Caron capered back into view. “I’m going to be a consultant for My Beautiful Self, Inc. It’s this unbelievably brilliant opportunity for me to make as much money as I want this summer” Her smile vanished, replaced by a look of sheer agony. “But wait! I can’t have a red convertible!”

An observer who might assume I understood any of this would be severely overestimating my maternal acumen, which, as usual, hovered near zero. I wasn’t about to ask any questions or demand any explanations, however, and merely watched as she slumped against the self-help books and rubbed her face.

“I can’t have black, either,” she said in a dull voice. “I’m Friendly, so I suppose I’ll have to get a bronze or forest-green convertible. I just can’t risk red.”

“I’m Elegant,” Inez said to me. “I could have a raspberry-colored car, but my parents probably won’t even let me drive until I’m twenty-one because of the insurance rates.”

I waited for a moment, but both of them seemed lost in despondency. Despite the innumerable occasions when I should have kept out of it and suffered accordingly, I said, “Friendly and Elegant? I suppose that’s better than being toady and dowdy.”

“Oh, Mother,” Caron said, lading the words with contempt as only a seasoned teenager can do, “nobody’s toady or dowdy. There’s only four categories: Sophisticated, Elegant, Lively, and Friendly, as in S-E-L-F. That’s to help you remember them when you’re doing a My Beautiful Self analysis.”

“And this leads to thousands-and thousands-of dollars?”

“My sixteenth birthday is the week before school starts, so you’d better hope it does. I have to have a car, you know, and not some ugly old pickup truck with dents all over it and a gun rack and horrible splotches of mildew.”

“Mildew?” Inez said, then slithered behind a rack as Caron glared at her

“Who said anything about a pickup truck?” I asked.

“Were you planning to buy me a new Camaro?”

I closed the ledger and locked the cash register. “Frankly, my dear, I wasn’t planning to buy you anything more complex than new loafers. We cannot afford a second car, especially in a recession. We’ll be lucky to survive the summer, and I’m going to have to figure out a way to increase inventory for the fall semester without selling you into white slavery.”

Caron’s lower lip shot out. “I am not going to be the only person at the entire high school without a car. Everybody’ll have a car this year, except maybe the nonentities who take welding and home nursing and disgusting things like that. Maybe I should forget about Honors Algebra and sign up for Teen Living? That’s the course where you carry around an egg all year, waiting for it to take its first step and call you Mama.”

“Allison Wade fried hers in the middle of the semester,” Inez said, “and the teacher flunked her.”

“How about omelets for dinner?” I suggested, then locked the store and herded them up Thurber Street toward our duplex across from the lawn of Farber College. Sally Fromberger’s café was closed for the summer, I noted unhappily, as were the renovated theater and pricey sportswear store. Their proprietors had acknowledged the inevitable, and if they were starving, they were doing it without the daily humiliation of silent cash registers.

“Don’t you want to know more about how I’m going to get rich?” Caron asked, the lip having retreated for the moment. I nodded. “Well, one of the girls from the sorority house next door came by while I was putting out your garbage and-”

“My garbage?”

“It’s certainly not mine. Anyway, she asked if I was interested in making a whole lot of money this summer. Then she told me all about how I could become a My Beautiful Self consultant, and how by the end of the summer I’d probably need a stockbroker and a bank account in Switzerland and-”

“A My Beautiful Self consultant?” I interrupted before we moved into the realm of treasury bonds and retiring the national debt.

We were in front of the sorority house, an imposing white brick structure reminiscent of a plantation with its pillars and green shutters. It would have been imposing, that is, had the paint not been peeling, screens missing from some of the windows, a shutter hanging crookedly, the sidewalk cracked, the shrubbery brittle, the lawn yellowish-brown and crisscrossed with worn paths. Although I’d walked past it numerous times a day for years, I’d never so much as paused to study it. It took me a moment to interpret the Greek letters on the sign:

Kappa Theta Eta.

I heard rock music coming from an open window on the first floor “I thought all the fraternity and sorority houses closed for the summer.”

“Not this one,” Caron said impatiently. “Anyway, Pippa’s going to train me, and when I’m a certified consultant, I can charge people for sessions and make as much money as I want. I can even recruit new consultants and train them myself. Then when their clients order cosmetics and stuff, I get ten percent.”

I tried to keep my voice light. “And this sorority girl spotted you clutching a garbage bag and realized you were the ideal candidate?”

“She said she’s always looking for potential trainees, and she’s noticed me walking past the house and thought how perfect I’d be. There are a few consultants in the dorms and other sorority houses, but there’s no one working the high school market. It ought to be a gold mine.

“And she gets ten percent of the gold you dig up at the high school?” I asked. “Is this Legitimate?”

Inez nodded. “It’s this big company with regional supervisors and catalogs and brochures and everything. My mother had some of her friends aver one night-”

“Of course it’s legitimate!” snapped Caron. “The founder is this Hungarian aristocrat who wanted to share her beauty secrets with the world. The training’s very involved and you end up with a certificate and a card to carry in your purse. You have to sort of make an investment in the beginning, but you earn it back right away, and after that, everything’s clear profit.”

The last sentence had been said in a fast mumble, but I caught it nevertheless. “How much of an investment?”

“Not that much,” she said in such a defensive tone that I knew I was going to hear a real whopper “You have to order the official My Beautiful Self kit, but it’s no big deal and it’s totally necessary for when you do the sessions. I’ll be able to pay you back at the end of the-”

I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Pay me back?”

The long-suffering martyr rolled her eyes in a heavenly direction. “We’re talking sixty dollars or so, not a zillion.”

“Don’t forget the shipping and handling charges,” Inez added. “That adds another twelve dollars and eighty cents, for a total of seventy-two dollars and eighty cents.”

Caron did not sound pleased with this display of arithmetic astuteness. “So there’s shipping and handling. The point is, Mother, that I’ll pay you back within a few days when I sign up all my friends. I can charge whatever I want, but Pippa says I should get a minimum of ten dollars for the basic analysis, and as much as twenty for an accessory awareness session. I get twenty-five percent of all the orders I generate, and ten percent of the orders of my trainees for the first six months.”

Before I could share my feelings about what might well be immoral, a silver Mercedes parked at the curb. A battered green truck pulled up behind it, and both drivers emerged from their vehicles. One was a slender middle-aged woman in a beige silk suit and matching heels, who moved with the brisk self-assurance of a Junior League president. The other was a shambling man with a stubbly face, thick wet lips, red-rimmed eyes, hair that might have been styled with pruning shears, and paint-spotted overalls. They started toward the sorority house.

I tried to nudge Caron and Inez into motion. “We will continue this discussion when we get upstairs,” I said in a cold, curt voice. I was actually rather proud of myself, in that my stomach was twisted into a cruel knot and I was having difficulty breathing. Clouds had not crossed the sun, but everything seemed to glow in an eerie way.