you think, Kenna?” She scratched the dog’s neck. “Think your master will groom her? Feed her? Keep her pen clean?”

“She’s yours for fifty bucks,” the guy said. “And I’ll throw in a bale of alfalfa.”

“Thirty,” Zoe said, visualizing her checkbook balance.

“Done.”

Nothing like buying a cheap horse to make you feel better, she decided later as she raked straw across its pen. It was things like this, unexpected gifts almost, that confirmed her belief that even if marrying Denny McCann hadn’t been the smartest move she’d ever made, it was also no cause for regret.

The biggest reason, of course, was Brett, but, shortly after Brett was born, Denny had managed to convince her that buying three acres of undeveloped land in northern San Diego County would be a good business investment.

The plan at the time had been for Denny to build houses on the property, one for them and then three others that he’d sell. “We’ll be set financially, babe,” he’d gloated. “I won’t ever have to work again.”

Omit the words, “have to,” and the second part at least was true.

Back then though, blissed out by the joys of new motherhood, not to mention sleep deprivation, she’d been pretty much indifferent to the idea of buying property. If Denny thought he could make it work, then fine.

While the first house—their house—was being built, she and Denny and Brett had lived in a trailer. Before ground was broken for the second house—actually before Denny had completely finished their own house—he’d succumbed to the charms of a young bank teller.

Zoe had kicked him out. He hadn’t taken a whole lot of convincing and, in a fit of conscience or guilt, had signed over the property to her. “You’re going to have to make the payments though,” he’d told her.

But of course.

The house, a gray two-story wooden structure, vaguely ramshackle New England in style, with a long back deck and steeply sloping roof now seemed so completely hers she could hardly remember her ex-husband’s role in its inception. Kind of like his role in creating their son, really.

Three acres of land and she knew every inch of it, from the gully at the bottom of the property that sometimes flooded after a heavy winter rain, to the faint pale green sheen on the distant brown hills that appeared after the first rains of the year. By early spring her land turned as lush and verdant as Ireland, lasting until about June, when the green faded to gold.

She loved it in every season. Like right now, walking through the beds of tomato plants, the pungent smell of ripening fruit, the sun warm on her back, Kenna trailing at her heels on the off chance that some food might be involved.

“You are getting way too smart for your own good,” she said.

“Woof.”

“Sit.” The dog sat, almost quivering with anticipation, her eyes on Zoe’s hand as Zoe reached into a huge old mailbox on the potting table in the middle of the garden. Dog biscuits. Kenna’s tail was going crazy now, her front feet dancing a little jig. “We’re happy, huh Boofuls?” Zoe threw the biscuit and watched the dog carry it off. She always got a kick out of how furtive Kenna looked as she trotted off with the prize. Gotta hide this real good, she could imagine the dog thinking. Never know when someone might get a taste for Old Roy peanut-flavored dog biscuit.

Some of the branches of the plants were so heavy with tomatoes that they were touching the ground, and she decided now was as good a time as any to do a little cleanup. As she went into the garage for twine and nippers, the phone rang from inside the house.

“Hello,” she said, breathless from running to catch it.

The line went dead.

Zoe stared at the phone and felt her newly improved mood begin to slump. This had been happening a lot lately. Nothing there when she picked up the phone. Once a girl had asked for Brett.

“May I tell him who’s calling?”

“Oh, he’ll know.”

“Maybe I’d also like to know.”

Click.

Brett tell you about his girlfriend?

She and Brett seemed to be fighting over everything lately.

You want to end up like your father, Brett? Is that what you want?

If she had a dollar for every time she’d stopped herself from blurting that question, she’d be a wealthy woman. And as much as she’d like to credit her restraint with something high-minded, like fairness at all costs, the main reason she never asked her son if he wanted to end up like his dad was a suspicion that Brett might say that turning out like his dad would be pretty cool. A garage full of toys—surfboards, water skis, a cluster of dirt bikes; summer weekends vrooming across the water in a sleek white powerboat, winter weekends snowboarding in the local mountains. A hot-looking babe for a wife. How bad could that be?

