Breathing Lessons

Maggie and Ira Moran had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick, Pennsylvania.

Maggie's girlhood friend had lost her husband. Deer Lick lay on a narrow country road some ninety miles north of Baltimore, and the funeral was scheduled for ten-thirty Saturday morning; so Ira figured they should start around eight. This made him grumpy. (He was not an early-morning kind of man.) Also Saturday was his busiest day at work, and he had no one to cover for him. Also their car was in the body shop. It had needed extensive repairs and Saturday morning at opening time, eight o'clock exactly, was the soonest they could get it back. Ira said maybe they'd just better not go, but Maggie said they had to. She and Serena had been friends forever. Or nearly forever: forty-two years, beginning with Miss Kimmel's first grade.

They planned to wake up at seven, but Maggie must have set the alarm wrong and so they overslept. They had to dress in a hurry and rush through breakfast, making do with faucet coffee and cold cereal. Then Ira headed off for the store on foot to leave a note for his customers, and Maggie walked to the body shop. She was wearing her best dress-blue and white sprigged, with cape sleeves-and crisp black pumps, on account of the funeral. The pumps were only medium-heeled but slowed her down some anyway; she was more used to crepe soles.

Another problem was that the crotch of her panty hose had somehow slipped to about the middle of her thighs, so she had to take shortened, unnaturally level steps like a chunky little windup toy wheeling along the sidewalk.

Luckily, the body shop was only a few blocks away. (In this part of town things were intermingled-small frame houses like theirs sitting among portrait photographers' studios, one-woman beauty parlors, driving schools, and podiatry clinics.) And the weather was perfect-a warm, sunny day in September, with just enough breeze to cool her face. She patted down her bangs where they tended to frizz out like a forelock. She hugged her dress-up purse under her arm. She turned left at the corner and there was Harbor Body and Fender, with the peeling green garage doors already hoisted up and the cavernous interior smelling of some sharp-scented paint that made her think of nail polish.

She had her check all ready and the manager said the keys were in the car, so in no time she was free to go. The car was parked toward the rear of the shop, an elderly gray-blue Dodge. It looked better than it had in years. They had straightened the rear bumper, replaced the mangled trunk lid, ironed out a half-dozen crimps here and there, and covered over the dapples of rust on the doors. Ira was right: no need to buy a new car after all. She slid behind the wheel. When she turned the ignition key, the radio came on-Mel Spruce's AM Baltimore, a call-in talk show. She let it run, for the moment. She adjusted the seat, which had been moved back for someone taller, and she tilted the rearview mirror downward. Her own face flashed toward her, round and slightly shiny, her blue eyes quirked at the inner corners as if she were worried about something when in fact she was only straining to see in the gloom. She shifted gears and sailed smoothly toward the front of the shop, where the manager stood frowning at a clipboard just outside his office door.

Today's question on AM Baltimore was: "What Makes an Ideal Marriage?" A woman was phoning in to say it was common interests. "Like if you both watch the same kind of programs on TV," she explained. Maggie couldn't care less what made an ideal marriage. (She'd been married twenty-eight years.) She rolled down her window and called, "Bye now!" and the manager glanced up from his clipboard. She glided past him-a woman in charge of herself, for once, lipsticked and medium-heeled and driving an undented car.

A soft voice on the radio said, "Well, I'm about to remarry? The first time was purely for love? It was genuine, true love and it didn't work at all. Next Saturday I'm marrying for security."

Maggie looked over at the dial and said, "Fiona?"

She meant to brake, but accelerated instead and shot out of the garage and directly into the street. A Pepsi truck approaching from the left smashed into her left front fender-the only spot that had never, up till now, had the slightest thing go wrong with it.

Back when Maggie played baseball with her brothers, she used to get hurt but say she was fine, for fear they would make her quit. She'd pick herself up and run on without a limp, even if her knee was killing her.

Now she was reminded of that, for when the manager rushed over, shouting, "What the . . . ? Are you all right?" she stared straight ahead in a dignified way and told him, "Certainly. Why do you ask?" and drove on before the Pepsi driver could climb out of his truck, which was probably just as well considering the look on his face. But in fact her fender was making a very upsetting noise, something like a piece of tin dragging over gravel, so as soon as she'd turned the corner and the two men-one scratching his head, one waving his arms-had disappeared from her rearview mirror, she came to a stop. Fiona was not on the radio anymore.

Instead a woman with a raspy tenor was comparing her five husbands.

Maggie cut the motor and got out. She could see what was causing the trouble. The fender was crumpled inward so the tire was hitting against it; she was surprised the wheel could turn, even. She squatted on the curb, grasped the rim of the fender in both hands, and tugged. (She remembered hunkering low in the tall grass of the outfield and stealthily, winc-ingly peeling her jeans leg away from the patch of blood on her knee.) Flakes of gray-blue paint fell into her lap. Someone passed on the sidewalk behind her but she pretended not to notice and tugged again. This time the fender moved, not far but enough to clear the tire, and she stood up and dusted off her hands. Then she climbed back inside the car but for a minute simply sat there. "Fiona!" she said again. When she restarted the engine, the radio was advertising bank loans and she switched it off.

Ira was waiting in front of his store, unfamiliar and oddly dashing in his navy suit. A shock of ropy black, gray-threaded hair hung over his forehead. Above him a metal sign swung in the breeze: SAM'S FRAME SHOP.

PICTURE FRAMING. MATTING. YOUR NEEDLEWORK PROFESSIONALLY DISPLAYED. Sam was Ira's father, who had not had a thing to do with the business since coming down with a "weak heart" thirty years before. Maggie always put "weak heart" in quotation marks. She made a point of ignoring the apartment windows above the shop, where Sam spent his cramped, idle, querulous days with Ira's two sisters. He would probably be standing there watching. She parked next to the curb and slid over to the passenger seat.

Ira's expression was a study as he approached the car. Starting out pleased and approving, he rounded the hood and drew up short when he came upon the left fender. His long, bony, olive face grew longer. His eyes, already so narrow you couldn't be sure if they were black or merely dark brown, turned to puzzled, downward-slanting slits. He opened the door and got in and gave her a sorrowful stare.

"There was an unexpected situation," Maggie told him.

"Just between here and the body shop?"

"I heard Fiona on the radio."

"That's five blocks! Just five or six blocks."

"Ira, Fiona's getting married."

He gave up thinking of the car, she was relieved to see. Something cleared on his forehead. He looked at her a moment and then said, "Fiona who?"

"Fiona your daughter-in-law, Ira. How many Fionas do we know? Fiona the mother of your only grandchild, and now she's up and marrying some total stranger purely for security."

Ira slid the seat farther back and then pulled away from the curb. He seemed to be listening for something- perhaps for the sound of the wheel hitting. But evidently her tug on the fender had done the trick. He said, "Where'd you hear this?"

"On the radio while I was driving."

"They'd announce a thing like that on the radio?"

"She telephoned it in."

"That seems kind of ... self-important, if you want my honest opinion," Ira said.

'"No, she was just-and she said that Jesse was the only one she'd ever truly loved."

"She said this on the radio!"

"It was a talk show, Ira."

"Well, I don't know why everyone has to go spilling their guts in public these days," Ira said.

"Do you suppose Jesse could have been listening?" Maggie asked. The thought had just occurred to her.

"Jesse? At this hour? He's doing well if he's up before noon."

Maggie didn't argue with that, although she could have. The fact was that Jesse was an early riser, and anyhow, he worked on Saturdays. What Ira was implying was that he was shiftless. (Ira was much harder on their son than Maggie was. He didn't see half as many good points to him.) She faced forward and watched the shops and houses sliding past, the few pedestrians out with their dogs. This had been the driest summer in memory and the sidewalks had a chalky look. The air hung like gauze. A boy in front of Poor Man's Grocery was tenderly dusting his bicycle spokes with a cloth.

"So you started out on Empry Street," Ira said.

"Hmm?"

"Where the body shop is."

"Yes, Empry Street."

"And then cut over to Daimler . . ."

He was back on the subject of the fender. She said, "I did it driving out of the garage."

"You mean right there? Right at the body shop?"

"I went to hit the brake but I hit the gas instead."

"How could that happen?"

"Well, Fiona came on the radio and I was startled."

"I mean the brake isn't something you have to think about, Maggie. You've been driving since you were sixteen years old. How could you mix up the brake with the gas pedal?"

"I just did, Ira. All right? I just got startled and I did. So let's drop it."

"I mean a brake is more or less reflex."

"If it means so much to you I'll pay for it out of my salary."

Now it was his turn to hold his tongue. She saw him start to speak and then change his mind. (Her salary was laughable. She tended old folks in a nursing home.)

If they'd had more warning, she thought, she would have cleaned the car's interior before they set out. The dashboard was littered with parking-lot stubs. Soft-drink cups and paper napkins covered the floor at her feet.

Also there were loops of black and red wire sagging beneath the glove compartment; nudge them accidentally as you crossed your legs and you'd disconnect the radio. She considered that to be Ira's doing. Men just generated wires and cords and electrical tape everywhere they went, somehow. They might not even be aware of it.

They were traveling north on Belair Road now. The scenery grew choppy.

Stretches of playgrounds and cemeteries were broken suddenly by clumps of small businesses-liquor stores, pizza parlors, dark little bars and taverns dwarfed by the giant dish antennas on their roofs. Then another playground would open out. And the traffic was heavier by the minute.

Everyone else was going somewhere festive and Saturday-morningish, Maggie was certain. Most of the back seats were stuffed with children. It was the hour for gymnastics lessons and baseball practice.

"The other day," Maggie told Ira, "I forgot how to say 'car pool.' "

"Why would you need to remember?" Ira asked.

"Well, that's my point."

"Pardon?"

