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  “Then she’ll make lots of other friends on her own. Besides, these girls aren’t really close friends of mine, particularly not Haley. Neither is Barbara. It’s Doug I really like.”

  Cole gaped at her, thinking of Barbara’s extremely tall and very gangly brother. “Doug is your boyfriend?”

  She shot him an odd look and sat down on a bale of hay near the open doors. “No, he’s my friend, not my boyfriend.”

  “I thought you were a little short for him,” Cole joked, rather enjoying her company. “What’s your real boyfriend like?” he asked as he reached for a big red plastic glass he’d left on the windowsill earlier.

  “Actually, I don’t have a boyfriend. What about you, do you have a girlfriend?”

  Cole nodded and took a swallow of water.

  “What’s she like?” Diana asked.

  He propped his foot on the bale of hay near her hip and leaned his forearm on his knee, looking out through a side window that faced the house, and Diana had the feeling that he had drifted very far away. “Her name is Valerie Cooper.”

  There was a long pause.

  “And?” Diana prompted. “Is she blond or dark, short or tall, blue eyes or brown?”

  “She’s blond and tall.”

  “I wish I was,” she confessed with a wistful look.

  “You want to be blond?”

  “No,” she said, and Cole laughed. “I want to be tall.”

  “Unless you’re planning an amazing growth spurt, you’d better aim for blond,” Cole advised lightly. “In your case, blond would be a little easier to achieve.”

  “What color are her eyes?”

  “Blue.”

  Diana was fascinated. “Have you been going together very long?”

  Cole belatedly realized he was not only socializing with one of his employer’s guests, which was totally unacceptable, but that the guest was fourteen years old and the conversation was entirely too personal. “Since high school,” he said briefly as he straightened and turned to leave.

  “Does she live in Houston?” Diana pressed, sensing the conversation was over but rather hoping it wasn’t.

  “She goes to UCLA. We see each other whenever we can, usually during the holidays.”

  * * *

  The birthday party continued for hours, ending with a huge cake served on the lawn, where Barbara opened piles of gifts; then everyone went inside while the servants cleaned up outdoors. Diana had started to follow along when she noticed that half the chocolate birthday cake was still left, and she thought about those lonely hot dogs in Cole’s empty refrigerator. On a whim, she walked back to the table and cut a huge chunk off the corner because he’d get more frosting on such a piece; then she took it down to the stable.

  Cole’s reaction to the chocolate cake was almost comically ecstatic. “You are looking at the owner of the world’s biggest sweet tooth, Diana,” he said as he took the plate and fork.

  He was already eating the cake as he headed down the hall toward his room. Diana watched him for a moment, aware for the first time that people she actually knew, actually came in contact with, didn’t always have enough to eat. As she turned away, she decided to bring extra snacks whenever she went to the Haywards, but she sensed instinctively that she’d have to find a way to give them to him that wouldn’t make him think it was charity.

  She knew nothing about college men, but she knew something about pride, and everything about Cole made her think he had a great deal of it.

  Chapter 4

  LIFE IS GOOD,” COREY ANNOUNCED to Diana two months after Barbara Hayward’s birthday party. She’d lowered her voice so they wouldn’t be heard by their parents, who had already gone to sleep. The two girls were huddled beneath the quilt on Diana’s bed, their backs propped against a pile of feather pillows with lace-edged cases, eating jumbo pretzels and having a gossip session. “I can’t wait until you meet Grandma and Grandpa tomorrow. By the time they leave here next week, you’ll be crazy about them, you’ll see. You’ll think of them as if they had always been your very own grandparents.”

  The truth was that Corey desperately wanted that to be so. She wanted to give Diana something of value to repay her for everything she’d done.

  School had started last month, and by that time, Diana had already become Corey’s best friend and champion. She helped Corey choose her clothes, helped her fix her hair in different styles, guided her through the social maze at school, and in the end, even Diana’s friends—some of whom were snobs—accepted Corey into their inner circle.

