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don't sound like a Chicago native, Butch. Do you live here now?"
    “Yeah, for as long as I'm with Jake. I still got a lot to learn."
    “So you want to do this yourself? Be a prop man?"
    “Property master, ma'am. Yeah. But I won't be ready for a while yet."
    “So, what is all this stuff?" Jane asked, gesturing toward the interior of the truck. As she did so, she noticed a movement inside and a glimpse of orange fur. "Meow! What are
you
doing in there!" she exclaimed.
    “Oh, is this your cat, ma'am?"
    “I'm afraid so. I'm sorry—"
    “Oh, it's okay. She's a nice little thing.”
    Meow, who normally ran for cover when a stranger was within a block, picked her way daintily through the truck and came up to Butch to have her chin chucked.
    “You must have a real gift with animals, Butch. Meow doesn't like anybody but me, and she only likes me when she's hungry. You haven't seen the other one, have you. The gray tabby?"
    “The one with 'Max' on his tag? Yeah, he's takin' a nap in the cab of the truck.”
    Jane sighed. "I'll take them home. It didn'toccur to me that I needed to shut them indoors this morning."
    “Naw, don't do that, ma'am. They're having a good time and I like the company. I'll make sure they're back to you before we shut down for the night so they don't get shut in somewhere. Which house do you live in?”
    Jane pointed it out, got Butch's repeated assurances that he'd be happy to keep tabs on her adventuresome cats, and went back to her own yard. Shelley had gone somewhere and Maisie was busy putting salve on an extra's insect bite. Jane wandered over to the table where the phone was. The table had colorful stacks of papers, each stack held in place against the breeze by an unopened soft drink can or other heavy object.
    Most of the photocopied piles meant nothing to Jane: call sheet, second unit requirements, a chart that appeared to show which scenes would be shot which days. But one stack said clearly, "Welcome Packet." Jane looked around for somebody to give her permission to study this, and since no one radiated authority or showed the slightest interest in what she was doing, she helped herself to one packet and went back to her lawn chair to skim through it.
    “Is it okay for me to look at this?" she said when Maisie was through with the extra.
    “Sure. It's for anybody who's involved in the production and you're involved — in a way."
    “Maisie, I was counting the people on the crew list. There are over a hundred of them and it doesn't include a single actor! That's amazing. I had no idea it took so many people to make a movie. But isn't it awfully wasteful? When I was roaming around earlier, there were a lot of people just sitting and doing nothing."
    “Like me right now? Well, it's a hurry-up-andwait kind of business. Everybody's an expert in their special, narrow area and when they are needed, they're needed desperately. But the ones who are sitting and doing nothing at any given moment are on instant call. We all have to be poised to do 'our things' at a second's notice."
    “Sort of like a mother," Jane said.
    Just then a young woman in jeans and a denim jacket approached with a clipboard. "Are you Mrs. Jeffry from this house?" she asked briskly.
    “Yes."
    “I just wanted to let you know that we'll be breaking for lunch in ten minutes and you can let your dog out for an hour if you'd like." With that, she made a check mark on her clipboard and moved on up the block.
    Maisie grinned. "As I said, there are a lot of very specialized jobs.”
    Jane went indoors to get Willard, whose fear of the dog run had come back full force. She had to put his leash on him and lure him with a piece of lunch meat to get him out the back door and then he stopped dead in horror at the sight of all the people in his yard. She hauled him to the pen and left him cravenly glued to the inside of the gate to the run while she went next door to put Shelley's yappy little poodle into its run. By the time she'ddealt