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divorce, I sent signals I didn't mean: that I was too depleted to fully love my daughters; that they had become a burden to single-mother me. That it was their responsibility to keep me upright and soothed. And, after such tension had eroded us for too long, maybe even that running away was the only thing left to do.
    Amanda and Stephanie remembered their parents' marriage better than the younger girls did, and they longed for the family of six—for their father—years after the two of us were finished with each other. Stephanie wrapped Tom's picture in the soft clothes of her underwear drawer. Amanda wore one of his old college T-shirts to bed. I loathed my ex-husband for promising to call the girls and then forgetting; I hated him for using the calls he did make to complain that I'd robbed him of his children, even though he'd made no move to stop me from going and in fact had agreed that Oregon was a good place for them to grow up. I condemned him for coaxing our girls to side with him, while I somehow ignored the fact that I was doing the same: to speak about him in our house brought a stern look from me; their mentioning his name caused me to grow stiff and silent. I waged my own campaign to win the girls' loyalty—mostly I pushed them to see the five of us as family and him as interloper. When he remarried and had another child and withdrew further from his first four daughters, well, that fit my projections nicely. And, lost in my own transformation to single woman, I missed my children's heartache over being shoved to the periphery, hardly noticed by their dad.

    In the last months of the marriage, in Tucson, I kept the girls busy enough that they didn't notice (I told myself) the first dust and crumble of the coming dissolution. Starting with Amanda. One Saturday that spring, she, ten years old then, and I stood in a long, hot line in a parking lot outside a downtown performance hall; black asphalt stuck to the bottoms of my sandals and the day's heat frying a hole in the top of my head. I'd read in the paper a few days earlier that a traveling acting company from New York was coming to town to put on eight days of performances of
Annie,
and they
were looking for local girls to play the orphans. I'd talked Amanda into trying out, since she'd always wanted to be in a play; it had seemed like a great idea until we were sixty-seventh in line for the audition and I realized I had three hungry kids at home with a father who often forgot about lunch and about checking regularly on the whereabouts of the younger ones. Besides, every dressed-up-pretty and sweetly curled child in Tucson, most of whom held professional glossy photos and blue folders of sheet music, twittered around us. I'd dragged my daughter into something that could end up embarrassing her—that was my worry. I should have figured out that Amanda herself was ambivalent about getting into the play, and that part of her buoyant pleasure at the moment was simply this chance to spend time alone with me without a sister or two along. A whole afternoon. (I'd often promise myself that I'd make time for each daughter alone—a lunch, a walk, a shopping trip—but then I'd quickly revert into my old pattern of taking the whole set of them, or at least half, to whatever function we had to attend or on some errand or grocery trip.) I'd tucked away in my purse the two snapshots of Amanda that we'd taken in the backyard, and I reached over now and then to clean dirt off the bottom of her chin with my shirt. That morning, before we'd left, she and Stephanie had crawled around in our big cactus garden, as they often did, searching for scorpions and spiders. Amanda hadn't swept the mud off her knees or pulled all the twigs from her hair. But no matter. I took another swig of water and passed the bottle on to her, draping my arm across her bony shoulders. We'd get inside, Amanda would sing her audition song, the people in charge would thank her for