"It shows you how time has passed, is what I'm saying. I wanted to tell one of my patients her daughter wouldn't be visiting. I said, 'Today's her day for, um,' and I couldn't think of the words. I could not think of

'car pool.' But it seems like just last week that Jesse had a game or hockey camp, Daisy had a Brownie meeting . . . Why, I used to spend all Saturday behind the wheel!"

"Speaking of which," Ira said, "was it another vehicle you hit? Or just a telephone pole?"

Maggie dug in her purse for her sunglasses. "It was a truck," she said.

"Good grief. You do it any damage?"

"I didn't notice."

"You didn't notice."

"I didn't stop to look."

She put on her sunglasses and blinked. Everything turned muted and more elegant.

"You left the scene of an accident, Maggie?"

"It wasn't an accident! It was only one of those little, like, kind of things that just happen. Why make such a big deal of it?"

"Let me see if I've got this straight," Ira said. "You zoomed out of the body shop, slammed into a truck, and kept on going."

"No, the truck slammed into me."

"But you were the one at fault."

"Well, yes, I suppose I was, if you insist on holding someone to blame."

"And so then you just drove on away."

"Right."

He was silent. Not a good silence.

"It was a great big huge Pepsi truck," Maggie said. "It was practically an armored tank! I bet I didn't so much as scratch it."

"But you never checked to make sure."

"I was worried I'd be late," Maggie said. "You're the one who insisted on allowing extra travel time."

"You realize the body-shop people have your name and address, don't you?

All that driver has to do is ask them. We're going to find a policeman waiting for us on our doorstep."

"Ira, will you drop it?" Maggie asked. "Don't you see I have a lof on my mind? I'm heading toward the funeral of my oldest, dearest friend's husband; no telling what Serena's dealing with right now, and here I am, a whole state away. And then on top of that I have to hear it on the radio that Fiona's getting married, when it's plain as the nose on your face she and Jesse still love each other. They've always loved each other; they never stopped; it's just that they can't, oh, connect, somehow. And besides that, my one and only grandchild is all at once going to have to adjust to a brand-new stepfather. I feel like we're just flying apart! All my friends and relatives just flying off from me like the ... expanding universe or something! Now we'll never see that child, do you realize that!"

"We never see her anyhow," Ira said mildly. He braked for a red light.

"For all we know, this new husband could be a mo-lester," Maggie said.

"I'm sure Fiona would choose better than that, Maggie."

She shot him a look. (It wasn't like him to say anything good about Fiona.) He was peering up at the traffic light. Squint lines radiated from the corners of his eyes. "Well, of course she would try to choose well," Maggie said carefully, "but even the most sensible person on God's earth can't predict every single problem, can she? Maybe he's somebody smooth and suave. Maybe he'll treat Leroy s just fine till he's settled into the family."

The light changed. Ira drove on.

"Leroy," Maggie said reflectively. "Do you think we'll ever get used to that name? Sounds like a boy's name. Sounds like a football player. And the way they pronounce it: Lee-ray. Country."

"Did you bring that map I set out on the breakfast table?" Ira asked.

"Sometimes I think we should just start pronouncing it our way," Maggie said. "Le-roy." She considered.

"The map, Maggie. Did you bring it?"

"It's in my purse. Le Rwah," she said, gargling the R like a Frenchman.

"It's not as if we still had anything to do with her," Ira said.

"We could, though, Ira. We could visit her this very afternoon."

"Huh?"

"Look at where they live: Cartwheel, Pennsylvania. It's practically on the road to Deer Lick. What we could do," she said, digging through her purse, "is go to the funeral, see, and . . . Oh, where is that map? Go to the funeral and then head back down Route One to ... You know, I don't think I brought that map after all."

"Great, Maggie."

"I think I left it on the table."

"I asked you when we were setting out, remember? I said, "Are you going to bring the map, or am I?' You said, 'I am. I'll just stick it in my purse.' "

"Well, I don't know why you're making such a fuss about it," Maggie said.

"All we've got to do is watch the road signs; anyone could manage that much."

"It's a little more complicated than that," Ira said.

"Besides, we have those directions Serena gave me over the phone."

"Maggie. Do you honestly believe any directions of Serena's could get us where we'd care to go? Ha! We'd find ourselves in Canada someplace. We'd be off in Arizona!"

"Well, you don't have to get so excited about it."

"We would never see home again," Ira said.

Maggie shook her billfold and a pack of Kleenex from her purse.

"Serena's the one who made us late for her own wedding reception, remember that?" Ira said. "At that crazy little banquet hall we spent an hour locating."

"Really, Ira. You always act like women are such flibbertigibbets,"

Maggie said. She gave up searching through her purse; evidently she had mislaid Serena's directions as well. She said, "It's Fiona's own good I'm thinking of. She'll need us to baby-sit."

"Baby-sit?"

"During the honeymoon."

He gave her a look that she couldn't quite read.

"She's getting married next Saturday," Maggie said. "You can't take a seven-year-old on a honeymoon."

He still said nothing.

They were out beyond the city limits now and the houses had thinned. They passed a used-car lot, a scratchy bit of woods, a shopping mall with a few scattered early-bird cars parked on a concrete wasteland. Ira started whistling. Maggie stopped fiddling with her purse straps and grew still.

There were times when Ira didn't say a dozen words all day, and even when he did talk you couldn't guess what he was feeling. He was a closed-in, isolated man- his most serious flaw. But what he failed to realize was, his whistling could tell the whole story. For instance-an unsettling example-after a terrible fight in the early days of their marriage they had more or less smoothed things over, patted them into place again, and then he'd gone off to work whistling a song she couldn't identify. It wasn't till later that the words occurred to her. / wonder if I care as much, was the way they went, as I did before. . . .

But often the association was something trivial, something circumstantial-"This Old House" while he tackled a minor repair job, or

"The Wichita Lineman" whenever he helped bring in the laundry.. Do, do that voodoo . . . he whistled unknowingly, five minutes after circling a pile of dog do on the sidewalk. And of course there were times when Maggie had no idea what he was whistling. This piece right now, say: something sort of croony, something they might play on WLIF. Well, maybe he'd merely heard it while shaving, in which case it meant nothing at all.

A Patsy Cline song; that's what it was. Patsy Cline's "Crazy."

She sat up sharply and said, "Perfectly sane people baby-sit their grandchildren, Ira Moran."

He looked startled.

"They keep them for months. Whole summers," she told him.

He said, "They don't pay drop-in visits, though."

"Certainly they do!"

"Ann Landers claims drop-in visits are inconsiderate," he said.

Ann Landers, his personal heroine.

"And it's not like we're blood relatives," he said. "We're not even Fiona's in-laws anymore."

"We're Leroy's grandparents till the day we die," Maggie told him.

He didn't have any answer for that.

This stretch of road was such a mess. Things had been allowed to just happen-a barbecue joint sprouting here, a swim-pool display room there. A pickup parked on the shoulder overflowed with pumpkins: ALL u CAN CARRY

$., the hand-lettered sign read. The pumpkins reminded Maggie of fall, but in fact it was so warm now that a line of moisture stood out on her upper lip. She rolled down her window, recoiled from the hot air, and rolled it up again. Anyway, enough of a breeze came from Ira's side. He drove one-handed, with his left elbow jutting over the sill. The sleeves of his suit had rucked up to show his wristbones.

Serena used to say Ira was a mystery. That was a compliment, in those days. Maggie wasn't even dating Ira, she was engaged to someone else, but Serena kept saying, "How can you resist him? He's such a mystery. He's so mysterious." "I don't have to resist him. He's not after me," Maggie had said. Although she had wondered. (Serena was right. He was such a mystery.) But Serena herself had chosen the most open-faced boy in the world. Funny old Max! Not a secret in him. "This here is my happiest memory," Max had said once. (He'd been twenty at die time, just finishing his freshman year at UNC.) "Me and these two fraternity brothers, we go out partying. And I have a tad bit too much to drink, so coming home I pass out in the back seat and when I wake up they've driven clear to Carolina 'Beach and left me there on the sand. Big joke on me: Ha-ha. It's six o'clock in the morning and I sit up and all I can see is sky, layers and layers of hazy sky that just kind of turn into sea lower down, without the least dividing line. So I stand up and fling off my clothes and go racing into the surf, all by my lonesome. Happiest day of my life."

What if someone had told him then that thirty years later he'd be dead of cancer, with that ocean morning the clearest picture left of him in Maggie's mind? The haze, the feel of warm air on bare skin, the phock of the first cold, briny-smelling breaker-Maggie might as well have been there herself. She was grateful suddenly for the sunlit clutter of billboards jogging past; even for the sticky vinyl upholstery plastered to the backs of her arms.

Ira said, "Who would she be marrying, I wonder."

"What?" Maggie asked. She felt a little dislocated.

"Fiona."

"Oh," Maggie said. "She didn't say."

Ira was trying to pass an oil truck. He tilted his head to the left, peering for oncoming traffic. After a moment he said, "I'm surprised she didn't announce that too, while she was at it."

"All she said was, she was marrying for security. She said she'd married for love once before and it hadn't worked out."

"Love!" Ira said. "She was seventeen years old. She didn't know the first thing about love."

Maggie looked over at him. What was the first thing about love? she wanted to ask. But he was muttering at the oil truck now.

"Maybe this time it's an older man," she said. "Someone sort of fatherly. If she's marrying for security."

"This guy knows perfectly well I'm trying to pass and he keeps spreading over into my lane," Ira told her.

"Maybe she's just getting married so she won't have to go on working."

"I didn't know she worked."

"She got a job, Ira. You know that! She told us that! She got a job at a beauty parlor when Leroy started nursery school."

Ira honked at the oil truck.

"I don't know why you bother sitting in a room with people if you can't make an effort to listen," she said.

Ira said, "Maggie, is something wrong with you today?"

"What do you mean?"

"How come you're acting so irritable?"

"I'm not irritable," she said. She pushed her sunglasses higher. She could see her own nose-the small, rounded tip emerging below the nosepiece.

