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“I have a mother,” Nina said, not wanting to discuss it. “She’s not interested in children. She gave birth, and then we took it from there.”

  Alex nodded sympathetically. “Career woman.”

  “No.” Nina took an Oreo from the package, rattling the plastic and alerting Fred, who came to sit beside her. She blinked down at him, surprised by his enthusiasm, and fed him a cookie, and then watched him trot to the couch before she looked back over at Alex. “Not a career woman. Society woman. We had money, we just didn’t have parents.”

  “So you went to college and became an editor?” Alex shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. You’re either supposed to become your mother or her opposite.”

  “I thought that was marry your father or his opposite.”

  “Same difference. So you became your mother’s opposite?”

  “No.” Nina put down her cookie as the realization dawned. “No, I became my mother. I married a lawyer and did the society thing and became a law-firm wife. My God, I did become my mother.” She blinked at Alex. “No wonder the divorce felt so good. That life was hers. Now I’m living mine.” She leaned back in her chair. “Boy, does this explain a lot of things.” She picked up her Oreo and bit into it, feeling even more liberated than she had before.

  “What kind of things?” Alex asked.

  Nina stopped in midcookie. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Well, I just spilled my family secrets to you,” Alex said reasonably. “It’s payback time.”

  “I didn’t hear any secrets.”

  “Okay.” Alex nodded at her, the picture of reason. “My father is an alcoholic. He doesn’t drink before seeing patients but we’re keeping an eye on him, anyway. My stepmother kicked an amphetamine addiction a couple of years ago and now is grossly overweight. We worry about her heart. My mother is manic-depressive, and I thank God every day for lithium. My sister has been married three times, all to cardiac surgeons, but refuses to see anything significant in the fact. She is now engaged, at forty-two, to her fourth cardiac man. My brother is chronically single because he lives for the thrill of the chase and finds stability boring, which I have told him is only an overreaction to our tense childhood.” Alex shrugged. “Other than that, we don’t have secrets. We’re just your standard family of obsessive-compulsive yuppie doctors.”

  Nina tilted her head at him. “And what’s your secret?”

  Alex stirred in his chair. “I don’t have any secrets. My life is an open book.”

  “Bull.” Nina got up to rinse out her cup. “You’re so defensive you won’t talk about yourself. You tell all about your family but you won’t say what you want.” She turned back to him. “So what do you want, Alex Moore? If you could have anything you wanted, right now, what would it be?”

  He sat very still on the chair, his eyes on hers, and she stopped breathing for a moment, sure she saw heat in his eyes, but that was so ridiculous she shook her head to clear the thought. Then he relaxed. “I want Oreos,” he said very seriously. “And I want to be able to come back here and talk when I’m not drunk.”

  “Sure,” Nina said and pushed the package toward him. “Help yourself. Anytime.” His eyes met hers again, and she blushed and added, “To the Oreos.”

  “Right,” Alex said. “That’s what I thought you meant.”

  Chapter Three

  “Then what happened?” Charity said the next day when Nina had spilled her guts on the phone.

  “Then Fred threw up everything, and the mood sort of died.” Nina scratched Fred behind the ears as he wallowed himself a place beside her on the couch. “I got a book out of the library today on how to take care of dogs, and it said never to feed them people food. We could have killed the poor baby feeding him all those Oreos. From now on, Fred eats only dog food.”

  Fred lifted his head to give her a dirty look, and she scratched him behind the ears again until he relaxed.

  Charity, as usual, had a one-track mind. “Does Alex still get Oreos?”

  “No.” Nina felt the warm little tingle she’d been getting every time she thought about Alex. That was one tingle she was going to get rid of. “Alex gets nothing. I’m staying away from that man.”

  “Oh, come on, live a little,” Charity said. “I admit the doctor bit is a letdown, but he’s still ten years younger. That qualifies as toy boy. Go for it.”

  “You’re telling me this based on your years of experience,” Nina said.

  “No, if I was basing it on my experience, I’d tell you to run like hell. Kenneth was a doctor, remember?”

  “Just vaguely,” Nina said. “You weren’t married that long.”

  “A year,” Charity said. “Long enough to know marrying a doctor was a bad idea. Don’t get serious about him. Just toy with him for your memory book.”

  The thought was attractive, but Nina shoved it aside. “Speaking of memory books, how is yours coming along?”

  “It’s wonderful,” Charity said. “I wrote all night. It was so exciting. I just love this!”

  “That’s great!” Nina tried to make her voice sound enthusiastic while she prayed that Charity’s book would be publishable. “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, first of all, I guess I should tell you that I’m going to use ‘she’ instead of ‘I.’ I just can’t write it with ‘I.’ It’s too embarrassing.”

  “You’re using third person,” Nina said. “Sure. That’s not a problem.”

  “And instead of using my name, I’m going to use my middle name,” Charity went on. “Charity seems sort of…not very serious, you know?”

  “What’s your middle name?”

  “Jane,” Charity said. “That’s serious, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Nina said, beginning to worry that Charity was going to plan forever without ever writing anything. “Did you write any of the book yet?”

  “Of course I wrote part of the book.” Charity sounded indignant. “I finished the first chapter. It’s about Howard.” Her voice grew thoughtful. “You know, I’d forgotten a lot of this stuff before I sat down to write it. This is like therapy only much cheaper.”

  “Howard.” Nina frowned, trying to remember. “Was he the hockey player who wanted you to wear the mask and pads?”

  “Oh, please.” The disdain in Charity’s voice was clear over the phone. “That was Helmut. I could barely do a paragraph on him. He wasn’t that interesting.”

  “I found him interesting,” Nina said, but Charity plowed on through her.

  “Howard was my date to the Riverbend Spring Fling.”

  Nina sat up, displacing an annoyed Fred. “In high school? You’re going that far back?”

  “I’m thinking about regressing to past lives. The faraway stuff isn’t as painful to write about.”

  “All right, all right.” Nina backed down before Charity could. “The Spring Fling is fine.”

  “The chapter’s called ‘Gone With Her Virginity,’” Charity said.

  Nina thought of Jessica. “Great title,” she lied. “What’s next?”

  “Mitchell. The Eagle Scout I hooked up with my senior year. We spent a lot of time working on his woodsman’s badge.”

  “Sounds…natural.”

  “I’m calling that chapter ‘Forest Grope.’”

  Nina winced. “Catchy.”

  “And then I’ll do that senior fraternity guy I dated as a college freshman,” Charity said. “Roger. You knew me by then. Remember Roger, the creep?”

  “Vaguely,” Nina said.

  “I’m going to call that one ‘Animal Louse,’” Charity said. “You know, I’m really getting into this.”

  Nina thought of Jessica and what Jessica would think of Charity’s memoir. “Go for it,” she told Charity. “But I want to see the first chapter as soon as it’s done. Do not come to the office and show it to Jessica without me seeing it first.”

  “No problem,” Charity said. “Now it’s Saturday afternoon, and you deserve a break. Go downstairs and seduce that n