A more pertinent question might be Do you want to end up like me?

Last month she’d attended her twentieth high-school reunion. Reluctantly. Her friend had practically had to drag her there. “Come on. It’ll be fun.”

Right. Wearing heels was never fun and neither was anything else about the evening. Like the emerald-green silk dress she’d bought from Second Time Around that clung like a fretting child to her legs, or the large, laminated and hideously embarrassing picture of herself at eighteen, or Evelyn Something-or-other, Ph.D., former class valedictorian, who had droned on about how reunions were a chance to catch up on one another’s lives.

“A reunion is an opportunity to examine our own life narrative,” Earnest Evelyn had told the assembled crowd in the San Diego Hilton ballroom. “A chance to consider the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we became that person. Always remember though,” she’d cautioned, “reunions can also threaten the integrity of those stories by subjecting them to the scrutiny of others, to friends and acquaintances whose memories of the past and of us may be altogether different from our own.”

That bit at least had gotten Zoe’s attention. In fact she’d fallen asleep thinking about it. Less about how she got to be the person she was—she could pretty much work that out—than why her version of who she was, which she was quite satisfied with, thank you very much—seemed so out of whack with the way everyone else saw her. Who exactly was fooling whom?

CHAPTER FOUR

AFTER HE’D TRIED TWICE to reach the boy’s mother and got Zany Zoe’s recorded message, Phillip decided he’d talk to Molly before he tried the number again. He reached her from his office, between surgeries.

“Hello?” a young, female voice responded.

“Hi.” Was this Molly? Embarrassing, but he couldn’t be sure. “Moll?”

“Dad?” It was Molly. “Something wrong?”

“No,” he said. “Why would you think that?”

“Uh, duh, Dad. Why do you usually call me?”

Phillip exhaled through this mouth, slumped in his chair. In his peripheral vision, he saw Eileen motioning to him. He covered the receiver. “Eileen?”

“Hospital administration on line two.”

“I’ll call right back.” He spoke into the receiver. “What’s up?”

“You called me, Dad.”

“I know I called you, Molly, I—”

“Well, you’re making it sound like I called you.”

“I’m not making it sound like anything.” He forced himself to relax. Exactly when they’d gone from being friends to adversaries, he couldn’t say, but lately every conversation with Molly seemed to go this way. “I just called—”

“What time is it?” Molly demanded. “I was still asleep.”

“It’s after noon, Molly.”

“So?”

“You were sleeping when I came to take you out to lunch last week.”

“So what?” Her voice had escalated a notch. “I was tired.”

“You don’t have school?” he asked, looking up as Eileen tapped on his door. “Hold on a minute, Moll. Yes?”

“That reporter from the Tribune. He has a follow-up question.”

“Tell him I’ll call him back.”

“He asked me to interrupt you. He said he’s on a deadline.”

“Hold on again, Moll.” He clicked the hold button and pressed the other line. “I have a question for you,” he said to the reporter. “What if you’d caught me in the middle of surgery?”

The reporter laughed. “I’m tenacious.”

“Okay,” Phillip said. “So what’s the question?”

“Confirmation really. You said on a typical day, you usually do four surgeries.

“Scheduled surgeries. There could be one or two emergency surgeries.”

“But not after-hours?”

“We’ve suspended twenty-four-hour coverage.” Phillip repeated the statement he’d given to every press query received since he and his partner had made the decision. Repetition didn’t make it any easier. Tonight, if there was a head-on crash in or around Seacliff, he didn’t say, or the gun and knife contingent went on a rampage, head or spinal injuries needing neurosurgery services would be airlifted to a center to the north, a potentially deadly delay. Worse, they’d be taken to the nearest E.R. where the chances of being misdiagnosed or undertreated by a sleep-deprived second-year resident…he stopped the thought.

“Any chance you’ll be starting up again?”