"It's Serena," he said.

"Serena?"

"You're upset about Serena and that's why you're snapping my head off."

"Well, of course I'm upset," Maggie said. "But I'm certainly not snapping your head off."

"Yes, you are, and it's also why you're going on and on about Fiona when you haven't given a thought to her in years."

"That's not true! How do you know how often I think about Fiona?"

Ira swung out around the oil truck at last.

By now, they had hit real country. Two men were splitting logs in a clearing, watched over by a gleaming black dog. The trees weren't changing color yet, but they had that slightly off look that meant they were just about to.

Maggie gazed at a weathered wooden fence that girdled a field. Funny how a picture stayed in your mind without your knowing it. Then you see the original and you think, Why! It was there all along, like a dream that comes drifting back in pieces halfway through the morning. That fence, for instance. So far they were retracing the road to Cartwheel and she'd seen that fence on her spy trips and unconsciously made it her own.

"Rickrack," she said to Ira.

"Hmm?"

"Don't they call that kind of fence 'rickrack'?"

He glanced over, but it was gone.

She had sat in her parked car some distance from Fiona's mother's house, watching for the teeniest, briefest glimpse of Leroy. Ira would have had a fit if he'd known what she was up to. This was back when Fiona first left, following a scene that Maggie never liked to recall. (She thought of it as That Awful Morning and made it vanish from her mind.) Oh, those days she'd been like a woman possessed; Leroy was not but a baby then, and what did Fiona know about babies? She'd always had Maggie to help her. So Maggie drove to Cartwheel on a free afternoon and parked the car and waited, and soon Fiona stepped forth with Leroy in her arms and set off in the other direction, walking briskly, her long blond hair swinging in sheets and the baby's face a bright little button on her shoulder.

Maggie's heart bounded upward, as if she were in love. In a way, she was in love-with Leroy and Fiona both, and even with her own son as he had looked while clumsily cradling his daughter against his black leather jacket. But she didn't dare show herself- not yet, at least. Instead she drove home and told Jesse, "I went to Cartwheel today."

His face flew open. His eyes rested on her for one startled, startling instant before he looked away and said, "So?"

."I didn't talk to her, but I could tell she misses you. She was walking all alone with Leroy. Nobody else."

"Do you think I care about that?" Jesse asked. "What do you think / care?"

The next morning, though, he borrowed the car. Maggie was relieved. (He was a loving, gentle, warmhearted boy, with an uncanny gift for drawing people toward him. This would be settled in no time.) He stayed gone all day-she phoned hourly from work to check-and returned as she was cooking supper. "Well?" she asked.

"Well, what?" he said, and he climbed the stairs and shut himself in his room.

She realized then that it would take a little longer than she had expected.

Three times-on Leroy's first three birthdays-she and Ira had made conventional visits, prearranged grandparent visits with presents; but in Maggie's mind the real visits were her spy trips, which continued without her planning them as if long, invisible threads were pulling her northward. She would think she was heading to the supermarket but she'd find herself on Route One instead, already clutching her coat collar close around her face so as not to be recognized. She would hang out in Cartwheel's one playground, idly inspecting her fingernails next to the sandbox. She would lurk in the alley, wearing Ira's sister Junie's bright-red wig. At moments she imagined growing Qld at this. Maybe she would hire on as a crossing guard when Leroy started school. Maybe she'd pose as a Girl Scout leader, renting a little Girl Scout of her own if that was what was required. Maybe she'd serve as a chaperon for Leroy's senior prom. Well. No"point in getting carried .away. She knew from Jesse's dark silences, from the listlessness with which Fiona pushed the baby swing in the playground, that they surely couldn't stay apart much longer. Could they?

Then one afternoon she shadowed Fiona's mother as she wheeled Leroy's stroller up to Main Street. Mrs. Stuckey was a slatternly, shapeless woman who smoked cigarettes. Maggie didn't trust her as far as she could throw her, and rightly so, for look at what she did: parked Leroy outside the Cure-Boy Pharmacy and left her there while she went in. Maggie was horrified. Leroy could be kidnapped! She could be kidnapped by any passerby. Maggie approached the stroller and squatted down in front of it. "Honey?" she said. "Want to come away with your granny?" The child stared at her. She was, oh, eighteen months or so by then, and her face had seemed surprisingly grown up. Her legs had lost their infant chubbiness. Her eyes were the same milky blue as Fiona's and slightly flat, blank, as if she didn't know who Maggie was. "It's Grandma," Maggie said, but Leroy began squirming and craning all around.

"Mom-Mom?" she said. Unmistakably, she was looking toward the door where Mrs. Stuckey had disappeared. Maggie stood up and walked away quickly.

The rejection felt like a physical pain, like an actual wound to the chest. She didn't make any more spy trips.

When she'd driven along here in springtime, the woods had been dotted with white dogwood blossoms. They had lightened the green hills the way a sprinkle of baby's breath lightens a bouquet. And once she'd seen a small animal that was something other than the usual-not a rabbit or a raccoon but something slimmer, sleeker-and she had braked sharply and adjusted the rearview mirror to study it as she left it behind. But it had already darted into the underbrush.

"Depend on Serena to make things difficult," Ira was saying now. "She could have phoned as soon as Max died, but no, she waits until the very last minute. He dies on Wednesday, she calls late Friday night. Too late to contact Triple A about auto routes." He frowned at the road ahead of him. "Urn," he said. "You don't suppose she wants me to be a pallbearer or something, do you?"

"She didn't mention it."

"But she told you she needed our help."

"I think she meant moral support," Maggie said.

"Maybe pallbearing is moral support."

"Wouldn't that be physical support?"

"Well, maybe," Ira said.

They sailed through a small town where groups of little shops broke up the pastures. Several women stood next to a mailbox, talking. Maggie turned her head to watch them. She had a left-out, covetous feeling, as if they were people she knew.

"If she wants me to be a pallbearer I'm not dressed right," Ira said.

"Certainly you're dressed right."

"I'm not wearing a black suit," he said.

"You don't own a black suit."

"I'm in navy."

"Navy's fine."

"Also I've got that trick back."

She glanced at him.

"And it's not as if I was ever very close to him," he said.

Maggie reached over to the steering wheel and laid a hand on his. "Never mind," she told him. "I bet anything she wants us just to be sitting there."

He gave her a rueful grin, really no more than a tuck of the cheek.

How peculiar he was about death! He couldn't handle even minor illness and had found reasons to stay away from the hospital the time she had her appendix out; he claimed he'd caught a cold and might infect her.

Whenever one of the children fell sick he'd pretended it wasn't happening. He'd told her she was imagining things. Any hint that he wouldn't live forever-when he had to deal with life insurance, for instance-made him grow set-faced and stubborn and resentful. Maggie, on the other hand, worried she would live forever-maybe because of all she'd seen at the home.

And if she were the one to die first, he would probably pretend that that hadn't happened, either. He would probably just go on about his business, whistling a tune the same as always.

What tune would he be whistling?

They were crossing the Susquehanna River now and the lacy, Victorian-looking superstructure of the Conowingo power plant soared on their right. Maggie rolled down her window and leaned out. She could hear the distant rush of water; she was almost breathing water, drinking in the spray that rose like smoke from far below the bridge.

"You know what just occurred to me," Ira said, raising his voice. "That artist woman, what's-her-name. She was bringing a bunch of paintings to the shop this morning."

Maggie closed her window again. She said, "Didn't you turn on your answering machine?"

"What good would that do? She'd already arranged to come in."

"Maybe we could stop off somewhere and phone her."

"I don't have her number with me," Ira said. Then he said, "Maybe we could phone Daisy and ask her to do it."

"Daisy would be at work by now," Maggie told him.

"Shoot."

Daisy floated into Maggie's mind, trim and pretty, with Ira's dark coloring and Maggie's small bones. "Oh, dear," Maggie said. "I hate to miss her last day at home."

"She isn't home anyhow; you just told me so."

"She will be later on, though."

"You'll see plenty of her tomorrow," Ira pointed out. "Good and plenty."

Tomorrow they were driving Daisy to college-her freshman year, her first year away. Ira said, "All day cooped up in a car, you'll be sick to death of her."

"No, I won't! I would never get sick of Daisy!"

"Tell me that tomorrow," Ira said.

"Here's a thought," Maggie said. "Skip the reception."

"What reception?"

"Or whatever they call it when you go to somebody's house after the funeral."

"Fine with me," Ira said.

"That way we could still get home early even if we stopped off at Fiona's."

"Lord God, Maggie, are you still on that Fiona crap?"

"If the funeral were over by noon, say, and we went straight from there to Cartwheel-"

Ira swerved to the right, careening onto the gravel. For a moment she thought it was some kind of tantrum. (She often had a sense of inching closer and closer to the edge of his temper.) But no, he'd pulled up at a gas station, an old-fashioned kind of place, white clapboard, with two men in overalls sitting on a bench in front. "Map," he said briefly, getting out of the car.

Maggie rolled down her window and called after him, "See if they have a snack machine, will you?"

He waved and walked toward the bench.

Now that the car was stopped, the heat flowed through the roof like melting butter. She felt the top of her head grow hot; she imagined her hair turning from brown to some metallic color, brass or copper. She let her fingers dangle lazily out the window.

If she could just get Ira to Fiona's, the rest was easy. He was not immune, after all. He had held that child on his knee. He had answered Leroy's dovelike infant coos in the same respectful tone he'd used with his own babies, "Is that so.

You don't say. Well, I believe now that you mention it I did hear something of the sort." Till Maggie (always so gullible) had had to ask, "What? What did she tell you?" Then he'd give her one of his wry, quizzical looks; and so would the baby, Maggie sometimes fancied.

