“So do I. So does he now that he’s older and knows better.”

“Will he change it back?”

I shrug.

She still has the Cheerio mouth.

“I bet you’re not divorced. Legally,” she says. “I bet you just ran away from him.”

I say nothing.

“I like that,” she says pensively. “The idea of the woman doing the running, the abandoning.”

“I didn’t abandon.”

“Did you tell him first or did you just disappear?”

“I just disappeared.”

“Go get ‘em, tiger!” she yells, clapping hands, and prancing about the room. “I know!”

But she does not know. She does not know about the girl. She does not know that I put the phone down so quickly because in the next instance he’d have put Panda on the line. And that would have been too hard. That would have been the hard thing. That would have been the thing to turn this witch into glass.

“I know!” Jumping up, she’s an ostrich dancing. Old-fashioned silk blouse with ruffles in the back. She dips her arms, then springs up. “I know!”

She does not know how straight my face gets when I lie.

28

“I think it’s a rotten idea,” Ernest says.

“What?” I ask, sitting down to breakfast and shaking salt into a cantaloupe half.

We’re on the terrace. She’s painted the chairs and table yellow. The sun’s yellow.

“I told Ernest about our idea.”

“What idea?”

“I don’t think it was Amanda’s idea,” says Ernest. “I don’t think she’d have anything to do with such a silly idea.”

“What idea?”

“She doesn’t even remember,” sulks Catherine. Her famous betrayed look. She stands up to leave the table.

“Sit down and eat your breakfast,” says Ernest.

She sits back down.

“What idea?” I persist.

“The baby!”

“That wasn’t my idea.”

She glares at me. “I’d never leave a man who was in love with me.”

“I’d never try to kill one,” I want to blurt, but instead I say, “Forget it.”

I plunge my spoon into the cantaloupe. When I stare into Catherine’s eyes again, she’s scratching inside her nostril, looking as if she’s already forgotten. Ernest reaches over and dabs cantaloup e juice from her jaw, plucks her finger from her nose like she’s the wayward brat herself.

Catherine shrinks down in her chair. Now she’s the shrinking woman.

“How are you?” he asks.

“Okay,” she says, and shrinks down further.

A woman stands in the window of a building across the street, shaking out a quilt. She eyes us, then she retreats into the recesses of shadow. I wonder if she’s still watching.

“I won’t be spending the day with you two girls,” he says. “Psychology Today is waiting for that article I was telling you about and I’ve got to finish it today.”

“You can’t leave! Spend at least part of the day with us. Let’s go cycling.”

“I can’t, Catherine. Work to do.”

“Take a hike then.” She thumbs her nose.

In spite of her, he stands and kisses her and waves to me. Catherine won’t look at him. She shrinks down further.