t was late Saturday afternoon when the shit hit the fan.

Jamie was sitting cross-legged on the floor by the fire. Her small, pointed chin was jutted out in the bulldog expression Jack knew meant trouble. "Okay, you guys, spill it."

Stephanie, in the rocking chair in the corner of the room, paled visibly.

"You want me to ask it another way?" Jamie said, her voice rising. "Steph and I aren't idiots. We know something is going on between you two."

"Leave me out of it," Stephanie said.

Elizabeth, who was sitting on the sofa, tucked her legs up underneath her. She didn't answer.

Obviously, she was leaving it up to Jack. That had always been their pattern. Elizabeth decided what the girls could and couldn't do, and Jack was the bad guy who laid down the law, the one who gave them a "talking to" when Elizabeth was unhappy with their grades.

"So?" Jamie demanded again.

The girls looked at Jack. They knew: All bad news came from Dad.

He gazed at his beloved daughters. Jamie's tight, ready-to-be-pissed expression was ruined by eyes that were already sad. And Stephanie never looked up from the hands coiled in her lap. She was like a buck private, hunkered down behind a building, waiting for the shrapnel to start flying.

The thought of telling them, of actually speaking the toxic words aloud, made him almost sick to his stomach. They would always remember that it was his voice that had torn their family apart.

He couldn't do it.

He was so deer-in-the-headlights frozen that he didn't notice when Elizabeth got up, walked around the sofa.

She was behind him now. She squeezed his shoulder, and there was a gentleness to her touch that hurt more than any punch.

"I know you guys sense that something is not normal with Dad and me," she said. Her voice was surprisingly calm.

He couldn't believe she was going to do it. Birdie. The woman who ran from conflict and couldn't make a decision to save her life... the woman who'd stand in front of a train to spare her children's lives.

"That's an understatement," Jamie said mulishly. "We know Dad slept on the sofa last night."

"People who love each other have fights, Jamie." Stephanie looked up. "That's all it is, right?"

Elizabeth's hold on Jack's shoulders tightened. It occurred to him to reach up, to lay his hand on hers, but he was paralyzed by what was unfolding. He could barely breathe. "It's a little more than a fight," Elizabeth said evenly. "The truth is, your dad and I have separated."

Stephanie's mouth dropped open. The color faded from her cheeks. "Oh, my God."

"I know this is difficult to hear," Elizabeth said quickly. "And we're going to have to work together to get through it, but we'll be okay. We'll always be a family, no matter what."

"Oh, this is fucking great. We'll always be a family. What a crock of shit." Jamie shot to her feet. She was breathing hard, and Jack could see that she was close to tears. "That's right up there with a guy asking to be just friends. It means he already has another girlfriend."

Elizabeth's grip became painful. "Honey, let us explain."

"No way. I've heard all I can take."

"Listen to us, please. Your dad and I were so young when we got married," Elizabeth said.

Stephanie's head shot up. "That's your reason? Because you got married too young? I thought... I mean you always... Oh, shit." She burst into tears.

This was ripping Jack's heart out. Nothing had ever hurt this much. Nothing. Ever. "Honey..." He didn't know what to say. He glanced helplessly up at Birdie. She gazed down at him; her mouth trembled. And then her beautiful face crumpled.

Jack didn't think. He leaned sideways and pulled her into his arms. "We'll get through this," he whispered against her wet cheek.

He had never loved her more than he did right then. She'd been stronger in this than he could have been, and now he saw the cost of that strength. She was tearing like old cloth, coming apart in his arms.

He looked at his daughters and knew he'd never forget this moment.

This was the price for every bad choice he'd ever made. And of all his poor choices, none had been worse than not loving Birdie enough to fight for their marriage. "This is hard on all of us," he said. His words came slowly; he was a blind man feeling his way down a dark and twisting hallway. "But we love you." He glanced at Birdie, did his damnedest not to cry. "And we love each other. For now, that's all we know. You guys can either help us through this, or you can be angry and shut us out. You're adults. We can't control you anymore." His voice almost broke. "But we need you now--both of us do. Maybe more than we ever have. We need to be a family."

That took the wind out of Jamie's sail. The anger seeped out of her; without it, she crumpled to her knees, whispering something Jack couldn't hear.

Elizabeth slid to the floor beside her. "My girls," she whispered.

Jamie and Stephanie launched themselves at her. The three of them clung together, crying.

Jack stared down at them longingly. He wanted to join them, to for once be part of that inner circle, but he couldn't move. They'd always been a trio first, a family second.

It was Jamie who looked up at him first. Jamie, his warrior princess, whose face was ravaged now by pain. "Daddy," was all she said, reaching out.

