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Meanwhile, to Karen’s relief, Ruby seemed to be further settling into Mather. And Karen had received promising signs from several family foundations that, with any luck, might be persuaded to make up at least part of the funds that could no longer be expected from Jesse James. In her few spare hours, and despite the nagging sensation that her expertise was better utilized elsewhere, Karen helped plan the Mather PTA Fund in the Sun picnic at a local park. In the plus column, her volunteer efforts at the school made her feel less paranoid. In the minus one, she was filled with a particular kind of self-loathing.

It was around the same time that Karen’s dreams of her dead mother returned on a near-nightly basis. They were always variations on the same melody, and they were simultaneously welcome and unwelcome. Mom! What are you doing here? Karen would ask as Ruth Kipple appeared at the top of the stairs in her favorite light blue polyester nightgown and said, What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for you for hours. Her mother was always exaggerating, Karen would think. But she was waiting—night after night after night—until Karen woke up, and Ruth Kipple wouldn’t be there after all, causing Karen to feel both exasperated and bereft. It was just like her mother to keep guilting her, even from the grave, Karen thought. Yet it was clearly Karen who had summoned her. So, really, what right did she have to complain—about any of it? Karen was one of the lucky ones on this earth.

If only it felt that way.



And then Charlotte blew off Ruby. The only reason Karen knew about it was that, finding her daughter unexpectedly glum at pickup on Friday, she proposed that Ruby invite over one of her new friends for a playdate. It seemed to Karen that enough time had passed that it was safe to reveal where they actually lived. Following Allison’s advice, Karen could always say they’d just moved. By city decree, a child who changed addresses didn’t need to change schools as well.

“I don’t have any friends,” Ruby told her.

“What?” said Karen, a twinge in her stomach. “But what about Charlotte?”

“She only talks to Finley now.”

“Who’s Finley?”

“A girl in my class.”

“But why can’t she be friends with you and Finley?”

“You don’t understand.” Ruby shook her head.

“I don’t understand what?” said Karen.

“Everyone has a best friend but me.”

“Well, I didn’t have a best friend when I was in third grade.”

“You grew up in the olden days.”

“Are you sure you’re not just being oversensitive?”

“I’m not being oversensible,” insisted Ruby, mispronouncing the word. Karen decided to let it go. “When I tried to sit down next to Charlotte in the cafeteria, she said, ‘This seat is taken.’ So I sat across the table. And then Finley sat down next to her, and they didn’t talk to me once the whole lunch period.”

Was it something about her daughter that caused other girls to push her away? Karen found herself wondering. Was she too clingy? Too bossy? Or were girls her age just mean? Karen had read in one of her parenting books that elementary-school-age children and especially girls were constantly changing friends. It was part of the developmental process and had something to do with identity formation and was therefore not a cause for concern. But then, why wasn’t Ruby sometimes doing the leaving instead of always being left? In any case, Charlotte Bordwell, like Mia, was too young for Karen to be angry at and, at the same time, too old to be considered an appendage of her mother. So Karen couldn’t very well hold Susan responsible. Moreover, in Karen’s experience, children came out of the womb with their personalities more or less already formed.

And yet…she found she was angry. Angry and hurt. It was intolerable to Karen that someone should have made her daughter feel so excluded and so unloved. It made Karen feel those things too. “Well, if Charlotte’s going to be rude, why don’t you sit with someone else?” she said.

“Like who?” said Ruby.

“What about Maeve?”

“I never see her. And when I do, she doesn’t talk to me anyway.”

“Well, then you’ll make new friends,” insisted Karen.

But would she? That was the question that nagged at Karen for the rest of the afternoon and evening.



The next morning, Karen turned on her phone and discovered a group e-mail from Principal Chambers. The administrative office of Betts must not have realized that Ruby had left, Karen thought. Dear Betts Families, it began. The e-mail concerned an emergency meeting that was being held in the school auditorium that night. It seemed that the city’s board of education had not only approved Winners Circle’s co-location inside the Betts building but had granted the WC network permission to begin immediate renovations on their portion of the school building, even though the charter was not planning to move in until the fall. This meant that Betts students would likely be spending their last two months of the school year breathing in construction dust and shouting to be heard over jackhammers. According to Principal Chambers’s e-mail, the CEO of Winners Circle was a close personal friend of the mayor, and this wasn’t the first time that the mayor had gone out of his way to accommodate her. To add insult to injury, due to budget cuts, Betts had no choice but to let its librarian go at the end of June. Since the library space would therefore be off-limits to Betts students, the city was allowing Winners Circle to take it over as their new robotics room.