The bouquet of irises in his kitchen had wilted and died by the time Kat and Jacki had gone to clean out his apartment. “Of course.”

“You two used to be close. You should call her,” Jacki said.

“Oh, you do make it irresistible, reconnecting with a haggard, crying former friend who-Tommy never would have died if-!”

“You’re too harsh-”

“She’s old business. Not your business, by the way. I haven’t seen Leigh since his funeral.” However, the image of Leigh standing by Tommy’s grave did rise up like a ghost before her, strange, unwelcome and compelling, a blurry image seen through a screen of tears.

“Exactly.” Jacki ate her last shrimp. “So I saw her at the cemetery, then I read this article, and I started thinking about the three of you, how golden you were. I was always jealous of how close you and Leigh were, and I don’t think I’ve seen you happy, not really, since Tommy died and you and Leigh quit being friends.”

Kat rolled her eyes and motioned to the waiter. “Margarita, no salt,” she said. “I get it, Jacki, I’m an antisocial flake. Can we move on?”

“Oh, get over yourself. I’m not going to compliment you for your terrific professional success, your ability to be independent and strong and fun and”-Jacki reached over and stroked the edge of Kat’s blazer-“fashionable and loyal and the best friend I could have on earth. But see how cranky you got just then? You have issues and they’ll never go away until you deal with them. What’s the harm in giving her a call?”

“I don’t want to see her. I hate her.” She threw cool margarita down her throat.

Jacki shook her head. “You hate yourself.”

“I gotta go.” Kat put a lot of cash on the table, because although Jacki and Raoul were okay financially, she knew they worried about the baby coming and how they could survive without Jacki working for a while. She reached down and pulled on the leather stacked-heel shoes. “I gotta rush now, off to the liquor store to stock up for the evening’s debauchery. Give the clerk my phone number while I’m at it. Thank goodness wine’s so cheap in California. I’m not yet reduced to drinking plonk from someplace in the world where you wouldn’t even drink the water.” She drank the rest of her drink standing up.

Jacki patted her hand. “You deserve much, much more out of life than a little apartment, a stressful job, and the memory of our brother to keep you company.”

Kat jumped up, hugged her sister, and said, “Enough, okay? You give good advice. If I were an integrated person like you, I would do whatever you say. I’d have two-point-six kids, an eight-hour workday, and a kindly rich fella by my side, hanging on tight to make sure I didn’t slip on an old banana peel.”

Jacki looked her in the eye. “I’m telling you, the stars are aligning. I dreamed about us as kids last night, you and Leigh swinging in the backyard on Franklin Street. You pushed her, and she-oh, she laughed in this itty-bitty-little-girl voice, and then she tickled you until you fell. It’s precious, what you had.”

Esmé Jackson bustled around, wiping down the granite countertops in her kitchen, slipping a serrated knife through tomatoes. Her son, Ray, was due for their usual Sunday meal. She had considered something elaborate for dinner but rejected the idea, settling on strata-baked layers of bread, eggs, cheese, vegetables, cooked sausage, and crumbs. Peasant fare. He liked that sometimes.

Fifty-nine, tall, still strong except for occasional breathing problems, she swung around her generous kitchen feeling lucky, so lucky to have a son like Ray, who loved her, who still came to dinner once a week. He was as dutiful as she had been to her own mother, sometimes at great personal risk. Her mother’s old flowered apron, stained with curry from last night’s dinner-or was it the night before’s-covered her carefully chosen slacks and blouse.

She flipped open the cupboard where she kept baking ingredients. She would make chocolate pie, his favorite, she decided, pulling out a box of graham crackers along with a pudding mix. He had eclectic taste in food, liking boxed macaroni and cheese as well as homemade pasta with a creamy béchamel. He loved pudding pie. Big baby, she thought, smiling to herself, stirring whole milk into the pudding mix in her non-reactive aluminum pot.

Humming a show tune, she turned the fire down to medium, stirring with a wooden spoon so that the pudding would not burn. When she finished, she crushed graham cracker crumbs with butter and sugar into a glass pie plate. She dusted the top with crumbs, too. Make it look fun. Ray needed bucking up. Her job made it hard to do the things she had done for him when he was young-she always tried so hard to make him happy, had devoted her life to it, in fact.

Ray filled a glass of water at the sink, then opened the cupboard door and peered underneath. “I sent Lamont over to fix that leak. He said you sent him away. It’s running down the back wall, Mom. Probably down behind the bricks in the basement by now. That’s going to be hard to fix.”

Esmé bristled. “I don’t need your fancy plumber, although of course, I really appreciate how you always want to help me. But as I told you, let me take care of my own home, okay? I’m not entirely useless, you know.”

A dozen maintenance problems always hung like spiders behind the newly painted exterior of the fifty-year-old house on Close Street, Whittier. In the past year, Ray had designed a garage to replace the sagging carport. He had built a gazebo in the backyard, had established plants in the front yard, and added shutters to the windows, creating what he jokingly called “curb appeal.” The house did look good, better than most old houses. However, the chimney blew smoke. The floors were so uneven you could roll a ball up and down them.

“I could build you something nicer,” Ray said, looking around.

“Admit you love this place.”

“Kind of. This kitchen. The old range. Even though the outside changes, the inside stays the same.”

He always said that. Although he wished she would move on, he took comfort from what didn’t change, just like she did: the pink and green bathroom tile, the checked curtains above the kitchen sink, the linoleum on the floor of the den. This was the place where they had stopped moving and Ray had finally made some friends.

For his own home, he had designed a showplace. Architectural Digest had featured it last spring. Of course, Ray’s house had too few lamps, Esmé thought. The couches weren’t comfortable. You couldn’t leave a book lying around without the place looking messy. Too big and too clean, it was no wonder Leigh had problems with it.

Ah, but here they could relax. Home.

Leigh never did understand Esmé’s house on Close Street. So many times she had harped on replacing the fixtures in the bathroom, installing a new stove, insulating the attic, removing the old asbestos, rebricking the uneven basement walls. Esmé had refused and Ray had backed her. “Leave it true to its time period,” he said.

“Why not cherry it up?” Leigh had persisted. “A Nelson sunburst clock. Basket chairs. Let’s turn the back patio into a real lanai, with netting and colored-glass balls.” This was not long after she and Ray had married, and their hands had always touched as their bodies leaned toward each other.

“No, thanks, Leigh, although you are always so full of helpful suggestions, aren’t you?” Esmé had said as kindly as she could considering how upset these suggestions made her. “I come home after a long day of checking out people’s groceries and water the sweet peas against the back fence. I run the water in the sink, which fills up a lot quicker than your water in your fancy new house. My toilets don’t spare the water, either, and the wall furnace may be rusty, but by God it heats the place in two minutes flat.”