“Not until we find a third partner,” Phillip said. The green hold light had gone out; Molly had hung up. He finished with the reporter and redialed her number. It rang four times before she answered.

“Sorry, Moll.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Molly…”

“Well, it’s not like I’m used to having your undivided attention. Like I’m suddenly thinking, ‘Whoa what’s with Dad? Omigod, his mind doesn’t seem to be on what I’m saying. I wonder what’s wrong—’”

“Knock it off, Molly. Let’s talk about you running up your mother’s American Express card.”

She sighed noisily. “I needed stuff, Dad. That’s why Mom said I could use the card in the first place.”

“Fifteen hundred dollars buys a lot of stuff. What stuff did you need?”

“Fine, forget it. I won’t use the damn card again. I don’t want to go through some stupid inquisition.”

“This isn’t an inquisition, Molly. I’m just asking you to account for the fifteen hundred dollars you charged this month.”

“I’m buying drugs.”

“Drugs?”

“You know, cocaine, heroin. Whatever I can get my hands on.”

“Very funny.” It was a joke, right? He might reject the psychiatrist’s diagnosis, but Molly frequently baffled him: her mercurial moods, the sudden and inexplicable obsessions—was it last month that she’d gone on, endlessly it seemed, about wheat grass? And before that, fasting as the cure to any medical problem. That one had driven him nuts. But, as Deanna had pointed out, whacky ideas were part of being seventeen. Drugs, though, hadn’t really occurred to him as a serious possibility. Molly wasn’t losing weight, she had no needle marks, and her eyes didn’t show any signs of drug use.

Denial? The psychiatrist smirked. Phillip pushed away the image.

“Anyway, fifteen hundred dollars,” Molly was saying now. “Big deal. Mom spends that on her facials.”

“We’re talking about you.”

“I needed clothes, Dad.”

“For yourself?”

“Of course for myself. What d’you think?”

“Your mother said something about a boy.”

“What boy?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

Silence on the line.

“Moll?”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now, Dad.”

“Is there a time you would feel like talking about it?”

More silence. “We could get something to eat at Swaami’s.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, like in an hour.”

“I’ll be in surgery in an hour, Molly.”

“Whatever,” she said.

The line went dead. In the outer office, he heard a phone ringing, then Eileen’s voice. “Next Thursday? Mmm…let me take a quick look at his schedule, but Thursdays are really booked tight.” He heard the tap of computer keys and then Eileen laughed. “True, Dr. Barry’s one busy man.”

“Dr. Barry.” Eileen’s voice now came through on the intercom. “Mrs. Barry on line two.”

He picked up the phone. “Yes, Deanna?”

“Tell Deanna she can wait,” said a voice from the doorway.

“Hold on,” Phillip told his ex-wife. The woman who’d just spoken was now walking into his office. He stared, slightly stunned, as she seated herself in the chair opposite his desk, watching him with a faint smile as though perhaps she knew him. He was quite sure he didn’t know her. He wasn’t in the habit of thinking in artistic or literary terms, but the term Rubenesque came to mind. Needs to lose a few pounds, Deanna would have sniffed. Voluptuous, he thought. High color, a great deal of fair hair and…breasts. Full and white, they seemed in imminent danger of tumbling from the low neck of the yellow blouse she wore. Not perky, twenty-year-old breasts, but full, lush, sensuous breasts. He mentally shook his head.

She crossed her legs. She wore sandals with thin leather straps that tied around the ankles. The hem of her long yellow-and-red skirt brushed the top of her left ankle. Beads and bracelets circling both arms created a constant small symphony of sound.

In his peripheral vision, he could see Eileen frowning in the doorway.

“I couldn’t stop her,” she explained.

“Phillip,” his ex-wife said. “I don’t have all day.”

“Just a second.” He addressed the woman. “What’s the problem?”

“Hi.” She gave him a long look. “How are you?”

He waved a hand, dismissing the formalities. “Do we have an appointment?”

