"Hey, parents," Camille calls out. "What's up with the gla.s.s all over the floor?"

Camille and Kendrick suck in air at the same time as if they can breathe the tension they have encountered. Kendrick stoops to pick up the largest pieces and signals Camille to wait. Camille bolts straight into the front entryway, where their father stands near the top and their mother stands in the middle of the stairs. When Kendrick joins them, daughter and son rib their father about his very real need for a haircut. Randall breaks into a smile, leaving Lena flattened against the wall, shocked at his swift transition.

"Where are you off to, Dad?" Camille asks.

"Please give us a few minutes," Lena prays that Camille and Kendrick are smart enough to recognize her request is really a plea.

"We're done." Randall tousles Kendrick's woolly head when he reaches the bottom of the stairs. "If you think I need a haircut, man, you should check out your wild 'fro." Father, son, and daughter's laughter reverberates throughout the house. "I've got to be in the Novato office before dawn tomorrow morning. I'm going to stay at the corporate apartment."

From the living room window, Lena watches Randall's long car pull out of the garage. Twenty-five years ago, Lena discovered that Randall had returned from the East Coast the summer day she drove down Highway 580. From a distance, she watched a man trying to talk a highway patrolman out of a ticket. His distinct hand movements tipped her off: Randall.

Lena sped across two lanes and parked her sports car on the embankment. When the CHP drove off, she jumped out of her car and waited for Randall to look her way; a different version of their first meeting. They hugged for five minutes while cars honked their appreciation for such a public display of affection.

Now, anger fuels Randall's swift descent down the driveway, morphs his taillights from red dots to snaking stream. His car disappears down the hill and around the corner. Lena loved the way she felt that day long ago: protective and powerful. Powerful enough to slow traffic, to keep Randall from speeding away, to control her destiny. For all of the years she has loved him and more, she has cared for him, worried about him, prayed for his safety. In this instant, she doesn't care what he does, how fast he drives, or where he goes. But never, never in a million years, did she ever think she would wish he would go to h.e.l.l.

Chapter 11.

Three days.

The first day, Lena retreats to her bed, a bottle of water under the sheets, the bottle of Drambuie on her nightstand. Calls ring through to the answering machine. She listens while Lulu asks, "Why haven't you come over?" The light bulb in the bathroom, she insists, needs to be changed right away because the new energy-efficient bulbs make her look old and green. She listens when Bobbie insists, "Pick up and tell me what's going on, Lena-Bena." She listens to Candace: "I hope you gave Randall a piece of your mind. Let me know if you want to talk."

The second day Randall calls late in the afternoon, Lena answers when his number flashes on the caller ID screen. She lays the phone on his pillow instead of using her hands and listens to Randall ask about Camille and Kendrick and what bills have come in the mail.

This third day falls into night, and feathered, dark clouds gather in the sky with the threat of rain. She cannot move in her bed, cannot talk to her children, cannot stop thinking of the vials of pills in the medicine cabinet. The lyrics Lena printed out, what seems like years instead of three weeks ago, are piled on the bed. Of all of Tina's songs, "On Silent Wings"-the words more than the melancholy music-brings tears. She does not have the mental ability this night to understand if it is good or bad to be so average, to live life, or lose love in such an ordinary way that it can be generalized in lyrics that could, and probably do, apply to many. But the songwriter has captured what she believed: the willingness to share a life, the strength of a love that held when times were tough. Someone to hold on to. Randall. They read like her story: I always thought our love was strong enough I always thought our love was strong enoughOne you could hold on to Lena climbs out of bed and pulls sweats over her pajamas. Tina gained strength with the help of Buddhist chanting, but it took courage for her to step out on her own. A moan is Lena's chant. She releases it and lets this depression that runs deep in her bones render her pa.s.sive for the last time. She stands over Randall's dresser. Sungla.s.ses, cuff links, and a mound of change are lined neatly on top.

Winter waves crashed on the cliffs behind the restaurant in San Francisco when Randall put that one-carat, emerald cut diamond on her finger. She believed: wife as partner, wife as friend. She believed when he replaced it with this larger stone. Each time he twisted her hand this way and that-like she does from time to time-the stone sparkled on her slim finger. The gold band accentuates the gold in her skin, the gold that comes shining through whenever she sits too long in the sun.

