Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew

that would coat the stove and her hands and the teakettle on the rear burner. With that picture in the back of her mind, she would carefully rewrap the cut-up meat and put it in the freezer, and she would drift out of the kitchen indecisively to begin some other project. In the evening she would open some tuna and canned peaches and make do one way or another, and the children preferred this laxity. Meanwhile, as the children slammed in and out of the back door during the day, they would pass the sink and take up a few of the delicately carved carrots and eat them out of hand. When Dinah cleared away the dishes and cleaned up after dinner, she had only the little pile of graying potatoes to dispose of.
    Now, with a party to cook for, Dinah took stock of all the little cans and bottles of spices lined up so carefully by Mrs. Horton, who had left a note encouraging Dinah to use them up. Dinah had cubed the sirloin for the shish kebab, and with rubber gloves over her hands she rubbed each separate piece with a cut clove of garlic and then with powdered ginger, being sure that the deep golden powder adhered to every surface. She stirred the cubes into a marinade of sour cream, rosemary, and bay, and left the bowl in a shady place on the counter.
    Pam kept the children for most of the day, and Dinah was lying on her bed, idly watching television and resting when she saw Pam’s car pull up in front of the house about four o’clock to drop them off. When she looked out to see that the children had been delivered home, she was surprised to find that she had become inordinately interested in the show she was watching. She didn’t want to get up and leave it, but she did, because she needed to feed the children their dinner early. Her guests would arrive about six o’clock; since they would eat outside tonight, she must cook while the light held.
    She gave the children a dinner of hot dogs and potato chips and then suggested that they ride their bikes down to the school playground, where there were swings and a jungle gym. She knew they were tired, and she had noticed that Toby was limping again slightly when he had come up the sidewalk from Pam’s car, although he seemed to be fine now. Dinah wanted them out of the house, because she knew she was too preoccupied to be kind to them if they were hanging about to hinder her dressing or final preparations for dinner.
    It was Sarah who objected. “I only have a Big Wheels, Mama! I can’t go as fast.”
    Suddenly Dinah was feeling very tense about the evening ahead, the dinner she would serve, the dress she would wear. She felt uncomfortable at the idea of giving a party without Martin to back her up in the face of any emergency, irrationally uncomfortable, since Pam and Lawrence and Buddy and her mother—her only guests—knew her at her most casual. But she bent down to Sarah and encircled her with one arm.
    “Sweetie, David will watch you. He’ll just walk his bike down, and you won’t have to cross a street, you know. It isn’t very far.” She looked at David, but he didn’t make any sign of disagreement, and she recognized that this was one of those rare moments when she had stepped into the scope of the children’s empathy. They had caught on to her nervousness, and it crossed her mind fleetingly how foolish it was to require these three children, whom she cared about so desperately, to accommodate her in order that she might impress other people, whom she could only regard with mixed affection and wariness. But the children went along, Toby and David with their bikes, and Sarah clattering horribly over the pavement with her wide-wheeled plastic tricycle.
    Her guests arrived all at once; they had walked down together through the village from the direction of her mother’s house. Dinah saw them coming leisurely along the sidewalk. Lawrence had dropped back to walk alongside her mother, and Pam and Buddy were walking more briskly, several paces ahead of them. She sat in