And Tom…she’d made the mistake of telling him that he should feel free to play the stereo. A mature seventeen-year-old would be into jazz, or maybe even classical music, right? Wrong! Try hard rock, at earsplitting volume from the moment she walked in the door until dinnertime…and after dinner until Lord knew when. Of course she could tell him to turn it down. That wasn’t even a minor deal, but it was rather a major one that they were getting along so well. Three strikes and you’re out, remember? At least Tom was her success story. But that wasn’t really the issue. It was all the thousands of things at once, so sudden, so overwhelming…

Tell Griff, Julie had insisted. But tell him what? That she was less and less sure where she stood with her husband, how he expected her to deal with his kids, what he valued in her as a woman? A bedmate? A mother? But the role of wife seemed to be steadily sinking in a morass of confusing adjustments. Griff was becoming the stranger across the crowded room, but the song had a lot less romance when the crowd was made up of children.

On top of everything else, a flu bug seemed to have been chasing her for the past few weeks. No, it hadn’t caught up yet, and Susan had no intention of falling ill. She’d beat the damn thing with vitamin C and sheer willpower, because the thought of even trying to cope with Griff’s kids if she weren’t healthy…

Which you are, she insisted to herself. Healthy as a horse. Strong as a mule.

Vulnerable as a buttercup. Oh, shut up, Susan.


***

Susan stretched as she got out of the car and shook herself. She’d been on her feet most of the afternoon, and the kinks had settled in the most unreasonable muscles-like where she thought she hadn’t any. She gathered her purse and raincoat and started toward the house, wincing the moment she opened the door.

Pop music was music, wasn’t it? Actually, it might be. It wasn’t the kids’ fault that her father had raised her on Debussy. The album cover for this particular CD showed two half-naked men who shaved their heads and wore pancake makeup, and at this point, she thought she deserved the Medal of Honor for being able to identify the CD cover that went with the raucous sounds coming from the living room.

She glanced into the kitchen and unconsciously winced again at the sight of the dirty dishes scattered around the counters in a long trail that spilled over onto the table. Unbuttoning her coat with one hand, she picked up the milk with the other to return it to the refrigerator before it spoiled. Then she put the little heap of cookies back in the cookie jar and replaced the cover. Filling up the sink with soapy water, she rapidly gathered glasses. Three children. Eleven glasses. That kind of mathematics seemed to come with teenagers. Oh, yes, she understood all about the adolescent herding instinct… At least, come ten o’clock, she’d know where her children were-not to mention an assortment of other people’s children.

When she opened the closet door to hang up her coat, her arms automatically reached out for the avalanche of jackets that cascaded down on her. Hangers were boring. If one shoved one’s jacket in the closet and rapidly closed the door, obviously no one would know. After neatly hanging up the jackets, Susan hurried into the bathroom to run a brush through her hair and wash her hands; then she reached out for a towel.

There wasn’t one, of course. Why did she persist in expecting to find one? Obviously, you used a towel only once, and then you tossed it down the chute. Fastidious personal cleanliness, filthy personal habits-that whole scene seemed to come with teenagers, too. At first, Susan had been rather bewildered by the mound of towels that seemed to mysteriously mate and multiply by the washing machine. She was learning.

Vigorously shaking her hands to dry them, she dared to venture closer to the living room in spite of the music assaulting her eardrums. Four lithe bodies were stretched out on the carpet, with Barbara, center stage, making up the fifth. Susan saw no purpose at all in entering the room, other than to pass through and use the excuse to touch Barbara lightly on the shoulder en route. A hello kiss was not yet appropriate, but every once in a rare while Susan got the impression Barbara was waiting for her to walk in.

Books littered the carpet; so did CDs, shoes, assorted jackets and, of course, more glasses.

Susan assured herself that she would have plenty of time to clean it all up before Griff came home. She had an hour and a half left. Way back when, she didn’t know how much she could accomplish in ninety minutes, but she was becoming a master of fifty-two pick-up. And the point was that Barbara should feel free to have her friends over. The point was not a little extra housekeeping. She’d told Griff she liked homemaking, right?

She poked her head into Griff’s study, to see Tom folded up with a book. He lifted his head long enough to utter, “Hi, Mom-Two,” before lowering his eyes again.

