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an elaborate gesture, he took a six-week cooking class at Hickory Woods Tech. The girls and Adam then got pasta and broccoli, pasta and shrimp, pasta and chopped tomatoes, pasta and ham, pasta quattro formaggi . Merry and Adam were mad at Mallory for complaining. They felt their gorges rise when they saw the blue boxes come out of the cupboard.
    Mally was sorry she’d ever brought it up.
    Maybe, Mally thought now, it was because Aunt Kate didn’t work at all that she always seemed so calm.
    Campbell was always pulling her hair up into spikes because she was always late. She was always wondering aloud if a person could do CPR on herself.
    Maybe Aunt Kate’s house was the house of a person who didn’t have stress. Uncle Kevin was a lawyer. Even the little girl cousins wore clothes from an English designer. Still, Mallory was proud of her mother. She couldn’t imagine a life that had enough time for actually making fossilized bread. Campbell’s job was boring, sticking needles into sad babies and old people so they didn’t starve or dry up (Mallory had never seen Campbell in the exciting pressure cooker of the operating room). But it was a real job .
    Merry completely disagreed.
    She worshipped Aunt Kate’s house.
    She insisted that raising a family was a real job, too. Meredith wanted to have a dozen babies and make needlepoint pillows.
    Mallory still wanted to grow up and one day be her dad’s partner in the sporting goods store he owned with Rick Domini. She wished the store were called Brynn and Daughter, instead of Domino Sports. She loved working at the store on Saturdays, smelling the new ski gloves and leather boots, getting free basket-balls and occasionally meeting very young (or very former) pro athletes who seemed to have gotten lost on the way to somewhere else at Domino Sports in Ridgeline.
    But it wasn’t really the shellacked bread that was so irritating tonight, Mally admitted to herself. Did she wish she were somewhere else tonight? Only with her entire soul. Even Mally, who was antisocial, wanted to be at a party tonight. People who babysat on New Year’s Eve were considered the crud at the bottom of the social barrel, below girl computer geniuses (Mallory actually was sort of a girl computer genius).
    But then, they hadn’t even opened half their gifts yet. They’d decided to wait until tomorrow to make the delicious memory last longer. It had been a fabulous party.
    And, to be honest, their parents really never did anything fancy, like Kate and Kevin did, such as dinner parties and Broadway shows. All they did was have Drew’s parents and Bonnie and their brothers and sisters over to play board games.
    In the summer, they all went for ten days to the family camp, and Tim and Campbell would drink beer and do wacky eighties dancing around the fire pit. When they went to movies, it was at the art cinema, for two dollars a ticket, to see old movies like Lawrence of Arabia —which they also forced on the twins.
    Okay, they deserved their big night. But the twins both thought Campbell was overdoing the concerned-parent bit.
    “We’ve just never left you alone and gone so far away before,” Campbell went on.
    And on and on.
    Even Meredith finally gently reminded her mom, “We’re hardly going to be alone. Grandma Gwenny will be here in a couple of hours.”
    Tim’s mom was coming to sleep over with the children, no later than ten that night. Since Tim’s father had a mild heart condition, they avoided large crowds and unfamiliar germs, and were having only a few friends over for bridge and a late supper. Tim’s sister, Karin, who also lived in Deptford and was home because she, just like Campbell thirteen years before, was in the final stages of her pregnancy, was also on alert.
    Nothing could go wrong.
    “Stop worrying!” Mallory scolded her mother. “You know you just want to leave, so leave!”
    “Mally,” Meredith said. “Come on. You’d worry. There’re a lot of kids