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at last. Underneath the drama queen was a pragmatist, after all. It had been eight years since Leonora’s TV show had aired—and been cancelled. Her fame had been at its peak; since then, it had dwindled. With the stock market in the shape it was in and her book royalties having steadily decreased until they amounted to maybe a couple thousand dollars a year at best, Leonora’s income was at its lowest tide ever. Luckily for the success of Nicky’s efforts at mother-moving, even famous psychic mediums had to eat—and pay the bills. “Ever since I saw Harry”—Harry Stuyvescent was her third husband, a sensible man who was in all likelihood at that moment watching ESPN in the detached garage, well removed from all the hullabaloo—“walking toward me all covered in blood, I haven’t been able to see a thing.”
    By “seeing” Harry, her mother meant that she’d had a vision of him, something that psychics were—fortunately or unfortunately, depending on the circumstances—prone to. Nicky remembered full well the semi-hysterical phone call she’d gotten just before Easter, during which her mother had insisted that her beloved Harry must be going to die in some horrible, tragic fashion in the near future, because she’d “seen” him all bloody.
    Okay, so Leonora had “seen” her first husband—Neal Sullivan, Nicky and Livvy’s dad—lying in their bed, soaking wet, in the weeks before he’d drowned in a boating accident. And she’d “seen” her second husband, Charlie Hill, on a beach in the Bahamas when he was supposed to be in New York on business—a little vacation he’d taken with his secretary that had ended up costing him his marriage to Leonora. Those visions did, perhaps, argue in favor of Leonora’s ability to predict husband-related calamity. But . . .
    “Harry got hit in the head with a golf ball two days later, Mother.” Now she was talking through her teeth. Nicky deliberately tried to relax her jaw muscles, without success. “It wasn’t even a bad injury. It was just a little bitty scalp wound that bled a lot. He didn’t even need stitches. He walked home from the golf course and put a wet washrag on his head, and that was that. Remember, you called me that night and told me all about it. You were so relieved. You said it yourself: That was why you saw him covered in blood.”
    “But the trauma ,” Leonora wailed. “You don’t understand how visions like that affect me. You’ve always been so insensitive, Nicky. If I hadn’t watched you being born and you didn’t look just like me, I’d say you couldn’t possibly be my child.”
    This all-too-frequently-heard refrain of her childhood started pushing buttons Nicky had almost forgotten were there.
    “I don’t have time for this,” Nicky muttered, exasperated, and began physically hauling her mother toward the door. Leonora outweighed her by a good fifty pounds and was perfectly capable of planting her feet and refusing to go if she truly didn’t want to. That her mother allowed herself to be pulled along, with whatever degree of apparent reluctance, reaffirmed what Nicky had suspected all along. Her mother had never actually intended not to show up. Ever the diva, she’d just needed to feel as though all eyes were on her first. In other words, this was just another big scene in the ongoing star vehicle that was Leonora James’s life.
    “I can’t just turn the gift on and off like it has a switch, you know,” Leonora protested, even as Uncle Ham and Karen and Mario fell back out of their way. The hall was long and narrow, white-painted bead-board with a hardwood floor. Nicky, with Leonora in tow and John following, charged up it like the little engine that could. The others had to practically run to stay ahead of them, and as a result, they all popped out into the kitchen like spray shooting out of a shaken-up soda bottle.
    “I know that, Mother.”
    Hanging on to her patience with grim determination, Nicky pulled