Stay the Way You Are, a Nice, Reliable, Settled, Comfortable Woman - Part Two

Myka

She wasn't sure why she had jumped in at that moment and volunteered to chaperone. Maybe it was because of the panicked look on her daughter's face as Maddie realized their outing at the art museum was coming to an end and that whatever she and Christina had planned wasn't likely to happen. It had been instinctive, a maternal desire to help her child. That was a little much, Maddie hadn't been hanging by her fingernails off a cliff. Or maybe she had done it, Myka thought, because of the pained look on Helena's face as Christina had all but clapped herself on the head with one of her poster tubes as she pretended to remember the pool party. Once upon a time Helena had been as clumsy - and charming - a liar, skating over a failed exam or her lack of study habits with the sunniest of smiles and kisses to the places where she knew Myka was most ticklish (the nape of her neck, behind her ears), claiming softly, "I'd be a straight A student if you weren't such a distraction." Myka had known better than to believe her (not completely, anyway), but it was nice to think she could have such an effect. But the Helena who had leveled a glare of Death Star magnitude at her daughter was . . . a grown-up, finally. Not the kind of grown-up Myka had imagined she would turn into, but perhaps everyone was destined to become a version of her parents, no matter how stoutly she had once resisted the possibility. Helena had spoken as darkly of the conservatism of her parents' politics as she had of the liberality they exhibited on a personal level, separating amid threats of divorce only to reconcile with equally passionate declarations. But here she was, the fiancée of Nate Robinson, corn mogul. Maybe, Myka conceded, she hadn't been able to resist twitting that glibly self-possessed business executive and giving her no escape from a tween pool party that had been invented only moments before.

Or maybe she had volunteered to chaperone because she wanted to see Helena one more time. As they had begun drifting away from each other in the museum's lobby, Myka had tried to reassure herself that it was okay that their meeting each other again after so many years didn't result in the connection that their meeting the first time had. Not the same connection, she had practically - and nervously - giggled to herself; that connection, which had led to a date the following night and then something best unnamed, still capable of making make her blush down to her toes even now, that connection wasn't ever going to happen again. But it would have been nice to feel a remnant, a decidedly platonic one, of those old feelings. Having seen the professional mask Helena's face had assumed, her "I'm sorry but we've gone with someone else" smile barely working the muscles of her mouth, Myka realized that there was no remnant. It was gone, all of it. And that simply couldn't be.

But having volunteered, having received a curtly worded email from Helena just days ago confirming the party, Myka was questioning the wisdom of her impulsiveness. She usually did regret being impulsive. Some people could act on a whim and shrug off the mistakes that resulted; some people could be spontaneous and never experience the dangers that attended a lack of planning. She was not one of those people.

Exhibit 1 - her marriage to Sam, which, although it had produced Maddie (an event so well orchestrated that it had incorporated her preference for entering her third trimester in the fall rather than at the beginning of summer), had been more lunging for a life preserver than deciding that this was the person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. After having her heart broken by Helena and her pride trampled on by Laurel, she had wanted someone who wouldn't challenge her to be more than she was but who also wouldn't encourage her to be less. She had been too cautious, too prosaic for Helena, she could admit it now. Not for her traipsing through Spain with only a wicked smile and a student credit card $500 short of being maxed out. On the other hand, rendezvousing with Laurel in the backseat of cars and in friends' apartments and then pretending they were just friends in front of Laurel's fiancé, it had been beneath her. Sam was immature and completely irresponsible when it came to money, but he was nice, and at that point in her life, being nice and undemanding and unable to focus on anything for longer than five minutes (except for sex), it was all she was asking for. Until, less than two years into their marriage, she remembered that she was Myka Bering, and she wanted a hell of a lot more than that. Of course, because she was Myka Bering, it had taken her another five years to admit it to herself and end her marriage.

Exhibit 2 - Michelle. No, that would be unfair because, on paper, they really were an ideal match. It would also be potentially devastating, because if Michelle were Exhibit 2, then she wouldn't have had a successful relationship since Helena, and since she could hardly consider her relationship with Helena successful, it would mean that she had never had a successful relationship, that all of them had been ill-advised and destined to end unhappily. Unless she widened the definition of relationship and counted Maddie, and how pathetic was that? Maddie was 11 and about as capable of fending for herself as a baby robin. Her daughter had to love her, she had no choice.

"I'd like to believe those are pleasant thoughts you're having," Dr. Frederic said with a sternness that wasn't entirely a pretense. "But I see the open Twizzlers package on your desk."

Myka was more aware of the half-eaten Twizzler dangling from her mouth, which, Irene, gracious as always, had chosen to ignore. Quickly biting through it and throwing the remnant into the wastebasket under her desk, she swallowed the chunk that was in her mouth and tried out what she hoped was a confident, I've-got-it-together smile, which would be even more persuasive if she didn't have flecks of Twizzler dotting her teeth. Did she? Irene always looked unflappable, no matter the crisis. Not that having pieces of Twizzler stuck to her teeth ranked with the campus protests that, earlier in the year, had greeted the arrival of a controversial speaker or the ethics violations committed by the athletic department and lecturers in the freshman core courses curriculum in a "pay for an A to play" arrangement (actually it had been pay for a C but C didn't rhyme as well as A), but it was embarrassing.