“No.” She looked mildly amused, as if she knew something that he didn’t. “I guess that’s the acceptable way to gain access to your inner sanctum, huh? An appointment. Kind of weeds out the crazies. Sorry, I’ve never been very good at that kind of formality.

“Dr. Barry.” Eileen motioned from the doorway, and pantomimed dialing a phone. Security? she inquired, silently mouthing the word.

Phillip shook his head. As soon as he learned what she thought she was doing here, he’d send her on her way.

The woman pulled a newspaper from her bag, slapped the front page on his desk. Did Jenny Have To Die? the headline read. “I don’t know what kind of whitewash job you did on this reporter, but we both know this doesn’t even come close to telling the real story.”

He looked at her. So this was the problem—the Todd Bowen article about Jenny Dixon. “And, what in your opinion, is the real story?”

“Okay, so you closed the emergency neurology services, but you didn’t stop being a neurosurgeon, right? You could have come in.” She nodded her head toward the newspaper he had just moved out of her reach. “I’m sure you had some terrific reason, I just thought maybe you’d do me a favor and share it with me.”

Phillip could hear his ex-wife calling his name. “I’ll call you back,” he told Deanna, and put down the phone.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the woman. “You’ll need to talk to someone in administration.” She didn’t appear convinced, so he stood up. “Look ma’am—”

“Ma’am. God, I hate being called ‘ma’am.’”

And he hated the fact that he was having the damnedest time keeping his eyes off her breasts. Words he’d long forgotten he ever knew ran through his brain. Wench. Moll Flanders. He forced himself to look up at her face. Amber eyes and a full mouth. Her clothes, he thought, would just slip off. Her breasts already appeared in danger of escape.

She noticed his focus and tugged at her blouse. As he marshaled his thoughts, it occurred to him that perhaps she was part of a gag perpetrated by one of his partners. Last year, on April first, he’d walked in to his office to find a temporary secretary in a fringed buckskin jacket sitting at Eileen’s desk, snapping gum and filing her nails. Eileen was sick, she’d told him. After several hours of horrendous inefficiency, he’d finally asked for the name of her temporary agency so that he could send her back. Just then, his partner, Stu, an inveterate prankster, had walked into the office, laughing uproariously as he confessed to the joke. Later, Eileen confessed, too; Stu had roped her into it. Stu might have struck again. Frankly, he would prefer that she was the latest of Stu’s jokes, rather than someone completely on the level.

“I didn’t catch your name,” he finally said.

“I didn’t throw it to you,” she said.

He folded his arms across his chest and waited.

“Defensive posture,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“Arms crossed like that.” She folded hers in the same way. “Denotes guardedness. Keep out, that’s what it says.”

He looked beyond her shoulder, hoping to spot Eileen. “So your name is…” he prompted.

“Um…” She appeared to be thinking about the question. “You don’t know, huh?”

“Should I?”

“Course not.” Another pause while she seemed to be thinking things over. “Anyway, my name isn’t important. I’m here on behalf of Jenny. The girl who died in the ambulance. All the Jennys and all their parents and families, who assume that if they need emergency room services, they’ll receive appropriate medical care.”

“Are you a relative?”

She looked at him. “Not relevant. Jenny could be a perfect stranger and her death would still be tragic and unnecessary.”

Phillip said nothing. He couldn’t. After the Bowen article, the hospital’s legal team had been crystal clear—he couldn’t discuss Jenny Dixon. Maybe he should send the woman down to legal.

“As if it isn’t awful enough to lose a child,” she said, “but then to know that this child didn’t have to die. You want to know my name? I’ll tell you what. You can call me Concerned. Frustrated. Mad as Hell.”

Or Crazy. Phillip reconsidered calling security. Last week in L.A., an angry family member of a former patient had walked into administration and fatally shot the assistant hospital administrator. The woman sitting across from him had a large yellow straw bag at her feet. Could be a gun inside for all he knew.

She leaned forward and jabbed at the newspaper on his desk. “How would you feel if this were your daughter?”

