"Come on." Eve winced at the pain in her feet as she stood to open the bedroom door. "Dru's in the bed, so you'll have to make yourself comfortable on the rug."

As it turned out, Cory liked Darby from the first day. The kids were nice and very smart, she reported, and the teachers joked with them instead of being "all serious and everything." Eve thought the Darby students were actually a bit nerdy, but then, so was Cory. Her beauty was a front for a hungry, scholarly mind. The cla.s.ses were rigorous, and that was a challenge Cory could rise to.

"I have four hours of homework!" she announced when Eve picked her up that first afternoon. She sounded sincerely thrilled by the prospect. And Eve was equally thrilled that she'd received no calls during the day from a teacher or a school nurse, asking her to pick up her anxious, frightened daughter.

Chapter Thirty-Six.

"Girls," Jack said at dinner several days after the new school year started. "I have a proposition for you."

"Am I one of the girls, too?" Eve asked as she spooned tuna ca.s.serole onto Dru's plate.

"No, dear, you're a woman. woman." He gave her a lecherous look.

"Ah," she said. "Just checking."

"What's a proposition?" Dru asked.

"Well, I'll tell you," Jack poured iced tea from the pitcher into his gla.s.s. "The Children's Theater is auditioning for a play and there are roles for some six-year-old girls and some thirteen-year-old girls in it."

Dru gave a quick intake of breath, her mouth open in a smile. "I could be in a play?" she asked.

"You'd have to audition first," Jack said. "That means we would go to the theater and read a little bit of a part on the stage. Other children will do the same thing, and then the director will pick the children he thinks will work best in the roles."

"I could be on a stage!" Dru bounced up and down.

"It's hard work, being in a play, though," Jack said. "You have to memorize a lot of lines."

"I memorize really well," Cory said.

"You do, do," Jack agreed. "So I think it's worth a shot. It'll be a good experience, whether you get to be in the play or not. So what do you say?"

"I say, yes! yes!" Dru pounded her fork on the table, sending a dollop of ca.s.serole flying through the air to land somewhere on the floor near the pantry. "Whoops." She giggled, covering her mouth with her hand.

"How about you, Cory-Dory?" Jack asked.

Cory paused. "Okay," she said finally. "What are the lines I have to memorize?"

Two weeks later, Eve and Jack sat in the back of the community theater auditorium to watch the auditions. Jack had worked with both girls on their lines, and they knew them inside out, upside down and backwards. Eve watched Cory take Dru's hand and walk toward the front of the theater where dozens of children were seated. She felt anxious, not about Dru, who was sure to sail through this experience with her ego intact, but about Cory, who probably would not.

And she felt anxious about herself.

She'd expected to get breast cancer some day. With a mother who died of breast cancer at the age of twenty-nine, it seemed almost a given. Yet that had not happened, at least not yet. Instead, her feet seemed to be her biggest problem. She'd finally seen a doctor the week before.

"All your blood work and X-rays are absolutely normal," he rea.s.sured her. "There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with your feet."

"Well, that's good," she'd said. "But why do they hurt when I get out of bed?"

"Could you have injured them?" he asked. "Are you exercising in a way that might be causing problems?"

She thought about her activities during the day. "I walk to the university in the morning," she said. "And I walk around the grounds quite a bit. My feet don't bother me much then, though."

He closed her chart. "Well, I think all that walking's just catching up with you while you sleep," he said. "I don't think it's anything to worry about."

It was all in her head. That's what he was really saying, wasn't it? She suddenly felt sorry for Cory, whose anxiety-provoked stomachaches were similarly disregarded by doctors-and, often, by Eve herself.

"Here we go," Jack said, and she pulled her attention back to the theater, where Dru was bounding up the stairs to the stage. The last to audition in her age group, she was a standout. She delivered her lines with punch and pa.s.sion and with facial expressions and body language that had the adults in the theater laughing. She was so clearly Jack's daughter. People applauded when she bowed and walked off the stage.

Five thirteen-year-old girls were scheduled to audition before Cory, and Eve knew how agonizing the wait had to be for her daughter. Cory's anxiety was palpable when she finally climbed the steps, and Eve was certain everyone in the audience was aware of it as the tall redhead walked to the center of the stage. Cory locked her hands behind her back, then moved them quickly to her sides, as though remembering her father's direction.

She began to speak, her voice so soft and tentative she was almost impossible to understand.

"Louder, honey," Jack whispered into the air.

If anything, her voice grew softer. Eve watched Sherry Wilson, the director, sit forward in her seat as she tried to hear her.

"Oh, Jack, I can't stand this," Eve whispered. She knew the courage it had taken for Cory to get up on that stage at all.

Jack took Eve's hand. "It'll be okay," he said.

