Marvin was sitting back in his leather chair and smiling, probably at the image of Shay being buried under a half ton of white sugar. “There would be a sizable bonus involved, of course,” he reflected aloud.

He hadn’t mentioned a bonus on Friday afternoon, when he’d first presented Shay with a storyboard for a commercial starring herself rather than the infamous “Low-Margin Marvin.”

Shay sighed, thinking of all the new clothes her six-year-old son, Hank, would need before school started and of the retirement savings account she wanted to open but couldn’t afford. “How much of a bonus?” she asked, disliking Richard Barrett for the smug look that flickered briefly in his blue eyes.

Marvin named a figure that would cover the savings and deposit payment and any amount of jeans, sneakers, jackets and T-shirts for Hank, with money left over.

“Just for one commercial? That’s all I’d have to do?” Shay hated herself for wavering, but she was in no position to turn her back on so much money. While she earned a good salary working as Reese Motors’s office manager and general all-around troubleshooter, it took all she could scrape together to support herself and her small son and meet the property taxes on her mother’s enormous, empty house. Lord in heaven, she thought, if only someone would come along and buy that house.…

Marvin and Richard exchanged indulgent looks. “If you hadn’t stomped out of here on Friday,” Richard said smoothly, “I would have gone on to explain that we’re discussing a series of four spots, thirty seconds each. That’s a lot of money for two minutes’ work, Shay.”

Two minutes’ work. Shay was annoyed and insulted. Nobody knew better than she did that a thirty-second commercial could take days to perfect; she’d fetched enough antacid tablets for Marvin and made enough conciliatory telephone calls to his wife to know. “I’m an office manager,” she repeated, somewhat piteously this time.

“And a damned good one!” Marvin thundered. “I don’t know what we’d have done without you all this time!”

Shay looked back over the half dozen years since she’d come to work for Marvin Reese. She had started as a receptionist and the job had been so important to her that she’d made any number of mistakes in her attempts to do it well. Marvin had been kind and his wife, Jeannie, had been a real friend, taking Shay out to lunch on occasion, helping her to find a trustworthy babysitter for Hank, reassuring her.

In many ways, Jeannie Reese had been a mother to Shay during those harried, scary days of new independence. Rosamond—nobody had suspected that her sudden tendency toward forgetfulness and fits of temper was the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease—had been living on a rancho in Mexico then, with her sixth and final husband, blissfully unconcerned with her daughter’s problems.

Now, sitting there in Marvin’s spacious, well-appointed office, Shay felt a sting at the memory. She had telephoned her mother right after her ex-husband, Eliott, then principal of a high school in a small town in Oregon, had absconded with the school’s sizable athletic fund and left his young and decidedly pregnant wife to deal with the consequences. Rosamond had said that she’d warned Shay not to marry an older man, hadn’t she, and that she would love to send money to help out but that that was impossible, since Eduardo had just bought a Thoroughbred racehorse and transporting the beast all the way from Kentucky to the Yucatan peninsula had cost so much.