Caught off guard by the question, he felt a moment of panic. Did this woman know Molly? Just then his secretary appeared behind the woman’s shoulder. “Dr. Samuels on line one, Dr. Barry. Administration on line two and you need to get down to conference—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” The woman nodded her head. “We get the idea, Dr. Barry is one busy dude. But I think, we, the Jennys of the world, deserve some answers. Why wouldn’t you come in that night—”

He needed to stop her questions. Now. “First of all, this isn’t about me. The trauma-system problem is a nationwide issue…” He wanted her to leave. The mild curiosity he’d initially felt had subsided along with his patience. She was, he was certain now, just another run-of-the mill crackpot. Her concern was probably genuine enough, but her methods needed work. “Second, unless you understand all the facts—”

“Exactly why I’m here.” She settled into the chair in a way that clearly meant to say she had all day. “What I want to understand is this. As Jenny was riding around in the ambulance, what exactly prevented someone, anyone, from coming in to save her? Really, I’m trying to imagine. You, Dr. Neurosurgeon, are asleep in your multimillion-dollar oceanfront house when the phone rings. A girl will die unless you come in to save her. What do you say? ‘Too bad, that’s the breaks,’ and just roll over and go back to sleep?”

The arrival of a security guard, apparently summoned by Eileen, saved him from having to answer the question, but not from feeling the bite of her anger.

“Brilliant solution,” the woman said as a blue-uniformed guard, who probably outweighed her by two hundred pounds or so, took her arm. “But you haven’t heard the last from me.”

SOMETIMES BRETT FELT he was surrounded by crazies. Like his mom, for instance, when she made him go sit in the car like he was some little kid while she ragged to his dad about taking him surfing.

Or like last week, when he got home from school and she was reading this magazine article.

“Watcha reading, Mom?” Like he cared, but he was trying to be nice. So she gives him this guilty look like he’s caught her doing something wrong.

Just because she looked so sneaky, he took a look over her shoulder to check out what she was reading. A full-page ad.

“It’s a moment all parents dread. The first time they hand over the car keys to their teen driver.” He read some more. ‘’Drivers in the sixteen-to-twenty-two-year-old age group are involved in more accidents and fatalities than…”

Then he figured out what the ad was all about and stopped reading.

“Jeez, Mom.”

“What?”

“See, that’s what I mean about you making a big deal out of everything. Roger’s folks are buying him a car—”

“And you can use the truck…”

“To go to the store. Big deal.” As soon as he said it, he knew he’d made a mistake. A few weeks ago, he’d driven the truck to pick up some stuff for her from the market and then, just because it felt so cool to be sitting behind the wheel, even if the truck was kind of a dump, he’d driven over to Roger’s, which was only three blocks from the market, but then Roger wasn’t home so he’d driven to another friend’s house and hung out there for a while. His mom had climbed all over him for that. She’d been standing at the door waiting as he pulled up.

“Three hours for a five-minute trip to the market?”

“Come on, Mom. I was just hanging out at—”

“Just hanging out. How did I know you hadn’t had an accident? How did I know you weren’t lying in an emergency room somewhere?”

He’d been grounded for a week, which he pretty much expected but then when she didn’t mention it again, he thought she’d forgotten all about it. Right.

“It’s a tracking device.” She was looking at the ad again. “When you’re driving, it will send me reports on your location, whether you’re speeding…”

Yep, his mom was definitely crazy, all right. And now, today, he walks in and she’s in the kitchen, standing over a screeching kettle. Just standing there, her back to him, with the kettle hissing and screeching away. Screech…rattle…hssssssssss. Standing there, like she had no idea it was practically falling off the stove, it was shaking so hard.

He coughed so she would know he was there, but she didn’t turn around.

“Mom?”

Finally. She turned off the gas, banged a mug on the counter and dropped a tea bag in it.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“The world.” She poured water into the mug. “Skewed priorities, inequity.” With her thumb and finger, she fished the tea bag out of the mug and threw it toward the trash can. Missed.

