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HAT ROBE HER MOTHER was wearing tonight was such a joke! The idea of it made Michelle laugh into her pillow. But then the lump in her throat started again and this time it wouldn’t go away, no matter how hard Michelle swallowed. She didn’t understand the lump in her throat any better than she understood her mother. She didn’t understand why she cried herself to sleep every night either.

3

    B . B. CONCENTRATED ON the sound of her breathing and the rhythm of her feet as she ran along the road. She did three miles each morning before breakfast. Then she showered, dressed, and was at her office by nine. She ran not just for the physical exercise, but to clear her head. It was a time for solving problems, a time for making decisions. Her body was as trim and firm as it had been when she was twenty, but she felt better now. She supposed one day she would have to face growing old, the way her mother was facing it now, but it seemed very far away. She breathed deeply, reminding herself not to gulp air. Sometimes she gulped and became bloated. She checked her watch as she rounded the corner. She’d gone two in eighteen-four. Not bad, B.B., she told herself.
    She hadn’t always been called B.B. She’d been named Francine Eloise Brady by her Jewish mother and her Irish father in Miami, in 1940. All her life she had been Francie to her family and friends and Francine to everyone else. Then she married Andrew and had taken his name—Broder. She thought she would be married for the rest of her life, but in twelve years it was over.
    She left Miami a month before the divorce was final. She left with Sara, who was six years old, with two suitcases, and with thirty-two thousand dollars in cash, which she had earned selling real estate. She left in the Buick at four in the morning and drove west, away from Florida, away from the ocean, away from reminders that she’d once had another life, a life she could not get back.
    She headed for Colorado because the year before she had seen an article in Architectural Digest about restored Victorian homes in Boulder. She remembered the color of the sky and the snowcapped mountains in the distance, which seemed as far from anything she had known as possible. When she arrived she checked into the Boulderado Hotel and two days later she bought her own small Victorian house on Highland. A week after that she went to work for the agency through whom she’d bought the house. And after a year she had opened her own agency. Francine Brady Broder—Elegant Homes. People around town began to call her B.B. because of her double last names. She didn’t mind. She thought it had a snappy sound to it.
    S HE RAN UP HER DRIVEWAY and paused at the car, checking her pulse. Lucy came up to her and licked her legs. B.B. patted Lucy on the head, then went inside to the kitchen.
    “Hi, Mom . . . table’s all set,” Sara said. “Did you have a good run?”
    “Yes, I could have kept going. I didn’t even feel tired.”
    “Did you know that female athletes sometimes have trouble getting pregnant?”
    “Really?” B.B. said, washing her hands at the kitchen sink.
    “Yes,” Sara said, popping an English muffin into the toaster. “I read about it. They get too thin and their periods stop. All that exercise isn’t good for their reproductive organs.” Sara drained her glass of orange juice and poured another. “So you should be careful, just in case.”
    “In case what?”
    “In case you want to have more children.”
    “I’m forty, Sara. I’m not about to have any more children.”
    “You never know,” Sara said. “Jennifer’s mother is forty-one and she just had a baby.”
    “Well, I’m not going to have any more babies.”
    “Okay . . . fine. I just thought you should know.”
    “Thanks for the warning. Do you want scrambled eggs or fried?”
    “Fried . . . so the yolks don’t run.”
    “Hand me the frying pan, would you?” B.B. said, putting up the kettle.
    “Do you remember