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angry, she threw the compress down and rose. She went into the family room and called out to her again. Annie was probably just going out for a walk to sulk. She’d come back in a more pliable mood. She always did. But it was aggravating to be made to wait. Patience wasn’t one of Nora’s virtues. She liked to have things settled as quickly as possible—and she didn’t like to worry and wonder about what Annie was thinking and doing. She liked to know where she was and what was running through her mind.
    Why is she being so difficult? I’m only doing what’s best for her!
    As she entered the living room, she saw Annie through the satin sheers of the front plate-glass windows. Her daughter was tossing a suitcase into the trunk of the new car her father had given her as a graduation gift. Shocked, Nora stood staring as Annie slammed the trunk, walked around to the driver’s side, unlocked it, and slid in.
    Where does she think she’s going? She’s never to leave without asking permission.
    As Annie drove down the street, two emotions struck Nora at once. White-hot rage and cold panic. She ran for the door, throwing it open and hurrying outside. “Annie!”
    Nora Gaines stood on her manicured front lawn and watched the taillights of her daughter’s car flash once as she stopped briefly at the corner and then turned right and drove out of sight.

Chapter 2

    Leota Reinhardt washed and rinsed her cheese glass, green Fiesta plate, fork and knife and set them to air-dry in the plastic stand on the sink counter. The house was silent, the windows closed. She used to leave them open all through springtime, loving the sound of the birds and the smell of clean, flower-scented air drifting in from her backyard garden. But her garden had gone to seed over the past few years, her arthritis keeping her a prisoner inside. Pulling the sink plug, she looked at her gnarled hands as the warm, sudsy water drained away.
    Just as time is draining away. At eighty-four, she knew she didn’t have much left. Sadness filled her, a loneliness that seemed to deepen with the long days and nights of waiting.
    A door slammed, and Leota raised her head and watched as three children appeared just beyond her west-side, paint-chipped white fence. The house next door was close, so close she could talk to her neighbors if she knew them, which she didn’t anymore. All the neighbors she had known were gone. They’d moved away or died long ago. The house west of hers was now occupied by a young black woman with three children, a boy of about nine and two little girls perhaps seven and five. Leota was the last one from the original families that had purchased these housesjust before World War II. Her husband’s parents had bought this house when it was new. She thought back briefly to those troubled times when Bernard had gone off to war and she had moved in with “Mama and Papa,” bringing her two babies with her. George had just turned three, and Eleanor was a toddler and into everything.
    When Bernard came back home a changed man, Mama and Papa insisted they remain with them. They saw his brokenness, and Leota faced her lack of options. For a time they all lived together civilly, if not happily, until the garage was lengthened and converted by Papa and Bernard into a one-bedroom unit with a living area and windows that looked out into the garden. Oh, the bitterness of those years.
    Things were better when Mama and Papa left the “big” house to them and lived in the smaller unit. Then Papa died a few weeks later of a heart attack, and Mama lived on thirteen more years. It wasn’t until the last few years of Mama’s life that Leota felt they had finally made peace.
    “I misjudged you.” Mama’s accent was still evident, even after so many years in America. She had tried hard to lose it, but it had returned as death approached, as though, perhaps, her mind was wandering back to her childhood in Europe. When Leota had leaned down to tuck the