Now she twists her ring-it slips easily from her finger-and tosses it onto his dresser in this bedroom soon to be for one. Wife in name only.

Lena drives fast and hard. If the two thousand pounds of steel encasing her could lead her to her death, she would not care. A bridge, an amus.e.m.e.nt park, hills sprinkled with trees. Forty-two miles in forty-two minutes. To do to him before he does it to her. Not like s.e.x: no sweet antic.i.p.ation. No hunger for his touch, his broad shoulders s.e.xy in the dark, his fingers and tongue working to please, not berate.

The rain pours like December instead of early May. Rain sheets on the windshield so hard that even the fast, swiping wipers cannot make the windshield clear enough to see more than twenty-five feet ahead. Headlights sweep in motion, cars blur midnight blue in the black of 9 p.m.

At the double doors of TIDA's executive suite, the carpet beneath her soaking-wet flip-flops is plush and thick. Framed posters of San Francisco and the sun setting behind the Golden Gate Bridge line the corridor's walls; gla.s.s sconces light the doors. Lena breathes in one, two and out one, two and tries to formulate her words. No more pretend. She will not ask Randall why he puts his wife last, work and grown children first. She fears his answer: wife like ice, distant as the moon, rose thorn in his side like the white man and the gla.s.s ceiling above his head.

It seems stupid, formal, to knock on the door when the corporate apartment key is in her left hand. Knock. It is a red key. She raises and lowers the key, then returns it to her pocket. With that one gesture she feels the change, the shift. Knock, knock-have they come full circle? Randall opens the door with the confidence of a big man who knows he can handle whatever awaits him beyond the threshold. There is no astonished look on his face. No smile or hug or happiness like the times when Lena visited this same suite for no reason except that she missed him, or surprised him in silk nighties and no panties beneath, for no reason except that she wanted him. He stands aside without concern for the wildness in her eyes, the intention in her step. The smell of burning wood reminds Lena of home: Irish coffees, music, conversation, Kendrick and Camille's fights over who could stoke the gamboling flames.

Lena scans the long hallway: two closed doors. She pushes open the door to the left, a closet, and the door to the right, a bedroom, and peers inside each one. Heat from a raised vent tickles the hair on her neck, but she is in no mood to laugh. From this end of the long hallway to the combined living and dining area Randall appears small and far away; a slight figure at the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. There is nothing small about Randall. She allows herself to be sidetracked by the pale green walls and the art she'd seen in a San Francisco gallery that would look perfect there so that she can gather her thoughts and slow her hammering heart. Lena wipes her wet hands on her sweats and sits on the angular sofa on the opposite end from Randall. She picks up the remote and clicks off the TV, and this time, he does not complain.

Randall waits and watches. His silence says, "You first."

Her words fall, like cards from a dealer's hand, easier than she thought they would. "I love you, but I can't be this way anymore."

"And, I love you, I always have." Randall's forehead creases so that little veins snake across it. "But, I don't feel loved. Why do you think I didn't ask you to come on this last trip? I needed a break. From the tension, from the anger." He rises from the couch and paces from the window to the small dining table and back, from the heavy coffee table to the fireplace in front of it.

Rain thrums against the sliding gla.s.s window. Its rhythm beats their message. Only when Kendrick and Camille were born, when Lena walked down the church aisle toward him, has she ever seen this kind of reaction on Randall's face. His eyes are tight, his lips fixed, his posture sloped in a way that only she would notice. Her hands tremble. They ache to reach out in a gesture all their own to take Randall's hand and make everything all right. She furls her hands tightly in her lap.

"Either we go back to counseling... or... separate." Lulu will say that separation never happens in their family, that Lena is inflexible, that she won't know how to make it without the man who's taken care of her for so long, that being single at fifty-four will make for a tough and lonely life. But courage itches in Lena's right ear, and she will not scratch it away.

Randall paces, diverts to the kitchen, splashes more wine into his gla.s.s. He sips, looking at Lena over the top of the clear rim. "I don't want some thirty-year-old therapist telling me how terribleI am."

The clock on the mantle intrudes on his words. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. No time. No time. Sixty ticks mark the minute, change their lives. No time. No time. Sixty ticks mark the minute, change their lives.

