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being the obedient little boy she so enjoyed parading in front of her patients as the poster child for good parenting, and he started experimenting with adolescent attitudes. Okay, Mom became in a minute, and sure became why, and suddenly, the great Sherry Carrigan O’Toole, celebrated author of The Mirror’s Not the Problem, found herself foundering in the same rocky waters where her patients’ ships had so often run aground.
    It was all Brandon’s fault, of course; it had nothing to do with her own neurotic obsession with her only child’s quest for excellence, or the fact that she’d never had time to counsel him . As the son of a famous author—she’d been on Oprah, after all—Scott had no need for such things. Apparently, if it hadn’t been for Brandon’s insistence that the boy attend public school and associate with people whose parents weren’t as neurotic as she, then Scott would have had the decency to repress the normal struggles of childhood. Overnight, it seemed, the men in Sherry’s life became giant boils on her butt.
    They conspired against her, don’t you know, intentionally putting the jelly or the milk on the wrong shelf in the fridge, and allowing dirty socks to touch the floor instead of making it all the way to the hamper. And God knows Scott’s soccer and basketball seasons were keeping her from fulfilling the contract on her second book.
    A few weeks on the Times list means a lot of dough, easily trumping Brandon’s hundred seventy grand a year, and money made Sherry Carrigan O’Toole queen of the roost, leaving Brandon and Scott as mere servants to the court. At first, these bizarre changes in his wife bugged him. For months, they bugged him. Then one day, without fanfare or any single event he could point to, he realized that he just didn’t give a shit anymore.
    He suggested they get a divorce and she said okay. Really, that’s all there was to it. They sold their house in Great Falls, and Brandon moved to a four-bedroom split-level in Fairfax, while Sherry bought a showplace in Georgetown, an address commensurate with her newfound ego. That Scott would live with Brandon was a foregone conclusion; none of them even questioned it.
    Until the attorneys got involved, and Sherry suddenly discovered her long-lost maternal instincts. She sued for sole custody initially, but then the thought of actually winning must have frightened her, because within a week, she’d changed it to joint custody.
    Child-sharing, Brandon called it. Like job-sharing, or ride-sharing. All about Sherry’s convenience, without a lot of consideration for what’s best for Scott. Brandon refused.
    No, he declared, it would be sole custody with visitation rights, and he, Brandon, would be primary custodian. Twenty-eight thousand dollars in legal fees later, it all boiled down to this: If Brandon relinquished rights to their marital stock investments—about $3 million—Sherry would go along with his custodial demands, provided her child support payments would never exceed $1,500 a month, even during the college years. Brandon signed the papers without two seconds’ negotiation.
    For the price of a Georgetown showplace, Sherry O’Toole had sold her son. If Brandon hadn’t been so ecstatic, he might have felt sorry for her.
    So, Brandon and Scott became Team Bachelor, and they’d gotten by pretty damned well these past six years. Granted, they ate a lot more frozen dinners than they probably should, but they ate most of them together, and Brandon would bet bucks against buttons that he knew more about his kid’s friends and activities than ninety percent of the two-parent families on the block. Brandon worried sometimes what would happen in another two years when he found the nest empty. Who was he going to talk to? How was he going to stay plugged in to what was going on in the community? How was he going to deal with the