Custody by Nancy Thayer Page B

been at your grandfather’s farm,you must shower and shampoo your hair before you do anything else. Certainly before you eat. And use pHisoHex.”
    Tessa stood staring down at the floor.
    “Well?” Anne demanded.
    “Yes, Mom,” Tessa said.
    “That’s better.” Anne left them, hurrying over the plush pale ecru wall-to-wall carpet that sank like butter beneath her heels down the hall into the rose-and-cream room she claimed for her own. Here her antique white-and-gold desk awaited her, everything on it belonging there, everything dusted and ordered.
    Sinking into her leather chair, she folded her hands and took a deep breath. She touched, in ritual order, her white telephone, the small caller ID box, the thick Rolodex, and delicately moved her daily calendar a fraction of an inch, so that it was exactly in the center of her desk. She touched her tape dispenser, her stapler, the malachite box where she kept her stamps. She touched the pastel Lucite in and out boxes. Last, she set both hands on the silver-and-amethyst tray where her pens lay.
    Her blotter was centered perfectly on her desk. Everything gleamed. She thought how much she loved marble and other veined stones whose fissures and stains were incorporated to make an even more beautiful whole, the way a streak first caused by a virus gave new breeds of tulips stripes and speckles and flaws that were considered assets.
    She drew a yellow legal pad toward her and took up a pen. Her fingernails were glossy with a pale pink polish, nothing chipped. She would write a letter to her friend Natalie Henderson, who was in charge of public relations at the local PBS station.
    Taking a deep breath, Anne began to work. Here, in the familiar order of her study, she could begin to change the world.

    Tessa looked at her father across the pine table. “So you aren’t going to talk to her today? About me living with you?”
    “Sweetie …”
    “Dad, you promised . And you said you’d make her let me have a computer!” She blinked back angry tears. “Everyone breaks their promises.”
    Her father gave her a level look. “Would you like me to go talk with her right now?”
    Exasperated, Tessa bonked her head right down on the tabletop and tugged at her hair. She knew the worst thing to do was to interrupt her mother when she was working in her study. If her dad went to her mother’s study now there’d be a fight, and Tessa hated it when they fought.
    She gave the table leg a good solid kick. “Okay, fine .”
    “Tessa, remember what I told you on the way to the farm?”
    “What.”
    “Your mother and you and I are all going to speak with a man, a wise man, a psychiatrist, who knows all about families like ours, families involved in a divorce. He’s going to help us decide what’s best for you. The judge we saw told us we have to see this man, because it’s the best thing for you. After that, the judge will decide where you will live. Until then, it’s best for you to stay here.”
    “But that’s crazy. Come on, Dad—” Tessa squirmed. “Can’t you just make Mom let me live with you? I don’t want to talk to strangers about it. Mom would go crazy if she thought I’d told strangers—” She kicked the table leg again, frustrated with the convolutions of her own thinking. What she wanted was to be magically transported out of her mother’s house without her mother knowing that that was what Tessa wanted, so that it wouldn’t be Tessa who hurt her mother’s feelings.
    Did this make her a monster , that she wanted to leave her mother? Or a coward , that she couldn’t tell her? Something was wrong with Tessa, she knew. Sometimes she felt so angry and sad she thought she’d explode right out of her skin.
    “Oh, Tessa, I know this all seems complicated and difficult right now. But it will get straightened out soon. It really will.” He stood up. His hair fell over his forehead and was shaggy around his ears. His clothes were rumpled and a thread dangled