Now she rapped her fingers on her desk, her eyes leaving the photo of her parents on the left end of the row for the one on the far right, an official NASA group shot of the crew on the flight that had "put her on the bronco's hump and broken her cherry," to quote not a famous writer this time, but rather the ever tactful Colonel Rowland. Of the seven men and women on that shuttle, two had been Turnips besides Jim and herself--mission specialists Walter Pratt and Gail Klass. It had been the multitalented, multilingual Gail, a computer scientist and electrical engineer by trade, who had designed their unique crew patch and translated the motto she and Jim had concocted into Latin ... to give it class and authenticity, she had explained.

Ah, Jimmy, how I wish you were here with some dumb wisecrack, preferably one built around an obscenity... as if you knew any other kind, Annie thought. Sorrow infiltrating her smile, she studied his face as it appeared in the starch official public-relations shot. Somehow his prankish sense of humor had managed to show through the stiffly formal pose their photographer had elicited from him.

She expelled a long, sighing breath and shifted her attention to the middle picture frame, having bypassed it a few seconds earlier, precisely because she had known it would make her struggle to keep her emotions under control unwinnable.

Behind the frame's nonreflective glass panel was a montage she had painstakingly composed from photo clippings of Mark, her children, and herself, using dozens of snapshots taken over the years, the images overlapping like the recollections they stirred within Annie. She was no Gail Klass in the creativity department, and most of her choices had been of the typical doting-mother, loving-wife sort that would have drawn afflicted little smiles had they been shown to friends or coworkers, boring them to death like nothing else besides home videos of birthday parties and backyard barbecues. Here was Mark proudly displaying a flounder he'd hooked from a fishing pier on Sanibel Island; here Linda on a playground seesaw; here the kids on a Christmas morning three years ago, still in their pajamas, wading into the presents under the tree; here the entire family at Disney World photographed by a roving six-foot-tall Mickey Mouse. And in the center...

Annie stared at the picture, transported back in thought to the night it was taken.