No, he wasn't immune, and he would set eyes on Leroy and remember instantly how they were connected. People had to be reminded, that was all. The way the world was going now, it was so easy to forget. Fiona must have forgotten how much in love she had been at the start, how she had trailed after Jesse and that rock band of his. She must have put it out of her mind on purpose, for she was no more immune than Ira. Maggie had seen the way her face fell when they arrived for Leroy's first birthday and Jesse turned out not to be with them. It was pride at work now; injured pride. "But remember?" Maggie would ask her. "Remember those early days when all you cared about was being near each other? Remember how you'd walk everywhere together, each with a hand in the rear pocket of the other's jeans?" That had seemed sort of tacky at the time, but now it made her eyes fill with tears.

Oh, this whole day was so terribly sad, the kind of day when you realize that everyone eventually got lost from everyone else; and she had not written to Serena for over a year or even heard her voice till Serena phoned last night crying so hard she was garbling half her words. At this moment (letting a breeze ripple through her fingers like warm water), Maggie felt that the entire business of time's passing was more than she could bear. Serena, she wanted to say, just think: all those things we used to promise ourselves we'd never, ever do when we grew up. We promised we wouldn't mince when we walked barefoot. We promised we wouldn't lie out on the beach tanning instead of swimming, or swimming with our chins high so we wouldn't wet our hairdos. We promised we wouldn't wash the dishes right after supper because that would take us away from our husbands; remember that? How long since you saved the dishes till morning so you could be with Max? How long since Max even noticed that you didn't?

Ira came toward her, opening out a map. Maggie removed her sunglasses and blotted her eyes on her sleeves. "Find what you wanted?" she called, and he said, "Oh ..." and disappeared behind the map, still walking. The back of the paper was covered with photos of scenic attractions. He reached his side of the car, refolded the map, and got in. "Wish I could've called Triple A," he told her. He started the engine.

"Well, I wouldn't worry," she said. "We've got loads of extra time."

"Not really, Maggie. And look how the traffic is picking up. Every little old lady taking her weekend drive."

A ridiculous remark; the traffic was mostly trucks. They pulled out in front of a moving van, behind a Buick and another oil truck, or perhaps the same truck they had passed a while back. Maggie replaced her sunglasses.

TRY JESUS, YOU WON'T REGRET IT, a billboard read. And BUBBA MCDUFF'S SCHOOL OF COSMETOLOGY. They entered Pennsylvania and the road grew smooth for a few hundred yards, like a good intention, before settling back to the same old scabby, stippled surface. The views were long and curved and green-a small child's drawing of farm country. Distinct black cows grazed on the hillsides. BEGIN ODOMETER TEST, Maggie read. She sat up straighter. Almost immediately a tiny sign flashed by: o. i MI. She glanced at their odometer. "Point eight exactly," she told Ira.

"Hmm?"

"I'm testing our odometer."

Ira loosened the knot of his tie.

Two tenths of a mile. Three tenths. At four tenths, she felt they were falling behind. Maybe she was imagining things, but it seemed to her that the numeral lagged somewhat as it rolled upward. At five tenths, she was almost sure of it. "How long since you had this checked?" she asked Ira.

"Had what checked?"

"The odometer."

"Well, never," he said.

"Never! Not once? And you accuse me of poor auto maintenance!"

"Look at that," Ira said. "Some ninety-year-old lady they've let out loose on the highway. Can't even see above her steering wheel."

He veered around the Buick, which meant that he completely bypassed one of the mileage signs. "Darn," Maggie said. "You made me miss it."

He didn't respond. He didn't even look sorry. She pinned her eyes far ahead, preparing for the seven tenths marker. When it appeared she glanced at the odometer and the numeral was just creeping up. It made her feel itchy and edgy. Oddly enough, though, the next numeral came more quickly. It might even have been too quick. Maggie said, "Oh, oh."

"What's the matter?"

"This is making me a nervous wreck," she said. She was watching for the road sign and monitoring the odometer dial, both at once. The six rolled up on the dial several seconds ahead of the sign, she could swear. She' tsked. Ira looked over at her. "Slow down," she told him.

"Huh?"

"Slow down! I'm not sure we're going to make it. See, here the seven comes, rolling up, up ... and where's the sign? Where's the sign! Come on, sign! We're losing! We're too far ahead! We're-"

The sign popped into view. "Ah," she said. The seven settled into place at exactly the same instant, so precisely that she almost heard it click.

"Whew!" she said. She sank back in her seat. "That was too close for comfort."

"They do set all our gauges at the factory, you know," Ira said.

"Sure, years and years ago," she told them. "I'm exhausted."

Ira said, "I wonder how long we should keep to Route One?"

"I feel I've been wrung through a wringer," Maggie said.

She made little plucking motions at the front of her dress.

Now collections of parked trucks and RVs appeared in clearings at random intervals-no humans around, no visible explanation for anybody's stopping there. Maggie had noticed this on her earlier trips and never understood it. Were the drivers off fishing, or hunting, or what? Did country people have some kind of secret life?

"Another thing is their banks," she told Ira. "All these towns have banks that look like itty-bitty brick houses, have you noticed? With yards around them, and flower beds. Would you put your faith in such a bank?"

"No reason not to."

"I just wouldn't feel my money was secure."

"Your vast wealth," Ira teased her.

"I mean it doesn't seem professional."

"Now, according to the map," he said, "we could stay on Route One a good deal farther up than Oxford. Serena had us cutting off at Oxford, if I heard you right, but. . . Check it for me, will you?"

Maggie took the map from the seat between them and opened it, one square at a time. She was hoping not to have to spread it out completely. Ira would get after her

^ for refolding it wrong. "Oxford," she said. "Is that in Maryland or Pennsylvania?"

"It's in Pennsylvania, Maggie. Where Highway Ten leads off to the north."

"Well, then! I distinctly remember she told us to take Highway Ten."

"Yes, but if we ... Have you been listening to a word I say? If we stayed on Route One, see, we could make better time, and I think there's a cutoff further up that would bring us directly to Deer Lick."

"Well, she must have had a reason, Ira, for telling us Highway Ten."

"A reason? Serena? Serena Gill have a reason?"

She shook out the map with a crackle. He always talked like that about her girlfriends. He acted downright jealous of them. She suspected he thought women got together on the sly and gossiped about their husbands.

Typical: He was so self-centered. Although sometimes it did happen, of course.

"Did that service station have a snack machine?" she asked him.

"Just candy bars. Stuff you don't like."

"I'm dying of hunger."

"I could have got you a candy bar, but I thought you wouldn't eat it."

"Didn't they have potato chips or anything? I'm starving."

"Baby Ruths, Fifth Avenues ..."

She made a face and went back to the map.

"Well, I would say take Highway Ten," she told him.

"I could swear I saw a later cutoff."

"Not really," she said.

"Not really? What does that mean? Either there's a cutoff or there isn't."

"Well," she said, "to tell the truth, I haven't quite located Deer Lick yet."

He flicked on his turn signal. "We'll find you someplace to eat and I'll take another look at the map," he said.

"Eat? I don't want to eat!"

"You just said you were starving to death."

"Yes, but I'm on a diet! All I want is a snack!"

"Fine. We'll get you a snack, then," he said.

"Really, Ira, I hate how you always try to undermine my diets."

"Then order a cup of coffee or something. I need to look at the map."

He was driving down a paved road that was lined with identical new ranch houses, each with a metal toolshed out back in the shape of a tiny red barn trimmed in white. Maggie wouldn't have thought there'd be any place to eat in such a neighborhood, but sure enough, around the next bend they found a frame building with a few cars parked in front of it. A dusty neon sign glowed in the window: NELL'S GROCERY & CAFE. Ira parked next to a Jeep with a- Judas Priest sticker on the bumper. Maggie opened her door and stepped out, surreptitiously hitching up the crotch of her panty hose.

The grocery smelled of store bread and waxed paper. It reminded her of a grade-school lunchroom. Here and there women stood gazing at canned goods. The cafe lay at the rear-one long counter, with faded color photos of orange scrambled eggs and beige link sausages lining the wall behind it. Maggie and Ira settled on adjacent stools and Ira flattened his map on the counter. Maggie watched the waitress cleaning a griddle. She sprayed it with something, scraped up thick gunk with a spatula, and sprayed again. From behind she was a large white rectangle, her gray bun tacked down with black bobby pins. "What you going to order?" she asked finally, not turning around.

Ira said, "Just coffee for me, please," without looking up from his map.

Maggie had more trouble deciding. She took off her sunglasses and peered at the color photos. "Well, coffee too, I guess," she said, "and also, let me think, I ought to have a salad or something, but-"

"We don't serve any salads," the waitress said. She set aside her spray bottle and came over to Maggie, wiping her hands on her apron. Her eyes, netted with wrinkles, were an eerie light green, like old beach glass.

"The onliest thing I could offer is the lettuce and tomato from a sandwich."

"Well, maybe just a sack of those taco chips from the rack, then," Maggie said happily. "Though I know I shouldn't." She watched the waitress pour two mugs of coffee. "I'm trying to lose ten pounds by Thanksgiving. I've been working on the same ten pounds forever, but this time I'm determined."

"Shoot! You don't need to lose weight," the woman said, setting the mugs in front of them. The red stitching across her breast pocket read Mabel, a name Maggie had not heard since her childhood. What had become of all the Mabels? She tried to picture giving a new little baby that name.

Meanwhile the woman was telling her, "I despise how everybody tries to look like a toothpick nowadays."

"That's what Ira says; he likes me the weight I am now," Maggie said. She glanced over at Ira but he was deep in his map, or else just pretending to be. It always embarrassed him when she took up with outsiders. "But then anytime I go to buy a dress it hangs wrong, you know? Like they don't expect me to have a bustline. I lack willpower is the problem. I crave salty things. Pickly things. Hot spices." She accepted the sack of taco chips and held it up, demonstrating.

"How about me?" Mabel asked. "Doctor says I'm so overweight my legs are going."

