Before the traffic moved again and I made the turn into tiny Northeast Airport, I put a second check beside number five. I'd shaved twice. Chip liked my legs hairless as a fresh pear. Not that I expected him to be interested in them or in any other part of my ample anatomy, but it couldn't hurt to be prepared for a miracle. In truth, I'd probably broken out the razor again just to procrastinate-because I wasn't sure I could do the sixth thing on the list.

I snatched the paper from the seat next to me and folded it one-handed as I pulled up to the gate marked EXECUTIVE AIRPORT PARKING. I was still trying to stuff the thing into my purse when an attendant marinating in boredom slid open the window in the booth. She drew sparse eyebrows together and mouthed something I couldn't hear. Of course. My car window was still up.

I pushed the button and felt like I'd just opened an oven door. As the aroma of jet fuel joined the July heat, the makeup melted from my face.

"Help you?" the woman said.

"I'm meeting my sister's private jet," I said.

"Name."

"Lucia Coffey. Oh-did you want my name or hers?"

"Don't need your name."

Staring vacantly at some point beyond me, she smeared her wrist across her forehead and produced a damp cuff. My mascara gathered in puddles at the corners of my eyes. I didn't even want to think about the damage in my armpits.

The woman shifted her gaze to a computer screen. "Who's it you're meeting?"

"Sonia Cabot," I said. "Abundant Living Ministries?"

The attendant's colorless eyes met mine for the first time. "She that woman on TV? Does the show for people got somebody dyin'?"

I gave my watch a surreptitious glance. I would be the one dying if I had to run from the car to the terminal to meet them on time. Just sitting there I was already dissolving like a pat of butter in a skillet.

"She's your sister?"

I looked up, unsurprised at the sudden interest on Apathy Woman's face. The tinge of suspicion didn't shock me either. I waited for the usual next question: Are you sure? To be punctuated with: You don't look anything like her.

I was tempted to save her the trouble and say, Sonia's adopted, which wasn't true. Or, Usually I look more like her than this, but I'm pregnant, which wasn't true either. The bulge hanging over the elastic in my pants resulted from pure mashed potatoes and gravy.

"Where do I park?" I said instead.

She perused the clipboard and, the epitome of servanthood now, pointed. "Just to the left of that building. Door's on the end. You better hurry. Plane's due in about five minutes."

I resisted blurting out a No kidding?

She knew who Sonia was, which meant I should be careful not to smudge the image. Besides, as I headed for the small, unimpressive terminal building, I had other things to deal with. Like the fact that my hands were now sliding off the steering wheel and my face felt like I'd baked it in the aforementioned oven.

When I parked, a glance in the rearview mirror confirmed it. My cheeks were the color of a pair of tomatoes. I pawed in my purse for Kleenex, found none, and grabbed the list. I tamped it against my forehead, my vine-ripened cheeks, my neck, and then viewed the half bottle of L'Oreal foundation I'd spread on them so carefully just an hour before. So much for the 'do as well. Dark curls, the only thing on me that I wanted to be plump, had flattened to my head in strips.

A jet taxied in already, white and sleek, the sun glinting from it like an insult as it made a ninety-degree turn to come perpendicular to the terminal.

The hair was hopeless. Ditto for the sweat situation. My black tunic, permanently glued to the Spandex shaper beneath, cooked my skin and did little to keep the fat under control. I dabbed at my raccoon eyes with my fingers, wiped them on my black pants, and climbed out of my PT Cruiser.

The list dropped at my feet and I would have abandoned it, except that all I needed was for Sonia or someone from her entourage to see it when we got back to the car. Especially the last entry:

tell Sonia I want my husband back

I debated whether to grab the Tupperware of truffles I'd planned for Sonia and whoever to have for the ride to my house. My cookies would be a soup of chocolate and coconut by the time we got back here anyway.

Oh, let it go, Lucia.

A guy in one of those sketched-in-with-a-pencil goatees and a dark blue jumpsuit he'd rolled up to his knees and elbows opened the door for me, then pushed it further, as if he could somehow make the doorway expand. He avoided meeting my eyes as he slipped out.

"Is that the plane from Nashville?" I said. "Sonia Cabot's plane?"

He didn't impress as easily as the lady at the gate. Probably didn't pause on the Christian Broadcasting Network while channel surfing.

"Guess so," he said before he disappeared.

My heart immediately slammed against my chest wall.

My husband was home.

I got through the empty waiting room-a miniature version of any I'd ever been in-to a row of seats that faced the window overlooking the tarmac, and perched on the edge of one. An image of getting stuck and having to Crisco my hips in order for emergency personnel to pry me loose while I watched my svelte sister descend the steps from the plane plastered itself across my mental screen. Behind her would be Chip, shading his eyes with his hand and, I hoped, looking for the wife he hadn't seen in three months. He'd have a hard enough time disguising his reaction to my recently acquired thirty pounds, layered over the extra fifty he surely hoped I had shed by now, without finding me trapped in a chair, awaiting the Jaws of Life.

I tried to breathe in the blessed cooled air, tried to erase the screen and form a cheerier picture. One of me running into his arms and finding the grizzly-bear chest and sinking into his smell: Downy fabric softener and spearmint gum and something musky and masculine I could never define. Then he would look into my face in that searching way, trying to memorize it, he always said.

I wilted further. Would there even be an embrace? Or would I draw back from a peck on the cheek? A backslapping hug with a quick release?

I opened my purse and groped for my Snickers, then remembered that I'd already polished it off driving down I-95. I was about to look around for a vending machine when the high-pitched whine of the jet engine pierced the glass. The plane made a maddeningly slow turn toward the crew of two that awaited it, almost as if Sonia were sneaking into Philadelphia.

Her assistant had said she wanted our visit to be quiet. She didn't have much time before she had to fly out to Pittsburgh, and she wanted us to have some "just family" togetherness-the implication being that I shouldn't invite any celebrity hounds over. I didn't tell her that none of my acquaintances were into Abundant Living. I wasn't even into it. I wanted to see Sonia-my-sister.

And...