She wonders why he doesn't think the therapist would tell him how terrible they they are. "Would it make a difference if he were older?" are. "Would it make a difference if he were older?"

"No." No tears, 'cause this man don't cry. But Randall's eyebrows fall down, and wrinkles gather on his brow and his mouth and the corners of his wide eyes. His answer resonates above the crackle of the fire, above the rain's patter, above the knock of Lena's heart. Lena wonders why so much now. It could have been put to better use when Camille screamed at her, when that d.a.m.ned cat stunk up the house, when Kendrick snipped at her for not being the same ole mom, when Lynne spoke like Lena was nothing in her own house, when Sharon flirted with him right in front of his wife.

Lena stands and tugs at the s.p.a.ce where her ring used to be. She steps toward Randall, but his eyes are dull and flat and have shut her out. The last words of love that she wants to speak do not fall from her mouth. If she knew then-that he would never come home again-she would have stolen a last hug. One long kiss goodbye, so that her imagination would not have to fill the places he no longer is. So that her Thursday ch.o.r.es would have left old sheets on her bed, or towels in the bathroom, his shirts in the hamper so that his smell would stay with her, and she could breathe deep his cinnamon scent for just one more night.

The mistake she makes that night is leaving him in control, but old habits are hard to break: the prompt hers, the decision his. By the time she gets home, Randall will have called Kendrick and Camille. Daughter and son will call her traitor; cite her tough love, her insistence on rules, and recent inattention as reasons to side with their father. They will comfort themselves in their father's temporary attention, so that when she gets home, forty-two miles in forty-two minutes, and gazes upon her children's faces, they will no longer be hers. Kendrick will be a turtle hidden in the sh.e.l.l of his twenty-year-old body; Camille, like her cat, claws extended and ready to fight.

And from this day on nothing will be the same. She will clean for one, not four. And eat for one, not four, and cry for one, not four.

The freeway signs say exit.

And her heart is broken, too.

Chapter 12.

Still woozy with the morning-after haze of sleeping pills, Lena busies herself in the kitchen: chop, mix, saute. Despite the intentional clatter of pots and pans, Kendrick and Camille have not gotten the hint, not smelled the vanilla, melted b.u.t.ter, and thick chunks of milk- and cinnamon-soaked bread simmering on the griddle. Hope rises with the clomp of Kendrick's heavy shoes on the stairs; perhaps the smells have lured them after all. Kendrick bolts into the kitchen, his backpack sagging between his shoulder blades. Camille, dressed in flannel pajamas, thick leg-warmers, and a hooded sweater, strolls behind her big brother.

"I want to talk to you both about me and your dad." Lena sets a medium-sized platter with four slices of French toast on the table, then sprinkles them with confectioner's sugar. These thick, fluffy pieces of cooked bread are Camille and Kendrick's first choice for breakfast food. The memory of six-year-old Kendrick gobbling the spiced bread by the mouthful, syrup on his cheeks and greedy hands, and a much younger Camille dipping her pieces into the tangy berry compote Lena concocted flashes in her head. Lena nods toward the table and prays Kendrick and Camille understand: food as love.

"I can't be late. I'll grab a breakfast burrito from 7-Eleven." Kendrick leans against the back door, the eagerness to get to his part-time job obvious in his shuffling from one foot to the other. He refuses to look at Lena. Camille edges, sinewy like Kimchee, toward the table.

"It won't take long. Please."

Kendrick picks up a piece of toast with his hands and folds it into a pizza-like wedge before swallowing it in two bites. Camille stabs the toast with her fork and drags it onto her plate. Even now Camille dips. She never pours gravy onto her mashed potatoes; she dips forkfuls of the creamy side dish into the gravy boat, or chunks of bread into melted b.u.t.ter. When Camille was eight, Lena decided not to stop the habit and bought her a tiny, bone-china dipping pot.

"I want you to understand that separating from your father doesn't mean that I don't love you or that life won't be the same." Lena looks from Kendrick to Camille. Two sets of eyes roam from food to table to each other; anywhere but their mother's eyes. "I don't know how to explain to you what has happened. I'm not sure I fully understand it myself."