"Oh, you are not! Show me where you're overweight!"

"He says it wouldn't be so bad if I was in some other job but waitressing; it gets to my veins."

"Our daughter's been working as a waitress," Maggie said. She tore open the sack of taco chips and bit into one. "Sometimes she's on her feet for eight hours straight without a break. She started out in sandals but switched to crepe soles soon enough, I can tell you, even though she swore she wouldn't."

"You are surely not old enough to have a daughter that grown up," Mabel said.

"Oh, she's still a teenager; this was just a summer job. Tomorrow she leaves for college."

"College! A smarty," Mabel said.

"Oh, well, / don't know," Maggie said. "She did get a full scholarship, though." She held out the sack. "You want some?"

Mabel took a handful. "Mine are all boys," she told Maggie. "Studying came about as natural to them as flying."

"Yes, our boy was that way."

" 'Why aren't you doing your homework?' I'd ask them. They'd have a dozen excuses. Most often they claimed the teacher didn't assign them any, which of course was an out-and-out story."

"That's just exactly like Jesse," Maggie said.

"And their daddy!" Mabel said. "He was forever taking up for them. Seemed they were all in cahoots and I was left out in the cold. What I wouldn't give for a daughter, I tell you!"

"Well, daughters have their drawbacks too," Maggie said. She could see that Ira wanted to break in with a question (he'd placed a finger on the map and was looking at Mabel expectantly), but once he got his answer he'd be ready to leave, so she made him hold off a bit. "For instance, daughters have more secrets. I mean you think they're talking to you, but it's small talk. Daisy, for instance: She's always been so quiet and obedient. Then up she pops with this scheme to go away to school. I had no idea she was plotting that! I said, 'Daisy? Aren't you happy here at home?' I mean of course I knew she was planning on college, but I notice University of Maryland is good enough for other people's children. 'What's wrong with closer to Baltimore?' I asked her, but she said, 'Oh, Mom, you knew all along I was aiming for someplace Ivy League.' I knew no such thing! I had no idea!

And since she got the scholarship, why, she's changed past recognition.

Isn't that so, Ira. Ira says-" she said, rushing on (having regretted giving him the opening), "Ira says she's just growing up. He says it's just growing pains that make her so picky and critical, and only a fool would take it to heart so. But it's difficult! It's so difficult! It's like all at once, every little thing we do is wrong; like she's hunting up good reasons not to miss us when she goes. My hair's too curly and I talk too much and I eat too many fried foods. And Ira's suit is cut poorly and he doesn't know how to do business."

Mabel was nodding, all sympathy, but Ira of course thought Maggie was acting overemotional. He didn't say so, but he shifted in his seat; that was how she knew. She ignored him. "You know what she told me the other day?" she asked Mabel. "I was testing out this tuna casserole. I served it up for supper and I said, 'Isn't it delicious? Tell me honestly what you think.' And Daisy said-"

Tears pricked her eyelids. She took a deep breath. "Daisy just sat there and studied me for the longest time," she said, "with this kind of ... fascinated expression on her face, and then she said, 'Mom? Was there a certain conscious point in your life when you decided to settle for being ordinary?' "

She meant to go on, but her lips were trembling. She laid aside her chips and fumbled in her purse for a Kleenex. Mabel clucked. Ira said, "For God's sake, Maggie."

"I'm sorry," she told Mabel. "It got tcune."

"Well, sure it did," Mabel said soothingly. She slid Maggie's coffee mug a little closer to her. "Naturally it did!"

"I mean, to me I'm not ordinary," Maggie said.

"No indeedy!" Mabel said. "You tell her, honey! You tell her that. You tell her to stop thinking that way. Know what I said to Bobby, my oldest?

This was over a tuna dish too, come to think of it; isn't that a coincidence. He announces he's sick to death of foods that are mingled together. I say to him, 'Young man,' I say, 'you can just get on up and leave this table. Leave this house, while you're at it. Find a place of your own,' I say, 'cook your own durn meals, see how you can afford prime rib of beef every night.' And I meant it, too. He thought I was only running my mouth, but he saw soon enough I was serious; I set all his clothes on the hood of his car. Now he lives across town with his girlfriend. He didn't believe I would really truly make him move out."

"But that's just it; I don't want her to move out," Maggie said. "I like to have her at home. I mean look at Jesse: He brought his wife and baby to live with us and I loved it! Ira thinks Jesse's a failure. He says Jesse's entire life was ruined by a single friendship, which is nonsense.

All Don Burnham did was tell Jesse he had singing talent. Call that ruining a life? But you take a boy like Jesse, who doesn't do just brilliantly in school, and whose father's always at him about his shortcomings; and you tell him there's this one special field where he shines-well, what do you expect? Think he'll turn his back on that and forget it?"

"Well, of course not!" Mabel said indignantly.

"Of course not. He took up singing with a hard-rock band. He dropped out of high school and collected a whole following of girls and finally one particular girl and then he married her; nothing wrong with that. Brought her to live in our house because he wasn't making much money. I was thrilled. They had a darling little baby. Then his wife and baby moved out on account of this awful scene, just up and left. It was nothing but an argument really, but you know how those can escalate. I said, 'Ira, go after her; it's your fault she went.' (Ira was right in the thick of that scene and I blame him to this day.) But Ira said no, let her do what she liked. He said let them just go on and go, but I felt she had ripped that child from my flesh and left a big torn spot behind."

"Grandbabies," Mabel said. "Don't get me started."

Ira said, "Not to change the subject, but-"

"Oh, Ira," Maggie told him, "just take Highway Ten and shut up about it."

He gave her a long, icy stare. She buried her nose in her Kleenex, but she knew what kind of stare it was. Then he asked Mabel, "Have you ever been to Deer Lick?"

"Deer Lick," Mabel said. "Seems to me I've heard of it."

"I was wondering where we'd cut off from Route One to get there."

"Now, that I wouldn't know," Mabel told him. She asked Maggie, "Honey, can I pour you more coffee?"

"Oh, no, thank you," Maggie said. In fact, her mug was untouched. She took a little sip to show her appreciation.

Mabel tore the bill off a pad and handed it to Ira. He paid in loose change, standing up to root through his pockets. Maggie, meanwhile, placed her damp Kleenex in the empty chip sack and made a tidy package of it so as not to be any trouble. "Well, it was nice talking to you," she told Mabel.

"Take care, sweetheart," Mabel said.

Maggie had the feeling they ought to kiss cheeks, like women who'd had lunch together.

She wasn't crying anymore, but she could sense Ira's disgust as he led the way to the parking lot. It felt like a sheet of something glassy and flat, shutting her out. He ought to have married Ann Landers, she thought. She slid into the car. The seat was so hot it burned through the back of her dress. Ira got in too and slammed the door behind him. If he had married Ann Landers he'd have just the kind of hard-nosed, sensible wife he wanted. Sometimes, hearing his grunt of approval as he read one of Ann's snappy answers, Maggie felt an actual pang of jealousy.

They passed the ranch houses once again, jouncing along the little paved road. The map lay between them, crisply folded. She didn't ask what he'd decided about routes. She looked out the window, every now and then sniffing as quietly as possible.

"Six and a half years," Ira said. "No, seven now, and you're still dragging up that Fiona business. Telling total strangers it was all my fault she left. You just have to blame someone for it, don't you, Maggie."

"If someone's to blame, why, yes, I do," Maggie told the scenery.

"Never occurred to you it might be your fault, did it."

"Are we going to go through this whole dumb argument again?" she asked, swinging around to confront him.

"Well, who brought it up, I'd like to know?"

"I was merely stating the facts, Ira."

"Who asked for the facts, Maggie? Why do you feel the need to pour out your soul to some waitress?"

"Now, there is nothing wrong with being a waitress," she told him. "It's a perfectly respectable occupation. Our own daughter's been working as a waitress, must I remind you."

"Oh, great, Maggie; another of your logical progressions."

"One thing about you that I really cannot stand," she said, "is how you act so superior. We can't have just a civilized back-and-forth discussion; oh, no. No, you have to make a point of how illogical I am, what a whifflehead I am, how you're so cool and above it all."

"Well, at least I don't spill my life story in public eating places," he told her.

"Oh, just let me out," she said. "I cannot bear your company another second."

"Gladly," he said, but he went on driving.

"Let me out, I tell you!"

He looked over at her. He slowed down. She picked up her purse and clutched it to her chest.

"Are you going to stop this car," she asked, "or do I have to jump from a moving vehicle?"

He stopped the car.

Maggie got out* and slammed the door. She started walking back toward the caf. For a moment it seemed that Ira planned just to sit there, but then she heard him shift gears and drive on.

The sun poured down a great wash of yellow light, and her shoes made little cluttery sounds on the gravel. Her heart was beating extra fast.

She felt pleased, in a funny sort of way. She felt almost drunk with fury and elation.

She passed the first of the ranch houses, where weedy flowers waved along the edge of the front yard and a tricycle lay in the driveway. It certainly was quiet. All she could hear was the distant chirping of birds-their chink! chink! chink! and video! video! video! in the trees far across the fields. She'd lived her entire life with the hum of the city, she realized. You'd think Baltimore was kept running by some giant, ceaseless, underground machine. How had she stood it? Just like that, she gave up any plan for returning. She'd been heading toward the cafe with some vague notion of asking for the nearest Trailways stop, or maybe hitching a ride back home with a reliable-looking trucker; but what was the point of going home?

She passed the second ranch house, which had a mailbox out front shaped like a covered wagon. A fence surrounded the property-just whitewashed stumps linked by swags of whitewashed chain, purely ornamental-and she stopped next to one of the stumps and set her purse on it to take inventory. The trouble with dress-up purses was that they were so small.

Her everyday purse, a canvas tote, could have kept her going for weeks.

