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I caught him checking out my ass.” She laughed. “How long do you think it’ll take me to get him into bed?” She laughed again. “What? You don’t believe I can do it? Wanna bet? How much? Ten bucks? A hundred? Hell, let’s make it a thousand. You can afford it.”
    The door opened. “Patsy,” Donna called from the doorway. “They need us in 307.”
    “Sure thing,” Patsy responded cheerily. “I’m done here.”

FOUR
    S he was three years old when she found out that the beautiful lady with the waist-length rush of natural blond hair that smelled of bubble gum and cotton candy was her mother and not just a mysterious woman named Alana who always had a glass in her hand, and who slept in her father’s bed.
    “Here, Casey, sweetheart. Can you take this drink upstairs to your mama? I’m on the phone with the cable company, and they’ve got me on hold.”
    “My mama?” the child asked. Who was Maya talking about? Maya hadn’t been living with them very long. It was possible she still didn’t know everyone.
    “The pretty blond lady who’s married to your father?” Maya said, as if Casey should know. “The one who stays in bed all day?” she added with a laugh. Then immediately, her normally pale complexion reddening: “Don’t you dare tell your mother I said that.”
    Casey took the glass of clear liquid from Maya’s outstretched hand and raised it to her nose. “What is it?”
    “Water.”
    Casey lifted the glass to her mouth.
    Maya quickly snatched the glass back. At just under six feet tall, she was an imposing young woman whose dark eyes brooked no argument. “What are you doing?”
    “I’m thirsty.”
    “I’ll get you your own drink.” Maya was instantly at the sink, the phone pressed between her shoulder and her ear as she poured Casey a small glass of tepid water.
    “Why can’t I have some of that water?” Casey pointed with her chin to the other glass Maya was holding. It was nice and cold and even had a few ice cubes floating across its surface.
    “Because it’s not good to drink from anybody else’s glass,” Maya said firmly.
    Even at the tender age of three, Casey knew she was being lied to. Just as she knew Maya was making up what she’d said about the beautiful woman upstairs in her father’s bed being her mother. Not that Casey knew what a mother was exactly. Her only experience with mothers had come at the park a few weeks earlier, when a woman with messy brown hair and faded, baggy jeans had perched herself on one corner of the sandbox and begun playing with a little boy whose nose was covered with a series of big orange spots that Maya had later identified as freckles.
    “You’re new around here,” Maya had said to the woman, leading Casey over to the sandbox and sitting down, then striking up a conversation as easily as if she’d known the woman all her life.
    “Yes. We just moved in last week. Still discovering the neighborhood.” The woman reached out her hand for Maya to shake. “I’m Ellen Thomas. And this is Jimmy.”
    “Nice to meet you. And you, too, Jimmy,” Maya said to the little boy, who was too busy digging in the sand to acknowledge her greeting. “I’m Maya, and this is Casey. She was named after Casey Stengel.”
    Ellen Thomas smiled, exposing a top row of uneven teeth. “Her father is obviously a baseball fan.”
    “Oh, you just name a sport. Mr. Lerner is into it. So who do you work for?” Maya asked in the next breath.
    Ellen Thompson looked puzzled. “Oh, I’m not Jimmy’s nanny. I’m his mother.”
    “Really?” Maya sounded very surprised. “That’s very unusual in this neck of the woods.”
    Casey’s eyes immediately shot toward the trees surrounding the acres of parkland, trying to figure out where their necks were located, when Maya dropped another bombshell.
    “I think you’re the first actual mother I’ve ever seen in this park,” she said.
    “What’s an ‘actual mother’?” Casey asked later, struggling to