Goddess Read Free

pulled up and I saw Mackenzie’s blonde head make its way unhurriedly towards the door. She gave me a little smile as she hopped off the bottom step. “Can Skyler come over for a play date?”
    “Who’s Skyler?” I inquired, letting CC lead us home.
    “A friend,” she said, annoyed by my ignorance.
    “Is she in your class?”
    Mackenzie rolled her eyes. “She’s in ‘fifth grade,’” she said, adding unnecessary quotation marks using four fingers in the air.
    “A fifth grader wants to have a play date with you?”
    “We both have Elizabeth. She wants them to meet.”
    Elizabeth was Mackenzie’s American Girl doll. Thanks to it, her knowledge of life just before the Revolutionary War was extensive. I shook my head. “I’ve got a PTA meeting. Isabelle’s coming over to watch you.”
    As we turned up our front walk, past our yard badly in need of attention, she took my hand and looked up at me with knowing eyes. “Isabelle’s a basket case,” she said with adult-like certainty.
    After homework and what passed for dinner at our house (hamburger with pickles for Mackenzie, soy bacon sandwich with no accouterments for Anna, who was deep in a vegetarian stage, and a note for Lily suggesting she eat her leftover Panera sandwich after practice), I was in the Prius, making the ten-minute drive to Fremont Elementary School for the first Wednesday of the month PTA meeting.
    The meetings were held in the library, where we could sit and admire the new beige carpet and the mural created by students with help from a professional artist, all funded by the PTA. Titled simply Kids! , the mural featured a multi-ethnic panorama of children playing traditional games. (One evening, after too many post-PTA cocktails, Van and I made up an accompanying call-and-response, sung to the tune of “War.” (“Kids! What are they good for? Absolutely nothing! Say it again!”)
    I called the meeting to order, then sat back while Helen Bartow, the PTA secretary, went through the minutes. It was an unusually warm fall evening and I was wearing a simple brown dress—comfortable, if not terribly stylish. I crossed one leg over the other, letting a sandal hang languidly from my foot.
    The majority of the small gathering was the usual suspects who accounted for the bulk of Fremont’s volunteer hours. Most of the women here didn’t work, or had part-time jobs as realtors or yoga instructors. There were also a couple of faces that I recognized from the school hallway who hadn’t attended a meeting before. We always snagged a few new PTA members this way, though most of them subsequently disappeared back into the great, dark mass of parents who occasionally showed up for activities but never volunteered their time.
    I’d already lost track of what Helen was saying so I continued to scan the room. That’s when I noticed a young woman sitting in the far corner, away from the other parents, under a poster featuring a cat improbably holding a book with “Read!” written underneath in bold, capital letters, as if it was an edict from a totalitarian government.
    She was Asian. I guessed she was probably in her late twenties, which made her the youngest person in the room. That wasn’t surprising; a fair percentage of parents were graduate students or contract employees at the local university. Most of them didn’t live by the current middle class American norm of marrying late and having children at the last possible minute.
    I suddenly realized she was staring intently at me. In the library’s bright fluorescent lights, I could see her dark eyes never wavering. Her youthful features were delicate, her skin unmarked by age. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a neatly pressed, knee-length skirt and a blouse bleached to a blinding shade of white. She appeared completely harmless, yet she made me very uncomfortable.
    “Julia?” It was Helen. She was watching me, amused. Evidently, she had finished the minutes and was waiting