She hadn't called him that in years.

Elizabeth reached behind her, felt around for Jack's hand. When she found it, she squeezed hard.

He slid off the sofa to his knees and took them all in his arms.

Elizabeth felt as if she'd just gone two rounds with Evander Holyfield. She sat in the porch swing, gliding back and forth. A full moon hung above the midnight-blue ocean, its light a silver beacon across the waves.

The last four hours had been the worst time of her life.

They'd all sat together, alternately weeping and shouting. Jamie had vacillated between fury and despair; Stephanie had been stubbornly silent, refusing to accept that her parents might not get back together.

Now, finally, the girls had gone to sleep.

She heard the screen door open and bang shut.

Jack stepped onto the porch. With a sigh, he slumped down onto the swing beside her. The chains groaned at his weight.

Elizabeth wrapped the woolen blanket more tightly around her shoulders. "We should have lied to them."

"I don't know how you had the guts to tell them," he answered. "When they started crying... shit, it was awful."

"It's my fault," she said. "I refused to go to New York. I wrote that letter. I had to be the one to tell them."

"We both know better than that, Birdie. This is a thing we did together."

It meant so much to her, those few and precious words. He'd shouldered part of her guilt. "I still love you," she said, realizing suddenly that it was true. That it had always been true. She turned to him. "Until tonight, I'd forgotten that."

He looked at her steadily. "For years, I asked you what was wrong. You never really answered, did you?"

"You don't know what it's like to disappear, Jack. How could you? You've always been so confident, so sure of yourself."

"Are you kidding, Birdie? I went from all-star in the NFL to nobody. Nobody."

"That's different. I'm talking about who you are inside. Not what your job is."

"You never understood," he said. "For a man, what you do is who you are. When I lost football, I lost myself."

"You never told me that."

"How could I? I was ashamed, and I knew what it had been like for you as a player's wife."

He was right. She'd grown to hate his football years; the better he did in the sport, the farther he moved from the family.

So she hadn't been there for him in his time of need. Instead of his safe harbor, she'd been another port to avoid. "I'm sorry, Jack."

"Don't say that. We've wasted too many years on that."

"Not wasted," she said softly. "We did okay, Jack. We buoyed each other up for twenty-four years. We built a house and home that was a safe and happy place. We created two beautiful, loving young women." She managed a smile. "Not too bad for a couple of kids who ran off to get married in the last semester of college. There were a lot of years when I thought we had everything."

He stood up and offered her his hand. She took it greedily, held on so tightly his strong bones shifted within her grasp. "You're something special, you know that?"

He'd never said that to her before. The simple compliment meant more to her than she'd thought possible. "You, too."

"Well. Good night, Birdie."

"Good night."

She went to her bedroom alone.

Jack pulled into the airport's underground parking lot. When he turned off the rental car's engine, the silence was deafening.

Jamie and Stephanie sat in the backseat, huddled together. There had been no clamoring to sit up with Dad. Not this time.

He glanced in the rearview mirror. "We'd better get going. You don't want to miss your flight."

"That's for sure," Jamie said, reaching for the door handle. "We want to get the hell out of this state."

Stephanie threw Jack a sympathetic look, then followed her sister out of the car. They didn't wait for Jack. Instead, they bolted for the terminal, walking so fast it looked as if they were fleeing a crime scene. Through the endless security checks, neither girl looked at him.

With a sigh, Jack followed them.

At the gate, they were forced to stop. Jamie finally turned to him. For a single second, their gazes met and her armor weakened. In her blue eyes, he saw a pain so raw and deep it rocked him back. She was hurting so damned much...

And he and Birdie had caused it. An ache spread through his heart, a combination of guilt and shame and regret. Regret most of all.

"Jamie," he said, moving toward her, hands outstretched.

"You do not want to touch me right now," she said loudly, stepping away from him.

He knew then the truth of a broken heart; it wasn't some poetic metaphor. It was muscle and sinew tearing away from bone. It hurt more than any blown knee ever could. "I'm sorry, Jamie. We're sorry."

Jamie's face crumpled. She appeared unsteady on her feet. "Bite me." She turned and stomped away from him. Even after she'd reached the Jetway door and stopped, she didn't look back.

"You know Jamie," Stephanie said, "when she gets scared, she gets pissed off."

Jack wanted to say, I'm scared, too, but he didn't know how to be that honest with his daughters. It was his job to be the family's strength. "I guess we're all scared."

Stephanie was doing her best not to cry. It was a terrible thing for a father to watch. His Stephie, always so strong, looking as if she were held together by old Scotch tape. "It's like discovering one day that you're schizophrenic. Everything you've believed in is suddenly suspect. I don't know how to live in a world where our family is broken up."

