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“About Sunday morning—I’ll pick you up for the service at eight-thirty. You’ll love it. I promise.”
    “Okay,” Dorry said. “Thanks. Bye.”
    Dorry got out of the car and waved as Angela pulled out. Angela gestured that she would wait for Dorry to go inside. Dorry turned around. She was surprised by how much light leaked out from around the edges of the curtains on the apartment windows—surely she’d only left one lamp on. She unlocked the door and pushed it open.
    “Dorry! Where have you been?” Her mother grabbed Dorry and hugged her tight. “We thought something awful had happened—” Her mother pushed Dorry back and looked into her face. “How could you do this to us?”
    As if too weak with relief to keep standing, Dorry’s mother collapsed onto the couch, pulling Dorry down with her. Dorry’s father was there, too. His eyes were cold and hard in his deeply lined face. Dorry knew that look of barely restrained fury—it had accompanied every single one of her childhood spankings.
    “I—I was just at a party with my friends,” Dorry said, stumbling over the words, even though she knew that made her sound guilty. “I thought you both had to work until midnight.”
    “So you thought it was okay to run around wild?” Dorry’s dad asked.
    Dorry was still caught in her mother’s embrace. She pulled away and sat on the edge of the coffee table. “No, no, it wasn’t like that. This was a church group I was with.” The word “church” had a magical effect, softening both of their faces. But they still looked mad. Dorry rushed to explain. “I would have left a note, but I thought I’d be home before either of you—”
    “You should have called me at work and told me where you were going. Asked permission,” Dorry’s mom said.
    “I never did that back home in Bryden,” Dorry said.
    “This isn’t Bryden,” Dorry’s dad said.
    A week earlier, that would have been a cue for Dorry to plead, “Then send me back there.” But now she only sat still, in stony silence. Just when she’d had a good time at the party, when Angela had told her everybody liked her and even asked for her help with Lara—why did her parents have to ruin everything?
    Dorry’s mother patted Dorry’s knee. “I guesseverything’s all right now. You didn’t do anything wrong. We’re just bound to worry, here in the city, since you hear about all the crime around here. But if you were with some church group . . .”
    Dorry looked at her father. “Dad?”
    “I reckon your mother’s right. But you call her the next time, you hear?” he said, grudgingly.
    “Okay,” Dorry said.
    Her father got up and walked to the window. He moved aside the curtain and looked out at the bleak parking lot. “I didn’t want to move here either,” he said. “But we did and that’s that. It’s only for three years.”
    Dorry started to answer, to say she hadn’t complained. Not this time. Then she decided he was saying that for her mother’s benefit.
    Her father dropped the curtain. “I’d better call work.” He brushed past Dorry to the phone in the kitchen.
    Dorry looked inquisitively at her mother. “Why are you both home?”
    “I wasn’t feeling too good so they sent me home early. When I got here and you weren’t home I called your dad. We were going to call the police if you weren’t back by ten-thirty.”
    “The police!” Dorry was horrified.
    “Yeah. I would have called them right away, but I figured they’d just think we were a coupleof hysterical hicks. Don’t worry us like this again, okay?”
    “Okay.” Dorry sat down next to her mother on the couch. “Do you still feel sick?”
    “I was so upset about you, I kind of forgot about it. But yeah, basically, I feel like I’ve been run over by a Mack truck. Don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
    Dorry’s dad hung up the phone. “Well, I’ve still got a job, but they want me in for the 6 a.m. shift to make up for this. I’m going to