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storing cartons (all of which were now “stored“ in her own bedroom). It had a double bed, a chair, a tiny dressing table, and a closet the size you might find in a train compartment. Worse, Phyllis would have to share a bathroom with Jane’s kids, a gruesome fate.
    But Phyllis didn’t find anything odd or inconvenient about the arrangement. She admired the pretty bedspread, commented favorably on the view of the field behind the house from the small single window, and complimented Jane on the felt Christmas banner hanging on the wall over the bed.
    “Phyllis, I hate to be rude, but there’s an errand Shelley and I have to do. I promised to help her take some things out of her car, and I don’t want to stick her with the job. It’ll only take fifteen minutes or so. Do you mind if I leave you here to unpack?“
    “Of course not,“ Phyllis said, giving her a quick hug to emphasize her sincerity. “I don’t want to be the least trouble to you.“
    “You’re not trouble at all. I’m glad to have you here,“ Jane lied. And yet, it wasn’t entirely a lie. If it hadn’t been for Bobby, she’d be enjoying Phyllis’s presence.
     

Five
     
    Bobby was blitzing through television channels, trying to find something to suit his tastes when Jane came back down. Shelley was in the kitchen, pacing. “Bobby, I’m going to run an errand,“ Jane called. “When I get back, I’ll make up your room in the basement. I’ll only be gone a little while.”
    He kept pushing the buttons on the remote control until he finally found MTV. Then he turned up the volume. If he’d been one of her children and ignored her, Jane would have snapped the set off, but he wasn’t hers—thank God!
    Shelley was out the door and had started the van before Jane could even climb in. They rode in silence, the magnitude of Jane’s plight having overwhelmed them both. Once Jane whimpered a little, and Shelley patted her hand.
    Shelley pulled into the curved, hedge-bordered drive of Fiona Howard’s house. The construction of this home in Jane and Shelley’s neighborhood had caused something of a stir a few years earlier. A conflagration (started by a grease fire caused by a notoriously bad cook and taken as a sort of divine culinary retribution) had seriously damaged two adjoining homes as well. The central house, as well as the two neighboring ones, were purchased by a couple named Fiona and Albert Howard who, to everyone’s surprise, made no attempt to repair the damaged homes to the side. Instead, they leveled both of them, as well as the middle one, and built a new house on the triple lot.
    This was considered an extravagant thing to do, but surprise had turned to disappointment and a certain measure of animosity when, before construction was even completed, a visually impenetrable wall of hedges went in around the entire site. Worse, the owners were seldom around during the construction process, so there was almost no opportunity to get to know them or their floor plan. This thwarting of natural nosiness was considered very unfriendly.
    The mystery of the Howards’ apparent secretiveness was solved, however, a scant week before they moved in. The realtor let drop an historical reference that was picked up and picked apart. The elusive Mrs. Howard, it turned out, was the former wife of Richie Divine, the late rock star whose untimely death had shaken the country--or at least the female half of it—as badly as Elvis Presley’s.
    Know to keep a public profile so low as to be nearly invisible, Fiona Howard was an extremely unwilling celebrity, almost a legend in a slightly pejorative sense. This made the hedge practically acceptable. After a while neighbors started to take a certain pride in it. “Oh, that hedge?“ they would say to visitors who were taken blocks out of their way to “happen“ to drive past. “Why, that’s the Howard estate—Richie Divine’s widow, you know.”
    It was Jane’s first time behind the