Kaye wanted to pick up a chair and throw it, but you couldn’t do that, could you? Throw $2,000 chairs? Oh, what was the use of it all? All the worry, all the buying and planning, and trying to be a good hostess and wife and mother. All that fuss for nothing. No one cared. She was like the maid. Undervalued. Replaceable.

She brought in dessert, a layer cake from the fancy bakery near the Metro, an oversize wonder of a cake, thick with chocolate frosting and huge, chocolate-covered strawberries on top. It said “Welcome home!” in red frosting.

“Terrance Miller is probably at home watching TV,” Kaye said, trying to keep the tears out of her voice. “He’s probably got his slippers on and his feet up and a bowl of popcorn on his lap. He probably doesn’t even remember what happened to him. Because nothing happened to him! It was an honest mistake. That’s all. We all make them.” She smiled hard and went back to the kitchen. She ran the water so they wouldn’t hear her sob.

So she’d screwed up. It wasn’t like it was deliberate, though you’d have thought so from the black looks the Millers gave her at the police station. She hadn’t lied or anything. She’d just tried to defend her daughter. It was Lindy who’d lied. Lindy who’d turned her into the neighborhood pariah, a laughingstock.

She wasn’t going to give them any more to laugh about. She was going to get rid of her mammogram paintings before someone found them. She grabbed the purple lighter she’d found in Lindy’s jeans pocket that afternoon when she went to do a load of wash—why did she have a lighter, the little sneak? Then she went downstairs and snatched the films off the light boxes, slid them out of drawers and into boxes, and heaved them into the back of the car. She dumped armload after armload of films, boxes of paints both used and untouched, brushes, cleaning solvents, you name it. Then she got behind the steering wheel and backed out.