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white ponytail who they probably think is a little bit nuts.
    Thank God for Kit! Edie lays down her pruning shears and walks over to the car. It isn’t that Edie was lonely exactly—she still has her job, after all, and goes to the YMCA regularly for her exercise classes—but she didn’t realize quite how much she missed having a friend next door until Kit moved in.
    Despite the age difference of over forty years, Edie now considers Kit to be a close friend. More than that; Kit is the daughter she never had. It is a special relationship, and one she has only ever experienced once before, many years ago. It didn’t end well, and she tries not to remember.
    Edie was careful not to impose too much on Kit, after that initial visit, but then Kit got the job working for Robert and was so grateful to Edie she brought her beautiful flowers to thank her, and now Edie finds she has a family, complete with blooming thirteen-year-old Tory, and adorable, adoring eight-year-old Buckley.
     
    And if you ask Kit, she would say she would never have expected to adopt a mother but, in truth, Edie is the mother she always wished she had. Not that Kit’s mother is bad, but she has never been particularly interested in Kit, never available for her in the way Kit always wanted.
    There are times when Kit would love to punish her for being so unavailable—by keeping the kids from her—but she is relieved that the children enjoy her so much, and that they are able to have a relationship with her mother she never had.
    But Edie? Edie is something quite different. Edie is the one she can rely on, Edie is the one who will drop everything to go and pick Buckley up from school if he’s sick and Kit can’t get to him. Edie joins them for dinner, at least a couple of times a week, firmly instructing Buckley not to talk with food in his mouth, and even, on occasion, forcing Tory to spit her chewing gum into the waiting hand Edie holds at Tory’s chin level.
    “Disgusting habit,” Edie mutters, as she heads to the trash can to get rid of the offending substance. “Not in my presence.”
    Amazingly, the children don’t seem to mind being told what to do by Edie. In fact, they are far more likely to listen to Edie than to Kit. Many’s the time Buckley has requested that Edie put him to bed, not Mom, and Kit has no idea what she would do without this surrogate grandmother, mother and friend who has become so indispensable in her life.

    “I saw in the paper that Robert’s giving a talk tonight,” Edie says, opening Kit’s car door for her, as the children shout their hellos and run into the house to switch on the television set. “I have Pilates but I thought perhaps I could miss it for once.”
    “No! You’d miss Pilates? I thought you never missed Pilates.”
    “Well, I don’t,” Edie grumbles. “But this is special. It’s not often that Robert gives talks any more and I’d like to hear what he has to say.”
    “It’s such a shame, isn’t it, that he rarely does this these days? ”
    “I agree,” Edie says with a sigh. “I think the press gave him such a hard time after his wife died, he just decided to keep to himself. Can’t blame the poor man, really. Terrible thing to happen to him, and there he was, trying to recover from the tragedy, and then all those rumors started. I would have probably gone to live in South America.” She follows Kit into the house.
    Kit laughs. “And then everyone would have assumed you were guilty.”
    “True, but you’d be living in a lovely hot climate, sunning yourself on a tropical beach. Who cares what people might think? ”
    “Only you would think like that. Well, I’m going, and I’d love you to come with me. Adam, miraculously, said he’d come home early and take the kids, so he should be here at around quarter to seven, and then we could head over there.”
    “Lovely! ” Edie’s face lights up. “I’ll just go and get ready.”
     
    When Kit and Adam were first divorced, most