"I don't know what's going on. All I know is that you haven't been Mom, Mom, in a while." Kendrick fidgets with his keys, sticking each of them into the lock on the door, even though only one fits. "And, I can't speak for Camille, but this is between you and Dad. I'm going back to Chicago as soon as summer school starts. Dad already agreed."

"I guess... I mean it's scary. You know? My life should be about college and prom and graduation, not my parents' problems," Camille mutters. "Dad told us he's in the middle of some crazy s.h.i.t at work, and you don't do anything to help."

"I'm not going to argue with either one of you. You have no idea of how it is between married couples. You don't understand my sacrifices."

"Those were your choices, Mom." Kendrick opens the back door and steps out as if his abruptness will change her decision.

"Are you getting divorced?" Camille pushes food around her plate.

"Nothing is settled. No matter what happens, graduation will be the same. For now, I a.s.sume, your Dad will stay in TIDA's corporate apartment."

"Can I stay with him?"

"I'd like you to stay with me." At the sink, Lena runs water into the teakettle and sets it onto the burner. She angles her head so that Camille cannot see her face and the tears she tries hard to blink away. When steam hisses from the capped spout, she reaches into the gla.s.s cabinet behind her and pulls out two flowery teacups. A heaping dollop of honey, lemon, and chamomile tea go into the cups. Lena sets a cup in front of Camille.

When Camille was ten, Lena started a tradition similar to the one her Auntie Big Talker had with her seven nieces: they gathered once a month for a manners and vocabulary lesson and lemon- and honey-laden tea. While the cousins sipped their tea, Auntie Big Talker read to them: the encyclopedia, obscure English novels, the dictionary. She made them write the words they didn't understand on three-by-five cards and insisted the cousins memorize them. Conundrum Conundrum irritates Lena's tongue now. There is a riddle, but no amus.e.m.e.nt; no pun in the answer to what mother and daughter can do to get along. irritates Lena's tongue now. There is a riddle, but no amus.e.m.e.nt; no pun in the answer to what mother and daughter can do to get along.

For her version of the ritual, Lena took Camille to a collectables store and together they selected teacups and matching saucers. At the bookstore, they searched the shelves until they came across a book about a gutsy little girl who braved her way through a country swamp. Then they sat at the table in front of the kitchen window, the three tall pine trees outside the sole witnesses to their closeness. They sipped tea, ate too many cookies and read aloud to each other. In the years that followed, the last Sat.u.r.day of the month was theirs. They read the swamp girl's story more times than either of them could remember, all of Beverly Cleary's books-it was because of Ramona's cat, Socks, that Camille fell in love with cats-and The Count of Monte Cristo The Count of Monte Cristo. They talked about the world and life and what Camille might be when she grew up.

"I'm late for school." Camille shoves the untouched tea across the table. She is upstairs and back out of the house before Lena can figure out what more to say.

Lena feels it; a barely perceptible rumble on her emotional Richter scale. She understands it: another shift. A shift from her coc.o.o.n, her warm fuzzy life, the lovely family she worked so hard for has a nasty crack and may soon rupture and split.

Upstairs in her office, Lena lights her candles, holds her book in her hands. It is hard to see through the tears that splash onto the yellowed pages. The thin threads of similarity between her life and Tina's are always in her head: their birthdays, a little insecurity, and deference to men. Creativity. For years Lena's art has been limited to the preservation of family posterity: anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, vacations. Time to step it up. If, she wonders, psychics gave Tina clues about her future, then shouldn't she consider the clues Vernon gave her?

The parking lot outside the camera store overflows with cars and the men and women who rush in and out of them. Lena sits inside her car watching people watch her rip the cellophane from the digital SLR camera she purchased minutes ago. Drizzle collects on her windshield, blurs the sharp edges of the megastore's grayish facade, the sky, and the people in a way she would like to capture in pictures.

