Shakespeares Counselor Page 0,1

intermittently every day and sitting limply in a recliner the rest of the time. I'd kept all of the children for a day and a half, only once, when Jay had had a car wreck out of town.

Probably these children were not demonic. Possibly, they were quite typical. But collectively, they were hell.

And hard on a house, too.

Carol needed me to come at least twice a week, for maybe six hours at a stretch. She could afford four hours a week, just barely. I gave Carol Althaus the best value for her money she would find anywhere.

During the school year, it was nearly possible for Carol to cope. Heather and Dawn were still at home, only five and three years old, but the boys (Cody and Tyler) were in school. Summers were another kettle of fish.

It was late June, so the kids had all been home for about three weeks. Carol had enrolled them in four Bible schools. The First Baptists and the Central Methodists had already completed their summer programs, and the house was even more littered with paper fish and bread glued to paper plates, sheep made from cotton balls and Popsicle sticks, and lopsided drawings of fishermen pulling in nets filled with people. Shakespeare Combined Church (a fundamentalist coalition) and the joint Episcopalian/Catholic Bible schools were yet to come.

I entered with my own key to find Carol standing in the middle of the kitchen, trying to get the snarls out of Dawn's long curls. The little girl was wailing. She had on a nightgown with Winnie the Pooh on the front. She was wearing toy plastic high heels and she'd gotten into her mother's makeup.

I surveyed the kitchen and began to gather dishes. When I reentered the kitchen a minute later, laden with dirty glasses and two plates that had been on the floor in the den, Carol was still standing in the middle of the floor, a quizzical expression on her face.

"Good morning, Lily," she said, in a pointed way.

"Hello, Carol."

"Is something wrong?"

"No." Why tell Carol? Would she be reassured about my well-being if I told her I'd tried to kill Jack the night before?

"You could say hello when you come in," Carol said, that little smile still playing across her face. Dawn looked up at me with as much fascination as if I'd been a cobra. Her hair was still a mess. I could solve that with a pair of scissors and a brush in about five minutes, and I found the idea very tempting.

"I'm sorry, I was thinking of other things," I told Carol politely. "Was there anything special you needed done today?"

Carol shook her head, that faint smile still on her face. "Just the usual magic," she said wryly, and bent to Dawn's head again. As she worked the brush through the little girl's thick hair, the oldest boy dashed into the kitchen in his swimming trunks.

"Mom, can I go swimming?" Carol's fair complexion and brown hair had been passed on to both the girls, but the boys favored, I supposed, their own mother: they were both freckle-faced and redheaded.

"Where?" Carol asked, using a yellow elastic band to pull Dawn's hair up into a ponytail.

"Tommy Sutton's. I was invited," Cody assured her. "I can walk there by myself, remember?" Cody was ten and Carol had given him a range of streets he could take by himself.

"Okay. Be back in two hours."

Tyler erupted into the kitchen roaring with rage. "That's not fair! I want to go swimming!"

"Weren't invited," Cody sneered. "I was."

"I know Tommy's brother! I could go!"

As Carol laid down the law I loaded the dishwasher and cleaned the kitchen counters. Tyler retreated to his room with a lot of door slamming and fuming. Dawn trotted off to play with her Duplos, and Carol left the room in such a hurry I wondered if she was ill. Heather appeared at my elbow to watch my every move.

I am not much of a kid person. I don't like, or dislike, all children. I take it on an individual basis, as I do with adults. I very nearly liked Heather Althaus. She would be old enough for kindergarten in the fall, she had short, easy-to-deal-with hair since a drastic self-barbering job that had driven Carol to tears, and she tried to take care of herself. Heather eyed me solemnly, said "Hey, Miss Lily," and extricated a frozen waffle from the side-by-side. After popping it in the toaster, Heather got her own plate, fork, and knife