Several times she heard Steve moving around downstairs. At one point the family room TV snapped on.

Sometime after three a.m. she finally managed to drift off but slept fitfully, bombarded by disturbing dreams. One involved her mother-in-law in a pointy black hat pedaling a bicycle across a tornado-tossed sky. The Wizard of Oz theme played out all night. Steve appeared as the Scarecrow, and then as both the Cowardly Lion and a heavily rusted Tin Man. The worst scene featured Malcolm Dyer as the unscrupulous Wizard caught behind his curtain with Glinda the apparently not-so-good witch giggling in his lap.

Not surprisingly, Madeline awoke groggy and out of sorts.

Steve's revelations stole back into her consciousness to command center stage, and she buried her face in her pillow and cried. When the bedroom door opened and Steve padded into the room, Madeline squeezed her eyes shut and feigned sleep.

While he showered and dressed in the bathroom she lay staring up into the ceiling. Although she felt him hesitate beside the bed, she kept her eyes shut and her breathing regular. She didn't get up until she was certain Steve was gone.

By the time he returned with his mother, Madeline had put away the sheet and pillow Steve had left on the couch, tidied up the guest room and bath, and put on a pot of soup.

Determined to make things look as normal as possible in front of her mother-in-law, she kept a smile on her face and her conversation casual. But pretending her world had not been shaken to its core required an Oscar-worthy performance.

"You seem a bit quiet, Melinda," Edna said as Madeline tucked her into the guest room bed and aimed the remote at the television. Madeline willed herself to ignore the insult; it hardly rated in comparison to Steve's revelations. "I'm sorry to be imposing on you. I wouldn't have come if Steven hadn't insisted."

"We're happy to have you," Madeline said, straightening as the hosts of HGTV's Hammer and Nail appeared on-screen and wishing this were true. She handed the remote to her mother-in-law, who was already focusing on the remodeling show. "But it would make me even happier if you stopped calling me Melinda."

Edna's gaze left the TV. Shock that Madeline had commented on the dig flared briefly in Edna's eyes.

"I hate to think your mind has really slipped so much that you can't remember your daughter-in-law's name," Madeline said. "Maybe we should do some cognitive testing. We never did go for that follow-up with the neurologist."

Edna snorted. "They're all just looking for any excuse to take away a person's rights. First it's the car. Then they don't think you can live by yourself." She strove for her usual belligerence but Madeline heard the note of fear underneath and chastised herself for putting it there. Her own fear was like a living, breathing thing. "There's nothing golden about the golden years from what I can tell so far."

"No," Madeline agreed, reminding herself that her mother-in-law's jabs were a very minor thing. "Getting older is definitely not for sissies." But then neither, it seemed, was marriage.

end.