"No!" Kaycee said decisively, which was not surprising, as that had become one of her very favorite words as soon as she hit the Terrible Twos. Sometimes it seemed that would never change.

"Whattaya mean, no?" I answered, feeling somewhat exasperated. Just because I was familiar with her ways didn’t mean I liked them, especially when she wanted one thing and I wanted another. "You always enjoy going with Gramma P."

Kaycee planted herself firmly on her bed amidst a crew of stuffed animals. "I’m not ready to make nice," she elaborated, and I began to regret ever introducing her to the musical group she referred to as The Dicky Chicks, or occasionally The Chickie Dicks. She wasn’t sure, she just knew she loved listening to them and singing along. And picking up annoying phrases.

"Katharine, she’s having a chick attack again!" I yelled. "You got any suggestions?"

Ask me why we decided to spend the weekend at the new hotel that had just opened up close to Westfield Fashion Center. Once we’d rendered our home child-free, it would have been just as easy to stay there, but for reasons I couldn’t quite remember, we’d decided we needed a change of scenery, if only for a couple of days. A change, as in dinner and dancing in the hotel ballroom, access to someone else’s pool, and no flying anywhere, as it was practically up the street. Katharine had just wrapped a movie but it would be quite a while before she’d be needed for major publicity, so we were going to drop everything and indulge in two days of nothing but pair bonding. She’d just spent a week at home doing nothing but reconnecting with the kids, so we both found the prospect delightful.

The movie had filmed locally and hadn’t really required a long time to complete, but as the star, Katharine had been in practically every scene and the hours had been ferocious, but she’d had a great time. Fans of an 80’s TV mystery series called The Nightengale had been delighted to find that there was interest in resurrecting the show as a feature film, and the heroine, a singer named Abigail Knight who helped her cop boyfriend solve crimes, was perfect for Katharine. We both read the script. It had Remington Steele’s cleverness, a bit of V.I. Warshawski’s toughness, and a touch of Moonlighting’s crazy comedy. And they could actually let this version of Gail Knight do her own singing.

In a few seconds, Katharine stuck her head in the door. "Don’t worry," she said lightly. "She’ll come around as soon as Mom gets here. She always does." She had Pookie slung over her hip, all dressed and packed and evidently behaving like the little blonde angel she resembled.

"You got the easy half," I grumbled.

"This time. Remember the first time we decided to have Mom take her instead of Kaycee?"

"Yeah," I said with a little chortle. "You’d have thought we were selling her to the gypsies. The kid definitely inherited your lungs. She may never need a microphone."

"Got her future all planned for her, Dad?" Katharine said mischievously.

"Well, wouldn’t you be surprised if neither one of them decided to get into music?" I said. "Don’t you suppose it’s in their genes or something?"

"Yeah, that’s probably why Kaycee likes to put splints and band-aids on all of her stuffed animals."

"That’s not genetic. That’s just being smart enough to know what it takes to make people fuss over you and go ‘Aw-w-w, isn’t that cute?’ "

"Well, that’s one of the things I wanted from you, Mr. Three College Degrees," Katharine said. "Kids with 20-20 uncorrected eyesight and the kind of a brain that lets them enjoy school."

"There’s nothing wrong with your brain," I said. "It just gets a little…overwhelmed sometimes, and you need to slow down, take a deep breath, and remember how to process things in order."

"I still turn words around sometimes," she said, frowning at Pookie as though she was trying to look through her blonde mop and see if all the little wheels under the skull were turning correctly.

I knew exactly what she was thinking. "So she didn’t start talking as early as Kaycee did," I said. "She’ll catch up. First kids are often more verbal, because for a long time it was just them and the adults, no other kids to babble at and pick up bad habits from."

"You know what I saw on TV the other day?" Katharine said without waiting for an answer. "This ad for—oh, I don’t know, something or other—and they said that one out of every 150 babies is born autistic. That’s pretty bad odds, you know that? You don’t think there’s any chance—"

"She is not autistic!" I said. "For Godssake, she relates to people."