"Do you want to tell me about it?" Carefully tucking her skirt around her knees, Irene sat in a chair facing her across the desk, ready for a heart to heart . . . or a mass evacuation. Either one.

While she encouraged Maddie to be open with her, to share her feelings good and bad, Myka hadn't been brought up that way, and though the parenting style of Warren and Jeannie Bering was not one she had chosen to adopt with her daughter, Myka didn't regret the nonexistent opportunities to confide in her parents. She and her father hadn't agreed on much, but she did share in his conviction that feelings were a lot like eggs; they made a big mess if you didn't handle them right. You were best off touching them as little as possible and keeping them in an out-of-the-way place. Of course, you couldn't not feel, which was why sisters had been invented - for when you accidentally knocked the carton of eggs out of the refrigerator . . . . You confided in them, not your boss.

"Nothing to tell, Irene, really." She opened a folder on her desk that she hadn't looked at in the past 30 minutes. "I've been reviewing the president's plan for increasing our profile among the city's business leaders."

"By plan, you mean the president's hasty remarks just before he jetted off for another conference. In Honolulu, I believe." Irene patted the intricately woven braids of her hair. "The only plan he has is the one you'll have to invent for him, Myka."

"That's my job, Irene."

There was another pat to her hair. "For which he'll take all the credit." It might seem an unconscious tic, Irene's patting of her hair, but next to removing her glasses mid-speech, it was the best indicator of how frustrated she was. Myka had worked for Irene for too many years and next to too many unfortunates not to have concluded that if Irene took off her glasses as she was speaking to you, you needed to be ready to hand in your resignation by the end of the day. Unfortunately, taking off her glasses when she spoke with President Kosan didn't have the same effect. He was Frederic-proof, spending most of his time attending conferences in places like Las Vegas, Miami, and, now, Honolulu, while Irene merely kept the university functioning from day to day, no easy feat in the face of declining student enrollment and deeper budget cuts.

"If it works, what does it matter?" Myka smiled wearily.

"It matters," Irene declared firmly. "You do good work, and you should be recognized for it." Relenting, she drew a line in the air that paralleled the desk. "But it's not what you were thinking about. If you'd had coffee mugs lined up like soldiers in formation, I might have believed it."

Usually there were at least three in a row by this time in the afternoon. Myka knew that coffee was an environmental and social justice disaster as a stimulant. Michelle had encouraged her to give it up for eight glasses of water and eight hours of sleep per day, claiming that the change would strike a blow, albeit a small one, against the corporatist mentality that exploited farmers, the Earth, and her own body, but Myka just couldn't. The most she had been able to do was banish Keurigs from the administrative offices in favor of French presses and to bring in an assortment of coffee mugs from home.

Irene's look turned knowing. "But Twizzlers, that's when your heart's involved." She paused. "It's not Michelle again, is it?"

Had there been the faintest note of disapproval? Myka tried to engineer a look as coolly knowing and failed. She might as well give up the act. She tore the Twizzlers package completely open and offered Irene a twist. For awhile they sat in contented silence, chewing on Twizzlers. "No, it's Helena," Myka said, and though she had mentioned Helena's name only a handful of times in the almost 20 years she had known Irene, at times working for her and at times working for someone else but being no more than a dash across the hall from her office, she knew Irene would know what the admission meant.

She had met Irene when she had answered a job posting pinned to the bulletin board outside the Academic Affairs office. She had spent the better part of an hour in the office arguing with one of the provost's nameless assistants that she should be transferring to the university as a senior, not a junior. Had she returned to the college at which she had spent two very good years and then a magical/horrible third year, she would be a semester away from graduating. Returning was what she had intended to do; as devastating as her break-up with Helena had been, she wasn't going to let it prevent her from graduating on time. Helena was her love, but this, this, reading and thinking and discussing what she had read and thought, it was her life. Until her father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in the summer following her junior year, the Helena year, and she had had to readjust her beliefs about what life was. She hadn't returned to college in the fall, she had helped her mother care for her father, made life as normal as possible for her 17-year-old sister, and worked part-time in the shoe department of a large retailer. (Maybe that was where her indifference to footwear had its origin, her trotting shoe boxes back and forth between the storeroom and customers who were determined to force their feet into shoes that didn't fit them. At times, especially as treatments failed and her father was moved to hospice care in the fall, she had been tempted to fling the boxes (empty of the shoes, of course) at the customers' heads, their stupid, stubborn heads, but she hadn't. She had only smiled and gently suggested a half size larger or wider.)

