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living.
    While Cousin Agatha doesn’t agree with her first cousin, she was keen enough to know that she could use a little cash to fix up the old house she and Uncle Chester had shared for years. So she arranged to have the timber cut on the land, something that hadn’t been done for decades.
    Cousin Agatha shopped around for the best price and, when she’d finalized the deal, she wrote letters to the entire Covington clan, telling each one how much they could expect as their share of the proceeds of the timber sale.
    For the past three weeks, the loggers had been cutting. Rain had stopped them temporarily, but once the sun came out, they’d pushed their trucks and saws further into the Covingtons’ forest.
    I don’t know if Cousin Agatha suspected that theloggers would try to cheat her or not, but she absolutely refused to leave her house while the timber was being cut all around her.
    The first phone call I’d gotten after Yasmine left was from Cliff. He told me that things in L.A. were really getting bogged down. It seemed that Mrs. Campbell’s appraiser came up with a greater value on their furniture than Mr. Campbell’s. Mrs. Campbell had worked herself up into a fine state, telling Cliff she was going to get every cent of her husband’s money.
    Both Cliff’s and Yasmine’s problems had me in a sickening funk. So when Cousin Agatha called to tell me that she had cooked our dinner and that all I had to do was to come to her house and pick it up, I felt things were looking up a little.
    I peeked into Mama’s room. The Meprozine capsules had knocked her out; she would be asleep until either my father got in from work or I returned from Cousin Agatha’s.
    Happy that I didn’t have to throw something together for the three of us to eat later, I got into my Honda and headed to Cousin Agatha’s house near Cypress Creek.
    It was a little after two-thirty when I pulled out of Smalls Lane. The rain had stopped; the sun was shining through the thickly tree-lined highway.
    I popped in Nancy Wilson. Her tape, “A Lady with a Song,” filled the car with her smooth and mellow voice. It was exactly what I needed on thistrip. I felt depressed, or maybe sad … I don’t know. Whatever my mood, Nancy’s voice supported it.
    The drive to Cypress Creek is along a twisting highway surrounded by acres of maples, silver-white birches, tall green pine and oak trees, and a thick undergrowth of shrubs. Every five or six miles, there is a sprinkle of farmhouses.
    The strip is usually empty. The few cars that use it whisk through with no downtime. So when I glanced at my rearview mirror, I was surprised to see the dark blue Ford coming up fast behind me.
    I slowed to let him pass. I wasn’t in any hurry. Yasmine was on my mind. Her world is made up of cosmetics, fashion shows, and salon events. She is on the go so much, she barely keeps up with herself. My girlfriend is bright, the kind of woman who becomes more attractive the longer you know her.
    Yasmine was a full-grown woman, I thought, capable of making her own decision, and I had no choice but to live with whatever she decided. I sighed, remembering that she hadn’t asked my opinion. All she wanted was for me to go with her to the clinic.
    I wrestled with that thought … to distance myself from personal involvement … to convince myself that I had to respect my best friend’s decision. But the more I thought about it, the more intense my feeling against the abortion became.
    And something else was bothering me. For years, I’ve had to defend not being maternal, not being a woman who thought the only way to be happy was tohave kids. Now I was having to defend why I wanted to save an unborn child, so much so that I was risking my friendship with my best friend over it.
    It was ironic that Yasmine’s dilemma and the kidnapped Morgan were what it had taken to spark my maternal flame. Still, my conversion was real—I felt like I had finally become a sharer in the