This was extremely high praise.

We had been here before, when Zack, miserable at Selwyn, had visited Alden and its "kick-a.s.s" light board. Alden had been right for Zack. I was very encouraged by his response to this Stone-Chase place.

"How compet.i.tive are the admissions?" I asked, a tactful way of finding out what his chances of getting in were.

"They're cool," he said. "They seem to be all about ignoring freshman grades if you can just show that you've gotten better. In fact, you'd think that they actually liked people who had s.h.i.t to figure out. The lady I interviewed with said that there was no question about my getting in. It was just a question of how much money I'd get."

"Money?" There was no way that Zack could qualify for financial aid. We hadn't even picked up the forms.

"It's merit money. They discount the tuition when they want somebody. And the more my SAT scores go up, the less Daddy will have to sh.e.l.l out."

He said the word Daddy with fierce sarcasm. He wanted to thumb his nose at Mike. Right now he would have loved not to take any money from him at all.

"Dad doesn't mind paying the tuition," I said urgently and truthfully. "You shouldn't pick a school because of the money. What do you like about the place?"

His answer was vague. He was done talking.

As soon as he left for his Friday-night prowls, I picked up the material he had brought home. All schools make themselves sound great in their brochures and catalogs. I couldn't figure out what he found so appealing about Stone-Chase. Monday morning I called school and left a message for Travis Jackson.

Travis called me after he had had a quick conversation with Zack. "I imagine what appeals to him is that Stone-Chase has a good track record for getting these late bloomers or kids with mild learning issues into medical school or dental school."

"Medical school? Zack?" I couldn't believe that I had heard him right. "Medical school?"

"They don't go to Harvard or Hopkins, but they go to perfectly respectable schools and do become doctors if that's what they want."

Because he has my memory for concrete facts and is nimble-fingered enough to be good in a lab, Zack had always gotten his best grades in science cla.s.ses; but he had never said anything about wanting to go to medical school. In fact, he taunted Jeremy for being such a grind.

That evening, in as neutral a tone as I could muster, I raised the issue with him.

"Not medical school." He grimaced. "G.o.d, no. Who would want to do that?"

"Okay." I let the subject drop, but when I was doing the dishes later in the evening, he wandered into the kitchen and started opening and closing one of the drawers. Slide, thump; slide, thump; slide, thump.

When my Ritalin is wearing off, as it was now, repet.i.tive sounds drive me crazy. I was about to tell him to stop when he spoke.

"You know, next door to the old house, Dr. Taft-did you ever see some of his before-and-after pictures? They were pretty incredible. And Dr. Cheryl, I loved going there."

Andrew Taft, our former neighbor, was an oral surgeon specializing in maxillofacial trauma. Cheryl Schwartz had been the boys' pediatric dentist. Her patients stretched out on brightly colored kid-size examining chairs and emerged ladden with balloons, stickers, and neon pencils. Kids who had to get Novocain shots got their faces painted. Except for a higher standard of cleanliness, her office had a lot in common with a circus.

Did Zack want to be a dentist? I'd had no idea. He had gone trick-or-treating as a cowboy, a fireman, and a Power Ranger, but never as a dentist.

"So you're interested in dental school?" I asked. My longhaired, skateboarding, recovering-slacker son . . . a dentist?

"Not necessarily." He wasn't looking at me. That meant that he wasn't telling the truth. He did want to go to dental school. "But you know how Dad was always yelling at me because I was *closing down my options.' So this is just keeping an option open, but there's no reason to blab about this all over Kingdom Come."

"I wasn't going to, but why the secret?"

"Oh, you know . . ." Now he was back into the shrug mode. "There's a pretty big dork factor in that career path."

"Let me at least tell Dad."

"Why would you want to go and do that?"

"He won't ride you so hard if he knows."

"Okay . . . if you have to."

I called Mike later the evening. The idea of Zack's becoming a dentist surprised him too. "But even if we accept that as a working premise," Mike said, "it doesn't mean he has to go to a place we've never heard of."

"It's named after two Marylanders who signed the Declaration of Independence."

"What earthly difference does that make?"

"None, I guess."