Warren Bering died in November, and in January, Myka, still helping her mother, still trying to ensure that Tracy had some semblance of a teenager's life, decided to transfer to the university. The student loan debt would be even more enormous, because she had had to give up her scholarship-paid-for tuition to that very wonderful and now Helena-free liberal arts college, but it was worth it. She needed something to feel finished . . . in a positive sense, and having a degree would get her out of the shoe department. But virtually a third of her credits didn't transfer, and she had the equivalent of a year to make up. Trying to understand how she had lost a year transferring from a far superior institution to a "kegger every Friday" university, she had come to stand in front of the bulletin board, and there she saw the job opening, a part-time administrative position in the External Affairs office. Applicants were to contact AVP Irene Frederic.

She hadn't met Irene that day; she didn't meet her until a couple of weeks later for an interview, and it had taken another week before she was hired, but Myka always considered that their history together, personal and professional, started from that day, not one of the worst days of her life but at the top of the "damn close" list. She had been Irene's top administrative assistant when Laurel had joined the office a year and a half later, an assistant (with an administrative assistant of her own) when she had met Sam on a task force that brought together External Affairs staff with their near cousins from the development office, and on the verge of being promoted to assistant vice president when she and Sam divorced. Myka had kept her tears and her arguments out of the office, but Irene had learned to read the bags of Twizzlers and other candy that would appear on her desk as a barometer of just how awful she was feeling. Laurel had rated half a bag of Twizzlers and a week's worth of candy bars, Sam a candy dish of salt-water taffy and bite-size Twizzlers for a year, Michelle a month-long conveyor belt from desk drawer to mouth of every Twizzler flavor that Myka could find - the first time. The second break-up had merited only an all-day Twizzler binge. Once, sometime during the periods of manic candy eating, Myka had only half-jokingly said, "Good thing I wasn't working here when I broke up with my college girlfriend. You probably would have found me suffocated under a mountain of candy wrappers."

"First loves," Irene had said, her imperturbable expression softening a fraction of an inch, "they're wonderful and exhilarating and, thankfully, never to be repeated."

As retentive as her memory was, Myka wouldn't have had any difficulty remembering her response, but what she had said was as true now as it had been then. "She wasn't a first love, Irene, she was an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink love. And then she took the sink, too."

Irene must have been remembering her words as well. "She's come back with the kitchen sink, has she? You have a dilemma. Just how eager are you to invite her back into your life, Myka?"

She's not entering it, Irene, Myka silently answered her. She's closing the door on me before I've made up my mind whether I want to close it on her. Rounding the corner, feeling more breathless than she would like by a run that had never pushed Remy out of an easy lope, Myka saw her house at the end of the street and thought, briefly, about sprinting the remaining distance. But there was no one to impress with her exertions, most especially her daughter who had a skinny child's certainty that she could always eat what she wanted when she wanted and a bookworm's disdain for exercising anything below her neck. Remy danced a little ahead of her, pulling at the leash in encouragement, but Myka slowed to a walk, feeling her skin doubling down on the amount of sweat it was producing. If there was no one to impress, there was no one who had to smell or touch her sweaty body, except Maddie, and Maddie was already beginning to enter that stage in which everything about her mother was icky; the sight of her dripping forehead and glistening arms and legs would be enough to drive Maddie to her bedroom for the rest of the night.

Her house, 150 years ago, had been a marvel of Victorian architecture, and under the frosting of turrets and dormer windows and intricately carved woodwork, there was a sturdy, two-story structure that Myka had become convinced she could reclaim from the years of abuse it had suffered as off-campus housing for the university's students. Maddie had been too young to stop her when they had walked through it with a real estate agent who, by the effect of the glowing picture he had drawn of a home restored to its nineteenth-century gingerbread glory, realized the truth of the saying that there's a sucker born every minute. Six years later the house still looked dilapidated, but at least no one could walk past it and imagine a drunken undergraduate leaning out of a second-story window to pee on the grass. Which had actually happened because the nineteenth-century house had had, shockingly, nineteenth-century plumbing. She had been able to address that at least, but there was so much more, so much, much more.

Maddie had been reading on the front porch's glider when Myka left for her run, but now she was on the steps, sitting next to Pete Lattimer. He was in his usual summer uniform of baggy cotton athletic shorts and extremely snug tee. Myka could admire his well-developed pecs and taut abs without confirmation that there was a six-pack under the shirt. It wasn't that he was a man, it was that he was Pete, and she could no more imagine herself running her hands over his chest than she could imagine herself kissing Irene. There were some people who had the ability to flip the switch in your head that would shut off the stray "Could I ever . . ." and "If we were the last two people on Earth, would we . . . " and Pete was one of those people for her. His mouth was going at its usual speed, too; if he wasn't eating, he was talking, and sometimes both simultaneously. Happily, there were no half-masticated chunks of food flying out of his mouth like missiles.

He stood up and vigorously waved at her, as if somehow she might manage to overlook him if he didn't. "Hey, Mykes, I was dropping off JP with his mom, and I thought I would see if you and the rugrat were around. I have a business proposition."