("You give the line 'Who steals my purse steals trash' a whole new meaning," her mother had once remarked.) Still, she had the basics: a comb, a pack of Kleenex, and a lipstick. And in her wallet, thirty-four dollars and some change and a blank check. Also two credit cards, but the check was what mattered. She would go to the nearest bank and open the largest account the check would safely cover-say three hundred dollars.

Why, three hundred dollars could last her a long time! Long enough to find work, at least. The credit cards, she supposed, Ira would very soon cancel. Although she might try using them just for this weekend.

She flipped through the rest of the plastic windows in her wallet, passing her driver's license, her library card, a school photo of Daisy, a folded coupon for Affinity shampoo, and a color snapshot of Jesse standing on the front steps at home. Daisy was double-exposed-it was all the rage last year-so her precise, chiseled profile loomed semitransparent behind a full-face view of her with her chin raised haughtily. Jesse wore his mammoth black overcoat from Value Village and a very long red fringed neck scarf that dangled below his knees. She was struck- she was almost injured-by his handsomeness. He had taken Ira's one drop of Indian blood and transformed it into something rich and stunning: high polished cheek-bones, straight black hair, long black lusterless eyes. But the look he gave her was veiled and impassive, as haughty as Daisy's. Neither one of them had any further need of her.

She replaced everything in her purse and snapped it shut. When she started walking again her shoes felt stiff and uncomfortable, as if her feet had changed shape while she was standing. Maybe they'd swollen; it was a very warm day. But even the weather suited her purposes. This way, she could camp out if she had to. She could sleep in a haystack.

Providing haystacks still existed.

Tonight she'd phone Serena and apologize for missing the funeral. She would reverse the charges; she could do that, with Serena. Serena might not want to accept the call at first because Maggie had let her down-Serena was always so quick to take offense-but eventually she'd give in and Maggie would explain. "Listen," she would say, "right now I wouldn't mind going to Ira's funeral." Or maybe that was tactless, in view of the circumstances.

The cafe lay just ahead, and beyond that was a low cinderblock building of some sort and beyond that, she guessed, at least a semblance of a town. It would be one of those scrappy little Route One towns, with much attention given to the requirements of auto travel. She would register at a no-frills motel, the room scarcely larger than the bed, which she pictured, with some enjoyment, as sunken in the middle and covered with a worn chenille spread. She would shop at Nell's Grocery for foods that didn't need cooking. One thing most people failed to realize was that many varieties of canned soup could be eaten cold straight from the tin, and they made a fairly balanced meal, too. (A can opener: She mustn't forget to buy one at the grocery.)

As for employment, she didn't have much hope of finding a nursing home in such a town. Maybe something clerical, then. She knew how to type and keep books, although she wasn't wonderful at it. She'd had a little experience at the frame shop. Maybe an auto-parts store could use her, or she could be one of those women behind the grille at a service station, embossing credit card bills and handing people their keys. If worst came to worst she could punch a cash register. She could wait tables. She could scrub floors, for heaven's sake. She was only forty-eight and her health was perfect, and in spite of what some people might think, she was capable of anything she set her mind to.

She bent to pick a chicory flower. She stuck it in the curls above her left ear.

Ira thought she was a klutz. Everybody did. She had developed a sort of clownish, pratfalling reputation, somehow. In the nursing home once, there'd been a crash and a tinkle of glass, and the charge nurse had said, "Maggie?" Just like that! Not even checking first to make sure! And Maggie hadn't been anywhere near; it was someone else entirely. But that just went to show how people viewed her.

She had assumed when she married Ira that he would always look at her the way he'd looked at her that first night, when she stood in front of him in her trousseau negligee and the only light in the room was the filmy shaded lamp by the bed. She had unbuttoned her top button and then her next-to-top button, just enough to let the negligee slip from her shoulders and hesitate and fall around her ankles. He had looked directly into her eyes, and it seemed he wasn't even breathing. She had assumed that would go on forever.

In the parking lot in front of Nell's Grocery & Cafe two men stood next to a pickup, talking. One was fat and ham-faced and the other was thin and white and wilted. They were discussing someone named Doug who had come out all over in swelters. Maggie wondered what a swelter was. She pictured it as a combination of a sweat and a welt. She knew she must make an odd sight, arriving on foot out of nowhere so dressed up and citified. "Hello!" she cried, sounding like her mother, The men stopped talking and stared at her. The thin one took his cap off finally and looked inside it. Then he put it back on his head.

She could step into the cafe and speak to Mabel, ask if she knew of a job and a place to stay; or she could head straight for town and find something on her own. In a way, she preferred to fend for herself. It would be sort of embarrassing to confess she'd been abandoned by her husband. On the other hand, maybe Mabel knew of some marvelous job. Maybe she knew of the perfect boarding-house, dirt cheap, with kitchen privileges, full of kind-hearted people. Maggie supposed she ought to at least inquire.

She let the screen door slap shut behind her. The grocery was familiar now and she moved through its smells comfortably. At the lunch counter she found Mabel leaning on a wadded-up dishcloth and talking to a man in overalls. They were almost whispering. "Why, you can't do nothing about it," Mabel was saying. "What do they think you can do about it?"

Maggie felt she was intruding. She hadn't counted on having to share Mabel with someone else. She shrank back before she was seen; she skulked in the crackers-and-cookies'aisle, hoping for her rival to depart.

"I been over it and over it," the man said creakily. "I still can't see what else I could have done."

"Good gracious, no."

Maggie picked up a box of Ritz crackers. There used to be a kind of apple pie people made that contained no apples whatsoever, just Ritz crackers.

What would that taste like, she wondered. It didn't seem to her there was the remotest chance it could taste like apple pie. Maybe you soaked the crackers in cider or something first. She looked on the box for the recipe, but it wasn't mentioned.

Now Ira would be starting to realize she was gone. He would be noticing the empty rush of air that comes when a person you're accustomed to is all at once absent.

Would he go on to the funeral without her? She hadn't thought of that.

No, Serena was more Maggie's friend than Ira's. And Max had been just an acquaintance. To tell the truth, Ira didn't have any friends. It was one of the things Maggie minded about him./

He'd be slowing down. He'd be trying to decide. Maybe he had already turned the car around.

He would be noticing how stark and upright a person feels when he's suddenly left on his own.

Maggie set down the Ritz crackers and drifted toward the Fig Newtons.

One time a number of years ago, Maggie had fallen-in love, in a way, with a patient at the nursing home. The very notion was comical, of course. In love! With a man in his seventies! A man who had to ride in a wheelchair if he went any distance at all! But there you are. She was fascinated by his austere white face and courtly manners. She liked his stiff turns of speech, which gave her the feeling he was keeping his own words at a distance. And she knew what pain it caused him to dress so formally each morning, his expression magnificently disengaged as he worked his arthritic, clublike hands into the sleeves of his suit coat. Mr. Gabriel, his name was. "Ben" to everyone else, but "Mr. Gabriel" to Maggie, for she guessed how familiarity alarmed him. And she was diffident about helping him, always asking his permission first. She was careful not to touch him. It was a kind of reverse courtship, you might say. While the others treated him warmly and a little condescendingly, Maggie stood back and allowed him his reserve.

In the office files, she read that he owned a nationally prominent power-tool company. Yes, she could see him in that position. He had a businessman's crisp authority, a businessman's air of knowing what was what. She read that he was widowed and childless, without any close relations except for an unmarried sister in New Hampshire. Until recently he had lived by himself, but shortly after his cook started a minor grease fire in the kitchen he'd applied for admission to the home. His concern, he wrote, was that he was becoming too disabled to escape if his house burned down. Concern! You had to know the man to know what the word concealed: a morbid, obsessive dread of fire, which had taken root with that small kitchen blaze and grown till not even live-in help, and finally not even round-the-clock nursing care, could reassure him.

(Maggie had observed his stony, fixed stare during fire drills-the only occasions on which he seemed truly to be a patient.)

Oh, why was she reading his file? She wasn't supposed to. Strictly speaking, she shouldn't read even his medical record. She was nothing but a geriatric nursing assistant, certified to bathe her charges and feed them and guide them to the toilet.

And even in her imagination, she had always been the most faithful of wives. She had never felt so much as tempted. But now thoughts of Mr.

Gabriel consumed her, and she spent hours inventing new ways to be indispensable to him. He always noticed, and he always thanked her.

"Imagine!" he told a nurse. "Maggie's brought me tomatoes from her own backyard." Maggie's tomatoes were subject to an unusual ailment: They were bulbous, like collections of little red rubber jack balls that had collided and mashed together. This problem had persisted for several years, through several varieties of hybrids. Maggie blamed the tiny plot of city soil she was forced to confine them to (or was it the lack of sun?), but often she sensed, from the amused and tolerant looks they drew, that other people thought it had something to do with Maggie herself-with the knobby, fumbling way she seemed to be progressing through her life.

Yet Mr. Gabriel noticed nothing. He declared her tomatoes smelled like a summer's day in . When she sliced them they resembled doilies-scalloped around the edges, full of holes between intersections-but all he said was: "I can't tell you how much this means to me." He wouldn't even let her salt them. He said they tasted glorious, just as they were.

Well, she wasn't stupid. She realized that what appealed to her was the image he had of her-an image that would have staggered Ira. It would have staggered anyone who knew her. Mr. Gabriel thought she was capable and skillful and efficient. He believed that everything she did was perfect.

He said as much, in so many words. And this was during a very unsatisfactory period in her life, when Jesse was just turning adolescent and negative and Maggie seemed to be going through a quarrelsome spell with Ira. But Mr. Gabriel never guessed any of that. Mr. Gabriel saw someone collected, moving serenely around his room straightening his belongings.