The chunky silver camera hides between layers of molded styrofoam, cardboard, plastic wrapped cables, a laminated quick reference chart, a 1GB compact flash card, batteries, and quarter-inch-thick instruction booklets in Spanish, English, and Chinese, all of which Lena tosses back into the limp plastic bag. She slips four batteries into the chamber. The camera emits an electronic, susurrant whine. Lena rolls down the window and points to the huge electronics store. Click. Click. Points to the sky. Points to the sky. Click. Click. Points to the little girl pa.s.sing by pointing at her. Points to the little girl pa.s.sing by pointing at her. Click. Click. Turns the camera lens around to her own face. Turns the camera lens around to her own face. Click. Click. Camera in hand like a newborn, she sets it back in its cardboard cradle on the pa.s.senger seat, turns on the ignition, and backs out of the lot. Camera in hand like a newborn, she sets it back in its cardboard cradle on the pa.s.senger seat, turns on the ignition, and backs out of the lot.

The city of Emeryville used to be an obscure industrial city on the edge of the entrance to the Bay Bridge. In the sixties and seventies, the mudflats were blank canvases for artists and rebellious hippies from UC Berkeley to build wooden sculptures and Vietnam protest signs in the slushy marshes alongside the freeway. Now the steel factories are gone, replaced with biotechnology headquarters, a mall, and a movie complex; only the train tracks remain. Lena drives to an empty lot next to a new condo building where anise grows wild, and the air smells of licorice.

Out of the car, into the street and the lot beside it. She takes the camera and snaps picture after picture. Click. Click. The rusted iron tracks, the rocks and gravel, the feathery weeds between the jagged stones and splintered wooden ties, the cracked brown beer bottle and discarded keychain beside it. The rusted iron tracks, the rocks and gravel, the feathery weeds between the jagged stones and splintered wooden ties, the cracked brown beer bottle and discarded keychain beside it. Click. Click. The back of an abandoned warehouse, its dock covered in graffiti, discarded grocery carts, the wrought iron gate of the condo complex. The back of an abandoned warehouse, its dock covered in graffiti, discarded grocery carts, the wrought iron gate of the condo complex. Click. Click. She shoots at every angle she can imagine: upward looking down, downward looking up. She shoots at every angle she can imagine: upward looking down, downward looking up.

She wishes that she had someone to hug and to hug her back, because she is so filled with the thrill of creating, the thrill of knowing that this old love will be the foundation that roots her to herself, especially if Randall no longer will.

Chapter 13.

This lake in the middle of Oakland is only odd because it is not in the middle of the city. But that's what Oaklanders say: Lake Merritt is a lake in the middle of the city. Actually, Lena thinks, it's kind of cool. Like the ca.n.a.ls in Paris. Or Central Park, if there is a lake in Central Park.

A photographer focuses his camera on a bride and groom in front of a pillar covered with rambling ivy. That is not the picture she would shoot, Lena reflects, pleased that her old pa.s.sion fulfills the possibilities of Vernon's prediction. She would pose the couple in front of one of the thick, gnarled trees near the western side of the lake to accentuate the opposites: the couple's loving intimacy and the bare-trunked tree's solitude.

With both arms extended above her head, she leans to her left and the bushy-haired man with seventies-style headphones coming her way. She prays he can't hear himself sing, knows that James Brown never sounded so bad. Arms to the right and away from the man who speed-walks in a kelly green Lycra bodysuit. If only her buns were that tight.

Most runners take the path to the right from this exact midpoint of the lake; there is the option of the higher cement sidewalk or the lower dirt path. A tree-lined gra.s.sy knoll between the two paths is filled with twenty or more elderly Chinese men and women in the midst of ancient Tai Chi moves. Lena begins a brisk trot behind a wizened couple holding hands. The gray-haired man and woman move solidly up the tamped dirt path and step to the side at the crunch of Lena's noisy gait. Today the lake is beautiful, odorless, and clear, with none of the slimy algae that often turns its water brackish.

"I guess this isn't isn't the best time to get on your a.s.s for not keeping in touch," a loud voice calls from behind. the best time to get on your a.s.s for not keeping in touch," a loud voice calls from behind.

"You're late." Lena waits for the body of the familiar voice to catch up. She has told Cheryl more than once, over the forty years they have known one another, that she will probably be late for her own funeral. "I guess this is is the best time to say you haven't done much to keep in touch your d.a.m.ned self." the best time to say you haven't done much to keep in touch your d.a.m.ned self."

