"Ava had two rules about dealing with adolescents," Churchill said. "First, the more you try to control them, the more they rebel. And second, you can always reach a compromise as long as they need you to drive them to the mall."

I smiled. "I'll have to remember those rules. Ava must have been a good mother."

"In every way," he said emphatically. "Never complained when she got the short end of the stick. Unlike most people, she knew how to be happy."

I was tempted to point out that most people would be happy if they had a nice family and a big mansion and all the money they needed. I kept my mouth closed, however.

Even so, Churchill seemed to read my mind. "With all you hear at work," he said, "you should have figured out by now rich folks are just as miserable as poor ones. More, in fact."

"I'm trying to work up some sympathy," I said dryly. "But I think there's a difference between real problems and invented problems."

"That's where you're like Ava," he said. "She could tell the difference too."

CHAPTER 15

After four years, I had finally become a full-fledged stylist at Salon One. Most of my work was as a colorist—I had a talent for highlights and corrections. I loved mixing liquids and pastes in a multitude of small bowls like a mad scientist. I enjoyed the myriad small but critical calculations of heat, timing, and application, and the satisfaction of getting everything just right.

Churchill still went to Zenko for his cuts, but I did his neck and eyebrow trims, and I did his manicures whenever he wanted them. And there were the infrequent lunches when one of us had something to celebrate. When we were together, we talked about anything and everything. I knew a lot about Churchill's family, particularly his four children. There was Gage, the oldest at thirty, whom he'd had by his first wife, Joanna. The other three he'd had with Ava: Jack, who was twenty-five, Joe, who was two years younger, and the only daughter, Haven, who was still in college. I knew Gage had become reserved since he had

lost his mother at the age of three, and that he had a hard time trusting people, and one of his past girlfriends had said he had commitment phobia. Being unacquainted with psychospeak. Churchill didn't know what that meant.

"It means he won't talk about his feelings," I explained, "or allow himself to be vulnerable. And he's afraid of being tied down."

Churchill looked baffled. "That's not commitment phobia. That's being a man."

We discussed his other children too. Jack was an athlete and a ladies' man. Joe was an information junkie and an adventurer. The youngest, Haven, had insisted on going to college in New England, no matter how much Churchill begged her to consider Rice or UT. or even, God help him, A&M.

I told Churchill the latest news about Carrington, and sometimes about my love life. I had confided in him about Hardy and how he haunted me. Hardy was every loose-limbed cowboy in worn denim, every pair of blue eyes, every battered pickup, every hot cloudless day.

Maybe, Churchill had pointed out, I should stop trying so hard not to love Hardy, and accept that some part of me might always want him. "Some things," he said, "you just have to learn to live with."

"But you can't love someone new without getting over the last one."

"Why not11"

"Because then the new relationship is compromised."

Seeming amused, Churchill said that every relationship was compromised in one way or another, and you were better off not picking at the edges of it.

I disagreed. I felt I needed to let Hardy go completely. I just didn't know how. I hoped someday I might meet someone so compelling that I could take the risk of loving again. But I had serious doubts such a man existed.

And that man was certainly not Tom Hudson, whom I'd met while waiting for a parent-teacher conference in a hallway at Carrington's school. He was a divorced father of two. a big teddy bear of a man with brown hair and a neatly trimmed brown beard. I'd gone out with him for just over a year, enjoying the comfortable nature of our relationship.

Since Tom was the owner of a gourmet food shop, my refrigerator was constantly filled with delicacies. Carrington and I feasted on wedges of French and Belgian cheese, jars of tomato-pear chutney, Genovese pesto, and double Devon cream, coral-colored slabs of smoked Alaskan salmon, bottled cream of asparagus soup, jars of marinated peppers or Tunisian green olives.

I liked Tom a lot. I tried my best to fall in love with him. It was obvious he was a good father to his own children, and I felt sure he would be just as good to Carrington. There was so much that was right about Tom, so many reasons I should have loved him. It's one of the frustrations of dating that sometimes you can be with a nice person who is obviously worth loving, but there isn't enough heat between you to light a tea candle.

We made love on the weekends when his ex-wife had the kids and I could get a

babysitter for Carrington. Unfortunately the sex was lukewarm. Since I could never come while Tom was inside me—all I felt was the mild inner pressure you feel from the speculum at the gynecologist's office—he would start out by using his fingers to rub me into a cl**ax. It didn't always work, but sometimes I achieved a few gratifying spasms, and when I couldn't and began to feel irritated and chafed. I faked it. Then he would either gently push my head down until I took him into my mouth, or he would lever himself over me and we would do it missionary style. The routine never changed.

I bought a couple of sex books and tried to figure out how to improve things. Tom was amused by my abashed requests to try a couple of positions I had read about, and he told me it was all still just a matter of putting tab A into slot B. But if I wanted to do something new. he said, he was all for it.