A vein in Ted Conway's forehead began to throb. "I don't have a problem," he began. "So I have a drink or two now and then. Who doesn't?" He gestured vaguely toward the expense report. "And most of that stuff's business." His voice took on a wheedling note. "C'mon, Frank, you know how it is! You used to do my job."

"And I was sober when I did it, Ted." He moved toward the door. "I'm going to need your keys."

Ted stared at his boss, reality finally sinking in. "You know what?" he said, fishing the heavy ring of keys out of his pocket and flinging them on the manager's desk. "You can't fire me, Frank. I quit! You run a crappy hotel here, and I can't believe how long I've hung around trying to clean it up. Well, the hell with it, Frank. The hell with it, and the hell with you! You can take this whole place and shove it." Snatching the envelope containing his last paycheck from Gilman's hand, Ted wheeled around and jerked the door open.

"On my report to the state, I'll say I laid you off, Ted," Gilman said. "That way you can collect your unemployment right away, and you won't have it on your record that you got fired. It's the best I can do for you."

Ted Conway ignored Gilman's words. Slamming the door shut behind him, he started across the lobby toward the bar, then remembered what Gilman had said about how many drinks he'd had that afternoon. Goddamn bartender must have been spying on him! Well, there were plenty of other places where he could get a drink.

And plenty of other hotels that needed a good assistant manager, too.

Who the hell needed the Majestic?

Goddamn dive!

It wasn't until he was a block away from the hotel, with the dank heat of the late afternoon sapping his anger, that he thought of Janet, and what she'd say when he told her he'd quit his job.

Automatically, Ted Conway turned into the first bar he came to.

How much longer? Janet wondered. The unspoken question had seemed utterly innocuous when it first popped into her mind, relating to nothing more earthshaking than how much longer the reheated casserole in the oven might hold out before it would need the addition of a little milk to keep it palatable. But as she cracked the oven open to test the tuna and noodle concoction, the question that had posed itself in her mind kept coming back, each time attaching itself to another aspect of her life.

How much longer before Ted comes home?

How much longer until he gets fired again?

How much longer do the kids have to put up with the fights?

How much longer can I put up with it?

"Will you stop worrying, Mom?" she heard her son say, and for a moment she thought she must have spoken aloud. Then she saw the mischievous glint in Jared's eyes. "We'll just tell Kim and Molly that the mold is parsley, or blue cheese or something."

Janet took a mock swing at Jared with the mixing spoon, and he spun out of range with a grace she would have expected from a dancer rather than a football player. Not that Jared bore the bulk of most football players; at nearly sixteen, with only 160 pounds on his six-foot frame, he was considerably smaller and lighter than most of his teammates. Still, despite Jared's quick reflexes and lean agility, Janet always cringed when she saw those big, lumbering tackles charging toward her son. "I've never served you moldy food yet, Jared Conway, but if you keep that up, I just might start!"

"Want me to call Pa and see how late he's going to be?" Jared asked, ignoring her threat as he opened the drawer next to the sink and pulled out a handful of silverware. Though he'd tried to make the question sound casual, there was enough tightness in his voice to betray his true question: Shall I see if I can find Pa at all?

Janet hesitated, then shook her head. "Let's give him another half hour, then we'll go ahead and eat and I'll just save some for him."

Jared hesitated, too, and Janet thought he was going to say something else, but he picked up a bunch of paper napkins and began setting the Formica-topped table that she'd bought seventeen years ago at a garage sale. At the time, her mother had deemed it "perfectly acceptable for newlyweds." Janet suspected that her mother's words now wouldn't be nearly as charitable. In fact, she suspected her mother would be less than charitable about her whole situation. She glanced around the kitchen, which was even more in need of a coat of paint than the rest of the house, and wondered if there were any possibility of convincing the landlord to repaint the place, and fix the roof as well. Fat chance! She'd begged for new screens all summer, hoping that the kids wouldn't have to make the choice between sweating through the nights in airless bedrooms or opening the windows to clouds of merciless mosquitoes.

"Hey, they don't drink that much blood," Jared had replied last week when she'd wondered how he could stand the incessant buzzing in his tiny room at the back of the squat one-story bungalow. It was exactly the kind of response Ted would have made years ago, when they'd first been married and his alcohol intake was little more than an occasional extra drink at a party. There was so much of Ted in Jared, just as there was so much of herself in Jared's twin sister, Kim, that at times Janet wondered if she and Ted had somehow managed accidentally to clone themselves, rather than produce offspring that were an amalgamation of the two of them.

For Jared's sake, she prayed he wasn't too much like his father, just as she hoped that Kim wouldn't prove to have a weakness for the same kind of man she herself had married.

Which wasn't really fair, she reminded herself. When she met Ted Conway, he'd had an easygoing charm that was so unlike her own family's stiff formality, she'd fallen for him almost instantly. And for a long time the marriage had been fine. Ted had a knack for the hotel business, and both of them had assumed they'd wind up in Atlanta, or Miami, or even New Orleans, with Ted running one of the major hotels, and she showing in some of the better galleries.

But somewhere along the way his drinking had crossed a line neither of them quite noticed, and that was the end of their dreams.

Not that those dreams had completely slipped away: Janet still harbored fantasies of showing at the major galleries, though she'd long since stopped sharing her hopes with Ted, whose former appreciation of her talent had devolved to carping about the amount she spent on canvases, paints, and brushes.

His own dreams were still wildly alive, at least when he'd had a few too many drinks. Then she would hear about how bad the management was at whichever hotel had taken a chance on hiring him. Though there was a time when she might not have agreed with him, during the last couple of years, she'd had to admit he was at least partially right. After all, what manager who knew his job would hire Ted, given his reputation and his history?

So why had she stayed with him?

It was a question Janet had pondered more than once, and she was all too aware of the answer: She stayed with Ted because she didn't have the nerve to take the kids and strike out on her own. After all, how much worse could things get? She might not be able to make much money, but she suspected that whatever she could earn would stretch at least as far as Ted's paycheck, since she wouldn't be wasting a single cent of it on liquor. And the shock of her packing up the kids and leaving just might jolt Ted into taking an honest look at his own life. In the privacy of her own conscience, she knew she was at least as responsible for the conditions of her life as Ted was. But how much longer could it go on?

She was rescued from having to come up with an answer to that question by the sudden appearance of Molly, charging into the kitchen with far more energy than even a fifteen-month-old had the right to possess in the face of the heat and humidity that had settled thickly over the stillness of the evening. Right behind Molly came Kim, who swept her baby sister off the floor just as Molly was taking a desperate plunge toward the shelter of her mother's legs.