Excerpt from Present Value by Sabin Willett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

So now they were nanny-free. To top it, on Sunday afternoon Linda had gone off to San Francisco to some kind of board meeting, leaving Fritz to do morning himself.

Which began, after the toss-and-turn night, with Fritz sleeping through the alarm. Finding Kristin’s J. Crew flip-flops had been a crisis (she used to wear sneakers, he thought. Why all this new tension about finding the right flip-flops? And what was with forty-eight-dollar flip-flops?), and then nobody could find Michael’s backpack, and then Kristin started wigging out about sunscreen, of all things (at the Chaney School, children must be equipped with sunscreen, without which it would be unsafe to play at recess). So Fritz, who rarely lost patience, and who almost never worried about anything, was in a uniquely uncomfortable state that morning of September 10, 2001. You could almost say he was getting nervous.

The car phone chirruped.

"Fritz, where are you?" It was Luce, Fritz’s administrative assistant.

"Hey, Luce. I’m in car pool."

"What?"

"Car pool. Dropping the kids off. You know."

Excerpted from Present Value by Sabin Willett Copyright© 2003 by Sabin Willett. Excerpted by permission of Villard, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.