Over glasses of iced tea and, yes, a few aging Fig Newmans for Pete, she heard him out. (She found it as difficult to refuse him snacks as she did Remy, unable to say to no to either set of pleading brown eyes.) He wanted to hire Maddie for occasional Saturday morning work as a "peer coach" for the soccer team he was coaching. "Your team is called the Soccer Sprouts, they're a bunch of five-year-olds, Pete. How, exactly, is Maddie their peer?" Myka held her sweaty glass of iced tea to her sweaty forehead and rolled it from side to side for marginal relief. By raising her arm, she was probably releasing a cloud of poisonous vapor from her armpit, but, thankfully, Pete wasn't someone she was worried about impressing. She had never thought she was missing an older (by ten months) brother in her life, but, given the ease with which he had slipped into the slot, Pete must be what she had been looking for without even knowing it. Pete and Helena . . . if they were her missing halves, no, thirds, whatever, she really needed to reread Plato.

Myka had a fair idea of what was behind his proposition, which, while great for Maddie (her own money plus yielding a larger benefit in boosting her self-confidence), had little on the plus side for Pete and the kids he was coaching. Myka loved her daughter, but she knew that Maddie moved like she did when she was 11, as if her arms and legs were each listening to the beat of a different drummer. Maddie had brains and heart and was, quite possibly, the worst soccer player in the Midwest.

Pete wormed another Fig Newman from the package. "Anyone can teach the kids the basic skills and plays, but it takes someone with persistence, with enthusiasm, who knows how to dig deep, to give them the passion for the game. That's what Maddie'll bring."

He had almost had her, Myka mused, until he oversold on the "passion" bit. Maddie had played soccer for two years, and the last year had been a struggle for Myka to get her into the uniform and to the practices and games on time. Maddie had promised that she would stay in orchestra "forever, Mom!" (i.e., until high school graduation) if only she could quit soccer. The one thing she had loved about it was Pete. Even though Maddie hadn't so much as kicked at a soccer ball in over three years, Myka knew that she would occasionally drop in on a practice on her way home from school just to talk to him. Pete wasn't just the older brother she had never had, he was, in some ways, more a father to Maddie than her own father was, and to give him his due, Pete had taken to the role, giving her daughter wise counsel (or, since he was Petel, giving her counsel that didn't result in utter catastrophe at least) and, more importantly, being an adult whom she could rely on who wasn't her mother. The only thing she wouldn't trust Pete with was advising Maddie on her homework, especially after stopping by the practice field herself one day and seeing their heads bent over the Darth Vader spiral-bound notebook in which Pete kept track of the team's expenses and hearing Maddie gently chiding him with "Pete, you forgot to carry the 2" and "19 minus 9 is not 9."

She owed Pete a lot, but he wasn't a saint and he wasn't above working a situation to his advantage, especially when it came to women. He loved coaching kids, but he also loved the opportunities it gave him to mingle with their mothers, a good number of whom were single mothers. He really was a dog. "I imagine Maddie - if she and I were to agree to this - would work primarily with the kids who are struggling?" Pete vehemently nodded his head. "A child like Cameron Davies? Really sweet but has some coordination issues." Pete's nodding slowed and his expression grew wary.

"Cameron's definitely a kid who Maddie could help in the enthusiasm department," he said, scaling back the hard sell. "He's shy."

"Do you know that I work with his mother, Leena? She's in the Academic Affairs office, just down the hall from me." She stared at him unblinkingly. He wasn't going to weasel out of having to look at her. Of course he knew that she worked with Leena. Without looking away from him, she asked Maddie, "I think I hear noises from the hall closet. Will you go check and see if Remy's chewing the flip-flops again?"

"If you want to talk privately to Pete, why not just say so?" Maddie grumbled, slouching out of the kitchen.

Myka lowered her voice to a growl. "You're using my daughter as a panderer, Pete."

"What?" He sounded both outraged and puzzled. In consternation he spoke through the Fig Newman he was eating, spraying a not-so-fine mist of crumbs over the table. "I don't know what a 'panderer' means exactly, but it doesn't sound good, and I would never involve Maddie -"

"In a scheme to hit on Cameron's mother?"

"Oh, so that's what a 'panderer' means," he said, enlightened. Smiling slyly at her, which was somewhat akin to the credulous expression Elmer Fudd would wear after hatching a "brilliant" plan to outwit Bugs Bunny, he said, "Maddie's not my panderer, you are. After all, who's going to take Maddie to those 9:00 a.m. Saturday morning games and pick her up after those 5:00 p.m. practices?"

"Pete," Myka said, protestingly. "Okay, maybe 'panderer' is too strong, but the Bering women are not women you want as matchmakers. If something's going to develop between you and Leena, it'll happen with or without our help."

She tried to look at Pete objectively, which was hard because he had a ring of cookie crumbs around his mouth. He and Leena's husband had both been Marines, but the similarities ended there. Cameron Davies, Sr. had died in Afghanistan when his son was a baby, heroically attempting to save the lives of fellow Marines pinned down by a sniper. Pete had been honorably discharged from the Marines but he had seen action no more taxing than that to be found servicing and repairing aircraft on a base in Okinawa. Leena's husband had been awarded medals before his death and awarded even more after it. Handsome, brave, intelligent, the life of the party as well as a natural leader, Cameron Davies had had plans to serve his country after his discharge, intending to get a law degree and, eventually, enter politics. Myka had heard nothing less glowing from Leena or her family during the summer barbecues and Christmas parties the university - and Irene - had hosted over the years. Pete had his own brand of courage, but battling successfully against a decade-long addiction to alcohol wasn't heroic in the same way. Then there was Leena's often-repeated declaration that "If, and I mean if, I marry again, it will be to a man who can be a strong, proud, role model for my son, a strong, proud, African-American role model."