Lena rubs her hand over her friend's gray-streaked hair. "You cut all your hair off." Cheryl has been obsessed with her hair since their college days. She went to the beauty salon two, sometimes three, times a week, despite persistent complaints that she was short on cash. If Cheryl made special arrangements with their handsome hairdresser, Lena never asked what they were, Cheryl's hair-long, short, or in-between-always looked good.

"And you should do the same; it's liberating." Cheryl tugs at Lena's stubby ponytail. "Us mature women don't need all this hair anymore. Short hair sets us free."

"Leave it to you to fight for a fashion trend." Cheryl is the medicine Lena needs. She would have called her old friend sooner or later. Bobbie's pushing made it sooner. Lena makes the sign of the cross over her heart when they pa.s.s the Church of the Virgin Mary on the opposite side of the street.

"You don't work and let yourself get all Suzy Homemaker conservative. Stop. Let me look at you."

When she was in her twenties, Lena jogged the lake regularly. Her legs were her best a.s.set then, and short shorts showed off her trim thighs and molded calves. Lena pulls her pants up to her knees and flashes a quick grin, proving to Cheryl and a chubby-cheeked man that they still are. "Looks are the least of my problems." Lena continues along the path and motions for Cheryl to follow.

"Let me guess. Mr. Spencer."

"Something like that." Lena picks up her pace as a light drizzle begins to fall; joggers speed past them. She pauses for Cheryl to catch up. Back in the day, Cheryl ran faster than Lena, socially and athletically. "I want to take pictures again."

"Photography is compet.i.tive. I'm not even sure how many black photographers are making money." Cheryl speaks with the knowledge and authority of fifteen years of representing emerging artists working in all kinds of mediums: acrylic, oil, organic and recycled material, metal, and indigenous stone.

"Art can't be subject to racial boundaries." Lena snaps. She knows the business business world is underhandedly racist-Randall's battles, his struggle to get to the top, prove that. world is underhandedly racist-Randall's battles, his struggle to get to the top, prove that.

Cheryl pokes a finger into Lena's taut bicep. "It's who, not what, you know that can keep some blacks from garnering the kind of success that makes them the big bucks." Cheryl lists the downside of photography: expensive equipment, darkroom time, or the latest digital software. Finding galleries. Rejection, rejection, rejection. "What do you want to work for anyway? You've got Randall."

"Randall may not always be around," Lena whispers.

"I knew it the minute you called." Cheryl's face reminds Lena of a person who has tasted something awful and wants desperately to spit it out. "I could hear it in your voice."

Lena points to a six-foot, multicolored sign and the giant heads of yellow and orange fantasy creatures visible through the trees. "Our parents took us to Fairyland when we were little."

"You didn't call to reminisce." Cheryl stops to retie her shoelaces and wipe sweat from her forehead with the terrycloth band on her wrist. "Talk."

It was Cheryl who listened when boyfriends dumped Lena, Cheryl who cried with her when Lena discovered she was pregnant with Kendrick. Cheryl took her to the hospital when she suffered false labor pains, comforted her after John Henry's first stroke, listened when she had no one else to talk to about Camille's temper tantrums. Cheryl knows most of the good and bad of Lena's life.

"Randall and I have separated."

Cheryl yanks at Lena's warm-up and embraces her friend. "You're going to be all right, you know that, don't you?"

Lena shakes her head no. "Oh, Cheryl, I'm so sorry for reconnecting like this. When I have a problem. I know I haven't been much of a friend. It's just that Randall..."

Cheryl and Randall tolerated each other for Lena's sake. Their common loyalty ended five years ago the evening Cheryl ran upstairs after dinner to say goodnight to Kendrick and Camille and returned to the kitchen in time to hear Randall: "I need more wine. This is the last time we entertain Cheryl. It takes three or four gla.s.ses just to put up with her loud clothes and louder mouth." Cheryl s.n.a.t.c.hed her red cape and silver-studded handbag and told Randall, in a voice more earsplitting than the one he had complained about, that she wouldn't dignify his comment with a response, loud or otherwise.

"Good friends pick up where they left off without explanation. What do you need me to do?"

"We haven't talked or decided anything. I'm worried about Kendrick and Camille."

"I know you love them like they were still babies, but Kendrick and Camille are grown. You need to take care of yourself and get a lawyer, because I know Randall will."

"I don't think he'd do that without talking to me first."