As expected, Cory didn't make the cut, while Dru was given the biggest role in her age group. After the parts were a.s.signed, Dru rushed back to Eve and Jack, while Cory walked toward them with a leaden gait.

Eve moved forward to hug her. "I was so proud of you for getting up there, Cory," she said. "That wasn't easy to do."

Cory shrugged her shoulders and looked away. She was quiet as they walked to the car and sullen on the drive home, her head turned toward the window.

"You both showed a lot of guts today, girls," Jack said from behind the steering wheel.

"I wanted Cory to be in the play with me," Dru complained from the back seat.

"It's okay," Cory said. "I don't really care."

The traffic came to a standstill, and ahead of them, blue lights flashed, the color bleeding into their car in rhythmic waves.

"Must be an accident," Jack said.

"I don't want to see!" Cory said. "Can we go a different way?"

"We're stuck on this road, Cory," Eve said. Cory hated driving by an accident, afraid of seeing blood or broken bodies. Eve wondered if it made her think about her fictional father's fictional motorcycle accident.

"Please, Dad," Cory pleaded. "Can't we cut through a parking lot or something?"

"Honey, just relax," Jack said. "Let's sing a-"

"I don't want to sing," Cory said. She lowered her head to her knees, her hands covering her eyes. "Just tell me when we're past it."

Dru craned her neck to look out the window. "It's okay, Cory," she said. "There's no blood or anything."

Cory didn't lift her head from her knees. "I don't belong in this stupid family," she said suddenly.

Her words were a knife in Eve's heart. "Why do you say that, Cory?" she asked.

"Everybody's talented except me."

"That's bull," Jack said. "You're smarter than the three of us put together."

"I don't mean that kind of talent," she said.

"I couldn't act or draw or dance to save my life," Eve said.

"My father's family is probably more like me," Cory said.

Eve glanced at Jack.

"Maybe they are," he conceded. "Maybe that's where your brilliance comes from."

Cory's head rose from her knees. "Stop talking about how smart I am," she said. "That's not what I'm talking about."

"You're one-fourth of this family, Cory," Eve said. "And we love that you're part of it, whether you like it or not."

The next day, Eve did something she would not admit even to Jack. She called Sherry Wilson and pleaded with her to give Cory a small, walk-on role.

"She needs the recognition," Eve said. "She needs to feel better about herself. Please."

Sherry paused. "I understand," she said. "I've got two kids myself, and one of them is a soccer star and the other couldn't find the ball if it were glued to her foot."

Eve laughed.

"I could use her in a group scene," Sherry offered.

"Thank you!" Eve said. "Will you call her, please? And don't let her know I called you?"

"Sure," Sherry said.

Cory heard from Sherry that evening. She came flying into the living room after the phone call.

"Guess what!" she said.

Eve looked up from the book she was reading, and Jack stopped tinkering with his laptop computer to give Cory his attention. "What?" he asked.

"That was the director of the play," Cory said. "She wants me to be in a scene!"

"You're kidding," Jack said before he caught himself. "That's great!"

"Wow," Eve said. "What do you have to do?"

"Just walk on and cheer with a bunch of other kids."

"Fantabulous!" Jack said. "I think you should go wake Dru up and tell her."

"Jack!" Eve complained. "It's a school night." But Cory's face was alight with joy. "Oh, go ahead," she said.

Cory ran upstairs to wake her sister, and Jack looked at Eve.

"Did you have something to do with this?" he asked.

She nodded. "I couldn't help myself," she said.

Jack laughed. "You're one zealous mama," he said. "Though I have to admit, I thought of doing it myself."

The play was a hit, the audience of relatives and family friends proud and enthusiastic. Marian sat with Eve and Jack, and dear Lorraine even made sure Channel 29 had a cameraman there to give the play a little airtime on the late-night news. Dru was superb in her role as the precocious six-year-old, for which she was a natural, and Cory stood out in the crowd of teenagers for her beauty if not her talent. They were both euphoric afterward, and it wasn't until two days later that Cory found the note Eve had scribbled to herself pinned to the bulletin board by the phone. Call Sherry Wilson, Call Sherry Wilson, she'd written, along with the director's phone number. she'd written, along with the director's phone number.

Cory confronted Eve in the living room when she got home from work. "Did you call Mrs. Wilson and tell her to give me that part?" she asked.

"No, honey." Eve tried to look surprised.

"Then why was her number on the bulletin board?" Cory held up the sc.r.a.p of paper in her hand.

Eve set her briefcase down on the chair near the door. "I just wanted to have it, since Dru was going to be in the play," she said.

"But you wrote that you should call call her," Cory said. "Not just her number. You called her about me." her," Cory said. "Not just her number. You called her about me."

"Cory, I did not."

"You forced her to give me a part. That's so lame. It's so...do you know how embarra.s.sing that is?"

"I know you really wanted to be in the play and that there were parts you could-"