Phoebe has to return to the party. She’s some kind of co-hostess for her mateless friend. But there’s a reason she usually doesn’t give or go to parties, and it’s keeping her here for a few more minutes. She touches the silk lilies. She chuckles quietly. Nearby is a Unitarian church, with similar silk lilies placed in the glass-fronted display that lists service times and ministers’ names. The silk lilies there are just as silly as those here; sealed in an airless shelf, the viewer knows they can’t be alive. What makes her chuckle is the name of the place – 1st Unitarian Church of Kensington – which switched to using the number instead of the word “First” in its name as soon as the local teenagers started calling it by its natural acronym.

Amused, she leaves the bathroom. Happily the door is where she expects, because it’s so well-papered it would otherwise be hard to find. She emerges into a window-lit butler’s pantry, moves to the right into the square kitchen, and collides with Natalie backing away from the refrigerator.

“Ooooh,” Natalie flutters as she turns around. Then she smiles and sets trays of canapes on the tiled counter. “Have you seen my daughter?”

“Not since your argument.” Phoebe last glimpsed Emily when the 11-year-old stalked away from her mother. Natalie insisted on lipstick removal and a wardrobe change, and Emily was having none of it. She stomped off in her mini-skirt and big sweatshirt, her tangled curls and baggy socks bouncing with each emphatic step.

“God, I need a smoke; that child wears me down,” Nat comments as she smoothes her print skirt over her hips. She shakes her streaked blonde hair and makes her earrings twinkle. They’re zircon studs, nearly half an inch in diameter, and they’re like holes in Natalie’s lobes. “I just wanted her to look nice for Mitch and Tim. Did I tell you Mitch has him for the weekend?”

Phoebe shakes her head as she helps carry hors d’oeuvres to the tables. “What is this food I’m serving?” she asks by way of non-sequitur.

“Tim is with Mitch through Monday. He’s 13, and from what I hear he’s cool, so I’m hoping he will interest Emily.” She straightens her skirt again. It isn’t nearly as short as Emily’s, but it’s tight and well above Nat’s knees. “And the food is the latest in vegetarian appetizers. ‘Faux’ meat, formed from tofu. Unbelievable, huh?”

“So this isn’t bacon around the water chestnuts? And it isn’t chicken breasts on the wooden skewers? That’s eerie. It calls to mind an old movie. Don’t look now,” Phoebe says as she cranes her chin toward the front door, “but I believe Emily is opening the door to the dark-haired man himself.”

“Mitch doesn’t color his hair,” Natalie says. Then she grins and gives Phoebe her sly look. “The hair on his head exactly matches the hair elsewhere, if you know what I mean.”

Phoebe makes a gagging motion. “Of course I know what you mean. And I know plenty of men with different colored body hair in different places. Beard and head, for instance. No, your argument is completely flat. If anything, it suggests Mitch brings in a pubic hair sample for his colorist to match. He’s 54 and his hair looks colored. It’s a safe bet that it is colored.”

“You’re impossible. But look at Tim and Emily. They appear to be hitting it off.”

The two young people are speaking to each other. They stand apart from the rest of the gathering and may even be enjoying their conversation. Phoebe thinks they look cute: he all in black except for a white shirt, his brown hair pulled into a ponytail, she in her red lipstick and dark grunge, both of them about five feet tall. As Phoebe agrees with Natalie about them, the youngsters walk outside into the yard.