There was no question that Stone-Chase didn't have the prestige of the schools that Jeremy had applied to. The average SAT scores of Stone-Chase students were hundreds of points lower than those at Pomona College, where Jeremy was. Instead of being from the top 10 percent of the best high schools in the country, the Stone-Chase students came from the top third of their cla.s.ses in midsize public schools. It had no national reputation.

"I know you think I'm being a big sn.o.b," Mike said. "But college is also about making contacts; it's about being around people with a sense of possibility. A lot of kids at these regional schools have a provincial att.i.tude. They a.s.sume that after college they'll go back home."

"He's not going to make any useful contacts if he hates the place."

F.

ortunately, Cami and Jeremy were handling their medical-school applications with all the discipline, motivation, and efficiency that Zack lacked. I was glad of it. Every few days Jeremy would send Mike and me an updated spreadsheet, recording the status of all their different applications. Each school had its own set of hoops that applicants had to jump through, and a person had to be pretty obsessive to keep track of each little step. Of course, most people want their doctors to be meticulous about details, so perhaps the process made some sense. Not a lot, but some.

I.

couldn't stop reading Claudia's blog. Even when she didn't post, other people did. Clearly she was a celebrity in this world of people who sewed for themselves and others. They were interested in her; they coveted her approval. Every few days she would refer to one of the comments, mentioning the writer by name, praising her insight into whatever sewing or design issue was being discussed. Before the day was over, the person singled out for the praise would reply, genuinely thrilled at having been noticed.

This was a world I knew nothing about, not just the sewing part, but the whole online-community thing. Claudia's followers were women who knew one another and cared about one another even though they had never met. I didn't get it.

Even stranger was Claudia's being at the center of it, and she seemed as open and warm as any of them. I couldn't reconcile this with the woman in the seafoam-green dress who wouldn't look me in the eye. I didn't want other people to like her. Yes, she had great posture, a risky hairdo, a premium cable package, and an entrepreneurial spirit, but people at the party Sat.u.r.day night-Mike and my boys, Cami and her family-shouldn't like her. They should like me.

Five.

I.

got a thank-you note from Rose. Folded inside was a drawing by Finney. An Egyptian-like stick figure with a triangular skirt was carrying an object the size of her blob-shaped head. The object looked like a brown UFO with a red midline, but underneath it Rose had written, "Mrs. Darcy's hamburger with ketchup." Finney had used brightly colored markers; Mrs. Darcy's lips were as crimson as the ketchup, and her eyes were cobalt b.u.t.tons. Just as my own boys had done at his age, Finney had worked with a heavy hand, bearing down so hard that the ink had bled into the paper. I put the drawing on my refrigerator door. This was what my house had been missing, little-kid art on the refrigerator door.

I'd looked at the drawing before reading the note. After thanking me for lunch and the great time her kids had had, Rose invited Jeremy, Zack, and me to the Hamptons for Thanksgiving and some heavy-duty wedding planning. She would also, if it was all right with me, like to invite my father.

I love Thanksgiving. It's my favorite holiday. I love cooking for it, and I'm thrilled that no one expects me to buy gifts or create charming craft projects with gold spray paint and fake snow. My grandmother had given me her big white tablecloth, and I used it at Thanksgiving. However well it got laundered, it would always have several faint amoeba-shaped reminders of gravy stains and some pinkish splatters, the result of cranberry sauce dribbling off a spoon. I didn't care. I saw enough clean white linens at work.

So, go to the Hamptons for Thanksgiving? Was this what the women at the engagement party had been warning me about? That I would never again have my family at my house for a holiday?

But to refuse the invitation made no sense. Rose and Cami had a lot of decisions to make about the wedding during the Thanksgiving weekend. Cami wanted Jeremy there, and that's where he wanted to be. So, if I wanted to be with both of my sons for my favorite holiday and-as important-to have the two of them be with each other, I had to let go of the whole mitochondria-DNA tablecloth thing.

I checked with Zack and then called Rose. "Of course you can invite my dad, but you have to let me bring some of the food."

"Only some of it?" she asked. "Guy and Finney are going to want you to bring everything. But first, tell me what your family does about holidays. Do you celebrate them with Mike and Claudia, or do you split the time?"