He bent down, scooped it up and tossed it. That’s how his mom talked: big words, big concepts. “Gotta overcome that genetic predisposition,” she’d say if she came in and caught him watching TV. Genetic predisposition. Translation. Don’t be like your father. “Skewed priorities” meant she’d probably been to see Rhea and got all fired up about Jenny dying while doctors played golf or something.

“I’m sorry, honey,” she said now. “I’m just in a very bad mood. Give me a few minutes, okay?”

“Sure.” He wondered what was for dinner.

“Getting people to pay attention,” his mom said. She was sitting at the table now, staring into her mug of tea like it was a crystal ball or something. “That’s the first step to creating change.”

Sure, Mom, he thought. Whatever you say. If anyone could make people pay attention, it was his mom. Sometimes she made him feel tired, like he’d been caught up in a hurricane and pushed around by all the noise and movement. Once Hurricane Zoe got rolling, no one thought for a minute she wouldn’t do what she’d set out to do. She’d get on these kicks…like right now it was getting the trauma services started again. The last one was getting a stop-light put in on this street where some little kid got run over, and before that it was getting a new trial for this black guy who was in jail for murdering a girl. Now the guy was out, back to working as a schoolteacher and telling everyone that he owed it all to Zoe McCann.

She’d even gotten herself arrested once for protesting against something. He couldn’t remember what it was now, but they’d shown her on TV being dragged across the street by a couple of cops. That’s how she was. Grandma said her own mother had led some kind of protest about women not being allowed into this bar where all the men were playing darts. Grandma and Aunt Courtney weren’t like that, though, but Grandma said these things sometimes skipped generations.

All he knew was that he didn’t want that gene, or whatever it was, lurking inside him waiting for a chance to make him act obnoxious. Not that his mom would call it obnoxious though, she’d say it was standing up for herself. Don’t let anyone push you around, ever, she was always telling him. You’re as good as anyone. Just remember that.

Like he could forget when she reminded him practically every day? Not that he wasn’t kind of proud of his mom, even though she sometimes drove him nuts the way she sucked him into all her energy. Like she was so big on him being a doctor, he even told the school counselor that’s what he wanted, too. Except that he didn’t know what he wanted to be, maybe a carpenter or something, like his dad—not that he’d ever tell her that. Plus, he hated chemistry and the other science stuff.

He watched her, still sitting there looking into her mug of tea. Uh, Mom? Dinner? I’m only like starving to death. He had a secret stash of burritos behind his mom’s bags of frozen whatever it was that she was always digging up from the garden, but with her in the kitchen there was no way he could get to it without her making this big, humongous deal about it. She’d grab the burrito box from him and start reading the list of ingredients. Picking out these long words that didn’t even sound like something you should put in your mouth. “Where did you get this disgusting thing from anyway?”

Then she’d fix him with a look that said she knew damn well where they’d come from. Pam, his father’s new wife, who looked more like a cheerleader than a stepmom and couldn’t cook to save her life, was always giving him stuff to take home with him. He knew she did it mostly to bug his mom, but, hey, he liked frozen burritos. When his mom made Mexican food, she always tried to put in stuff like zucchini.

“I am so furious at myself.” She brought her fists down so hard on the table that the mug jumped and the tea splashed all over the place. “God, I’m an idiot.”

He stopped thinking about how he could get a burrito from the freezer and microwave it without her noticing, and sat down at the table. “Why? Granny Janny?” His grandma always put his mom in a bad mood. Aunt Courtney this and Aunt Courtney that, he mimicked his mom’s voice in his head. Once he’d asked his mom if she was jealous of Aunt Courtney and then she’d really blown up.

“No. I told you, I’m mad at myself.”

“What’s for dinner, Mom?”

“Dinner?” She looked up as though she’d suddenly noticed he was sitting there. “Oh, honey…I’m sorry, I got so caught up in…I’m so sorry, sweetie.” Now she had her arm around his shoulder. “God, I didn’t realize the time, you must be starving—”