  Corey spent the first month in a state of gratitude and mounting awe toward her new sister. Unlike Corey, Diana never got flustered, never worried about saying the wrong thing, never made a dumb joke, and never looked like a fool. Her thick, dark reddish-brown hair was always glossy; her complexion was flawless; her figure was perfect. When she climbed out of the swimming pool with her hair soaking wet and no makeup on, she looked like a television commercial. She never even got wrinkles in her clothes!

  By then, both girls were already thinking of their respective stepparents as real parents, and now Corey wanted to give Diana some “real grandparents.”

  “When you meet Gram and Gramps,” Corey told her, “you’ll see why everybody thinks they’re so neat. Gram can figure out a way to make almost anything, and it turns out pretty. She can knit and sew and crochet. She can walk into the woods and come out with ordinary twigs and leaves and stuff, and turn it into amazing things by using just a dab of glue or a little paint. She makes the presents she gives to people, and she makes her own wrapping paper; then she uses things like berries for decoration and everything looks awesome! Mom is just like her. Whenever there’s a church auction, everybody in town tries to buy whatever Mom and Gram donated.

  “A man who owns a fancy designer gallery in Dallas came to an auction in Long Valley and saw their work. He said they’re both really, really talented, and he wanted them to make some things he could sell in his showroom, but Gram said she wouldn’t enjoy making things that way. Mom was so tired when she got home from work that she couldn’t promise to do what he wanted. Oh, and Gram’s a fantastic cook, too. She’s really into ‘natural,’ homegrown stuff—natural food and homegrown veggies and fresh-picked flowers—only you never know whether she’s going to decorate with it and put it on the table or put it on your plate. Either way, whatever she makes is just great.”

  She paused to take a swallow from her can of Coke before she continued, “Gramps loves to garden, and he experiments with ways to grow everything bigger and better. Most of all, he likes to build things.”

  “What sort of things?” Diana asked, fascinated.

  “He can build just about anything that can be made out of wood. He can make little rocking chairs for babies, or garden sheds that look like cottages, or tiny furniture for a dollhouse. Gram usually does the painting for him because she’s the most artistic one. I can’t wait for you to see the dollhouse he built for me! It has fifteen rooms and real shingles and flower boxes on the windows!”

  “I’m really looking forward to meeting them. They sound terrific,” Diana replied, but Corey was distracted from that discussion by something that had bothered her since the first day she’d peeked into Diana’s bedroom, before Diana came home from Europe. “Diana,” Corey teased in a dire voice as she surveyed the relentless orderliness of the pretty room, “didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s unhealthy to keep a bedroom this neat?”

  Instead of making some sort of deserved rejoinder about Corey’s sloppy habits, Diana took a dainty bite of her pretzel and thoughtfully looked around the room. “It probably is,” she agreed. “It could be because I have an artistic eye that appreciates symmetry and order. Or it could be because I’m obsessive-compulsive—”

  Corey wrinkled her brow. “What’s ‘obsessive-compulsive’ mean?”

  “Nuts.” Diana paused in her explanation to rub her fingertips free of pretzel dust. “Crazy.”

  “You’re n
ot wacko!” Corey stated loyally and emphatically, taking a bite of her own pretzel. It snapped in two, half of it landing in Diana’s lap. Diana’s pretzels never broke when she bit into them.

  Diana picked it up and handed it back to her. “It could be that I have a neurotic need to keep everything tidy as a way of controlling my surroundings, which was brought about because my mom died when I was little and then my grandparents died a few years later.”

  “What does your mom dying have to do with why you file your shoes in alphabetical order?”

  “The theory is that I think if I keep everything in perfect order and as pretty as possible, then my life will be like that and nothing else bad will happen.”

  Corey was dumbstruck at the sheer absurdity of such a notion. “Where’d you hear that junk?”

  “From the therapist Dad took me to after my grandparents died. The shrink was supposed to help me ‘work through’ the grief of losing so many people so quickly.”

