Free Death Gets a Time-Out by Ayelet Waldman

We can get on the road as soon as I drop off the kids.”
    Suddenly, I remembered what I’d found out sitting on Polaris’s throne. I didn’t say anything, though. I wasn’t ready to believe it myself, let alone tell my partner. I could only imagine what a pregnancy was going to do to my productivity, such as it was. And when the baby came, well, I’d be completely useless to Al. It was just so frustrating. Here I was, beginning to get something of a life back for myself, and this happened.
    After Al left, I sat behind the wheel of my car for a few moments, debating whether I wanted to take the coward’s way out and tell my husband over the telephone, or if I should go home and make my announcement in person. I felt the saliva gather in the corners of my mouth. I opened the car door, leaned out, and threw up on the elegantly appointed streets of San Marino. Nice. First I had to go up to my elbow in Polaris’s toilet; now I was either going to have to find a hose somewhere, or leave a delightful little calling card on his curb. My cell phone rang as I was wiping the sweat from my forehead.
    “Don’t come home!” Peter said as soon as I answered the phone.
    “Why not?”
    “Because I found a babysitter, but her mother won’t let her stay out past eight. Meet me at Off Vine in half an hour.”
    “Who’s the sitter?”
    “Bethany, from next door.”
    “Peter! Bethany’s like twelve years old!”
    “No she’s not. She just turned fourteen. And you should see her—she’s grown up a
lot
in the past couple of months. She looks like Pamela Anderson.”
    Was
that
what he was doing while I was driving carpool? Scoping out the local teenage girls? “I missed the section in T. Berry Brazelton where he says that you should judge a babysitter by her breast size.”
    “Juliet, give me a break. She’s
fine.
Her mom is right next door. Just get your butt over to the restaurant. We haven’t had an evening without the kids in I don’t know
how
long. Let’s have some fun, dammit.”
    Oh well. A cute little restaurant in a renovated cottage in Hollywood was as good a place as any to tell my husband that our lives were in for a drastic upheaval. Again. I slammed my car door, determinedly not looking at the mess I’d made in front of Polaris’s house. It’s biodegradable, after all.
    On my way across town, I called Lilly. Her assistant patched me through to her cell phone.
    “Hi, Juliet!” she shouted over the sound of traffic. Her freeway was moving faster than mine.
    “Hi. Listen. I hate to ask you this over the telephone, but do you mind telling me how your mother died?” There was only the sound of cars on her end, the hiss of a cellular connection. “Lilly? Are you still on the line?”
    “Yes,” she said. “There was an accident.”
    We already knew that. Why, I wondered, had Lilly used precisely the same inexact words to describe her mother’s death as had her stepfather? “What
kind
of an accident?” Again the only sound in my ear was the hum of traffic. “Lilly?”
    “I’m still here. Juliet, I’m sorry. I can’t talk to you about this. It’s too . . . too traumatic.”
    “But—”
    “No. No, I can’t.” And she hung up.
    As I drove the rest of the way to the restaurant, I pondered Lilly and Polaris’s unwillingness to talk about Lilly’s mother’s death. Something had happened in Mexico, but what? And could it possibly have anything to do with Chloe Jones’s murder? But I had my own problems to worry about, and I pushed thoughts of Lilly’s mother out of my mind. I made it to Off Vine before Peter, and sat down at a table on the front porch under the heat lamps, nervously eating my weight in bread. I smeared inch-thick layers of butter on the crusty rolls—For the calcium! Really!—and looked around the empty restaurant. Apparently, Peter and I were the only two people in Los Angeles uncool enough to be dining out at 5:30 P.M. I glumly counted off how many years it would be