“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said, with a shrug. “Nobody likes Nadine.”

“Then would you like me to go back and annoy her some more? Maybe sneak in and spill some molasses on the floor?”

She giggled and shook her head. She cast an ostentatiously jealous look at our hamburger and fries, then sighed.

“Want fry?” Timmy said, offering her one of his largest.

“No thanks,” she said. “Not that I wouldn’t love one,” she added to me. “I’ve been on this diet forever. Doomed to nibble lettuce like a rabbit for the rest of my life.”

I nodded sympathetically. Since she was busily emptying four packets of blue cheese dressing on an enormous Cobb salad, I found myself wondering whether my lunch was all that much more fattening than hers, but I’d learned long ago to keep my mouth shut about other people’s diets and pray that they did the same about mine.

“When Nadine gets over being ticked at you and Karen, maybe I’ll ask you to come back and rile her up again,” she said. “Right now she’s just ignoring me, and that’s the way I like it. So Karen left Timmy with you?”

When he heard his name, Timmy grinned broadly, revealing all the bits of ketchup-daubed French fry he was chewing. Sandie and I both averted our eyes.

“Don’t chew with your mouth open,” I reminded him. “Yes, Karen asked me to take care of him for a little while. That was yesterday morning. I’m getting a little frantic.”

“I can imagine.” She glanced over at Timmy, who was jamming a fry against Kiki’s stitched mouth.

“You have to eat something, Kiki,” he said. More of a sentence than he usually constructed, so I suspected he was echoing something he’d heard repeatedly from Karen.

“It’s probably because of her husband,” Sandie said. “She found out Friday he was back in town.”

“Her husband? Jasper? They’re still married?”

“She filed for divorce when he ran out on her, but it takes a while, especially if you can’t find the jerk to get him to sign any papers. So when she heard he was back, living at his uncle Hiram’s old house, she said she was going to go out and get him to sign something.”

“Don’t people usually get a lawyer or a process server to do stuff like that?”

“Yeah, but she didn’t have a lot of money,” Sandie said. “I guess it’s cheaper if you do it yourself. Anyway, she was going to go out and see him.”

“Did she say when?” I could feel the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. If Karen had left Timmy with me because she was going to see her estranged husband—and hadn’t returned . . .

“She was talking about it Friday afternoon,” Sandie said. “I assumed she meant to do it over the weekend. And then when she didn’t come on time yesterday morning, I thought maybe she’d taken the morning off to do it. Then Nadine went on the warpath—she’s a real stickler about unexcused absences.”