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Amanda had stayed home to play with a friend from the other end of our apartment complex—the first of the girls to enter this new circle of apartment friends—Mary was in the passenger seat next to me, while Mollie sat behind us in
her car seat. Stephanie was alone in the far reaches of the van, sighing out her disappointment. "Is that belt on tight?" I said, watching her in the rearview mirror. Another sigh, this one louder.
    Fine. I had enough on my mind. I preferred silence over the morning's argument about the costume. Stephanie hated the homemade idea, and Amanda was her champion in dissent. Didn't I know how important it was for Steph to look right when she hit the trick-or-treating with her fourth-grade friends? With everything they were going through, the two girls as a unit told me, the least I could do was make sure Stephanie had the perfect costume.
    I drove the school's circular driveway and turned sharp out onto the street, tipping over a couple of grocery sacks. Cheese, toilet paper, a package of hamburger, and apple-strawberry juice boxes tumbled onto the floor. "I want one! I'm thirsty!" Mollie cried when she saw the drinks. I ignored her plea and Stephanie's silence and raced home to get Amanda to afternoon theater rehearsal—off to her new play.

    Soon after the girls and I had moved into that apartment several miles from their dad's house—and many weeks post-
Annie
—the same troupe of New York actors came back to town. Their director called Amanda and asked her to be in the new production—
Jesus Christ Superstar.
She spoke on the phone with him for only a minute, giving him a quiet answer of
yes,
as if the theater were a tedious habit now, the fun wrung out of it. Her separated parents, who lived in different houses, would juggle the rehearsal schedules and the performances in which she would play a leper, a child at Jesus's feet, and an angel in the afterlife. Opening night would fall on Halloween.
    In the evenings after rehearsals and dinner and homework, Amanda went over her dance steps and songs for the musical, Stephanie a skinny shadow behind her and Mary and Mollie watching from the doorway. The dark and strange un-
Annie
songs sank into the girls' imaginations, and a steady stream of musical ques
tions floated through our house: "What's the buzz?" "Who are you, what have you sacrificed?" "Why'd you let the things you did get so out of hand?"
    The play confused Amanda. In
Annie,
right and wrong were cloyingly obvious. But what was Judas, she asked me, a good guy or a bad guy? She brought me a Bible from our bookshelf, asking me to locate the part about the betrayal, the blood money. I rifled through the pages and read a couple passages that seemed to relate while she slunk down next to me and laid her head on my shoulder. "What does it mean?" she said. She couldn't put the Scripture together with the rowdy scenes on stage: Judas wailing in the disco afterlife.
    I set the book on the floor and pulled her closer to me. Maybe the play was too sad, I said, running my fingers through her long hair. Maybe it was too big a load of sadness and darkness in the middle of my separation from her dad. "It's not too late to quit," I told her.
    She sat up straight and turned to me. "No way," she said. "You can't make me quit."
    "I didn't say you had to, only if you want to," I said to her shaking head, her outstretched hands that were pushing me away.
    No matter what, she'd stay with it. She was too enchanted by the dazzling Mary Magdalene, who'd promised to help layer on the gray leper makeup and attach the angel halo once performances began. And she couldn't leave Jesus, who gently touched the top of her head every time he passed her on stage.

    I was thinking about all this driving back to the apartment after I'd picked up Stephanie. I'd promised cookies for Mollie's preschool class and it was my week to cart Amanda back and forth to the rehearsal hall. Tom's phone calls were coming