Step-Ball-Change Read Online Free PDF Page B

that.”
    I thought I must have misunderstood him, though I couldn’t identify which part of the sentence could be thought of as unclear.
    “Oh, come on,” George said. “Stop it with the shocked-mother face. You knew that.”
    “Jack the D.A.?”
    “I think he has another last name, but yes, Jack the D.A.”
    “Kay’s been seeing Jack?”
    “Seeing all of Jack.”
    I looked around my kitchen. There were cans of plaster stacked up in rows. There were buckets and drop cloths and rollers. Outside the window there were four men sitting on my patio furniture looking at old architectural plans of our house. It didn’t look like anyplace I knew.
    “I always thought she liked Jack.”
    “She likes him,” George said.
    “I have no idea what’s going on anymore.”
    “I guess even Kay has a private life.”
    I shrugged. None of this made sense to me. “I should get ready for work.”
    “It isn’t a big deal, whatever it is with Jack. Maybe I’m completely wrong about it.”
    “You’re not wrong.”
    “Okay, I’m not wrong, but I certainly didn’t mean to upset you.”
    “I’m not upset,” I said, and gave his hand a squeeze. “But I should get to work, and then I have to come home and get thingscleaned up, not that this place cleans up very well. I don’t want Taffy sneezing the whole time she’s here.”
    “You’re going to have to tell me about that, too,” George said.
    “I think after tonight you’ll know as much about it as I do.”
    I TRIED TO sort it all out on the way to the dance studio. I wasn’t upset about Jack, not in the sense that I was upset about Kay sleeping with Jack. Kay was thirty years old. I knew she wasn’t a virgin. What I was upset about were all of the things I hadn’t known: I hadn’t known that she had any interest in marrying Trey Bennett; I hadn’t known about Jack the D.A. Jack Carroll, that was his name. I felt like I must have been doing a pretty poor job as a mother if Kay didn’t feel like she could talk to me about these things. Then again, maybe when your daughter was thirty, she didn’t really need a mother to confide in anymore, and the thought of that depressed me, too.
    When we had Henry and then Charlie, I felt like I was just trying to figure out how to keep them alive: food, shelter, avoiding major head injuries. But by the time Kay came along, I was much better at the job. I was more relaxed. I was the kind of mother I wanted to be, the one you could talk to. And now I was finding out that when it came to the really big stuff, she hadn’t been talking at all.
    When I walked into the dance studio, my mind still going in a dozen different directions, a five-year-old girl named Poppy attached herself to my leg.
    “I lost a tooth,” Poppy said.
    I squatted down on the floor in front of her. Such a gorgeous child, black haired and freckled. “Where did you lose it?”
    “Right in my hand,” she said, and she opened the little drawstring bag she wore around her neck and produced the missing tooth, a tiny chunk of ivory.
    “How could it be lost?” I said, touching the tip of my finger to the tiny incisor. “It’s right here.”
    Poppy looked at the tooth and then looked at me, puzzled. “I lost it out of my head,” she said finally.
    And I thought, The world is still full of little girls who want to talk to me, so things can’t be too bad. Some days they rushed out into the parking lot and clustered around my car while I unfastened my seat belt. Their sentences began long before I had the door open. “Mrs. McSwan,” they would say, “look at my new tights, my new shoes. Look, Mrs. McSwan, I cut my hair. I can do the splits today.” And down they would go, legs splayed across the dirty asphalt. I leaned over and hoisted Katie Chundra back up to her feet and she beamed at the touch. They wanted nothing more than my attention, the opportunity to confide in me, to stand beside me in front of the mirror. They raised their hands to speak even