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small white poodles.
    “Excuse me?” I said. I wasn’t sure she had spoken to me, but there was no one else on the sidewalk.
    “Mrs. Torrey. The owner. She has some harebrained idea to sell that house to someone who won’t tear it down. Of course everyone else on this block has already torn their old bungalow down and made a fortune in the process. Peg Torrey doesn’t care about any of that. After Harry died—he was her husband—I’m afraid she’s gone ’round the bend.”
    I smiled. I had no idea what to say, and the poodle lady took my silence as an invitation to carry on.
    “The daughter just wants Peg out of the house before she hurts herself,” she said. “And all of us”—she swept her free hand across the street, taking in every house on the block—“would just like to see someone move in here who’ll keep the lawn mowed.”
    I smiled again, feeling like a prisoner in my own car.
    “I’d put in a good word for you, if I thought it’d matter, ” she continued, “but Peg Torrey doesn’t think much of me, I’m afraid, after that business with the fence in ’97.”
    I sensed my opening. “Well, thank you,” I said, quickly, and turned the key in the ignition.
    When I pulled away, the neighbor was standing on the curb waving to me as if I were heading out on a long journey.
    I’d only left myself an hour and a half to write a draft of the lingerie piece. I quoted a woman from the Organic Trade Association about how traditionally grown cotton is the most polluting crop on the planet, and then talked about the sportswear companies’ lead in creating a market for organic farming that had now trickled down to the lingerie niche. I talked about doing good, feeling good and looking good, and then headed over to the high school to watch Jackie’s volleyball game.
    I climbed onto the bleachers in the gym and took my place next to Gina, one of the other moms, whose daughter was the star setter for the team and who was expected to receive a scholarship to UCLA when recruiting decisions were announced next fall. I’d sat through hundreds of hours of volleyball with this mom. Our role was to sit and watch, and to know when a back row attack was illegal or when the players were running a five-one offense. The girls rarely looked our way. After the games, they headed for the locker rooms, and the cars of the kids who had their drivers’ licenses, and you’d think that they didn’t even know we were there, or care that we were there, but they did. Once, the coach yelled at Jackie for being in the wrong place on the final point of a tie-breaker. He towered over her—a large man with a loud voice, pointing his finger and barking at her for making a mistake in a ball game—and as I watched her eyes tear up and her shoulders slump, I decided I couldn’t stand the silent witnessing any longer.
    “What did he say to you?” I asked when we got in the car. I was picking a fight and she knew it.
    “Who?” she asked.
    “Coach Ben.”
    “When?”
    I took a deep breath. “When he benched you after the tie-breaker.”
    “That I’d been playing too long to make a stupid mistake like that.”
    “He can’t talk to you that way,” I insisted.
    “He talks to everyone that way, Mom,” she said. “You can’t take it personally.”
    “You’re saying it doesn’t bother you?”
    “Of course it bothers me.”
    “Then why put up with it?”
    “It’s part of the game.”
    “It shouldn’t be.”
    “Well, it is.”
    “Then it’s a part I don’t choose to watch.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Meaning that if I have to sit there and watch him yell at you like that, I don’t know if I’m going to come anymore. I can’t stand it.”
    “Do whatever you want,” she said.
    But later that night when I went into her room to say good night to her, Jackie stopped me in the dark.
    “Mom?” she asked, in the voice of a little girl. “I like it when you come to my games.”
    And so I was there.
    Midway