Pete was a great guy, but . . . Myka tried not to wince at the hopefulness of his expression. Damn, there were those eyes again. She found herself reaching for one of the Fig Newmans and repressing a shudder as she nibbled at it. She had bought them for Ethan the day they had all gone to the movies during Maddie's stay at summer camp, but he had taken one look at the cookies and begun to cry. "Pete," she said more softly.

"I know she's out of my league, Mykes, that's why I'm asking for some help." Realizing what she was looking at, he lifted his hand to the back of his mouth to wipe away the crumbs and then thought better of it, applying a napkin instead. "And what's with this 'it'll happen naturally'? Aren't you letting Maddie and what's her friend's name," he snapped his fingers rapidly, "Christina? Aren't you letting Maddie and Christina fix you up with her mom?"

"That's not what it is, Pete. It's an entirely different thing." Suddenly Myka wanted nothing more than to pull her tank away from her chest and pour the melted ice in her glass between her breasts. "The girls struck up a friendship at camp and, coincidentally, Helena and I knew each other in college. It's a different, different thing. There's no fixing up going on, on either side."

"Uh, huh. Which is why you guys went to the art museum, which is why you're chaperoning the pool party Christina's throwing." His eyes were no longer pleading, they expressed a grievous sense of injury, much like Remy's would when Myka pried a well-chewed flip-flop from her jaws. "Helena's engaged, Myka. Leena's out of my league, but at least I'm not chasing someone who's out of bounds."

Maddie

She and Sophie had emptied a bottle of 100spf sunscreen lotion between them. Probably not necessary given the shade provided by the umbrella overhead, but you never knew when an adult or one of Christina's obnoxious friends might commandeer the chairs she and Sophie were reclining on, and they would be pushed out into the sun like tiny baby rabbits or starfish. Christina had been making the rounds most of the afternoon, very much a miniature Helena Wells, except for the t-shirt that she had slipped over her bathing suit, a men's crewneck with blue sinuous curves painted on the front, resembling a peacock's head and neck, and, on the back, a fan-shaped splash of iridescent green, blue, and orange. Kind of clever, Maddie grudgingly admitted. She was in a mood, she realized, which made anything but grudging acceptance difficult, because this afternoon was not turning out the way she had hoped.

She hadn't expected to see her mother and Helena fly into each other's arms and kiss. Ish. But they were acting as though the other one didn't exist. Helena had been shaking hands and giving air hugs and kisses and sampling pretty heavily from the beverage ends of the buffet tables when she wasn't enthusiastically greeting the parents of Christina's friends. Now she was sitting at a table with her back to the pool, laughing it up with some of the parents. As for her mother, Maddie raised her head to scornfully stare at Myka. She had been in the pool most of the afternoon, refereeing the kids like she had been a daycare provider all her life.

"Hey, what page are you on?" Sophie had lifted her head from her tablet to squint at her. They had started reading a new YA science fiction trilogy a couple of nights ago, and Sophie always liked to stop after a few pages and ask her if she thought the future would really be like this. Sophie's mother was a physics professor at the same university where her mother worked, and Sophie said her mom thought a lot of the YA science fiction was silly. In fact, Sophie's mom thought fiction in general was silly, so Sophie frequently asked her whether she, Maddie, not a child prodigy like Professor Levinson had been, believed that people could teleport to different planets or, with a simple Bluetooth-looking device, access others' memories, as though Maddie's opinion carried the same weight as her mother's. "Do you think Kazimir can really recombine his DNA and turn himself into someone else?"

"Um, I'm still on page 75. Kazimir's only turned a butterfly into a tarantula." Maddie was caught by the almost synchronous turn of Christina's and Helena's heads. They were staring at a woman who had come out onto the patio. She suddenly stretched, which seemed to draw every male eye, with the exception of the eyes of the men at Helena's table, and not a few of the women, but she seemed unaware of the attention. Maddie thought she heard Helena snort, but maybe she was only coughing because she had her fist up to her mouth as though her cherry-red drink, her fourth or fifth of the same color by Maddie's count, had gone down the wrong way.

Christina ran to greet the woman, tugging on her hand and leading her toward the pool. "Come on, Gigi," Maddie heard her cry. "I want to introduce you to some of my friends."

