“It’s not your fault, darling,” she replied.

“No, but it still sucks,” I said. She nodded sadly, and that was the end of the conversation. I felt really bad about it, but there was really nothing I could do. When I told Alice about it later, she looked thoughtful and said that we should invite Helena over more often and ask her if she’d babysit for us sometimes.

She did gladly. Kallie was always well-behaved with us, and apparently that didn’t change when we left her with someone for the night. She adored Helena, to the point where she grew to recognize her name when Alice or I would say it and grin like there was no tomorrow. She was really good for Jenny and Shane, too. They watched her every now and then, not as often as Helena did, but Kallie still adored Jenny so we tried to have them see each other every so often.

Jenny didn’t seem quite as enamored with her as Helena did, and she’d sometimes looked surprised that Kallie seemed to adore her so much. We all thought it was really cute. Well, except for Bette, of course. She went into a spiel about how we shouldn’t trust Jenny to be anywhere near the baby without corrupting her in some way. I think that was the first time I ever got angry enough with Bette to ask her to leave the house.

It all started innocently enough. Bette and Tina had come over with Kit in the late afternoon and were staying to have dinner with us. Kallie was playing on the floor as usual, and Kit was with her while I was showing Bette some of the photos Shane had recently taken of Kallie. Tina and Alice were off somewhere doing God knows what.

“These are really good, I like the black and whites,” Bette said after looking at some of them for a few minutes.

“We’re hanging that one,” I told her, pointing to the one of Kallie on Alice’s tummy. “It’s at the framing place so they can enlarge it and stuff. It’s gonna go right over there.” I pointed at the wall right behind the dresser.

“That’ll look really nice,” Bette replied. “So Shane’s been over here a lot lately, then?”