"So why doesn’t she talk?"

"I don’t know. Maybe she doesn’t have anything to say."

"Don’t be a smartass. What if it’s serious and we’re just missing something? That happens. It happened to me when I was little."

"Okay, I’ve got another reason for you. Because she’s not Kaycee. Kaycee wants everything yesterday. She’s always been that way. She’s done everything fast from the day she was born."

"Yeah, she popped right out and Pookie took two days and scared the crap out of everybody."

"See? They just have different styles," I said, anxious to find something to say that might make Katharine feel better. Setbacks in her own life she could handle, but anything affecting the kids kept her up nights, whether it should or not.

"Are you talking about me?" Kaycee wanted to know.

"Yes," Katharine said. "You’re a little girl in a hurry. So why don’t you hurry and get ready to go with Grandma? Speaking of which, I think I just heard her come in."

"And I think I heard Ildie drive up. Come on, Chickie."

"No," Kaycee said, quite predictably.

"Maybe she’d rather swap and go with Ildie," I said. "Then she’d have three people to alternately charm and terrorize. She’d love it."

"Oh shut UP," Katharine said. "This is going to be tricky enough as it is."

"What’s tissic? What’s that mean?" Kaycee asked.

"And you’re always on ME to watch my mouth around the kids," I said. "Now what?"

Katharine rolled her eyes at me. "How should I know? Help me!"

"We were just discussing why Pookie doesn’t seem to want to talk," I said, sidestepping the question. "And it occurs to me that a lot of the time, you seem to know what she wants better than we do. But you know what? I think you should just let her make her own needs known. Maybe then she’ll start talking to us."

"No," Kaycee said. "She’ll just get mad and scream. I don’t like it when she screams."

"Nobody does, Honey," Katharine said. "That’s why she needs to learn to talk."

"Hi, guys!" Peisha called down the hall.

Kaycee dropped the stuffed chihuahua she’d been cradling and scrambled down from the bed. Flying out the door, she threw herself into Peisha’s arms babbling "Gramma P! Gramma P!"

I looked at Katharine and shrugged and she gave me an "I told you so" look.

My stepmother arrived shortly thereafter, still dressed for battle and looking quite formidable in a gray suit and heels. I loved her to death but seriously pitied anyone who had to face her in a courtroom. She and Peisha acknowledged each other, took possession of their respective charges, wished us a lovely weekend, and walked out chatting like the friends and allies they had become over the past few years.

"Well," I said happily, "that went well."

"Super," Katharine agreed. "Now, let’s go check into our little love nest and go crazy." She struck a hands-on-hips pose. "You’re going to have a remarkable weekend."

"And what are you going to have?"

"Two days of just being me, nobody crying or screaming or wanting anything from me, or telling me we need to do that one more time to get it just right—"

"Well, I can’t promise that," I said.

"That’s different."

"Because I’m special?"

"Because I can actually say no to you if I want to. But I won’t!" She slunk across the room and glued herself against me like a silent movies siren constrained to convey a vamp on the prowl in a way the audience would understand with no need for words. "I didn’t put that quite right. The point of the weekend isn’t just for me to be me, it’s for us to be us. And I’ve got a few surprises for you. Just for fun."

Our weekend was more like a day and two nights, with Saturday being our big "date night." The Baronet provided excellent food and the kind of ballroom orchestra you could dance to if you actually liked to hold onto your girl. I would tip the band leader and ask him very politely to NOT introduce Katharine and ask her to come up and sing. For one night, we were just going to be vacationers.

Friday we were just going to order room service and collapse, and I was going to get my surprise. I lounged on the bed, idly flipping through tv channels while Katharine disappeared into the bathroom. In a few minutes she called out "Find us some good music!" so I tuned the radio into a jazz/R&B station and sat back to wait.

