Chapter One

April 3, 2003

4:15 a.m.

Four-fifteen in the morning is the perfect time to catalog the one commodity I am still rich in: regrets. I keep trying to pare that lengthy list down to a manageably brief inventory of everything I failed to acquire during marriage to a scion of one of America's wealthiest dynasties. Over the past few months, I have smelted a King Solomon's mine of lost swag down to the few basics I most regret either not obtaining or not hanging on to:

1. A husband

2. A home

3. A Pap smear

I've added and removed "4. Children" from the list several times. Currently, they are off.

Recently I've also started to regret christening myself Blythe Young. I picked the name at the end of my sophomore year at Abilene High School. It was an improvement over the one my mother had saddled me with, Chanterelle Young. I was tired of being taken for either an exotic dancer or, far worse, exactly what I was, the daughter of a trailer-trash tramp of a mother too stupid to know that in her single, solitary moment of maternal lyricism she had named her only child after a mushroom.

Eighteen years later, however, instead of blithe and young, I feel burdened and every day of my thirty-three years. What I am is divorced, desperate, and currently clinging frantically to a very tenuous toehold here in Bamsie Beiver's historically significant carriage house. Although Bamsie redid the main house in meticulous turn-of-the-century detail for maximum "authenticity" and "tax benefits," my abode never received such tender ministrations. Renovations on the carriage house appear to have started and stopped once the horse turds