At night she lay awake and concocted dialogues in which Mr. Gabriel confessed that he was besotted with her. He would say he knew that he was too old to attract her physically, but she would interrupt to tell him he was wrong. This was a fact. The mere thought of laying her head against his starched white shoulder could turn her all warm and melting. She would promise to go anywhere with him, anywhere on earth. Should they take Daisy too? (Daisy was five or six at the time.) Of course they couldn't take Jesse; Jesse was no longer a child. But then Jesse would think she loved Daisy better, and she certainly couldn't have that. She wandered off on a sidetrack, imagining what would happen if they did take Jesse. He would lag a few steps behind, wearing one of his all-black outfits, laboring under his entire stereo system and a stack of record albums. She started giggling. Ira stirred in his sleep and said, "Hmm?"

She sobered and hugged herself-a competent, adventurous woman, with infinite possibilities.

Star-crossed, that's what they were; but she seemed to have found a way to be star-crossed differently from anyone else. How would she tend Mr.

Gabriel and still go out to a job? He refused to be left alone. And what job would she go to? Her only employment in all her life had been with the Silver Threads Nursing Home. Fat chance they'd give her a letter of reference after she'd absconded with one of their patients.

Another sidetrack: What if she didn't abscond, but broke the news to Ira in a civilized manner and calmly made new arrangements? She could move into Mr. Gabriel's room. She could rise from his bed every morning and be right there at work; no commute. At night when the nurse came around with the pills, she'd find Maggie and Mr. Gabriel stretched out side by side, staring at the ceiling, with their roommate, Abner Scopes, in the bed along the opposite wall.

Maggie gave another snicker.

This was turning out all skewed, somehow.

Like anyone in love, she constantly found reasons to mention his name.

She told Ira everything about him- his suits and ties, his gallantry, his stoicism. "I don't know why you can't act that keen about my father; he's family," Ira said, missing the point entirely. Ira's father was a whiner, a user. Mr. Gabriel was nothing like him.

Then one morning the home held another fire drill. The alarm bell jangled and the code blared over the loudspeaker: ' 'Dr. Red in Room Two-twenty.'' This happened in the middle of activity hour-an inconvenient time because the patients were so scattered. Those with any manual dexterity were down in the Crafts Room, knotting colored silk flowers. Those too crippled-Mr. Gabriel, for instance-were taking an extra session of P.T. And of course the bedridden were still in their rooms. They were the easy ones.

The rule was that you cleared the halls of all obstructions, shut stray patients into any room available, and tied red cloths to the doorknobs to show which rooms were occupied. Maggie closed off and , where her only bedridden patients lay. She attached red cloths from the broom closet.

Then she coaxed one of Joelle Barrett's wandering old ladies into . There was an empty tray cart next to and she set that inside as well, after which she dashed off to seize Lottie Stein, who was inching along in her walker and humming tunelessly. Maggie put her in with Hepzibah Murray.

Then Joelle arrived, wheeling Lawrence Dunn and calling, "Oops! Til-lie's out!" Tillie was the one Maggie had just stashed in . That was the trouble with these drills. They reminded her of those pocket-sized games where you tried to get all the silver BBs into their nooks at once. She captured Tillie and slammed her back in . Disturbing sounds were coming from . That would be a fight between Lottie and Hepzibah; Hepzibah hated having outsiders in her room. Maggie should have dealt with it, and she should also have gone to the aid of Joelle, who was having quite a struggle with Lawrence, but there was something more important on her mind. She was thinking, of course, about Mr. Gabriel.

By now, he would be catatonic with fear.

She left her corridor. (You were never supposed to do that.) She zipped past the nurses' station, down the stairs, and made a right-angle turn.

The P.T. room lay at the far end of the hall. Both of its swinging doors were shut. She raced toward them, rounding first a folding chair and then a canvas laundry cart, neither of which should have been there. But all at once she heard footsteps, the squeak of rubber soles. She stopped and looked around. Mrs. Wil-lis! Almost certainly it was Mrs. Willis, her supervisor; and here Maggie was, miles from her proper station.

She did the first thing that came to mind. She vaulted into the laundry cart.

Absurd, she knew it instantly. She was cursing herself even as she sank among the crumpled linens. She might have got away with it, though, except that she'd set the cart to rolling. Somebody grabbed it and drew it to a halt. A growly voice said, "What in the world?"

Maggie opened her eyes, which she had closed the way small children do in one last desperate attempt to make themselves invisible. Bertha Washington, from the kitchen, stood gaping down at her.

"Hi, there," Maggie said.

"Well, I never!" Bertha said. "Sateen, come look at whoall's waiting for the laundry man."

Sateen Bishop's face arrived next to Bertha's, breaking into a smile.

"You goofball, Maggie! What will you get up to next? Most folks just takes baths," she said.

"This was a miscalculation," Maggie told them. She stood up, batting away a towel that draped one shoulder. "Ah, well, I guess I'd better be-"

But Sateen said, "Off we goes, girl."

"Sateen! No!" Maggie cried.

Sateen and Bertha took hold of the cart, chortling like maniacs, and tore down the hall. Maggie had to hang on tight or she would have toppled backward. She careened along, dodging as she approached the bend, but the women were quicker on their feet than they looked. They swung her around handily and started back the way they'd come. Maggie's bangs lifted off her forehead in the breeze. She felt like a figurehead on a ship. She clutched at the sides of the cart and called, half laughing, "Stop!

Please stop!" Bertha, who was overweight, snorted and thudded beside her.

Sateen made a sissing sound through her teeth. They rattled toward the P.T. room just as the all-clear bell sounded-a hoarse burr over the loudspeaker. Instantly the doors swung open and Mr. Gabriel emerged in his wheelchair, propelled by Mrs. Inman.

Not the physical therapist, not an assistant or a volunteer, but Mrs.

Inman herself, the director of nursing for the entire home. Sateen and Bertha pulled up short. Mr. Gabriel's jaw dropped.

Mrs. Inman said, "Ladies?"

Maggie laid a hand on Bertha's shoulder and climbed out of the cart.

"Honestly," she told the two women. She batted down the hem of her skirt.

"Ladies, are you aware that we've been having a fire drill?"

"Yes, ma'am," Maggie said. She had always been scared to death of stern women.

"Are you aware of the seriousness of a fire drill in a nursing home?"

Maggie said, "I was just-"

"Take Ben to his room, please, Maggie. I'll speak with you in my office later."

"Yes, ma'am," Maggie said.

She wheeled Mr. Gabriel toward the elevator. When she leaned forward to press the button, her arm brushed his shoulder, and he jerked away from her. She said, "Excuse me." He didn't respond.

In the elevator he was silent, although that could have been because a doctor happened to be riding with them. But even after they arrived on the second floor and parted company with the doctor, Mr. Gabriel said nothing.

The hall had that hurricane-swept appearance it always took on after a drill. Every door was flung open and patients were roving distractedly and the staff was dragging forth the objects that didn't belong in the rooms. Maggie wheeled Mr. Gabriel into . His roommate hadn't returned yet. She parked the chair. Still he sat silent.

"Oh, land," she said, giving a little laugh.

His eyes slid slowly to her face.

Maybe he could view her as a sort of I Love Lucy type- madcap, fun-loving, full of irrepressible high spirits. That was one way to look at it. Actually, Maggie had never liked / Love Lucy. She thought the plots were so engineered-that dizzy woman's failures just built-in, just guaranteed. But maybe Mr. Gabriel felt differently.

"I came downstairs to find you," she said.

He watched her.

"I was worried," she told him.

So worried you took a joyride in a laundry cart, his glare said plainly.

Then Maggie, stooping to set the brake on his wheel-chair, was struck by the most peculiar thought. It was the lines alongside his mouth that caused it-deep crevices that pulled the corners down. Ira had those lines. On Ira they were fainter, of course. They showed up only when he disapproved of something. (Usually Maggie.) And Ira would give her that same dark, sober, judging gaze.

Why, Mr. Gabriel was just another Ira, was all. He had Ira's craggy face and Ira's dignity, his aloofness, that could still to this day exert a physical pull on her. He was even supporting that unmarried sister, she would bet, just as Ira supported his sisters and his deadbeat father: a sign of a noble nature, some might say. All Mr. Gabriel was, in fact, was Maggie's attempt to find an earlier version of Ira. She'd wanted the version she had known at the start of their marriage, before she'd begun disappointing him.

She hadn't been courting Mr. Gabriel; she'd been courting Ira.

Well, she helped Mr. Gabriel out of his wheelchair and into the armchair next to his bed, and then she left to check the other patients, and life went on the same as ever. In fact, Mr. Gabriel still lived at the home, although they didn't talk as much as they used to. Nowadays he seemed to prefer Joelle. He was perfectly friendly, though. He'd probably forgotten all about Maggie's ride in the laundry cart.

But Maggie remembered, and sometimes, feeling the glassy sheet of Ira's disapproval, she grew numbly, wearily certain that there was no such thing on this earth as real change. You could change husbands, but not the situation. You could change who, but not what. We're all just spinning here, she thought, and she pictured the world as a little blue teacup, revolving like those rides at Kiddie Land where everyone is pinned to his place by centrifugal force.

She picked up a box of Fig Newtons and read the nutrition panel on the back. "Sixty calories each," she said out loud, and Ira said, "Ah, go ahead and splurge."

"Stop undermining my diet," she told him. She replaced the box on the shelf, not turning.

"Hey, babe," he said, "care to accompany me to a funeral?"

She shrugged and didn't answer, but when he hung an arm around her shoulders she let him lead her out to the car.

To find any place in Deer Lick, you just stopped at the one traffic light and looked in all four directions. Barbershop, two service stations, hardware, grocery, three churches-everything revealed itself at a glance.

The buildings were set about as demurely as those in a model-railroad village. Trees were left standing, and the sidewalks ended after three blocks. Peer down any cross street; you'd see greenery and cornfields and even, in one case, a fat brown horse dipping his nose into a pasture.

