Chapter One

I didn't really want to go to the "women's conference" the first weekend of May. Spending two hundred bucks to stay in a hotel for two nights only forty-five minutes from home? Totally out of our budget, even if it did include "two continental breakfasts, the Saturday night banquet, and all conference materials."

Now if it had been just Denny and me, that'd be different. A romantic getaway, a second honeymoon ... no teenagers tying up the phone, no dog poop to clean up in the yard, no third-grade lesson plans, no driving around and around the block trying to find a parking place. Just Denny and me sleeping late, ordering croissants, fruit plates, and hot coffee for breakfast, letting someone else make the bed (hallelujah!), swimming in the pool ... now that would be worth two hundred bucks, no question.

I'm not generally a conference-type person. I don't like big crowds. We've lived in the Chicago area for almost twenty years now, and I still haven't seen Venetian Nights at the lakefront, even though Denny takes Josh and Amanda almost every year. Wall-to-wall people ... and standing in line for those pukey Port-a-Potties? Ugh.

Give me a small moms' group or a women's Bible study any day—like Moms in Touch, which met at our church in Downers Grove all those years the kids were growing up. We had some retreats, too, but I knew most of the folks from church, and they were held at a camp and retreat center out in the country where you could wear jeans to all the sessions and walk in the woods during free time.

But listening to the cars on I-90 roarin