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house.
    “Here she is,” he said. “I found her on TV-Phile.”
    I lifted my head and looked at the screen.
    The headshot that decorated Alicia Felix’s page on TV-Phile.com, a website devoted to the minutiae of canceled television shows and former personalities, was the same one I had seen in her apartment. It showed a gamine-faced blond woman with a thick head of tousled hair and a pout that somehow managed to look both sexy and innocent at the same time.
    Alicia had an impressive list of television credits. She had appeared in guest roles on almost every major sitcom and drama in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She had even had arecurring role in a short-lived drama that I remembered watching when I was in law school. It had featured a cast of stunningly attractive prosecuting attorneys, and a few of us had gathered weekly to watch the show in the student lounge. We weren’t fans; rather our purpose was to jeer with our newfound expertise at the glaring errors and misrepresentations in the cases on the television lawyers’ make-believe dockets. I couldn’t honestly remember this Alicia; there had been too many young blond females in the cast.
    Beyond the early 1990s, there were fewer and fewer entries for Alicia. The last listing was in 1997: she had had nothing since.
    “What happened after 1997?” I asked Peter.
    “Maybe she moved into film.” He clicked over to the part of the site devoted to filmographies. Inputing Alicia Felix’s name resulted in no hits.
    “Does that mean she didn’t do any movies? Do they have every single actor listed online? Or could she have had some small roles that don’t show up?” I asked.
    Peter wrinkled his forehead. “I think the site is pretty thorough. I mean, I know that the casting agents on our movies use it to dredge up information even on the most unknown person who auditions for us. I think this has got to mean she never made a movie.”
    “Huh.” I leaned back on the couch and heaved my legs into his lap, pushing aside the computer. “Will you rub my feet, sweetie? Is helps me think.”
    Peter lifted my left foot. “It’s like a little, tiny sausage bursting out of its casing,” he said, poking the swollen skin. His finger left an indentation on my ankle.
    “That’s nice, honey.” I jerked my foot away. “Way to make me feel good.”
    “Oh stop it.” He took my foot back in his warm palmsand began rubbing. “You know I think you’re fat little feet are adorable.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    He tickled my toes and I giggled. “I do,” he said. “You’re the cutest pregnant woman around.”
    I sighed. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew Kat. She’s gorgeous. She looks like a supermodel who happens to have swallowed a basketball. A very neat, petite little basketball.”
    Peter reached his arms around my waist and heaved me on to his lap, grunting loudly. “I prefer women who look like basketballs, not women who look like they swallow them.”
    I leaned against his chest, first checking to make sure that I wasn’t crushing the life out of him. Why am I one of those pregnant women who blows up to cosmic proportions? Why can’t I be like Kat, or like the other Santa Monica matrons at my yoga studio?
    “How about a root beer float?” Peter asked.
    Aha. The answer to my question. “Sure,” I said, rolling off his lap.
    I followed my husband out to the kitchen, and while he scooped vanilla ice cream into the soda fountain glasses he’d bought me for our anniversary the year before, I mused aloud about Alicia Felix’s career.
    “Maybe she stopped getting parts because she got too thin,” I said. “It was disgusting. She looked like an Auschwitz survivor.”
    Peter popped the top off four different bottles of root beer. He was involved in a systematic and painstaking analysis of all commercial root beer brands, including ones available only over the Internet at shocking prices. There were literally two hundred single bottles and cans of rootbeer