When she saw him start to rise, she returned to the kitchen. She had his food at his place and was fixing a plate for herself when he slid onto his seat.

"Hey, Doug," he said, holding out a hand for a high five. "How was school?"

Angie listened to a repeat of the stories she had heard in the car.

When Ben asked a question that got Dougie going off in another direction, she tried to concentrate, but her thoughts were on the "later" she had been thinking of in the den. She managed to put in an appropriate word, enough to ward off suspicion that something was wron. She even managed to eat a good half of her dinner, but all the while she was plotting. "Later" came just after she placed large pieces of chocolate cake before Dougie and Ben.

"I've been thinking," she said in what she thought was a reasonably conciliatory voice.

"I know that neither of you is happy with the added hours I've been working since Mara's death. My new schedule isn't going over terribly well. So"she cleared her throat"I've decided to make some adjustments."

Both faces were wary.

"Dougie, you object to having to get up earlier in the morning."

"That's not it, Mom, but you drop me at school too early. It's embarrassing. Nothing's happening. The dorm kids aren't even awake then."

"They should be," Angie said, "if they want breakfast before school beginsbut that's their problem, not ours. Now that Paige has a live-in to help with Sami, she can take her turn with the early emergency drop-ins so that I only have to do it twice a week. On those days, your father can drive you to school at the usual times. Same thing with picking up at the end of the day. On the three days that I have to stay late, your father will pick you up and bring you home.

You can have a snack here, so that you won't be starved if you have to wait for dinner until seven."

Neither of them spoke. She looked from one face to the other.

"Well?

Does that sound better?"

Dougie looked at Ben, who had his lips pursed and was looking at his plate.

"What?" she prodded.

Dougie looked back at her. "You're missing the point, Mom. The point is that I want to be a boarder."

"We agreed last night that that wasn't feasible."

"You agreed. I didn't."

She tucked her napkin beside her plate, feeling genuinely confused.

"Doug, why is this coming up now? Why not last spring? That would have been the appropriate time to decide whether you were going to board. Why now?"

"Because the kids are great this year, and I'm a year older, and if I don't board, you'll be on my back all year about using the telephone at night. Besides, if I board, I can eat dinner when the rest of the kids do."

"I just said that your father would pick you up earlier so that you could get a snack here."

"I don't want to come home earlier. I want to stay later." He pushed away from the table.

"What about your cake?" Angie asked.

"You didn't bake it. It came out of a box." ill can't do everything"

"The cook at school makes it homemade," he said as he went out the door.

Angie was bewildered all over again, wondering what had gotten into Dougie. When she looked to Ben for help, he met her gaze.

"You don't listen, do you?" he said quietly.

"He's telling you that he needs more freedom, but you don't hear."

"I accommodated him," she protested. "I told him that he could sleep later again, and that he wouldn't have to hang around school until six-thirty at night because you would pick him up earlier. I'm doing the best I can to make things the same as they were before Mara died."

"But that isn't what he wants. He's telling you that he wants to board."

An$e caught her breath. "Do you want him to "No, but that's not the point. The point is that you're still orchestrating things, which is what he's rebelling against. He needs freedom from that.

So do I."

"A household can't function without organization."

"Organization is one thing, manipulation another. You've just informed Doug that I'll be driving him to school twice a week and picking him up three times a week, but you never even asked me if that was all right."

She was speechless, feeling overwhelmingly wronged. Finally she pointed a shaky finger at the floor. "Right here, last night, you told me that I emasculated you, that I never let you do things for our son because I was afraid you wouldn't do them right. Now I'm giving you a chance. I don't understand why you're upset."

"Because it's your plan. You came up with it all on your own. You didn't ask me what I thought, or if I had any better suggestion."

"Do you?"

"That's not the point" He ran a hand through his hair, made a guttural sound, and rose from the table. "It's a losing battle. I can't get through." He headed for the door.

"Where are you going?" A picture of Nora Eaton flashed through her mind.

"Out."

"Ben" But the screen door slammed shut, and he was off toward his car.

Angie sank down on her chair and looked blankly at the uneaten servings of cake. When the numbness of his abrupt departure began to wear off, her insides were trembling.

She had been so sure she was doing all the right things. She had certainly wanted to do them. She didn't understand where she had gone wrong.

But there was no denying how deep the resentment ran against her. She might have attributed last night's flare-up to moodiness, had tonight's not followed it. Not only did the resentment run deep, but it struck her that it must have been building for years. And all the while she had been oblivious of it.

She wondered where had she been all that time, what she had been thinking. "You don't listen, do you?" Ben had asked, echoing all he had said last night. To one who took pride in having a firm grip on her life, his words came as a blowand that, on top of the cutting fact of his infidelity. They hadn't even touched on that tonight. But perhaps rightly so. It was a symptom. Just as her schedules, and revised schedules, were placebos.

The problem was that for all her knowledge, for all her training and skill and competence, she didn't have the faintest idea where to turn.

NOAH PERRINE CAME FROM A FAMILY OF academics.

His father, his mother, and two older sisters were all teachers. It was understood that he would do the same. And he wanted that. Having grown up on the campus of the small southwestern college of which his father was a dean, he liked the sense of community that campus living offered. The seeming insularity of it didn't bother him at all. He believed that electronic communication made the world a smaller place, such that he could be cosmopolitan and provincial at the same time.

For the sake of tasting the cosmopolitan, he completed a doctoral program in New York, then took a position as the head of the Science Department at a prep school outside Tucson, but it soon became clear that his talents were wasted if limited to teaching. He had a way with adults. He had organizational skills and a feel for business that few others at the school had. Almost by default, he became involved in upper management and, in time, was named director of development. It was a position that allowed him to combine teaching with alumni relations and fund raising, both of which were critical to the institution's survival. The fund raising involved travel, and although he wasn't wild about that, he was paying his dues. His goal was to be named Head, if not of that school, then of another.