Oh, c.r.a.p. It wasn't enough to renounce my grandmother's tablecloth. I still had the Mike-Claudia issue. I didn't want them there, at least I didn't want her there, but it didn't seem right not to have Mike. He'd celebrated every holiday with the boys and me, even after he'd moved out.

"Actually," I said to Rose, "this is the first time we've had to deal with that. Mike only met Claudia this summer."

She paused. "You're kidding."

"No. They met in June."

That surprised her. "I got so many e-mails from Claudia before the party, and she was so chatty and friendly and so excited about the wedding that I a.s.sumed she would be the one I'd be dealing with during this process. Once I got here, I realized that I had it wrong, but June?"

"Until Sat.u.r.day she had only met Jeremy once, and I hadn't met her at all." I could hear how tight my voice was. All through the planning of the engagement party Rose had thought that I didn't matter?

"I don't know what to say," Rose said. "She gave me the impression that their relationship was very established. But I can't invite Mike and not her, not after she put on that party. So, do I invite neither of them or both of them?"

I knew what was right. If Claudia wanted to be part of the family, I should treat her that way. I should welcome her. I should be saying to Rose, Yes, by all means, invite both of them, put them in a room next to me, and, if I'm lucky, the walls will be thin and I can hear them having s.e.x.

"I can't tell you who to invite to your house and who not to," I said instead.

"I don't know why not. Everyone else does," she said bluntly. "You try having a big house too many people want to visit. We bought this place last May, and at one point during the summer I felt I should be circulating my guest lists for public comment. So you need to do better than that. Tell me what you want me to do."

"I don't know. The boys and I have never celebrated a holiday without Mike. On the other hand, having him in a room down the hall with another woman . . . I suppose I need to get used to that."

It wasn't really about s.e.x-or if it was, I was too deeply in denial to admit it-it was about another woman having the right to be at a holiday gathering with my family. Was that part of Claudia's plan in hosting the engagement party-to box us in so that we had to include her in everything? If so, it had worked.

"Well, you don't have to get used to it on my watch," Rose said briskly. "I'll invite them, but I'll make reservations for them at a nearby inn."

"Oh." I thought for a moment. Rose apparently did think it was about the sleeping arrangements . . . but even so, it was a good plan. Mike and Claudia would be there, but not all the way there. There would be something slightly second-cla.s.s, B-list about their invitation. I probably shouldn't have liked that, but I did. "Thank you," I said to Rose. "Thank you." I wasn't used to people making allowances for my feelings . . . probably because I usually pretended that I didn't have any.

My father decided to come as well. He had never been to the Hamptons, and he liked to go to new places. "And I can still write prescriptions," he said. "I'm bringing my own EpiPen."

When Mike found out that my father was coming, he called me. "What should we do about my mother? Should we say something to Rose and Guy about her?"

So we were a "we" again. "Mike, we're their guests. We can't invite our own relatives." If I was indeed locked in a lifelong battle with my son's in-laws about holidays, Mike's mother was the last prisoner I would ask to be exchanged.

"But they invited your dad. Why did they do that?"

"I don't know," I said, although I did. People liked my dad, and he knew his way around an EpiPen. A more perfect guest the Zander-Browns couldn't have found.

"I know that this is at their house," Mike complained, "but this is our family holiday too. I don't like how fragmented things are becoming. If you hadn't sold the house, we could at least have Christmas there and we could control who was invited."

And if he hadn't moved out on me, all kinds of things would be different. He was the one who had started the fragmentation, not me.

He and I had imagined that we would be in the old house forever. We had seen ourselves hosting huge Thanksgiving dinners and having Christmases with so many grandchildren that brightly wrapped presents would spill across the living-room floor far beyond the branches of the tree.

Of course, we'd never thought about how we were going to accomplish this, how we were going to keep our boys and their families always coming to our house, and only our house, for holidays. I suppose the safest way would have been to encourage them to marry orphans or women who loathed their own families. The worst way, of course, had been for us to have divorced and sold the house.

C.

laudia's blog was getting boring. She apologized for how much s.p.a.ce she had devoted to her personal activities and launched into a discussion of the challenges of machine quilting with metallic thread. Metallic thread would provide sparkle to holiday projects, and with the proper needle . . .