  “What a jerk! He’s supposed to help you, so he tells you all that stuff to scare you and make you think you’re crazy?”

  “No, he didn’t tell me that. He told Dad, and I eavesdropped.”

  “What did Dad tell him?”

  “He told the shrink that he needed a shrink. See, in River Oaks, whenever parents think their kids are getting into trouble, or might someday, they take them to a shrink. Everybody told my dad he should do that and so he did.”

  Corey digested that and then reverted to her earlier line of thinking. “When I kidded you about being so neat, I was just trying to say that I think it’s really amazing that we get along so great even though we’re so different. I mean, sometimes I feel like a hopeless charity case who you’ve taken under your wing, even though I’ll never be able to be like you. My grandma always says a leopard can’t change its spots, and you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

  “Charity case!” Diana sputtered. “Sow’s ear—but—but it isn’t like that at all! I’ve learned lots of new stuff from you, and you have things that I wish I had.”

  “Name one,” Corey said skeptically. “I know it’s not my grades or my breasts.”

  Diana giggled and rolled her eyes; then she said very seriously, “For starters, you have an adventurous side that I don’t have.”

  “One of my ‘adventures’ will probably land me in jail before I’m eighteen.”

  “It will not!” Diana said. “What I mean is, when you decide to do something—like take pictures from the top of that scaffolding on that new high-rise—you ignore the danger and just do it!”

  “You went up there with me.”

  “But I didn’t want to. I was so scared my legs were shaking.”

  “But you did it anyway.”

  “That’s what I mean. I never would have done that before. I wish I could be more like you.”

  Corey considered that for a long moment; then her eyes began to sparkle with mischief. “Well, if you want to be more like me, we should start with this bedroom.” She reached behind her head before Diana knew what she was up to.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have you ever had a pillow fight?”

  “No, wh—” The rest of her question was cut off by a fat pillow stuffed with goose down that landed on her head. Corey swiveled to the foot of the bed and ducked, expecting retribution, but Diana sat very quietly, munching on her pretzel, the pillow lying on her knees. “I can’t believe you did that,” she said, studying Corey with fascination.

  Caught off-guard by her tranquil tone, Corey said, “Why not?”

  “Because it makes me have to—retaliate!”

  Diana lunged so swiftly, and her aim was so good, that Corey didn’t have time to duck. Laughing, she dived for another one of the pillows, and so did Diana. Five minutes later, when their concerned parents threw open the bedroom door, they had to peer through a blizzard of drifting feathers to locate the two teenage girls, who were lying on their backs in the middle of the bedroom, shrieking with laughter.

  “What in the world is going on in here?” Mr. Foster said, sounding more alarmed than annoyed.

  “Pillow fight,” Diana provided breathlessly. A feather was stuck to her lips, and she started to remove it with her thumb and forefinger.

  “No, just spit it out,” Corey laughingly instructed her, and then demonstrated, forcing the feathers away from her lips with her breath and the tip of her tongue.

  Diana followed suit, then dissolved into giggles at the expression on her father’s face. While feathers floated around his head and settled onto his shoulders, he stood stock-still in his robe and pajamas, gaping at them beside Diana’s new mom, who was trying to look stern and hide her laughter at the same time. “We’ll clean this mess up before we go to bed,” Diana promised.

  “No we won’t,” Corey stated implacably. “First you have to sleep in this mess. If you can do that, then there’s a slim chance that with more practice you could become a marvelous slob like me!”

  Still lying on the floor, Diana turned her head toward Corey and choked back another giggle. “Oh, do you really think so?”

  “There’s a chance,” Corey declared solemnly. “If you truly, truly work at it.”

  Robert Foster looked taken aback at the plan, but his wife put her hand on his sleeve and drew him out of the room, closing the door behind them. In the hallway, he looked at his new wife with a baffled expression. “The girls made that mess, don’t you think they should clean it up tonight?”

  “Tomorrow is soon enough,” Mary Foster said.

