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she had children, and my father was always afraid he would get weaker and weaker as my mother demanded more of him."
"Is she right about all this?" Star asked Dr. Marlowe. "Does she know what she's talking about?"
"Maybe," Dr. Marlowe said.
"Don't you ever say yes or no?" Star snapped at her.
Doctor Marlowe just looked calmly at her. "Yes," she said finally, holding her expression for a moment and then we all laughed. It felt good, like we were all able to stop pulling on a rope.
From the way Star looked at me, I knew she had another delicious question rolling around in her brain. "What about this?" she asked, motioning around the room.
"This?"
"Coming here to see the therapist. Who pays for that?"
"Oh, they both do that:' I said. "Although there's no question my father thinks it's my mother's fault and my mother thinks it's my father's."
"So how did they agree on it?" Misty asked.
"The judge made them agree," I said.
"The judge made them?"
"I'm practically a ward of the state at the moment," I said. "You didn't have all that much to do with your parents' divorce, did you?"
She shook her head.
"You do?" she asked.
"Are you kidding? I have two new best friends," I told her.
"Who?" Star asked
"My parents' lawyers," I said and I laughed.
None of the others joined me.
They were all just staring at me. Why weren't they laughing too? I wondered.
Until I felt the first tear slide down my cheek. 2
" Sometimes I wish my parents had sued each other for divorce immediately after I was born," I said after I regained control of myself. "That way I wouldn't have to live through all this. Everything would have been decided down to the last Egyptian vase or Persian rug before I even had a chance to understand that most kids have two parents living at home, parents who are not on opposite sides of a seesaw trying to outweigh each other in importance.
"What you don't have, you don't miss, I suspect. At the beginning of all this, things were not all that different from the way they are now. I used to think of myself as the golden latchkey child who returned to an empty house in which there was still a maid, a cook, and around it, a small army of grounds people cutting and pruning to keep our home looking like something special in the gated community. My parents were rarely home when I got home from school. Most of the time though, my mother would get home before my father. One day I think she decided that getting home ahead of him made it look like her job was less important, so she started to stay later and later in order to arrive home after my father.
"Then there was the division of labor. My mother discussed the menu with the cook. My father was in charge of the grounds maintenance employees. They had a business manager to help with the bills and keep the separate accounts, and everything they bought for the house they evaluated together and both had to agree to buy or it had to be bought with separate money."
"That doesn't sound like a family. It sounds like a business," Star muttered.
"You're probably right. They saw it more like a partnership with each of them holding equal shares. Maybe my family can go on the stock market, Dr. Marlowe," I said. "Lester Incorporated. Only, who'd want to invest in it since the partners don't?" I added.
She gave me that blank therapist's face, that look that made me turn to myself for the answers.
"Yes, that's what's happened," I said to Star. "You've hit it right on the head--their relationship was more like a business than a marriage. And now the company's gone bankrupt."
"You've still got plenty of money," Star said with that now familiar twist in her lips that assured me I would find no sympathy on this subject.
"Oh, yes, plenty of money. The company's just out of that other stuff families need. You know, what's it called, Dr. Marlowe? Love?" I nodded before she could respond. "That's it. Love. We ran out of love and there just wasn't any to be had so we had to close the company doors.
"Now, the