“Everything go okay at school?”

“Par.”

“Where’s Tiger?”

“Upstairs.”

Tom could be very talkative, when he wasn’t concentrating. His boots weren’t going to mar Griff’s desk, because they were rubber-soled, she reminded herself. After throwing a “Home, Tiger!” up the stairs, she rushed back to the kitchen to finish the dishes. She paused in the middle of that task to hurry downstairs and toss a load of towels into the machine.

Before she could take the first step upstairs to change her clothes, she paused, suddenly frantically remembering that she hadn’t taken a thing out of the freezer to thaw for dinner. Dinners for five refused to appear out of nowhere. With just Griff, it had been different. On a rough day, they had simply gone out, or Griff had brought home Chinese delicacies; otherwise, they had simply put their feet up for a while and later fixed something together over wine. Now that she left the shop at three o’clock-usually-she’d made a point of telling Griff he no longer needed to help. Griff liked to cook, but it seemed far more important that he spend his free time with the kids, and he’d been working such long hours lately…

“Susan?”

Tiger’s face appeared at the top of the stairs, and her face relaxed. “Hi, sweetie.”

He was all excited, all big eyes and laughter. “I’ve got the neatest thing to show you.”

She followed him, laughing at his bouncing impatience. Dinner would have to wait. “Come on,” he insisted. “Hurry up!” At times like this, when he was so eager to share, broken cookies-and even broken heirloom-vases were mere bagatelles.

Up the stairs, past Tom’s room-Lord, what a mess-past Barbara’s, which surpassed any destruction a bomb could cause, and finally into Tiger’s. Toys as well as school clothes littered the floor, but Susan reminded herself that there was still plenty of time to get it all back in place before Griff came home.

“You’re just not going to believe this,” Tiger informed her.

She didn’t. The hamster cage had been relocated from the basement to Tiger’s room the day Tiger moved in. The project had not worked out quite as Susan had expected. She was the one who cleaned the cage four times a week and fed the animal that happily bit her each time. She had anticipated shared responsibility…but no, she hadn’t pushed it, because not a single rule had been imposed on Tiger in Sheila’s house. In time, she kept thinking. This extra work, like all the rest, was largely her own doing… Susan understood that, but something inside her refused to admit that in trying to make the kids happy and easy and comfortable she had dragged herself into a pit she couldn’t get out of. Children needed consistency, and she’d consistently indulged them, so… There must be a fallacy there, but who had time to analyze?

Crouched down next to Tiger, she stared in horror at the hamster cage. The one little animal had turned into seven. The six smaller creatures were tiny and hairless and ugly.

“I thought you had to have a boy and a girl to have babies,” Tiger speculated.

“I did, too,” Susan replied dryly.

“Isn’t it neat?”

Susan had loved animals from the day she was born, but all she could think of was the seven bites she would get from now on, every time she put her hand in the cage. “Neat,” she agreed, hoping it sounded convincing.

“I’ve been watching the whole thing. But I still don’t get it. I thought you had to have a father and a mother. How could she have the babies without a father?”

“Hmm.” Not an impressive answer. Susan rallied. “If we’d bought the animal from a pet store, this probably wouldn’t have happened,” she explained. “But I got this hamster from an ex-friend. There must have been a father and mother together at one time.”

Tiger wrinkled his nose. “What do you mean-ex-friend?”

“That’s very involved,” Susan said vaguely. No wonder Beth Smith had been frantic to find a home for the damn hamster! She rocked back on her heels. The smell from the cage threatened to overwhelm her, and she had cleaned it the night before.

“We’ll have to have more cages,” Tiger said in a rare burst of practicality.

More cages to clean. Susan closed her eyes wearily, but then opened them, her eyes suddenly soft on their youngest child. How many women would have killed for such an endearing kid? Suddenly, Susan was overpowered by a sense of blessing. “Pretty special, watching them being born?” she questioned.

Tiger nodded, still speaking in whispers. “I was even scared to breathe.” Those beautiful eyes darkened. “I told Barbie to turn down the stereo because I was afraid the noise would be upsetting to a new mother. Barbie said the whole idea of hamster babies was stupid.”