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afternoon in a variety of shops. Theresa bought three new outfits and a new swimsuit before Deanna dragged her into a place called Nightingales, a lingerie shop.
    Deanna went absolutely wild in there. Not for herself, of course, but for Theresa. She would pick up lacy, see-through underwear and matching bras off the racks and hold them up for Theresa to evaluate. “This looks pretty steamy,” she’d say, or, “You don’t have any this color, do you?” Naturally there would be others around as she blurted these things out, and Theresa couldn’t help but laugh whenever she did it. Deanna’s lack of inhibition was one of the things that Theresa loved most about her. She really didn’t care what other people thought, and Theresa often wished she could be more like her.
    After taking two of Deanna’s suggestions—she was on vacation, after all—the two spent a couple of minutes in the record store. Deanna wanted the latest CD from Harry Connick Jr.—“He’s cute,” she said in explanation—and Theresa bought a jazz CD of one of John Coltrane’s earlier recordings. When they returned to the house, Brian was reading the paper in the living room.
    “Hey there. I was beginning to get worried about you two. How was your day?”
    “It was good,” Deanna answered. “We had lunch in Provincetown, then did a little shopping. How did your game go today?”
    “Pretty well. If I hadn’t bogeyed the last two holes, I would have shot an eighty.”
    “Well, you’re just going to have to play a little more until you get it right.”
    Brian laughed. “You won’t mind?”
    “Of course not.”
    Brian smiled as he rustled the paper, content with the fact that he could spend a lot of time on the course this week. Recognizing his signal that he wanted to get back to reading, Deanna whispered in Theresa’s ear, “Take it from me. Let a man play golf and he’ll never raise a fuss about anything.”
    *  *  *
    Theresa left the two of them alone for the rest of the afternoon. Since the day was still warm, she changed into the new suit she had bought, grabbed a towel and small fold-up chair and People magazine, then went to the beach.
    She thumbed idly through People, reading a few articles here and there, not really interested in what was happening to the rich and famous. All around her she could hear the laughter of children as they splashed in the water and filled their pails with sand. Off to one side of her were two young boys and a man, presumably their father, building a castle near the water’s edge. The sound of the lapping waves was soothing. She put down the magazine and closed her eyes, angling her face toward the sun.
    She wanted a little color by the time she got back to work, if for no other reason than to look as though she had taken some time to do absolutely nothing. Even at work she was regarded as the type who was always on the go. If she wasn’t writing her weekly column, she was working on the column for the Sunday editions, or researching on the Internet, or poring over child development journals. She had subscriptions at work to every major parenting magazine and every childhood magazine, as well as others devoted to working women. She also subscribed to medical journals, scanning them regularly for topics that might be suitable.
    The column itself was never predictable—perhaps that was one of the reasons it was so successful. Sometimes she responded to questions, other times she reported on the latest child development data and what it meant. A lot of columns were about the joys that came with raising children, while others described the pitfalls. She wrote of the struggles of single motherhood, a subject that seemed to touch a nerve in the lives of Boston women. Unexpectedly, her column had turned her into a local celebrity of sorts. But even though it was fun in the beginning to see her picture above her column, or to receive invitations to private parties, she always had so much going on, she