I countered with 9:00 P.M., and even though she drove a hard bargain, we finally settled on 10:00.“Ten it is,” she said, all business. “And don’t tell Jean. She’ll talk you out of it.”That’s how I wound up, at 9:56 on a Saturday night, sneaking out the back door of my bedroom like a naughty teenager, rolling my minivan down the gravel drive in neutral with the lights off, and hoping like hell that Jean and Russ, who were in the kitchen playing Scrabble, didn’t come out to ask what on earth I was up to.Next thing, I was stopping for Sunshine and her backpack of séance supplies—which, incidentally, included a Magic 8 Ball—at Russ’s gate.“I didn’t think you’d really come,” Sunshine said as she popped open the door.“Hop in,” I said, and I was pulling away before she had even closed it.Back home, I never would have left my children in the middle of the night without telling anyone. I never would have gone anywhere at all—and if I had, I’d have left pages of typed instructions for the babysitter on how to handle any conceivable emergency.But things had shifted.