"Keep believing in all of us, Steph. Someday you'll understand. Mom and I have been together since we were your age. That's a long time. Things... pile up between people. But we're not even talking about divorce."

Stephanie gave him a pathetically hopeful look. "We thought you were lying about that."

"No. We're just taking a little breathing room; that's all for now."

"Oh."

In the background, a voice came over the loudspeaker, announced the boarding of flight 967.

Jack glanced over at Jamie. Her back was to him. Even from this distance, he could see how stiff she was.

Poor Jamie. Always so terrified of bending. She was probably tearing apart inside, but she wouldn't show it. "Take care of your sister. She acts tough..." He couldn't go on. He remembered the day Jamie had broken her arm. All the way to the doctor's office, she'd sat stoically silent. It hadn't been until late that night, in her dark bedroom with its Big Bird nightlight that she'd finally cried. She'd curled into Jack's arms and whispered, It hurts, Daddy.

Back then, all he'd had to do was stroke her hair and tell her a bedtime story.

"She's really pissed off at you and Mom. Did you see her at the house? She wouldn't even let Mom ride to the airport with us. I've never seen her so mad."

"I wonder how long she can avoid talking to us."

"Jamie? How long until the polar ice cap melts?"

"Take care of her. And of yourself. I love you, Stephie."

Stephanie looked up at him. "Be honest with us, Daddy, okay? If it's time for us to stop hoping, tell us."

"I promise." He saw by the look on her face that he'd said the wrong thing. Of course. In the past, his promises hadn't meant much. It was another change he'd have to make in the future.

They called the flight again.

"Come on, Stephanie!" Jamie yelled, waving her sister over.

"Bye, Dad." Stephanie shouldered her carry-on bag and hurried toward Jamie. They both boarded the plane without a backward glance.

Jack went to the window and stared out. A hazy reflection of his own face stared back at him. Beyond it, the plane pulled away from the Jetway. Slowly, Jack headed for his own gate.

The make-believe spring lasted until the end of March. Then the rains returned with a vengeance. Each day, Elizabeth walked to the mailbox in her Eddie Bauer raincoat and knee-high boots, with high hopes. Time and again, she returned empty-handed. Twice in the past weeks, Stephanie had written. Short, pointed letters; each one contained a burning, unanswerable question.

Who stopped loving whom?

Were you lying to us all those years?

Do you want a divorce?

The questions were youthful demands for certainty in uncertain times. Elizabeth knew that her answers were too vague to be of much help. How could it be otherwise? Some issues were simply obscured by the fog of too many lost years.

Jamie hadn't written at all. Nor had she returned any of the phone messages Elizabeth left on their machine.

Elizabeth had always been so close with her daughters. This new distance--and their hurt and anger--was almost unbearable. The old Birdie would have crumpled beneath its weight, but the newer, stronger version of herself knew better. Sometimes a woman had to stand up for what she needed, even against her own children. This was one of those times. And yet, the silence ate at her, ruined her ability to sleep well.

"It would have been better to lie to them... or to go back to Jack," Elizabeth said to Anita for at least the hundredth time since the birthday party weekend. "I could have moved to New York and restarted my old life. Everyone would be happier." She stepped back from her painting, frowned, then added the barest streak of Thalo purple to the sunset. It was the painting she'd begun the first night Anita arrived. She'd finished four of the pieces for the Stormy Weather Arts Festival, but the rains had forced her back inside. So, she'd turned her attention back to the portrait.

At the kitchen table, Anita sat knitting. She barely looked up. "I don't suppose everyone would be happier."

"Everyone else then," Elizabeth said, standing back from her work again. It was lovely. Perhaps the best work she'd ever done. "Okay. That's it. I'm done."

"Can I finally see it?"

Elizabeth nodded, suddenly nervous. It was one thing to be happy with your art. It was quite another to show it off. She stepped aside and let her stepmother stand directly in front of the easel.

Anita stood there forever, saying nothing.

"You don't like it. I know the colors of the sunset are a little crazy; I wanted to emphasize your softness by exaggerating the world around you. You see how it seems that the sky is drawing the color out of you, leaving you a little paler?"

Elizabeth studied the work for flaws. In it, Anita looked frail and ethereal, yet somehow powerful, like an aged queen from King Arthur's court. There was the barest sadness in her gray eyes, though a hint of a smile curved her lips. "Maybe you think I gave you too many wrinkles. I thought--"

Anita touched her arm, but still said nothing.

"Say something. Please."

"I was never this beautiful," Anita said in a throaty voice.

"Yes, you are."