So this was Gigi, the potential wrench in their plans, her plans, because Christina would be more than happy to see her mom and her mom's ex-girlfriend get back together, leaving the door open for another ex-girlfriend, namely Michelle, to try to win back her own mom. There had been no new developments on that front since the matinée of a few weeks ago, at least none that her mother had mentioned. Which meant there could have been lunches she didn't know about, casual drop-ins at her mom's office during which Michelle could have been reminiscing about those awful dinners with Ethan or how they had (not) watched The Voice together. Michelle could be making inroads on her mother's not-so-formidable resistance, especially as her resistance was usually halfway gone when she thought she was needed or missed, which Maddie had learned through careful testing. She steeled herself for another glance at Helena, expecting to discover that half-chagrined, half-wistful look actresses on TV always had when they learned that the cute surgeon/detective/lawyer who had come to their rescue was already married or hooked up with a "terrific woman" who was conveniently offscreen. But that wasn't Helena's look at all, she looked like she was witnessing a really bad accident, one that in Maddie's imagination involved lots and lots of blood. Helena's mouth had dropped open and her eyebrows were arched high above her sunglasses as Christina, continuing to tug at Gigi like a sled dog in harness, shouted to her mom, "Hey, Myka, come meet my friend Gigi" and then a little faster than if it had been in afterthought "Hey, you too, Maddie and . . . Sophie? Effie? Uh, Maddie's friend."

Christina could have forgotten to include her altogether and she had sort of gotten Sophie's name right. It was Christina. How much more could she expect? As for Helena's look of horror, Maddie refused to confirm what she knew it was - her mom had reached for a kid she thought was drowning or lunged after a ball about to whiz out of the pool and her breasts had fallen out of her suit. Last summer one of her mom's bathing suit straps had flopped over her shoulder and she didn't pull it up for, like, minutes. Maddie had known then that it was only going to be a matter of time before they were out there for the world to see, and it had happen to now.

Myka

She's out of bounds. Pete's pearls of wisdom were few, but this was one to keep in mind. Myka thumbed the water out of her eyes as a tween boy dove underneath the surface with an unnecessarily aggressive kick, splashing water in a wide arc. Spangled with the drops of water beading her eyelashes, the back of Nate's house looked no less an overbuilt self-tribute to his prowess than its front. The "patio," as Helena called it, was an enormous expanse of travertine that extended into a yard that extended, in turn, for hundreds and hundreds of acres. Or so it seemed. And the caterer she had hired for this kids' pool party? Her own university couldn't afford to hire it.

This was the house that Nate built and Helena had made her home in it. A ball was rocketing toward Myka and she automatically raised a hand to slap it away, accepting as automatically the shouts of "Sorry!" and "Wyatt did it, not me." Too bad that her reflexes, which had gained in speed and precision when she had to look after her uncoordinated child, reverted to their natural sluggishness when it came to Helena. She would look away from her only to feel her eyes slide in their sockets as they sought her out again. Myka hadn't intended to spend the entire afternoon actively chaperoning the kids; she had hazily pictured the parents trading off the responsibility and she had then pictured herself, once her obligatory half-hour was over, sampling the finger food to the accompaniment of Helena's wry commentary on the party. Her assumption that the other parents would pitch in was her mistake for thinking this really was a kids party but no more naive than her hope that Helena might join her in the line for the mini corn dogs. Maybe there was no better reality check than protecting the younger children from pool wedgies, unassisted, while Helena, playing the gracious hostess, stopped at every table, wearing a bikini, four pocket squares held together by a breath, that would daunt younger women.

Smiling at her bout of self-pity, Myka turned her head back toward the pool, only to be doused by another sheet of water, erupting from the simultaneous plunge, feet first, of several of Christina's closest friends into the pool. How many of them could Christina even name? There followed more thumbing of water from her eyes, a clipped "Please don't do that" issued in tandem with a murderous look, and, after making sure there was no child with his trunks pulled over his head or chained to the bottom of the pool, she glided toward the steps. She held a hand out for balance as she pushed through the water to find her footing and felt it gripped by a hand that, despite its softness and impeccably trimmed and polished fingernails was more than capable of steadying her.

It wasn't Helena's hand. It wasn't just larger and softer, it hadn't tried to push her back into the water.

"Thanks." Myka let that hand draw her up the steps, experiencing a flash of pleasure at the top when she realized that she was shorter, by an inch or two, than the woman who had helped her out of the pool. It was an old-fashioned satisfaction but she had always preferred that those offering her a casual gallantry be the taller.

"Myka," Christina was practically hopping with impatience, "I was calling and calling you. This is my friend Gigi."

"Giselle Fourier," the woman said, offering her that soft-strong hand again, this time in a handshake. "But I refuse to answer to 'Giselle,' I'm 'Gigi' to friends and enemies alike."

There were few women who could carry off a nickname like Gigi, Myka thought, but this woman did, from the teasingly prim chignon in which she had captured what would be, of course, an abundance of ash-blond hair (Farrah Fawcett meets Grace Kelly) to the teasingly molded fit of her bikini. You wouldn't remove it so much as peel it from her, and Myka blushed at how readily she had arrived at the conclusion and blushed harder when the image of peeling a peach or plum immediately followed it, their skin so thin that she always ended up digging her fingers into the flesh. She coughed, suddenly aware of the hair plastered to her head, her eyes red-rimmed from the combination of sun and chlorine. "Myka Bering," she choked out charmlessly.