  “Those pillows are expensive. Diana should have thought of that ahead of time. It’s reckless and irresponsible to have destroyed them, honey.”

  “Bob,” she said softly, tucking her arm in his and marching him down the hall and into their bedroom suite. “Diana is the most responsible girl I’ve ever met.”

  “I’ve taught her to be that way. It’s important for an adult to be conscious of the consequences of their actions and to act accordingly.”

  “Darling,” she whispered. “She isn’t an adult.”

  He considered that while a mischievous grin lifted the corners of his mouth. “You’re right about that, but do you really think it’s important that she also learn how to spit?”

  “It’s imperative,” his wife said with a laugh.

  Leaning down, he kissed the smile off her face. “I love you,” he whispered.

  She kissed him back. “I love Diana,” she answered.

  “I know, and that makes me love you even more.” He got into bed and pulled her on top of him, his hands shifting over her silk negligee. “You know I love Corey, don’t you?”

  She nodded, her right hand reaching stealthily for the feather pillow on the headboard.

  “You’ve changed our lives,” he continued.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, lifting off his chest into a sitting position beside his hip. “Now let me change your attitude.”

  “About what?”

  “Pillow fights,” she said, laughing as she smacked him with her pillow.

  Down the hall, in Diana’s room, the sisters heard a loud thud. Both girls jumped to their feet in alarm and ran down the hall. “Mom, Dad—” Diana called, knocking on the door. “Is everything okay? We heard a noise!”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Mary Foster called, “but I could use a little help in here.”

  Diana and Corey exchanged puzzled looks; then Diana turned the knob and opened the door. They stopped dead. Openmouthed, they gaped at their parents, then at each other.

  And they burst into shrieks of laughter.

  On the floor, amid another blizzard of feathers, their father had pinned their mother beneath him and was holding her forearms against the carpet. “Say uncle,” he ordered.

  His wife laughed harder.

  “Say uncle, or I won’t let you up.”

  In response to that arrogant masculine command, Mary Foster looked at her daughters, struggled for breath, and
managed to say between laughs, “I think women have to . . . to stick together . . . at times like . . . this.”

  The girls stuck together. The score that night was 12 to 2; twelve feather pillows that met their demise against two foam-rubber pillows that survived.

  Chapter 5

  BRIMMING WITH GOOD NEWS, DIANA snatched her schoolbooks from the leather seat of the new BMW her father had given her last month for her sixteenth birthday and raced up the steps of the stately Georgian mansion that had been her first and only home. In the two years since her stepmother, and then her stepgrandparents, had come to live with them in River Oaks, the house and grounds had changed in atmosphere and appearance. Laughter and conversation had filled the empty silences; wonderful smells emanated from the kitchen; flowers bloomed in rampant splendor in the gardens and splashed their colors in beautiful arrangements all over the house.

  Everyone was happy with the new look, the new atmosphere, and the new family arrangements—everyone except Glenna, the housekeeper who’d helped raise Diana after her mother died. It was Glenna who was in the foyer when Diana ran into the house. “Glenna, is Corey home?”

  “I think she’s out in back with everyone else, talking about tomorrow night’s party.” Glenna finished dusting a walnut console table and straightened, giving it a close look. “When your mama was alive, she called in caterers and florists when she wanted to give a party. She used to let them do all the work,” she added pointedly. “That’s the way most rich folks entertain each other, but not us.”

  “Nope, not us,” Diana said with a quick smile. “Now we’re trendsetters.” She headed down the hall, toward the back of the house, with Glenna walking beside her, irritably swiping her dustcloth at nonexistent specks of dust on tables and chairs as they passed.

  “Used to be, when we gave a party,” Glenna continued doggedly, “that everything only had to look pretty and taste good. But now, that’s not good enough. Now everything has to be fresh and everything has to be natural and everything has to be homegrown and homemade. Homegrown and homemade is for country folks. I realize your grandparents are country folks, and they don’t understand that . . .”