This sounded to her more like an admission of dissatisfaction with himself than anything else, confirmation of her suspicions that at least some of the balloons and chanting associated with Gay Pride were a matter of trying too hard. “I love him for who he is. And of course Thomas adores him. And I’ll tell you something else, Desmond; if Gerald does end up going to a shrink twenty years from now, I’d like the shrink to know that whatever else he says about his parents, he had a mother enlightened enough to send him to a psychologist at age six.”

“Get the shrink on your side, you mean.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but now that you mention it, why not?” One of the most troubling aspects of dropping Gerald off at Dr. Garitty week after week was not knowing what he was saying about her, what he truly felt about her. Garitty refused to divulge much of interest about her conversations with Gerald, which surely couldn’t be ethical practice when the patient was a six-year-old.

“It sounds like a workable but complicated plan.”

“I’m a complicated woman. Which doesn’t prevent me from being a complete idiot some of the time. Half the time.”

Desmond said, “I doubt you’re ever an idiot.”

“No, not a complete one, anyway.”

He gave her an exceptionally magnanimous smile, one that put her at ease about her series of confessions and blunders. Although his real motivation might have been finding an excuse to display teeth that appeared to have been professionally whitened. She’d been pondering having hers whitened for a couple of months now, but worried it might be a first step down a very treacherous path that ended ten years later with a $25,000 facelift. She’d started to hear women not much older than her, perfectly reasonable, intelligent women, too, talking about what they intended to have “done,” as if they were discussing altering a jacket. Jane considered plastic surgery an overpriced form of self-mutilation; a pointless one, too, since everyone agreed that the people who’d had the best things “done” were the ones who looked exactly as they had before surgery. In July, she’d had lunch with Sonia Clark, a former co-worker at the station. Sonia was fifty-three and married to a successful financial type, and after Jane had complimented her once too often on how rested she looked, she revealed that her recent “vacation” had been three hours on an operating table, followed by six weeks of at-home recovery. Jane had been appalled by Sonia’s giddiness over it and so repulsed by the idea that she’d subjected herself to such a bloody renovation, she’d had trouble finishing her lunch. Although to be fair, she had written down the surgeon’s name on a list somewhere.

“Are you in therapy?” she asked.