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this.”
    “Right.” Treva bit her lip. “Right. I’m sorry. I’ve just had such a lousy week. And now this. It’s just awful. I feel awful about everything.”
    “Well, at least you got dinner out of it.” Maddie stretched to hand her the bowl of grated cheese and the rest of the block of Parmesan.
    “No, grate the whole thing,” Treva said.
    “For one pan of manicotti?”
    Treva opened the refrigerator and gestured, and Maddie craned her neck to see past her. Five more pans of manicotti sat already stuffed on the shelves.
    Maddie slumped back, appalled. “Treva, we have to talk. This isn’t good. What’s wrong with you?”
    “You should talk. All I have is a lot of pasta. You have crotchless underwear.” Treva slammed the refrigerator door. “What are you going to do? Whatever it is, I want to help.”
    Maddie opened her mouth to ask what was wrong again and stopped, blocked by Treva’s bland stonewall stare, the stare that had gotten Treva out of any number of confrontations in her life. Whatever it was that was bothering Treva was not going to be discussed. Period. Maddie gave up and went back to her own problems. “I’ll confront him when he gets home, I guess. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have any proof. I threw the pants away.”
    Treva rolled her eyes. “You don’t need proof. This is divorce; not murder.”
    Murder. It had such a nice clean sound compared to divorce. “Wait,” Maddie said. “The day is not over yet.”

    “Did you ask about the puppy yet?” Mel asked Em.
    “No,” Em said. “It’s not a good time.”
    “Well, then, I have excellent news about Jason Norris.”
    They’d climbed into Mel’s tree house, the one she’d inherited from her older brother, and now Em leaned back on the old blue couch pillows they’d liberated from the family room and tried to decide whether or not to dump all her worries on her best friend. Mel looked like her mother— skinny, blonde, and freckle-cute—but she had a mind trained on Nintendo and every R-rated video in town. She’d be the best person in the world to talk to about the trouble at home. Em just wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about it. Talking might make it real.
    “Dierdre White told me Richelle Tandy is crazy about him,” Mel went on, “but Jason is definitely not interested.”
    Neither was Em at the moment. “He told me all girls have cooties.”
    Mel sat up. “Well, see, that’s great. He’s talking to you. According to my mom, boys aren’t verbal, so if they do anything more than grunt, it’s a good sign.”
    Em shook her head. “He also tried to chase me around the pool with a frog. Like I’d be afraid of a frog. He’s a mess.”
    “Well, I think he’s cute.” Mel frowned at her. “Are you okay? Last week you thought he was cute, too.”
    Em gave up. “There’s something really wrong at my house.”
    “Your parents fighting?” Mel shrugged. “No big deal. Mine fight all the time.”
    “They do?” Em was distracted for a moment, trying to imagine her uncle Howie yelling. It was hard to imagine Uncle Howie even talking back to Aunt Treva, but then it was hard to imagine anybody talking back to Aunt Treva.
    Mel rummaged around in the old suitcase they’d swiped as a treasure chest and pulled out a crumpled pack of Oreos. “Sure. Last week it was about the grass.” She took a cookie and passed the package to Em. “Of course, they didn’t know I was listening.”
    “The grass?” Em pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose to see the package better. No bugs. She took a cookie and bit into it. It was stale and soft, but it was a bugless Oreo in a tree house, so it was still pretty good. A breeze came up and blew through the window and even more through the cracks between the boards Three had nailed up in his early carpentry days. The cracks made it better. Anybody could nail boards close together; only Three would build in air conditioning.
    Mel swallowed her Oreo. “Yeah, the