"So Christina's been endlessly repeating. Very nice to meet you, Myka." The smile was as casually gracious as the helping hand up the pool steps and even more attractive because, yes, Myka conceded, she was having to look up the tiniest bit to receive the full effect of it.

"I thought I'd see what food is left, now that the lines are gone." What she needed to do was to duck into Helena's house and find a bathroom in which she could put herself together. Comb her hair, readjust her swimsuit, which, thoroughly waterlogged, was settling into crevices she didn't have the nerve to publicly reconnoitre. Instead, she asked, mesmerized by irises as light as Helena's were dark, "Care to join me?"

"I've heard the mini cheeseburgers are good."

Christina tagged along with them, disbelief written on her face. Myka regarded her warily; Maddie adopted that alarmed look whenever her mother had committed a faux pas too egregious to be named and yet, apparently, known only to 11-year-old girls. "Do I have a swimsuit malfunction I don't know about?"

"Gigi's the one having a malfunction. She doesn't eat." Christina clapped her hand over her mouth as though she had just revealed a secret.

"It's true," Gigi said gravely. "Human pleasures are unknown to me."

It was on the tip of Myka's tongue to reply "That's a shame because you're built for them," but she didn't make suggestive remarks in public or to strangers or in front of children. Nevertheless, Gig's casually gracious smile became wider and knowing, as though she had heard every word Myka didn't say. Gesturing aimlessly at the buffet tables because she wasn't sure she knew how to respond to, or handle, that smile, Myka nearly clipped the head of a boy who was darting under her arm to take a position next to Christina.

"Jordan," Christina greeted him with exasperation.

"Sorry, Jordan," Myka said, and then with the same gulping and crimsoning she would have experienced had she actually said something suggestive to Gigi, she said, "I try to help children, not hurt them." She had meant it to be funny, taking a jab at her awkwardness, but Gigi was looking at her as if she could see straight back to her first day of school, not missing a single gaffe, blunder, or ugly spill along the way.

"You sat in the first row in the classroom, and the boy who was all knees and the girl who had nosebleeds were picked for teams before you were." Myka nodded. The details weren't right, but they weren't all that far off the mark. She was picked before the girl who kept saying her heart would burst if she had to run as part of the game. "And," Gigi tapped her chin musingly, "you played saxophone in your school's band."

"Oboe," and because she couldn't resist adding it, "first chair."

"Of course."

They sat a table vacated by the parents of one of the two Jennifers and the parents and step-parents of Kylie, who were leaving to attend another party "just down the road" so one of them said. Watching them walk away, Myka murmured, behind the cheeseburger poised to enter her mouth, "You mean the one paved with gold that runs through the peasant villages."

If she wasn't embracing with gusto her introduction to the human pleasure of eating, Gigi was at least welcoming it, ensuring that her plate held more than one mini appetizer and chips that hadn't first been painstakingly counted out. Turning an amused eye on Myka, Gigi said, "Born with a wooden spoon in your mouth and proud of it?"

"Wooden and splintered, so my grudge is deep-seated." Myka grinned. She was a mess while the woman sitting next to her was stunning, but after her initial bout of nerves, she was feeling . . . okay. Better than okay, relaxed, letting the chlorinated tangle of her hair dry in the sun and discreetly shifting in her chair to work her swimsuit out from the crannies it had settled in.

In the amount of time it had taken them to select their food from the chafing dishes and to find this table, which, set apart from the others and offering the illusion that this whatever-it-was between them, maybe, in the end, just a friendly conversation to pass the afternoon, was unconnected to the party, Myka had learned two interesting things about Gigi. One was that, like her, Gigi had grown up in the city, and, second, unlike her, she had been offered a modeling contract while still in high school. "To think," Gigi had finished dryly, "ten years ago almost to the day, I gave up my exciting career of modeling lingerie for catalogs and sales flyers to come home and take a job in the mayor's office. You may have seen some of my work lining the bottom of your Target shopping cart."

Gigi might have a jaundiced appreciation of her former career, but Myka was battling not to think about her in a black negligée. The bite of the mini cheeseburger she was chewing became so much sawdust as she banished the image from her mind - again - and she had to drain the rest of her bottle of water to get the bite down.

" . . . wooden, silver, brass. The mayor collects spoons. He doesn't care what kind they are because he can eat from all of them." Gigi nibbled at a mini meatball, then put it down to break off a particle of potato chip.

"Are you chastising me or hitting me up for a contribution?" Myka had voted for Larry Jenkins in both elections, but only because he had been the sole viable alternative to a former prosecutor-turned-conservative-radio-talk-show-host. There was a whiff (sometimes more than a whiff) of corruption and cronyism about their current mayor; on the other hand, Gigi would make a terrific gangster's moll.

"You're the face of external affairs for the university, and you're benefiting, indirectly, from the largesse of one Nate Robinson, who, as he tells it, ate with no spoons as a child, just his bare hands." Gigi waved behind her toward Robinson Manor. "He's a generous donor to several nonprofits and charities, and his name alone attracts other investors. Plus you have an in with him already. Helena's his fiancée."

