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big moment. Go down and congratulate him!”
    With Chuck shouting happily and half pulling her through the crowd, Charlotte went down to tell her son how proud she was of him.
    Except that she wasn’t really sure she was all that proud.
       “How do you do it?” Elaine Harris asked Sharon Tanner an hour later. The two women were alone in the Tanners’ kitchen, searching through a box of towels clearly marked EVERYDAY CHINA, in the vain hope of finding coffee cups. Their husbands were in the living room, already discussing business, and Mark had taken Linda Harris outside to show her the rabbit hutch, with Kelly tagging along. Robb had not yet shown up, having gone out with the rest of the team for a celebratory hamburger in violation of their training diets. “You don’t look a day older than you did three years ago,” she went on, eyeing Sharon’s svelte figure with undisguised envy. “And I suppose your hair’s still its natural color, too, isn’t it?”
    Sharon chuckled. “As natural as it ever was. Nobody has natural auburn hair, and you know it. And you haven’t changed either.”
    Elaine shrugged amiably and patted her hips. “If you call twenty extra pounds ‘not changing,’ I thank you. But I decided that if Jerry doesn’t care, I don’t either, so I eat what I want, and the hell with it.” Then her expression turned serious. “Mark hasn’t changed either, has he,” she said, almost tentatively.
    Sharon hesitated only a second, then shook her head, but her gaze shifted toward the window. By the garage, Mark was standing next to Linda Harris. Even Linda, who was not a big girl, was an inch taller. “But we’re still hoping he’ll do some growing,” she said with forced cheerfulness, “and you can believe he’s hoping so, too. What about Robb?”
    Elaine grinned. “You won’t recognize him. Six-foot-one, with shoulders a yard wide.”
    Sharon sighed ruefully. “Well, that’s going to be something else for Mark to adjust to. I have a feeling he thinks Robb’s going to be just the same as he was three years ago.”
    “Nothing stays the same,” Elaine observed, then made an expansive gesture. “So what do you think of it all? Not like San Marcos, is it?”
    “Not at all,” Sharon agreed. “But I think I like it.”
    “You’ll do more than like it,” Elaine assured her. “Within a month you’ll love it and won’t know how you ever lived anywhere else. Clean air, a small town, nice people, skiing, hiking, the film festival at Telluride—it’s like I died and went to heaven.”
    “And what if you get transferred?” Sharon asked, not trying to conceal the edge in her voice.
    But Elaine only shrugged. “I’ll deal with it when it happens, and from here there’s nowhere to go but up. And speaking of things that have gone nowhere but up, look who’s coming!”
    Sharon glanced out the window, and barely recognized the boy who had left San Marcos three years before. The thinand wiry Robb Harris who had been only a little taller than Mark, and slightly asthmatic as well, was now a solidly built young man whose features had matured into a husky handsomeness. His wide-set blue eyes seemed to have become brighter with adolescence, and his blond hair, cropped short, appeared even lighter in contrast to his deeply tanned skin. Catching sight of her through the open window, he grinned, exposing a perfect set of even teeth.
    “Hi, Mrs. Tanner,” he called. “Welcome to Silverdale. Where’s Mark?”
    “Out back,” Sharon replied vacantly. The change in Robb was so startling, she hardly knew what to make of it. As he headed on down the driveway toward the garage, she turned back to Elaine. “My God,” she said. “He’s gorgeous! But what about his asthma? Ever since he was a baby—”
    “It was the smog,” Elaine said. “As soon as we got him out here, it cleared right up! I always half suspected it, but that quack in San Jose always insisted it was psychosomatic. But