Anita Baker was just drawing to a close on The Best Of My Love – it was that kind of a station. I turned up the volume and called out "What do you think of this?"

"Good! Now what do you think of this?"

I looked up to see a tall woman in a silky kimono with a blonde Posh Spice hairdo advancing on me, looking like she meant business. "Ho-lee sheet!" I breathed.

"It’s Do Something Different Night," she said, "or maybe I should say someone." Then she began a slow strip tease, starting with the sash.

In the background, a smooth voice was singing over a sultry beat, something about "sign your name across my heart, I want you to be my bay-ay-bee," and as the kimono slid smoothly and silkily to the floor, I forgot all about how long the week had been. Various undergarments came loose and were twirled around and pitched in my general direction, so I caught them, and then, obeying some insane impulse, wadded them up and stuck my face in them, moaning and growling like a demented creature from The Island of Dr. Moreau. This elicited the expected giggles and protests, then she dived into my lap, completely breaking character as we rolled around laughing and struggling and I wondered how the wig managed to stay on through all of that.

"You pervert," she chuckled in my ear. "I thought you were all through with blondes."

I thought better of reminding her that the whole thing had been her idea. "I am," I insisted. "Except for this one." I pushed my nose right into the hollow at the base of her neck and breathed in, then placed my lips gently on that same spot. "You know what’s right there?"

"What? A freckle? A mole?"

"No, your vocal cords."

"You know what, Mr. Medical School? You’re supposed to tell me about, oh, how smooth my skin is, or how good I smell, or something romantic."

"I was about to say, that’s a sacred place because that’s where so much beautiful music comes from. Something like that."

"Aw-w-w, that’s so sweet," she said, suddenly very serious. "Nobody’s ever said that to me before. Well, not quite like that. It almost sounds like something my mom would say—you know, that you should take good care of your instrument because it’s a sacred gift."

"We agree about that. Now I don’t want to think about your mom anymore. In fact I don’t want to think about anything." So we stopped talking and followed the cues coming from the radio. The only actual words I heard were "slowly we make love," but that was enough.

Later I asked her where the idea for the wig had come from, and her answer surprised me, although I suppose it shouldn’t have. "I saw the strangest thing on-line," she said, idly running her fingers across my chest. "It was funny, but interesting. Somebody had found a site where you could try different hairstyles on any picture you wanted to, and they’d used one of me, from a photo shoot I did a long time ago, and they put about half a dozen different looks on me. Some of them were terrible, but the one with the short straight blonde hair actually didn’t look too bad."

"So you just decided to go blonde?"

"I don’t know why I did it. I’ve always wondered what I’d look like as a blonde, and I just wanted to see how you’d react."

"Why do I get the feeling I’m getting into damned if I do, damned if I don’t territory? Like if I liked the wig, it’s because I secretly wish I was here with some hot blonde, and if I didn’t, you’ll be upset because it was your idea and you were just trying to indulge me."

"I’m an evil woman. I shouldn’t put you in that kind of position, should I?"

"Yes you are, and no you shouldn’t. Do you know how strange it is seeing a blonde head where, well, your head ought to be?"

She pushed up on an elbow and looked at me very intently. "Was it a bad idea?"

"No. But not because I need a break from my gorgeous brunette. Or any other reason." I knew somewhere in the back of her mind was an image of me and the beautiful and very blonde Jenna Holstrum, who had been an assistant district attorney back in the days when she had very thoroughly and expertly broken my heart.

"I know," Katharine said. "If I’d had any doubts about that, I’d never have had the nerve to try to seduce you in a blonde wig."

"You know what? Just for the hell of it, I’d like to see the original. Do you think you could find it?"

"Oh lord, I don’t know. I have an idea, though. I guess we could fish around and see what happens. Wait til I find my glasses."

Eventually we tracked down the site and the thread using Katharine’s BlackBerry and I sat there grinning like an idiot at the image of Katharine in her slightly lopsided, rather elfin blonde hairdo. "That’s cute," I said. "I’m going to save that to my hard drive just as a memento of this weekend."

