YOU. BREAK A LEG TONIGHT. LOVE KAREN AND ABBY. WITH SUGAR AND KISSES ON TOP.
Will smiled and waggled the Baron’s wings against the cerulean sky.
Karen stopped the Expedition beside her mailbox and shook her head at the bronze biplane mounted atop it. She had always thought the decoration juvenile. Reaching into the box, she withdrew a thick handful of envelopes and magazines and skimmed through them. There were brokerage statements, party invitations, copies of Architectural Digest, Mississippi Magazine, and The New England Journal of Medicine.
“Did I get any letters?” Abby asked from the back seat.
“You sure did.” Karen passed a powder blue envelope over the front seat. “I think that’s for Seth’s birthday party.”
Abby opened the invitation as Karen climbed the long incline of the drive. “How long till my birthday?”
“Three more months. Sorry, Charlie.”
“I don’t like being five and a half. I want to be six.”
“Don’t be in too much of a hurry. You’ll be thirty-six before you know it.”
When the house came into sight, Karen felt the ambivalence that always suffused her at the sight of it. Her first emotion was pride. She and Will had designed the house, and she had handled all the contracting work herself. Despite the dire warnings of friends, she had enjoyed this, but when the family finally moved in, she had felt more anticlimax than accomplishment. She could not escape the feeling that she’d constructed her own prison, a gilded cage like all the others on Crooked Mile Road, each inhabited by its own Mississippi version of Martha Stewart, the new millennium’s Stepford wives.
Karen pulled into the garage bay nearest the laundry room entrance. Abby unhooked her own safety straps but waited for her mother to open the door.
“Let’s get some iced tea,” Karen said, setting Abby on the concrete. “How do you feel?”
“Good.”
“Did you tee-tee a lot this afternoon?”
“No. I need to go now, though.”
“All right. We’ll check your sugar after. Then we’ll get the tea. We’re going to have some fun today, kid. Just us girls.”
Abby grinned, her green eyes sparkling. “Just us girls!”
Karen opened the door that led from the laundry room to the walk-through pantry and kitchen. Abby squeezed around her and went inside. Karen followed but stopped at the digital alarm panel on the laundry room wall and punched in the security code.
“All set,” she called, walking through the pantry to the sparkling white kitchen. “You want crackers with your tea?”
“I want Oreos!”
Karen squeezed Abby’s shoulder. “You know better than that.”
“It’s only a little while till my shot, Mom. Or you could give me that new kind of shot right now. Couldn’t you?”
Abby was too smart for her own good. Conventional forms of insulin had to be injected thirty minutes to an hour before meals, which made controlling juvenile diabetes difficult. If a child lost its appetite after the shot and refused to eat, as children often did, blood sugar could plummet to a dangerous level. To solve this problem, a new form of insulin called Humalog had been developed, which was absorbed by human cells almost instantly. It could be injected right before a meal, during the meal, or even just after. Physicians like Will were some of the first to get access to the drug, and its convenience had revolutionized the daily lives of families with diabetic children. However, Humalog also tempted children to break their dietary rules, since they knew that an “antidote” was near to hand.
“No Oreos, kiddo,” Karen said firmly.
“Okay,” Abby griped. “Iced tea with a lemon. I’m going to tee-tee.”
“I’ll have it waiting when you get back.”
Abby paused at the hall door. “Will you come with me?”
“You’re a big girl now. You know where the light is. I’m going to fix the tea while you’re gone.”
“Okay.”
As Abby trudged up the hallway, Karen looked down at The New England Journal of Medicine and felt the twinge of anger and regret she always did when confronted by tangible symbols of the profession she’d been forced to abandon. She was secretly glad that the flower show had given her an excuse to miss the medical convention, where she would be relegated to “wife” status by men who couldn’t have stayed within fifteen points of her in a chemistry class. Next month, Will’s drug research would be published in this very magazine, while she would be entangled in the next Junior League service project. She shoved the magazine across the counter with the rest of the mail and opened the stainless-steel refrigerator.
Every appliance in the kitchen was a Viking. The upscale appliances were built in Greenville, Mississippi, and since Will had done the epidurals on two pregnant wives from the “corporate family,” the Jennings house boasted a kitchen that could have been featured in the AD that had come in today’s mail—at a discounted price, of course. Karen had grown up with a noisy old Coldspot from Sears, and a clothesline to dry the wash. She could appreciate luxury, but she knew there was more to life than a showpiece home and flower shows. She took the tea pitcher from the Viking, set it on the counter, and began slicing a lemon.
Abby slowed her pace as she moved up the dark hallway. Passing her bedroom, she glanced through the half-open door. Her dolls were arranged against the headboard of her tester bed, just as she’d left them in the morning. Barbies, Beatrix Potter bunnies, and Beanie-Babies, all mixed together like a big family. The way she liked them.
Five more steps carried her to the hall bathroom, where she stretched on tiptoe to reach the light switch. She pulled up her jumper and used the commode, glad that she didn’t tee-tee very much. That meant her sugar was okay. After fixing her clothes, she climbed up on a stool before the basin and carefully washed and dried her hands. Then she started for the kitchen, leaving the bathroom light on in case she needed to come back.
As she passed her bedroom, she noticed a funny smell. Her dolls all looked happy, but something didn’t seem right. She started to walk in and check, but her mother’s voice echoed up the hall, saying the tea was ready.
When Abby turned away from the bedroom, something gray fluttered in front of her eyes. She instinctively swatted the air, as she would at a spider-web, but her hand hit something solid behind the gray. The gray thing was a towel, and there was a hand inside it. The hand clamped the towel over her nose, mouth, and one eye, and the strange smell she’d noticed earlier swept into her lungs with each gasp.
Terror closed her throat too tightly to scream. She tried to fight, but another arm went around her stomach and lifted her into the air, so that her kicking legs flailed uselessly between the wide-spaced walls of the hallway. The towel was cold against her face. For an instant Abby wondered if her daddy had come home early to play a joke on her. But he couldn’t have. He was in his plane. And he would never scare her on purpose. Not really. And she was scared. As scared as the time she’d gone into ketoacidosis, her thoughts flying out of her ears as soon as she could think
