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“Okay,” she says. “I’ll be back in a few hours. Tell Mom.”
    “Tell her yourself.” Molly pushes her chair back. “I’m outta here.”
    “When will you be back?”
    “Later” is Molly’s sullen reply as the screen door bangs shut behind her.
    Rory stands in the middle of the kitchen for a moment. Then she gets her sister’s bowl from the table and puts it into the sink, absently running water into it long after the milk has swirled down the drain.
    H earing a screen door slam next door, Michelle Randall glances out the open window next to the bathroom sink.
    A pretty redhead with long, untamed curls is striding quickly toward the detached garage, and Michelle can hear the impatient jingling of the car keys in her hand even from up here.
    That has to be Molly’s older sister, Rory. Michelle decides that now isn’t the time to catch her and introduce herself in a neighborly fashion.
    Even if the woman wasn’t clearly in such a hurry, it would take Michelle forever to lug her enormous body—not to mention Ozzie—down the steep flight of stairs in this heat. Besides, her stomach is still roiling from being sick in the toilet a few moments ago.
    “Are you done frowing up, Mommy?” Ozzie asks from the floor at her feet.
    She glances down and sees that he’s playing with the long-handled brush she uses to clean the toilet.
    “Ozzie, no!” she shrieks, grabbing it and prying it from his chubby fingers.
    He promptly bursts into tears.
    “That’s yucky, sweetheart,” she says, shoving the brush back into the plastic holder behind the tank and scooping her toddler into her arms. “Come on, let’s scrub your hands.”
    “No! No scrub!”
    “Ozzie, stop squirming,” Michelle says sharply, struggling to keep her grasp on the little boy despite her enormous, protruding tummy.
    She hoists him toward the sink, turns on the water, and reaches for the antibacterial soap. They go through a lot of that these days. Ozzie gets into everything.
    Oh, Lord, what am I going to do when I have a baby to take care of, too? she wonders, exhausted already though it’s barely nine A.M. She didn’t sleep more than a few hours total last night, thanks to indigestion and the baby pressing on her bladder, which meant countless trips down the hall to the bathroom.
    Maybe it’s a mistake to have another one right now, she thinks wearily. She shouldn’t have let Lou talk her into it. They have their hands full with Ozzie, who’s in the throes of the Terrible Twos, not to mention this big old house that’s under renovation and will be for what’s bound to feel like forever.
    We never should have bought this place, she tells herself . I knew it from the start .
    Lou was the one who had stumbled across the For Sale sign one day, and insisted that they look at it even though it was obviously falling apart. He was the one who had talked her into buying this place, calling it a steal. It was surprisingly inexpensive for a house this size—due, no doubt, to the fact that it had stood vacant for years, and was rumored to be haunted. Aside from all that, she had thought they were taking on more house than they needed or could afford.
    The renovation is going to be a slow process; they don’t have the money for most of what they want to do, even with Lou’s recent promotion at the law firm to junior partner.
    Before he left for the office this morning, Lou had reminded Michelle to call John Kline, her second cousin and the architect they’re working with, and set up an appointment to discuss the family-room addition.
    When Michelle suggested that they hold off until they have some money in the bank, Lou argued that they’ll need the extra space as soon as possible, with a baby on the way.
    “But we can use the extra money, too,” Michelle had pointed out. Until she got pregnant, she had been planning to go back to work this fall at the elementary school where she had taught art until Ozzie was born.
    But now she’s expecting