Excerpt from While I Was Gone by Sue Miller, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I went into Cass's blank room and lay down across her bed. Maybe it was the girls I wanted. Maybe I just missed the comfort of their noise, of their smells and music and flesh.

And then I laughed out loud, thinking of how angry I'd gotten at them, and how often, for these very things. Allie, our old retriever, barked at me, for my odd sudden noise. "Sorry," I said, and dangled my hand off the edge of the bed so she could lick it. "Sorry, old girl."

Suddenly I was thinking of a morning years before when all three girls had climbed into bed with me and Daniel. I kept trying to get up to make breakfast, and this became the game. The twins held me in their bony hard arms, they wrapped their long stringy bare legs around me. They were shrieking, "No! No breakfast! You must stay in the nest! You must!" Sadie, sleepy, plump, all our baby, lay in front of Daniel in the curve of his arm, her pink, wet thumb resting at her lip. The two of them--Daniel and Sadie--were turned to watch us wild wrestlers, but they had moved out to the edge of the bed, trying to avoid the odd knee or elbow.

I reached over, making my hand a desperate claw. "Help me, Sadie," I croaked dramatically from the flailing mound of bony flesh. "Help, help!"

Sadie sobered and looked for a moment up at her father. Was it real? She believed in everything. He made a face that put her at ease. She laughed.

She lay thoughtfully still for just a few seconds more, before she, too, threw herself forward into the fray--my rescuer. And then Daniel's arms were encircling all of us, and he grabbed somebody from behind--Nora, I think--and swung her up. I felt his legs push powerfully against me.

It lasted only a minute or so, the shrieking, the laughter, everyone's nightie hiking up, all the bare flesh, the bones and angles, feet big and small, soft parts, damp parts. Our familiar smells.

Ordinary life. Flesh. It was my world then. I was wrapped in it, held in it, I thought. And now I'm not. Now I float.

Allie was steadily licking my hand. I turned, and she stopped and smiled at me, panting, her long curled tongue flicking upward slightly with each breath. "Laughing Allegra" we had named her, because her face fell into this happy, dopey grin when her mouth opened.

"It was fun, wasn't it, Allie?" I said. She thrust her head forward and licked my face, once.

I got up and went downstairs, into our bedroom. At one time it had been the front parlor of the house. It had a working fireplace with a painted wooden mantel, but no closet, so we'd mounted a row of hooks on the wall and hung them with what we most frequently wore--Daniel's slacks and jackets, jeans and scrubs for me and one or two nighties; both our bathrobes, homely, wrinkled shapes. A motorcycle blatted rudely past on the town road, only a dozen yards or so from our bed. We had talked about moving upstairs to the back of the house now that the girls were gone, but we hadn't done anything about it yet.

I stood for a long time in front of the mirror. Flesh, indeed. From time to time Daniel felt moved to say to me, "God, you're a beautiful woman," but this was kindness, or love. I examined myself objectively, clinically now. I saw a nice-looking middle-aged person, someone you wouldn't look at twice if you passed her on the street. And I'd never been beautiful, in fact. I'd been attractive, tall and blond and strong-looking. I'd had a notable kind of energy, and people--men--were drawn to it.

Now, though, when my face was in repose, I looked tired. The downcurving lines at the corners of my mouth made me seem judgmental and stern, even a little pissed off. Sometimes my receptionist, Beattie, a woman I'd known and loved for twenty years, would ask me--out of the blue, from my perspective--"What's wrong?" and I'd realize my face had fallen into those lines again. "Nothing," I'd say. And then consciously try to open my face, to make it pleasant. To make it, I suppose, younger.

Excerpted from While I Was Gone by Sue Miller. Copyright© 1999 by Sue Miller. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, 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.