“Bogus.”  Deena dropped her head again.  “Why can’t my father work for a bank or something?”

            I tried to imagine Ed investing the funds of helpless old ladies.  Taking breaks as the market crashed around him to read new interpretations of Buber or the spiritual significance of cellular mitosis.   I told her there was cereal in the cupboard.

            “Nothing I’d eat.”

            There was no chance Deena would starve.  My softly padded daughter has a healthy respect for food and a disdain for Hollywood’s skinny glamour girls.  I’m not sure where her positive self-image originates, but I’m sure not going to root around in her psyche to find out.

            Deena got up, chair riding comfortably in the new grooves in the floor, and went to the refrigerator.  While I finished washing dishes she stood at the refrigerator and ate a carton of blueberry yogurt, half a banana and a chocolate chip muffin that I’d salvaged from Sunday’s social hour.  The minister’s salary might be small, but the parish house leftovers make up for a lot.

            Deena closed the door and faced me.  This month her strawberry blond hair falls straight to her shoulders.  Hair, we take day by day, never knowing what the morrow might bring.  Her skin is still smooth and clear, her cheeks plump and rose-tinted.  Most of the time she is more interested in cleaning out stalls at a country horse farm than in her image in the mirror.  This will change, I know, but for now I revel in her disinterest.

            “Do I have to put on different clothes?”

            I recognized a challenge when I heard one.  “Not if you don’t care what people think.”

            “Not people.  The ladies group.”

            “Last time I looked they were people.  And it’s the Women’s Society.”

            “Society women.  Ladies.”  Her shrug said it all.  “Is the witch flying here on her broom?”

            This particular metaphor was the first of its kind, but no mystery.  “Mrs. Falowell.  And can the cute stuff, okay?”

            “She acts like a witch.”  Deena picked at the edge of a counter where the Wedgewood blue laminate was cracking.  Children, I discovered long ago, make it their sworn mission to expose and highlight all flaws.

            I couldn’t blame my daughter for disliking Gelsey.  They'd  had an unfortunate run-in.  Last month Lady Falowell had caught my daughter riding her bike across the church lawn in a short cut to the street.  She had lectured Deena at length on the expense of grass seed and fertilizer and respect for church property.  Deena, never easily intimidated, had suggested that the Women’s Society buy her a horse to replace the bike.  The horse could keep the precious grass mowed and fertilized.  What a bargain.

            Ed had heard every detail of that conversation from a number of different sources, all of them female and post-sixty.  Luckily for us, most had been smiling as they recounted it.

            I tried to calm the waters.  “Sometimes when people live alone, they get stuck on certain things that seem silly to the rest of us.”

            “She doesn’t have anything else going on in her life so she picks on kids.”  Deena had been a PK--preacher’s kid--from birth.  She knew the score.

            Picks on kids.  On ministers.  On the partners of ministers.  “Something like that,” I said.

            “How long is she going to be here?”

            As long as it took to drop hints that whatever we thought of the Society’s plans for pruning our yard didn’t matter.  Because the Reverend Edward Wilcox, his wife Agate Sloan-Wilcox and their two obnoxiously precocious daughters wouldn’t be living in Emerald Springs long enough to disapprove.

            I scoured the counter and wondered why that thought made me sad.  Emerald Springs and I are not simpatico.  The town doesn't have a Chinese restaurant, for heaven’s sake, never mind Thai, Salvadoran, Ethiopian.  The movies that make their way to the local triplex in our one and only shopping mall routinely rate two thumbs down.  Emerald Springs is a one-horse town--or would have been if Gelsey had acted on Deena’s suggestion.

            “I don’t know how long she’ll be here,” I told my pouting daughter as I tried not to think about what that pout would do to hormonal teenage boys in a year or two.  “They’re coming to look at the yard.  And you’ll be on your best behavior.”

            Any argument was forestalled by Teddy and Ed’s return.  Moonpie streaked up the stairs, probably not to be seen or eulogized for the rest of the day.

            Teddy joined her sister.  They weren’t peas in a pod, my darling daughters, but they clearly had the same father.  Ed’s light reddish hair, Ed’s dark blue eyes.  Teddy was thin and athletic, the bane of every little boy on her soccer team, and the lusher Deena was on her way toward being a different sort of bane.  But sisters they clearly were.

            I, on the other hand, look only like myself.  Ed once described me as “not quite.”  My eyes aren’t quite brown, not quite hazel.  My hair’s not quite black.  My body’s not quite fashionably thin--I have boobs that make “dartless” clothing a joke.

            I’m not quite pretty, although I suspect this never deterred a man, who only saw the boobs anyway.  And in my opinion, this particular “not quite” was a blessing.  I gave up trying to compete with other women once I realized I was not quite in the contest. 

            I developed other parts of myself.  Parts that are clearly going to waste in Emerald Springs.

            “I think I hear a car,” Ed said.

            In a rush I remembered everything I hadn’t done.  Taken out glasses and placed them on a tray.  Filled them with ice.  Opened cans of juice and poured them in a glass pitcher.  Discovered the latest hiding place for our paper napkins.  The board was early by more than half an hour, but I should have expected that.  Gelsey was the sort of woman who would try to catch Ed off guard.

            “You greet, I’ll finish here,” I told my husband. “But change the shirt first.”

            He looked down as if trying to imagine what might be wrong.  It said Harvard, after all.  “Something with a collar,” I prompted.  “Something without writing on it.”

            He left for the master bedroom.  I made my best guess on the napkins and celebrated a minor victory in the third drawer of an old maple cabinet in the corner.  Deena grudgingly agreed to change her clothes, too, and left the room, and Teddy agreed to let the board in after they knocked. Even Gelsey would have trouble finding fault with our Teddy in her beribboned pigtails and favorite denim jumper.

            Motherhood is the best training for doing everything in double time.  I finished piling cookies on the platters, got out the ice trays and managed to open the juice cans.  I was feeling on top of things, minimally in control of my destiny, when a scream from our front yard put an end to that. 

            “Teddy!”  I knew the scream hadn’t come from my daughter since it had clearly come from an older, hoarser throat, but I was determined to make sure the next one didn’t come from Teddy, either.

            I sprinted down our center hallway and arrived at the front door before Teddy could open it.  Another scream followed the first.  Louder and longer, ending on a wail that indicated another would begin as soon as the screamer breathed. 

            “Go upstairs and get your Daddy,” I told Teddy, barring the door with my body.  I wasn’t sure we needed Ed, but I was sure my daughter shouldn’t be a party to whatever had happened outside.

            Curious Teddy was less sure, trying to peer around my body and out the sidelights.  Hands firmly on her shoulders, I turned her and sent her off to get her father. Teddy was on the landing and out of sight before I pulled open the heavy front door.  A woman lay across our wide front porch, staring glassy-eyed at the sky-blue tongue and groove ceiling.

            It only took one horrified glance to see she was badly in need of one of Teddy’s funerals.  And clothing, for that matter.  Except for the tattoo of a cobra with a skeleton’s head curving around one ample breast, the dead woman, a hard-used blonde, was stark naked.