"You’re crazy. You can see the real thing any time you want to."

"What if I’d like to look at you during a random free moment at work?"

"Okay, that’s all I need to know. Wait… let’s look around while we’re here."

We found threads with candids from the set of Nightengale, some with pictures of the kids, polls and chatter and speculation on such subjects as what kind of movie they’d like her to do next. Then I spotted a sub-forum and had her investigate. "Holy shirt," I said. "What is all this?"

"I don’t know," Katharine said, "but you’re getting pretty good at cleaning up your language. At least that beats what you used to say. "

"The Old McDonald thread. Hmmm. Open that." We started reading, intermittently squabbling over the fact that our eyes were negotiating the tiny screen at different speeds. "They seem to think I might be a bit too old for you."

"That’s silly. Eight years isn’t that much."

"Mm-hmm. Some of them agree with you. Some don’t. Hmm. This one thinks older men make better lovers. I think I like her. Oh my god. Read this one."

"I’ve only been with one guy my whole life?"

"Yeah, she read it in a magazine interview, so it must be true."

"I never said that."

"What did you say? Do you remember? I get the feeling these guys remember more than I do. Is that weird?"

"Probably."

"You know what’s really weird?"

"Mmm," she said, not really paying attention to me. I knew I shouldn’t interrupt while she was reading something, because when she really wanted to concentrate she simply shut out the world. This wasn’t anything of earth shattering importance, but Katharine’s preferred method of learning had always been aural rather than visual, because she had learned early on that sometimes her eyes played tricks on her.

"What’s weird is being in bed with a blonde woman sitting on my lap."

"What? Oh. I am not on your lap. I’m just leaning on you. Oh good grief!"

"What? What did you find now?"

"Pictures from that creep who published all that stuff from our day at the beach. You know, during the Idol tour. The guy who caused all the trouble."

"Yeah, Duncan Dimwitz."

"Yeah. I mean—what? Anyway… oh good lord. That looks like a picture of your chest. How did they get something like that?"

"Photoshop. You can do anything."

"They’re fighting about whether they like hairy chests or not. This is bizarre."

"What a way to get your fifteen minutes of fame," I said. "But more to the point, do YOU like them?"

She frowned at me over a shoulder, squeezed one arm between us and rubbed my stomach. "I’d say that’s just about right."

"Well I’m certainly glad we settled that. By the way, are you ever going to take that thing off?"

"Hmmm?"

"The wig. Do I ever get my wife back?"

"Oh, yeah. Whatever you want. Look at this! They’re comparing you to a bunch of ‘Who Has The Best Beach Body?’ shots from Us Weekly." The screen wound its way down. "Oh my god, Christopher, this is, like, totally bizarre. I’m saying the same word over and over. There must be another word. Are my eyes deceiving me or is that six little closeups of swim trunks in a row?"

"Yup," I said, "followed by a poll. I’m sorry I ever brought this up. Let’s shut it down."

"Don’t you want to see if you won?"

"No."

"Well I do. C’mon."

"Can we just stop now, please?"

She seemed about to say something combative, then obviously thought better of it and simply leaned her head back against my shoulder. "Well anyway, I like your beach body," she said.

We put the BlackBerry away and Katharine removed the wig, shaking her head and freeing her hair, which fell down into its normal pattern around her shoulders. "I don’t think I want to do this again," she said, looking at the wig as though it might suddenly come to life, hissing and spitting and doing all manner of unnatural things. "Oh--unless you want me to, of course."

"What do you mean?" I asked, stroking the dark silky strands, feeling a bit grateful for their familiarity. "Fish around online, or wear a wig?"

"Maybe both," she said, and I was struck again by how much younger she looked without makeup. Sometimes I suspected her of being one of those people with a portrait in the attic that grew old and twisted and wrinkled and ravaged while the subject walked around looking like a cameraman’s dream.