I'd never registered with the site. Registering would have given me the right to purchase her patterns or post comments, neither of which I wanted to do. Registering would have also given whoever administered the site access to my name. I wondered if Claudia could find out who the nonregistered "guests" were. My user name was nursemom23. The boys had picked it; the 23 meant nothing except that twenty-two other women wanted the world of cybers.p.a.ce to know them as "nursemom." At least I a.s.sumed they were all women.

If Claudia did have a list of her lurkers and stalkers, would she know that nursemom23 was me? That would stink.

R.

ose and I were exchanging daily e-mails about Thanksgiving plans. She had been planning on getting most of the side dishes from a caterer whom she trusted not to use corn products. But I kind of got in the way of that. I volunteered to take care of the sweet potatoes, the mashed potatoes, the cranberry relish, and the pies. Oh, and the green beans and, if they didn't mind, the ambrosia salad. I apologized for the salad. "It's Kool-Whip, coconut, canned mandarin oranges, and minimarshmallows. It's 1950s cuisine at its worse, and we can't let Finney near it, but we always have it at Thanksgiving. It's our worst family tradition."

She laughed. "Guy grew up on food like that. He'll love it."

Then, a week later, she e-mailed me, saying that Claudia was going to bring the pies.

Claudia was bringing the pies? She hadn't mentioned that on her blog.

I make a fabulous pie. Even Mike's mother says that no one makes a piecrust like I do. People are always asking me for my recipe, and of course I give it to them, but the secret isn't in the ingredients. It's the technique as well as understanding and respecting the molecular structure of different fats. I cut the shortening into a finer crumb than the b.u.t.ter. Once I add the water, I hardly even breathe on the dough. I'm not vain about much, but I am about my pies.

This was far too important an issue for e-mail. I called Rose. "Are you sure Claudia understands about Finney's allergies? Don't you remember what happened at the engagement party?"

"I don't think she's the sort of person who makes the same mistake twice. She's already talked to the pastry chef."

The pastry chef? She was going to buy these pies? We were going to have store-bought pies on Thanksgiving? Don't they take your citizenship away for that? "But you've said yourself how easy it is to forget. Some people automatically dust their bottom crust with cornstarch." I did that when a fruit filling looked particularly runny. "They may do it without thinking. They may not believe her. They may not take her seriously."

Who was sounding like the food-allergy mom now?

"I suspect," Rose said carefully, "that Claudia is very capable of making people take her seriously."

Of course she was.

"Is there something you aren't telling me?" Rose asked.

"No, no. I just like making pies, that's all."

What a liar I was. This was about more than pies or even Finney's health. It was about my role as the Pie-bringer Queen. Claudia was trying to dethrone me. First she had left me off the guest list and then had put me at the losers' table. Now she was bringing the pies. Why hadn't the divorce agreement covered things like this?

S.

ince I was hauling only slightly less food than a family setting out on the Oregon Trail, I was driving to the Hamptons for Thanksgiving. In order to beat the traffic, I left Washington before dawn on Wednesday. Zack had morning cla.s.ses; he would fly up in the afternoon.

Everything I had read about the Hamptons commented on the light, how clear and crisp it was supposed to be. This light had lured artists to come out from the city and to turn garages and sheds into studios. But I, good midwesterner that I am, noticed how fertile the soil was. The crowns of trees were broad and spreading. On either side of the highway were the cultivated fields, now fallow for the winter. Many of the farms had roadside market stands. Most were boarded up with sheets of plywood, but some were still open, selling decorative gourds and the peach jams and strawberry preserves made from the summer's harvest.

Guy's a.s.sistant, Mary Beth, had sent me directions that were easy to follow. I took the Montauk Highway, then turned left on Mec.o.x Road just past the watermill. I pa.s.sed the inn where Claudia and Mike were staying. It looked quaint and historic. Then the road bent to the left, then to the right. Some of the houses were also quaint, charming places with shingles and porches, nicely sized for second homes. But many of the houses were new, and their ma.s.sive roofs loomed over the ten-foot privet hedges. I pa.s.sed a house under construction; its yard was rutted with tire tracks and its walls were wrapped with Tyvek, the white protective material emblazoned with blue lettering. Immediately beyond it was the Zander-Browns' place. I slowed, found the break in the privet hedge, and then turned up a long gravel drive.