"Lordy, I wish your daddy could see this. He'd put it up on the wall and make sure everyone saw it. 'Come on in,' he'd say to our guests; 'see what my little girl did.' " Anita finally turned to her. "I guess now it'll be me sayin' that."

On the first thursday in april, Elizabeth drove to the community college. She found a spot close to the entrance and parked. Light from a nearby streetlamp poured into the car, gave everything a weird, blue-white glow.

From the passenger seat, Anita shot her a nervous look. "I don't know about going to this meeting, Birdie," she said, wringing her hands together. "I've never been one to air my troubles in public."

"It'll help, Anita. Honest. I used to call these women passionless, but they're not. They're just like us."

Anita didn't look convinced. "Okay."

They got out of the car and walked down the long, shadowy concrete pathway, then pushed through the orange metal double doors. A wide, linoleum-floored hallway stretched out before them, dotted here and there with blue doors.

Anita paused.

Elizabeth took her stepmother's hand and squeezed it gently. She remembered the feeling with perfect clarity; it had been only a few months ago that she herself had been afraid to walk down this corridor. Now she did it easily, eagerly. "Come on."

At the closed door, she looked at Anita. "Ready?"

"Do I look ready? No, I do not"--Anita tried to smile--"but my stepdaughter doesn't care about that." She puffed up her ample chest and tilted her chin up.

Elizabeth recognized the gesture. She'd done the same thing herself that first time, tried--like a frightened bird--to make herself seem larger. She opened the door and went inside, pulling Anita along beside her.

The first thing she noticed was the balloons. Pretty, helium-filled "good luck" balloons hung in the air, tethered to chairbacks. A few rebels had freed themselves and now bumped aimlessly along the ceiling.

"She's here!" someone cried out, and all at once, the women in the room came together in a crowd. They were clapping.

Elizabeth looked down at Anita. "I guess they like it when you rope in a new member."

Sarah Taylor pushed through the group, smiling broadly. In a bright yellow dress, she looked like a ray of sunshine against the drab gray walls. "You tried to keep it a secret, Elizabeth. Quite naughty."

Elizabeth had no idea what Sarah was talking about.

Joey pushed forward. "I saw it in the newspaper. I couldn't believe it. You never told us."

Mina was next. "Joey called me right away. I drove down to buy myself a paper and there it was. I called Sarah immediately."

Fran smiled. "When I saw it..." Her face twitched, as if she were about to cry. "... I went right out and joined that choir. My first concert is next Sunday."

The only one who had nothing to say was Kim. She hung in the back of the room, by the coffeemaker, wearing her usual mortician's garb, fiddling with a pack of cigarettes. Every once in a while she looked up, then quickly glanced back to the table.

"What in the world are you all talking about?" Elizabeth asked when there was a break in the conversation.

"The art show," Joey said, her voice reverent.

A hush fell over the room.

Elizabeth's cheeks heated up. "Oh. That."

Anita squeezed her hand, steadied her.

"We're so proud of you," Mina said. "It took real guts to sign up for that."

"Balls of steel," Fran agreed.

Joey smiled up at her. "You gave me hope, Elizabeth. I signed up for a dental hygienist class. I thought, if you can do it, so can I."

"But I'm scared to death," Elizabeth said.

"Don't you see?" Fran said. "That's what makes us so proud of you."

Elizabeth's emotions suddenly felt too big for her body. "Well... thank you."

"Who's your friend?" Sarah asked.

Elizabeth turned to Anita. "This is my stepmother, Anita."

"Welcome to the group, Anita," Sarah said.

"I lost my husband recently," Anita blurted out, as if she'd been scared of her "turn" and wanted it out of the way. She laughed nervously. " 'Course I didn't actually lose him. He's... dead."

Mina stepped forward and slipped her arm through Anita's. "Come sit by me. I'll tell you about my Bill and how I'm learning to find a life of my own."

Elizabeth talked to the women for a moment longer, then went back to the food table. Kim stood by the coffeemaker.

"Hi," Elizabeth said.

Kim stared at her through narrowed, heavily made-up eyes. "How will it feel to fail?"

It was the question Elizabeth had chewed on at every meal. For weeks, she'd worried about it. Every time she dabbed on a bit of paint, she second-guessed her choice and her talent. "I expect to fail," she said at last.

"And you're doing it anyway?"

Elizabeth shrugged. "For years, I failed by omission. I don't think anything can be worse than that."

Kim hitched her purse strap over her shoulder. "I don't know, Elizabeth. Every time I think life can't get worse, my husband sends me a new set of papers. But good luck. I suppose good things have to happen to someone."

Elizabeth was still trying to fish out a response to that when Kim walked past her and left the meeting.