An in I would prefer to ignore, Myka thought but didn't say. "In better times, I dealt with community groups and schools for the most part, strengthening the university's presence in the community and promoting it as a 'force for good.' There was someone else to gladhand the business leaders and flatter them into setting up joint ventures and other 'mutually beneficial partnerships.' Chad loved it, but he fled for greener pastures when the university started its budget cutting. Now I have to woo the movers and shakers, and I'm not much of a wooer." Myka closed her eyes in chagrin. Why, why did she use "woo"? All it did was bring up the image of Gigi in a negligée and confirm her ineptness. There went the relaxation - she felt waves of blushes rolling up into her face like it was high tide.

"I doubt that," Gigi said softly. "I think you value sincerity, Myka. When you feel passionately about something, I bet it's hard for people to say no to you."

Without intending to, Myka let her eyes pick out Helena, who, surprisingly, had pulled up a lounge chair and was talking to Maddie and Sophie by the pool. "Not so hard," she said, her voice both rueful and resigned.

"Hey, Myka." Christina leaned over the back of Myka's chair, Jordan, an admiring shadow, swiftly coming to her side. "I'll get that t-shirt made for you in a couple of weeks. I need to think about the design." She scampered off in the direction of the house, fruitlessly trying to shake the persistent Jordan.

"What t-shirt?" Gigi smiled at another youth passing by their table. "Would you be so kind as to get us a couple of bottles of water?" He goggled for a second at that smile, poorly mirroring it with an awestruck one of his own, before hurrying to the beverage table.

That was wooing, convincing someone who, mere seconds ago, might not have been aware of your existence (although hard to believe in Gigi's case) that pleasing you was his sole mission in life. Telling herself that it came easily to Gigi because all men, fundamentally, were 12-year-old boys didn't undercut the effect. If Gigi worked in the External Affairs office - Myka had to rapidly blink away the scenarios prompted by that fantasy. "I asked Christina to design a t-shirt for me like the peacock one she's wearing, but with a dolphin."

Gigi's eyes widened, and there was a rising note of surprise in her voice. "You're commissioning art from someone who just finished fifth grade?"

"She's talented," Myka explained, "why wouldn't I encourage her efforts? She's charging me $25, so she already has a feeling for what her work might be worth someday." As Gigi continued to stare incredulously at her, Myka said, "Talent's talent, no matter the age. She's no less an artist just because she's a kid."

"I'm beginning to understand why Christina likes you so much." As Myka pulled a face, Gigi laughed. "It's not because she's $25 richer today than she was yesterday, it's because you get her, get what's important to her. She can be closed off, like her mom."

It was Myka's turn to stare incredulously. "You think Helena's hard to read?" Shrugging, looking down and away, she added quietly, "Maybe she is now."

Holding out the two bottles of water as if he hoped she might autograph them, the boy Gigi had sent off to retrieve them waited for her to acknowledge him. With another artfully pleased smile, she did so by saying, "Thanks very much. You were a lifesaver." His thin chest swelling with the pride of a man who had just prevented two ugly dehydration deaths, he mumbled something that sounded like "Anytime" and dashed off to join his friends near the pool. Passing a bottle to Myka, Gigi asked, "Why a dolphin?"

"Beautiful, smart, graceful. I know they're as much a predator as sharks are, but they just look kind." Myka wagged her head in self-deprecation.

"You're describing yourself."

"You're flattering me."

"No," Gigi said, suddenly serious, "I'm not." She sent a surveying glance across the patio and, finding Helena, still talking to Maddie and Sophie, it settled on her briefly. Then she angled her body in her chair, putting Helena more decidedly behind her, and focused her gaze on Myka. "We should continue our conversation about wooing the city's business leaders. I have some experience in that area." She said the last playfully with a playful smile, but as they looked at each other, her smile grew more intent. "Maybe over coffee . . . or dinner?"

Were those irises blue? Gray? Silver? White? While they weren't windows to her soul necessarily, they were windows to something, and Myka felt emboldened enough to demand, "Are you asking because you work for the mayor and you're not one to miss an opportunity to promote his interests, or are you asking for you?"

"You're right. I don't overlook opportunities - of any kind. We could have coffee and see if the university and the mayor's office have some common goals, but I'm even more interested in having dinner and seeing what we have in common." Her brows quirked and Gigi laughed at herself. "Oh my God, I've become the clueless loser at the bar in a romcom. Did I just completely blow my chance at having dinner with you?"

Was Gigi so smooth she could inject a goofy, self-conscious Myka-Bering-like moment? Or did a dork actually lurk within that former model? A soft-strong hand covered hers, the thumb grazing the underside of Myka's palm. Black negligées swam in front of her eyes. "No, you just made a great save by admitting what a lame come-on that was. I'm interested in both, coffee and dinner." The animal on Gigi's t-shirt wouldn't be a strutting peacock or a friendly dolphin, not with those light eyes. A raptor, that's what her t-shirt animal would be. Myka repressed a shiver, but it wasn't from fear.