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to work?” She smiled at Emily. “Outside the home, I mean.”
    Emily grinned fondly at Chloe who perched next to her in a high chair, calmly squeezing warm French bread between her fingers, making sure it was thoroughly dead before licking what was left of it off her knuckles. “No. Dante and I plan to homeschool our children.”
    This was news to me, but clearly not to Paul, who smiled benignly at his daughter across the table. Or perhaps he had retreated from the battlefield and was mentally far, far away, working on some theorem. Either way, we would discuss this homeschooling nonsense later.
    “I sent Darryl and Deirdre to Catholic schools,” Darlene said. “It was all I could afford.”
    I had decided that the conversation was going nowhere and had shanghaied Georgina to help me clear the table when Daddy gazed at Darlene, his eyelids at half mast. “Poor Darlene. She’s lost three husbands.”
    I nearly dropped the dirty dishes I had been balancing, plate upon plate.
    “It’s still hard to talk about.” Darlene bowed her head. Emily skillfully steered the conversation back to the more happy topic of Darlene’s children. Between trips to the kitchen I learned that Deirdre was a graduate student in biology at the University of Maryland and lived in a condo in Bowie.
    After a few moments, Ruth joined us at the kitchen sink. “She’s lost three husbands? How careless of her!”
    Georgina arranged a row of salad bowls on the top rack of the dishwasher. “Well, it’s not exactly her fault, is it?”
    “How do we know?”
    “Ruth!” My sister had been watching too many reruns of Murder, She Wrote .
    “I’d give my eyeteeth to know what happened to them.”
    “Why don’t you just ask?”
    Ruth gave me an Oh, Sure look. “She’s after his money. I just know it.”
    “You don’t know anything of the kind,” I said. “Did you see the car she’s driving?”
    Ruth shook her head.
    “A Porsche.”
    Georgina, who didn’t have a car of her own, whistled. “They don’t come in Cracker Jack boxes, do they?”
    “No, ma’am.” I tapped Ruth’s cheek lightly. “She could have inherited tons of money from her former husbands, sweetie. Maybe she really loves Daddy.”
    If we had been taping a TV ad, Ruth’s explosive Ha! would have shattered the wineglass she held. “You realize, don’t you, my dears,” she drawled, “that if Daddy marries That Person and he dies, she’ll get everything. Grandmother’s furniture. Mother’s jewelry. This house. His car. Everything.”
    Georgina leaned against the kitchen table. “Don’t be silly, Ruth. There’d be a will!”
    I had to agree with Georgina. Daddy loved his family to distraction. He would never enter into a marriage without taking us, and his grandchildren, into consideration. “There’d be a prenup,” I stated with confidence.
    Ruth wasn’t swayed. “Once he gets into the clutches of that hussy, absolutely nothing would surprise me.”
    “Don’t you think you’re being just a wee bit premature?” Georgina chided. “They’ve only just met and you already have them walking down the aisle.”
    “Georgina, dear, did you look at her?”
    Georgina nodded.
    Ruth upended her wineglass into the dishwasher. “I rest my case.”
    But during dessert—Georgina’s homemade deep-dishapple pie, warm from the oven, over which Darlene gushed her approval—Ruth melted a bit around the edges, like a scoop of ice cream à la mode, softening enough to ask Darlene where she had bought her sweater and making it sound as if she really cared.
    Unfortunately, Darlene seemed preprogrammed to blow it. “You know, George,” she said as we rose to leave the table, “if you put up a chair rail, you wouldn’t have all those scuff marks on the wallpaper.” She touched the paper, a beige silk floral that Mom and Dad had selected and hung themselves only weeks before Mother had been rushed to the hospital. Darlene leaned toward my father and said, sotto voce,