"I like to plan ahead. What if I got stuck in there with just People magazine?"

"If you like I can bring you the Enquirer as soon as the baby's delivered."

"I thought you had enough of me throwing up already."

Truth was, she hadn't thrown up that much with this baby. The best morning-sickness period of all four pregnancies. Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe this baby was going to be no trouble. Maybe Step wouldn't have to lie beside his bed every night for the first three years of his life, humming "Away in a Manger" over and over again. Maybe this one wouldn't wake up with screaming nightmares: Maybe this one wouldn't periodically decide to hit a sibling over the head with something heavy.

Then it occurred to him that DeAnne was not waiting up at the kitchen table to read a book-she could have done that in bed. She was waiting up to talk to him at the opposite end of the house from the children.

"What's up?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said. "How did it go?"

"Fine. Lee's a little weird, but Sister Highsmith was fine. A nice old lady who likes to talk but then she's never boring, so it's OK. Not a lot of woes and troubles, either. Most of what she talks about is bragging about her late husband or her wonderful children or her even more wonderful grandchildren who are being spoiled or overprotected by her very stupid children."

"I thought her children were wonderful."

"Only when they were children," said Step. "Now they're parents and so they've become stupid. Hey, it happened to our parents, didn't it? And it's happened to us, too."

"Are we really stupid parents, Step?"

"By definition," said Step. "I was a brilliant parent till Robbie was born. Then all the things I'd learned about parenting went right out the window. Robbie was completely different from Stevie and so nothing that worked with Stevie worked with Robbie. I think that's why second-child syndrome develops. You know, nice cooperative first child, rebellious and troublesome second child.

The first child was raised by confident parents. The second child was raised by parents who were nervous wrecks, trying to apply first-child methods to second-child problems. No wonder second kids want to spend most of their teenage years screaming at their parents."

"Poor Robbie. And what explains Elizabeth's temper?"

"I haven't analyzed third-child syndrome yet," said Step. "Give me time. She's still very, very short."

They sat in silence for a few moments.

"Did you meet Lee's mother?" asked DeAnne.

"Sure," said Step. "It's kind of impossible not to. She guards Lee like a tigress. I felt like I was going through a job interview just to get her to call Lee into the room so we could go."

"I can understand being protective."

"Yeah, well, especially with Lee. The kid's got a twisted sense of what it means to be Mormon."

"Oh really?"

"It's not so much that he can hardly wait for God to retire so he can move into the job, like Sister LeSueur.

It's more like he thinks that he already is God, or at least a god, and he thinks Mormonism is cool because we seem to be the only ones who understand that a divine person like him is possible."

"How strange," said DeAnne.

"But he's young. Young people fantasize about a lot of things." Step had been thinking about his own youthful thought that maybe someday he would be president, or a great conquering general like Frederick the Great, or a doctor who discovered the cure for cancer. But now, when the words came out of his mouth, he instantly thought of Stevie. Of what Stevie was fantasizing. Not some grandiose megalomania. Just having a friend, that was all. A couple of friends. Did that make him crazy? It was Lee Weeks who was crazy if anybody's child was, and his mother was a psychia trist, for heaven's sake.

"She's a shrink, too," said Step, following his own thought and not the thread of the conversation.

"Who is?" asked DeAnne.

"Lee's mother," said Step. "She's a shrink. That's what he called it. He said, She's a shrink. But she's nice, though."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"No, I mean, that's what he said. That she was nice though. As if to be nice was sort of a contradiction to being a shrink."

"So now we actually know a psychiatrist," said DeAnne.

"Well, not like we're intimate friends."

"But at least we wouldn't be sending Stevie to a stranger."

It came to him all at once. DeAnne knew perfectly well that Dr. Weeks was a shrink. And it wasn't just that.

DeAnne had set up the home teaching appointment, had pushed him into doing his church calling, which she had never done before, just so that he'd meet a psychiatrist. In fact, Dr. Weeks might well be one of the shrinks on the list she got from Jenny's pediatrician. There couldn't be that many shrinks in town. DeAnne had manipulated him. It made him feel sick and angry, and he wanted to say something really cruel and walk out of the room.

Instead he just sat there, thinking. What had she done, really? Just helped him to do his home teaching. Just helped get him into a position where he'd meet a psychiatrist. What was so bad about that?

She didn't tell me, that's what was so bad. She maneuvered me to this position instead of persuading me to it.

But Step hadn't left her much room to think that he'd be open to changing his mind. And so if she really felt strongly about getting help for Stevie, maybe she thought there was no other way. So it isn't that she manipulated me. No, I feel angry and sick because I'm ashamed that I'm the kind of husband whose wife thinks she has to do this kind of manipulation in order to get from her husband what she thinks her child needs.

I must be a really terrible husband, in her view, that she has to fool me. Like the giant's wife in Jack and the Beanstalk. Doing her best to save the life of the small person in her care by keeping him out of the way of the cruel, awful, tyrannical husband.

When the silence had grown very long, he said, "Maybe you could find out her office number and set up an appointment for Stevie. If she takes children."

"Do you think she'd be good for him?"

No, Step thought. I don't think any more of psychiatrists now than I did before. Less, in fact, because she's so weirdly protective of her own son. Treating him like a child at this age. No wonder he has power fantasies, with her shepherding him through life as if he were incompetent to zip his own fly after peeing. What's she going to do for my child when her own is Lee Weeks?

That wasn't fair. Just because she couldn't see the problems in her own family didn't mean she couldn't see clearly the problems in others. When Step had been elders quorum president, he had seen a lot of things clearly about other people's lives, but his own was just as murky to him as ever.

"She might be," said Step. "As good a chance as anybody else. And like you said, we know her."

"You know her," said DeAnne.

"Well, anyway," said Step. "Make the appointment. And then we have to figure out how to break it to Stevie that we're taking him to a shrink."

"It will help if you don't call her a shrink in front of him."

Oh, you've already thought this all through, I'm sure. "Well don't call her a psychiatrist, either," said Step.

"Call her a therapist."

"Why? A psychiatrist is a doctor, and a therapist isn't. Sheila is a therapist."

"In contemporary American culture," said Step, "going to a psychiatrist means you're crazy. But going to a therapist means you're rich and stylishly uptight."

"I hate it when you talk about 'contemporary American culture' this and 'contemporary American culture'

that."

Well, I hate it when you treat me like a puppet you can maneuver however you want. I didn't know how much I hated it till now, because up till now you had never done it.