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unable to comfort her loved ones or stop them from turning on one another.
    Nora recalled that priests always used the child’s name in the context of sainthood at a baptism, even if it was Saint Tiffany or Saint Justin. Nora said a prayer to Georgia. I’m going to need your help, she said. She hoped it was not blasphemy, especially at a time like this.
    Diane Nye hoped she did not look as stupid as she felt, because she felt stupid enough for three people, and the size of three people, with a purple foam rubber harness strapped around her middle and purple foam slippers strapped onto each foot, churning her legs up and down in the deep end of the pool at Sandpiper. This water aerobics class had been Shelby’s idea. Shelby, Diane’s herbalist and best friend, though probably not much older than Diane herself, was starting menopause and starting to pack on the pounds. She’d cajoled Diane into at least trying the class with her, pleading she’d otherwise be the only lady there under sixty. Diane owed it to her friend, whose floral teas had banished Diane’s migraines three years before and who was now concocting everything in her power to help save Georgia.

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    Shelby, whose face was ruddy with effort, glanced over at Diane, and Diane tried to smile. But she kept feeling as though at any moment she was going to tip over like a duck diving and end up with those absurd slippers waving in the air.
    This was a little much. Diane liked a walk, and tennis, but she had never gone for that Ironwoman crap, and she never would. She knew Shelby was trying to hold back time, so that she might still have a baby with that really sweet (and much younger) guy of hers. But she thought Shelby ought to be looking to freeze-dry some of her eggs before she ran out of them instead of lifting weights and churning up the club pool.
    “Okay, now let’s stride!” called the instructor, miming giant steps on the edge of the pool. The teacher was no older than Diane’s children, and had one of those peekaboo little navels, the kind Diane had been proud to display like a tiny smile above her hip huggers even after she’d had Raymond Junior and Alison. Of course, she’d been only twenty-one after those first two, with skin that snapped back like a Spandex leotard. It was Caroline, who weighed ten pounds, who stretched Diane’s poor tummy to such a size her belly button still looked like a shut eye winking. Well. Couldn’t hurt, Diane sighed, trying to synchro-nize her arms and legs to sluice through the water like one of those big old skinny bugs that skated over the pond at her grandpa’s horse farm when she was a little girl.
    At first, Diane thought it was the heat or all this damned flailing around that made her think she saw her daughter, Caro, standing with her mouth open and her hands pasted against the glass of the club-house grill. But, no, it was Caro, and she was crying.
    Diane went still in the water, then awkwardly rowed herself over to the ladder, hauling herself up even though the foam-rubber belt felt like a huge purple sponge. Big Ray, she’d thought first, he’s had heat-stroke or palpitations. Merciful God, the man couldn’t stuff himself with cheeseburgers and martinis and then go out in this heat and play nine more holes . . . then, she’d thought, oh, no, oh, it’s Georgia. Georgia’s had a seizure again. Georgia’s dead. As she walked toward Caro, Diane had a last, irritating notion. Caro should still have been at work.

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    JACQUELYN MITCHARD
    It had to be Caro’s husband Leland. Some new fart-witted nonsense from Leland, like the time he’d gone off to New Mexico to turn himself into a he-man by drumming with the Indians. Then Caro had disappeared and come running out the door of the ladies’ locker room and said the thing that would break open Diane’s world like a boot to a melon.
    She’d been