The Class Menagerie

regret it the rest of your life if you tell Jenny’s secrets. Other people might like knowing the secrets, but they won’t like you for telling them. And you’ll never really, really like yourself again.“
    Katie fidgeted with her hair and looked out the window. “How do you know?“
    “Because I’m a grown-up and I’m smarter than you,“ Jane said, uttering the one phrase she had sworn she would never use. She’d never succumbed to it before today, but she was rattled by the events at the bed and breakfast.
    “Look Katie, I’m sorry I said that, but it is true. I’ve had experience in all kinds of things that you haven’t yet. And I want to keep you from making big mistakes. It’s my job as a mother to make sure you don’t harm your opinion of yourself. Do you understand?“
    To her astonishment, Katie hugged her hard and ran upstairs without a word.
    Jane sat down at the kitchen table, shaking her head. All those years she’d spent trying to explain, cajole, and gently urge Katie along, and this time a firm order had not only worked, but elicited a rare expression of affection. Why didn’t they issue a handbook in the delivery room that explained which approach would work when? And why was it so hard for mothers and daughters to get along? Her boys were easy. They seemed genuinely to like her most of the time and if they disagreed with her rules, they criticized the rules, not her character. It must have to do with hormones, she concluded unhappily.
    She threw together a quick dinner for the kids, gave last warnings about house rules while she was gone, and dashed back to the bed and breakfast to help Edgar. He was planning an elaborate dinner that night of glazed ham steaks with raisin/ginger sauce, julienned potatoes fried into tiny baskets with an artichoke heart filling, and a salad with a thousand finely diced ingredients. This was in addition to a raspberry souffle“ for dessert and rolls that had to be watched carefully. He and Jane were so busy with the dinner itself that there was little time for chat about anything else. The only reference to murder was when Edgar said, “Would you prepare a tray for what’s his name to eat in the library?“
    “Which what’s his name?“
    “The officer they’ve left here to keep an eye on things.“ Edgar said this so bitterly that Jane didn’t ask any other questions.
    When everything was nearly ready to serve, Edgar said, “Gordon will help me take everything in. You run along to your meeting.“
    Jane glanced at her watch with horror. The Back-To-School night was starting in five minutes and she had to be there on time or she’d be assigned all kinds of responsibilities she didn’t want. It was highly dangerous to miss this night because the nonattendees, as a punishment, were given hideous jobs in their absence.

    Jane got off lucky. No driving on field trips, no fund-raising carnival jobs, no baking for PTA meetings. Only assistant room mother for the Christmas—to be politically correct, Winter Break—party. It would be unspeakably horrible, of course, but it was still a couple of months away and the head room mother under whom she would work was a bossy woman who always ran the whole thing herself anyway. Jane even managed to protect Shelley from being voted PTA secretary, for which Shelley would owe her at least another permanent.
    When she returned to the bed and breakfast very early the next morning, she discovered that Shelley’s personality had come back up to full force the evening Jjefore and she had compelled the other women to tend to the business of having their fund-raising meeting. God only knew how she had done it. Jane suspected it would be generations before the meeting faded from the collective minds of Ewe Lamb history. She told Shelley so.
    Shelley was tidying up the last of her paperwork in the kitchen, packing it away into file folders. “I got a call a while ago about buying the rights to do a Movie of the Week about it. They’ve run out of diseases and are going into severe personality disorders,“ she said, collapsing into a chair. “I’ve never been so tired in my life, Jane.“
    “This might perk you up. That vicious Elaine person you fell out with over the carnival budget tried to nominate you for secretary of the PTA.“
    “The bitch!“ Shelley said, horrified. .
    “Don’t worry. I put a stick in her spokes. But I couldn’t save you from directing the ‘Brownies Around the World’ program for