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Chapter One

You could argue that it started thirty-four years ago whentwenty-year-old Frank Kettle, a tall, fair, hyperactive ex-altar boy,fell madly in lust with Maxine Leonard, a long-legged languid redheadjust a few days short of her nineteenth birthday.

He was pumping with fresh testosterone. She knew better butdid it anyway. In the backseat of Frank's dad's Holden. Twice. Thefirst time involved a lot of head-bumping and grunting andbreathless shifts of position, while Johnny O'Keefe bellowed atthem from the car radio. The second time was slower and gentlerand rather nice. Elvis soothingly suggested they love him tender.In each case, however, the terrible result was the same. One ofFrank's exuberant little sperm cells slammed head-on with one ofMaxine's rather less thrilled eggs, interrupting what should havebeen an uneventful journey to nonexistence.

Over the following days, while Maxine was chastely datingmore suitable boys and Frank was pursuing a curvy brunette, twofreshly fertilized eggs were busily bumping their way along Maxine'sfallopian tubes toward the haven of her horrified younguterus.

At the exact moment Maxine allowed the very suitable CharlieEdwards to hold back her long red hair while she puffed out her cheeks and blew out nineteen candles, one egg fizzed with somuch friction it split right in two. The other single egg burrowedits way comfortably in between the two new identical eggs.

Guests at Maxine's birthday party thought they'd never seenher look so beautiful -- slender, glowing, almost incandescent!Who could have guessed she'd been impregnated with someCatholic boy's triplets?

Frank and Maxine were married, of course. In their weddingphotos, they both have the blank-eyed, sedated look of recenttrauma victims.

Seven months later, their triplet daughters came kicking andhowling into the world. Maxine, who had never even held a babybefore, was presented with three; it was the most despair-filledmoment of her young life.

Well, that would be Gemma's preference for how it started.Cat would argue that if she was going to begin with their conception,then why not go back through their entire family tree? Whynot go back to the apes? Why not start with the Big Bang? I guessI did really, Gemma would chortle, Mum and Dad's big bang. Ohfunn-y, Cat would say. Let's look at it logically, Lyn would interrupt.Quite clearly, it started the night of the spaghetti.

And Lyn, quite naturally, would be right.

It was a Wednesday night six weeks before Christmas. A nothingsort of night. An unassuming midweek night that should havevanished from their memories by Friday. "What did we doWednesday?" "I don't know. Watch TV?"

That's what they were doing. They were eating spaghetti anddrinking red wine in front of the television. Cat was sitting crossleggedon the floor, with her back up against the sofa, her plateon her lap. Her husband, Dan, was sitting on the edge of the sofa,hunched over his dinner on the coffee table. It was the way theyalways ate dinner.

Dan had cooked the spaghetti, so it was hearty and bland. Cat was the more accomplished cook. Dan's approach to cooking wassomehow too functional. He stirred his ingredients like concretemix, one arm wrapped around the bowl, the other stirring thegluggy mix so vigorously you could see his biceps working. "Sowhat? Gets the job done."

That Wednesday night Cat was feeling no specific emotion;not especially happy, not especially sad. It was strange afterward,remembering how she sat there, shoveling Dan's pasta into hermouth, so foolishly trusting of her life. She wanted to yell back atherself through time, Concentrate!

They were watching a show called Med School. It was a soapabout a group of very beautiful young medical students withshiny white teeth and complex love lives. Each episode featured alot of blood and sex and anguish.

Cat and Dan shared a mild addiction to Med School. Wheneverthe plot took a new twist, they responded with loud enthusiasm,yelling at the television like children watching a pantomime:"Bastard!" "Dump him!" "It's the wrong medication!"

This week Ellie (blond, cutesy, cropped T-shirt) was in a state.She didn't know whether to tell her boyfriend, Pete (dark, brooding,abnormal abs), about her drunken infidelity with a guest-starringtroublemaker.

"Tell him, Ellie!" said Cat to the television. "Pete will forgiveyou. He'll understand!"

The ad break came on, and a manic man in a yellow jacketbounced around a department store pointing an incredulous fingerat the Christmas specials.

"I booked that health and beauty thing today," said Cat, usingDan's knee as a lever to help her reach over him for the pepper."The woman had one of those gooey, spiritual voices. I felt like Iwas getting a massage just making a booking."

For Christmas, she was giving her sisters (and herself) a weekendaway at a health retreat in the Blue Mountains. The three ofthem would share an "exquisite experience" of "indulgent pampering." They would be wrapped in seaweed, dunked in mud, andslathered in vitamin-enriched creams. It would be extremelyamusing.

She was pleased with herself for thinking of it. "What a cleveridea!" everyone would say on Christmas Day. Lyn definitely neededthe stress relief. Gemma didn't need it but she'd be right into pretendingthat she did. Cat herself wasn't especially stressed either,but perhaps she was, because she wasn't pregnant and she'd beenoff the Pill now for nearly a year. "Don't get stressed about it,"everybody said wisely, as if they were the first to pass on that hotlittle tip. Apparently, the moment your ovaries noticed you wereworried about becoming pregnant, they refused to cooperate. Ohwell, if you're going to get all huffy about it, we'll just close down ...

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Excerpted from Three Wishes: A Novel by Liane Moriarty
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.