"Mommy, Mommy!" my five-year-old daughter Amanda yelled, slamming her way out of her father's car. "Maya called Daddy a jerk-off!"

She hurtled up the front walk toward where I was crouched under the hedges, trying to clear the dead leaves away from the hyacinths and tulips, and leaped on top of me, knocking me backward onto the wet lawn. I shut my eyes and pulled her close, burying my face in her mango-and-sweat-scented hair.

"That's not a nice word, sweetie," I said, feeling her heat above me, while below the damp from the grass was already seeping through my clothes.

"I know," said Amanda, pulling back and looking at me gravely. "That's what Daddy told Maya. And then she said, okay, she was sorry, he wasn't a jerk-off, he was a dickhead."

I bit back a laugh.

"Why did she call him that?" I said, working to keep my face as serious as hers. "Did they have a fight?"

Amanda only shrugged. "Can I go play Barbies?"

"Sure."

She scrambled off me and ran up the stairs into the house. I had barely made it to my feet, and was still trying to get a look at what was going on inside the car, when the passenger door shot open. Now it was Maya tearing up the walk.

"Mom," she said, as she whizzed past me, "tell Frank to leave me alone."

Frank was already out of the car, also hurrying my way. This was a real shocker: Usually he was peeling out within nanoseconds, heading back to New York, not even cutting his engine in his eagerness to flee. It had been weeks since I'd gotten so much as a glimpse of him, and now I tried to keep from gawking, so transformed was he with his newly lean body and his bleached blond spiky hair, his suede jacket and -- my God, could it really be? -- teeny tiny hoop earring dangling what looked like an ankh.

"What's going on?" I asked him.

I could feel Maya breathing behind me, sucking her rage in and out through her teeth.

"Nothing," said Frank, trying to look around me to where she hid. "She's just being fifteen."

"If you don't fucking tell her," Maya said, "I will."

"See how she talks now?" Frank said. "This is okay with you?"

Dickhead, I thought. "Tell me what?"

Frank took a deep breath. "I'm leaving the firm, Kennedy. I'm becoming a yoga instructor."

Frank, who couldn't make it through a cocktail-party conversation without mentioning he'd gone to Harvard Law. Frank, who used his legal stationery to write to the local newspaper to complain about faulty garbage collection. Chucking it all for the downward dog.

Now I really did burst out laughing.

He drew himself up to his full height, which wasn't all that tall. "I object to your ridicule."

"You're not a lawyer anymore, Frank," I said, still chuckling. "Remember?"

"This is about healing," Frank said. "This is about giving back to society."

"This is about you covering your ass," Maya said.

Frank opened his mouth, then shut it again. "I don't have to put up with this," he said, lifting his hands in surrender. "I'm out of here."

He half-turned and had started to move back down the path when Maya spoke again.

"The thing he didn't want me to tell you, Mom, is that we met her. We met Sunny."

Frank froze. Maya held her breath, waiting for my reaction. And I stood rooted in my spot, trying to take it in. I knew about Sunny, of course, the high school surfer girlfriend Frank had run into last fall at the Oyster Bar. Had gotten reacquainted with, had slept with, had left me for. I knew all about her, but my daughters were not supposed to. Not yet.

"What do you mean, you met her?"

"She came to the apartment, Mom. Duh! She came for dinner Saturday night and she was still there when we woke up this morning."

Frank broke in. "Maya, I warned you not to go running to your mother with all this misinformation." He took a step back toward me. "Kennedy, this is not what it seems."

"She was wearing a diamond ring, Mom," Maya said from behind me. "Way bigger than yours."

Without thinking, I reached out and pushed Frank. Hard. Leaving a muddy handprint on his pristine suede. I should turn him in to the maharishi for wearing dead cow.

"You promised me, Frank." I advanced on him. "You agreed we were going to give them time to adjust to the separation before we introduced other people into their lives."

"It's been four months, Kennedy," he said, backing away.

"Four months is nothing. They're nowhere near ready."

He stopped. "I think you're the one who's not ready."

He said this so quietly that it didn't even sound at first like it had come from him. It was more like a voice in the air, one of those voices that crazy people heard. Behind me, the screen door slammed; Maya had retreated into the house, leaving the two of us alone. I blinked.

"What do you think I'm not ready for?" I asked him.

"To leave the past behind. To start a new life."

That uncharacteristically straightforward no-bullshit statement coming from Frank hit me like a hardball between the eyes. Reeling, my gaze swerved and I looked blindly beyond him, desperate for something, anything else to focus on. What I found was Mrs. Husk's cherry tree across the street, which seemed overnight to have come into bloom. For months I'd seen only a tangle of black branches, and now suddenly there was this cloud of pink. Gaping at that pinkness, I realized that Frank was right. I had not, until that moment, accepted that he was gone and that my life was once again my own. And right then, ready or not, I knew that my future had already arrived, and that I was sailing into it by myself.

Copyright © 2003 by Pamela Redmond Satran