Desire is moved with violent motion... And is called love. (Socrates)

"I want proof your homework is done or I'm pulling the plug." Leslie hovered her index finger over the main power switch and looked Matt in the eye.

"Aw, Mom," he said, not unexpectedly.

"Your report card is not what either of us expect from you. So, from now on, you show me your finished homework or no computer games. You know I can set up a password if I have to. Don't make me.

He kicked the leg of the desk, also not unexpectedly, then slunk off to his bedroom to get his books. Leslie sighed. Another eight months of the terrible twelves. Then it's the terrible thirteens for a whole year. And so on.

Matt wouldn't be slacking off on his homework if he weren't bright enough to pull in Bs without studying. But Leslie had vowed that she'd stamp out any "good enough to pass" sentiments her son might have. In the scheme of world history, this was not the time to be a lazy white boy.

"Read it aloud to me," Leslie said, when she suspected that Matt was daydreaming and turning pages to make her think he was reading. "I don't know anything about Pierce or Taylor. When I took U.S. History we jumped from war to war and in between is a vague blur."

Leslie half-listened as she finished the dinner dishes. She wiped down the counters and made a short To Do list for the morning. If she was going to have this enforced vacation, she might as well make the most of it. She heard Matt end the chapter and offered him his dessert, but he wrinkled his nose.

"Can I go outside for a while? I know it's getting dark, but I'll stay in the backyard."

"Sure. Fresh air helps the brain."

Matt gave her a look that said, "Yeah, right" and slunk out the back door. She watched his silhouette kick at imaginary rocks.

"Poor little guy," she said to herself. It had been bad enough when his father had moved with Matt's two half-brothers to the East Coast. Instead of seeing his dad every other weekend, or more frequently, he saw him every other 3-week school break in the year-round school schedule.

Then his best friend's mother had gotten a promotion and they had moved to Sacramento. The two boys e-mailed each other, but Matt's evenings and weekends were essentially empty. Leslie knew how he felt — she missed Carol's coffee cake and bright wit as much as he missed Lenny's skateboarding and Nintendo.

She could always fill up the hours she'd spent yakking with Carol with work. The product launch was looking to happen in about eighteen months and she was increasingly busy. But Matt needed her more now than ever.

She tore up her To Do list. "Hey, kiddo," she called.

"Yeah," floated back out of the darkness.

"Want to go to Great America tomorrow? I promise not to scream if you go on the Drop Zone, and I'll write an excuse to the Vice Principal."

"Okay," Matt said from the doorway. "How long is Uncle Richard going to keep you from going to work?"

"Well, if everything goes well, they'll let me back in on Monday."

There was a thump from the front door and through the screen she heard Richard say, "We'll let you back in tomorrow."

Leslie flew to the door, unlocked the screen and dragged Richard into the kitchen. He had a bag full of hot bagels and what looked like real cream cheese from the deli at the bottom of the hill. Leslie let out a high-pitched squeal she hadn't known she was still capable of and threw her arms around him.

"It works!" They rocked back and forth in each other's arms, and then Matt bounded into their celebratory hug, adding his own shrill, "It works! It works!" to the noise.

Matt broke out peach Snapples for all three of them, while Leslie slathered a steaming pumpernickel bagel with cream cheese and pressed it to Richard's. "Cheers," she said. Richard was right as always: hot bread and cheese were better than champagne.

"Dammit, Leslie, I'm telling you, it worked the first time we ran it. I'm sorry you missed it." Richard had cream cheese in his mustache and beard.

"Wasn't my idea," Leslie reminded him. She had wanted to watch the first run of the software, but instead had been banished.

"You were making me nervous with all your what-ifs. And the programmers didn't want to screw up in front of you. You're practically their mom."

"Thanks," she said wryly. Some of the programmers at MagicWorks were in their thirties, not that you'd know it from their behavior.

"Uncle Richard, I still don't understand what you and Mom are making," Matt said. Leslie was glad to see that his aura of gloom had lifted considerably.

"Let me give you an example," he said. "Remember in Aladdin how Robin Williams did the voice of the genie?" Matt nodded. "Well, he also inspired the artists who drew the genie. He moved in ways that fit his voice and artists laboriously recorded the gestures and movements. Now imagine if they could have filmed Robin Williams instead. And then matched, say, six to ten of his movements to an equal number of poses for the genie, and then had a computer review all of Robin's performance and then draw all of the genie's movements to match?"

"Uh-huh," Matt said dubiously. "So what does that do?"

"It means quality animation based on human movement without frame-by-frame drawing. It'll be a brand new way to create animated films.

"Think of this, Matt. You could collect some pictures of Abraham Lincoln and scan them into your computer. Then you could film yourself walking and talking, then overlay the pictures of Lincoln and your film and presto! An animated Lincoln that you created based on what you read and knew about him."

"That would be way cool," Matt said. "I could make Lincoln say anything." He bit into his bagel before Leslie noticed the cream cheese was two inches thick.

Leslie met Richard's gaze over Matt's head. They both knew that Matt was likely to create a Lincoln who skateboarded and quoted X-Man.

"Not unimportantly," Richard said, "some very large companies will pay us a great deal to have the software — that is, after your mom finishes convincing them they can't survive without it."

"And no one beats us to it," Leslie added.

"Ever the optimist," Richard said. "So you'll be back at the office bright and early, going through all those resumes you got from prospective attorneys."

Leslie saw Matt's face fall back into his lines of gloom. "Sorry, Richard, but I have plans. Matt's going to play hooky with me." She was rewarded by Matt's first genuine smile in what seemed like weeks.

Richard smiled indulgently. "Fair enough," he said, patting her hand. "Go have fun wherever it is you're going."

"You're a great boss," Leslie told him as he was leaving. "And a great friend."

He kissed her lightly, his attitude fatherly, though at 41 he was only her senior by two years.

"Did Uncle Richard ever want to marry you?" Matt asked the question later that evening from the depths of the pajama top he was pulling over his head.

"Nope, never. We're just best friends," Leslie said.

"We've made great partners for holy moley — twenty years — but romance has never been a part of it. Not like with your dad."

Matt was silent, his face carefully neutral. She knew he was desperately missing his father and thinking about how nice it would have been to have "uncle" Richard around all the time. He understood that she was not interested in men, but at the moment Uncle Richard was the only other adult prominently in her life. Poor little guy, she thought, he was so lonely sometimes, and she knew his loneliness was not a commentary on her mothering. He was just at an age when he wanted ...more.

He went off to bed and Leslie spent the next hour polishing off another bagel and channel-surfing while she played "if onlies" in her head.

If only she had been happy married to Alan. If only Sharon had been able to adapt to having a kid around, then Matt would have had a second adult in his life on an everyday basis and not miss his dad so much. If only she and Carol had had some flickering of passion between them—they'd have made both their sons ecstatic. If only almost-forty women with offspring didn't produce anti-endorphins in every eligible lesbian they met. If only Captain Janeway would beam into her living room.

She would have moped for a couple more hours, but she remembered that she did have a vastly more interesting job ahead of her, now that they knew their software could work. She needed to start interviewing consultants for package design and technical writing. Her trip to Chicago and New York to interview design agencies was definitely on. And, heaven forbid, she had to hire a lawyer to write their patent application and take care of a lot of other corporate business Leslie didn't even want to think about. Maybe she could get Richard to do the dirty deed. She'd had an antipathy for lawyers ever since they had almost turned her amicable divorce from Allan into World War III.