Ira parked on the asphalt next to Fenway Memorial Church, a grayish-white frame cube with a stubby little steeple like a witch's hat. There were no other cars on the lot. He'd guessed right, as it turned out: Continuing on Route One had been quicker, which wasn't all that fortunate, since it meant they'd arrived in Deer Lick thirty minutes early. Still, Maggie had expected to find some sign of the other mourners.

"Maybe it's the wrong day," she said.

"It couldn't be. 'Tomorrow,' Serena told you. No way you could mix that up."

"You think we should go on in?"

"Sure, if it's not locked."

When they got out of the car, Maggie's dress stuck to the back of her legs. She felt shellacked. Her hair was knotted from the wind, and the waistband of her panty hose had folded over on itself so it was cutting into her stomach.

They climbed a set of wooden steps and tried the door. It swung open with a grudging sound. Immediately inside lay a long, dim room, uncarpeted, the raftered ceiling towering above dark pews. Massive floral arrangements stood on either side of the pulpit, which Maggie found reassuring. Only weddings and'funerals called for such artificial-looking bouquets.

"Hello?" Ira tried.

His voice rang back.

They tiptoed up the aisle, creaking the floorboards. "Do you suppose there's a ... side or something?" Maggie whispered.

"Side?"

"I mean a groom's side and a bride's side? Or rather-" Her mistake sent her into a little fit of giggles. To tell the truth, she hadn't had much experience with funerals. No one really close to her had died yet, knock on wood. "I mean," she said, "does it make any difference where we sit?"

"Just not in the front row," Ira told her.

"Well, of course not, Ira. I'm not a total fool."

She dropped into a right-hand pew midway up the aisle and slid over to make room for him. "You'd think at least some kind of music would be playing," she said.

Ira checked his watch.

Maggie said, "Maybe next time you should follow Se-rena's directions."

"What, and wander some cow path half the morning?"

"It's better than being the first people here."

"I don't mind being first," Ira said.

He reached into the left pocket of his suit coat. He brought out a deck of cards secured with a rubber band.

"Ira Moran! You're not playing cards in a house of worship!"

He reached into his right pocket and brought out another deck.

"What if someone comes?" Maggie asked.

"Don't worry; I have lightning reflexes," he told her.

He removed the rubber bands and shuffled the two decks together. They rattled like machine-gun fire.

"Well," Maggie said, "I'm just going to pretend that I don't know you."

She gathered the straps of her purse and slid out the other end of the pew.

Ira laid down cards where she'd been sitting.

She walked over to a stained-glass window. IN MEMORY

OF VIVIAN DEWEY, BELOVED HUSBAND AND FATHER, a plaque .beneath it read. A husband named Vivian! She stifled a laugh. She was reminded of a thought she'd often had back in the sixties when the young men wore their hair so long: Wouldn't it feel creepy to run your fingers through your lover's soft, trailing tresses?

Churches always put the most unseemly notions in her head.

She continued toward the front, her heels clicking sharply as if she knew where she was going. She stood on tiptoe beside the pulpit to smell a waxy white flower she couldn't identify. It didn't have any scent at all, and it gave off a definite chill. In fact, she was feeling a little chilly herself. She turned and walked back down the center aisle toward Ira.

Ira had his cards spread across half the length of the pew. He was shifting them around and whistling between his teeth. "The Gambler," that was the name of the song. Disappointingly obvious. You 've got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them . . . The form of solitaire he played was so involved it could last for hours, but it started simply and he was rearranging the cards almost without hesitation. "This is the part that's dull," he told Maggie. "I ought to have an amateur work this part, the way the old masters had their students fill in the backgrounds of their paintings."

She shot him a glance; she hadn't known they'd done that. It sounded to her like cheating. "Can't you put that five on the six?" she asked.

"Butt out, Maggie."

She wandered on down the aisle, swinging her purse loosely from her fingers.

What kind of church was this? The sign outside hadn't said. Maggie and Serena had grown up Methodist, but Max was some other denomination and after they married, Serena had switched over. She was married Methodist, though. Maggie had sung at her wedding; she'd sung a duet with Ira. (They were just starting to date then.) The wedding had been one of Serena's wilder inventions, a mishmash of popular songs and Kahlil Gibran in an era when everyone else was still clinging to "O Promise Me." Well, Serena had always been ahead of her time. No telling what kind of funeral she would put on.

Maggie pivoted at the door and walked back toward Ira. He had left his pew and was leaning over it from the pew behind so he could study the full array of cards. He must have reached the interesting stage by now.

Even his whistling was slower. You never count your money when you 're sitting at the table . . . From here he looked like a scarecrow: coat-hanger shoulders, spriggy black cowlick, his arms set at wiry angles.

"Maggie! You came!" Serena called from the doorway.

Maggie turned, but all she saw was a silhouette against a blur of yellow light. She said, "Serena?"

Serena rushed toward her, arms outstretched. She wore a black shawl that completely enveloped her, with long satiny fringes swinging at the hem, and her hair was black too, untouched by gray. When Maggie hugged her she got tangled in the tail of hair that hung down straight between Serena's shoulder blades. She had to shake her fingers loose, laughing slightly, as she stepped back. Se-rena could have been a Spanish senora, Maggie always thought, with her center part and her full, oval face and vivid coloring.

"And Ira!" Serena was saying. "How are you, Ira?"

Ira stood up (having somehow spirited his cards out of sight), and she kissed his cheek, while he endured it. "Mighty sad to hear about Max," he told her.

"Well, thank you," Serena said. "I'm so grateful to you for making the trip; you have no idea. All Max's relatives are up at the house and I'm feeling outnumbered. Finally I slipped away; told them I had things to see to at the church ahead of time. Did you two eat breakfast?"

"Oh, yes," Maggie said. "But I wouldn't mind finding a bathroom."

"I'll take you. Ira?"

"No, thanks."

"We'll be back in a minute, then," Serena said. She hooked her arm through Maggie's and steered her down the aisle. "Max's cousins came from Virginia," she said, "and his brother George, of course, and George's wife and daughter, and Linda's been here since Thursday with the grandchildren. ..."

Her breath smelled of peaches, or maybe that was her perfume. Her shoes were sandals with leather straps that wound halfway up her bare brown legs, and her dress (Maggie was not surprised to see) was a vibrant red chiffon with a rhinestone sunburst at the center of the V neckline.

"Maybe it's a blessing," she was saying. "All this chaos keeps my mind off things."

"Oh, Serena, has it been just terrible?" Maggie asked.

"Well, yes and no," Serena said. She was leading Maggie through a little side door to the left of the en-trance, and then down a flight of narrow stairs. "I mean it went on so long, Maggie; in an awful way it was kind of a relief, at first. He'd been sick since February, you know. Only back then we didn't realize.

February is such a sick month anyhow: colds and flu and leaky roofs and the furnace breaking down. So we didn't put two and two together at the time. He was feeling off a little, was all he said. Touch of this, touch of that . . . Then he turned yellow. Then his upper lip disappeared. I mean, nothing you can report to a doctor. You can't exactly phone a doctor and say . . . but I looked at him one morning and I thought, 'My Lord, he's so old! His whole face is different.' And by that time it was April, when normal people feel wonderful."

They were crossing an unlit, linoleum-floored basement overhung with pipes and ducts. They picked their way between long metal tables and folding chairs. Maggie felt right at home. How often had she and Serena traded secrets in one or another Sunday-school classroom? She thought she could smell the coated paper that was used for Bible-study leaflets.

"One day I came back from the grocery store," Serena said, "and Max wasn't there. It was a Saturday, and when I'd left he was working in the yard. Well, I didn't think much about it, started putting away the groceries-"

She ushered Maggie into a bathroom tiled in white. Her voice took on an echo. "Then all at once I look out the window and there's this totally unknown woman leading him by the hand. She was sort of ... hovering; you could tell she thought he was handicapped or something. I went running out. She said, 'Oh! Is he yours?' "

Serena leaned back against a sink, arms folded, while Maggie entered a booth. "Was he mine!" Serena said. "Like when a neighbor comes dragging your dog who's dripping garbage from every whisker and she asks, 'Is he yours?' But I said yes. Turns out this woman found him

SS wandering Dunmore Road with a pair of pruning shears, and he didn't seem to know where he was headed. She asked if she could help and all he said was: 'I'm not certain. I'm not certain.' But he recognized me when he saw me. His face lit up and he told her, 'There's Serena.' So I took him inside and sat him down. I asked him what had happened and he said it was the oddest feeling. He said that out of the blue, he just seemed to be walking on Dunmore Road. Then when the woman turned him back toward where he'd come from he said he saw our house, and he knew it was ours, but at the time it was like it had nothing to do with him. He said it was like he had stepped outside his own life for a minute."

MARCY + DAVE, read the chalked words above the toilet paper dispenser.

SUE HARDY WEARS A PADDED BRA. Maggie tried to adjust to this new version of Max-vague and bewildered and buckling at the knees, no doubt, like one of her patients at the home. But what she came up with was the Max she'd always known, a hefty football-player type with a prickle of glinting blond hair and a broad, good-natured, freckled face; the Max who'd run naked into the surf at Carolina Beach. She'd seen him only a few times in the past ten years, after all; he was not the world's best at holding down a job and had moved his family often. But he had struck her as the type who stays boyish forever. It was hard to imagine him aging.

She flushed the toilet and emerged to find Serena considering one of her sandals, twisting her foot this way and that. "Have you ever done such a thing?" Serena asked her. "Stepped outside your own life?"

Maggie said, "Well, not that I can recall," and turned on the hot water.

"What would it be like, I wonder,"- Serena said. "Just to look around you one day and have it all amaze you-where you'd arrived at, who you'd married, what kind of person you'd grown into. Say you suddenly came to while you were-oh, say, out shopping with your daughter-but it was your seven-or eight-year-old self observing all you did. 'Why!' you'd say. 'Can this be me? Driving a car? Taking charge? Nagging some young woman like I knew what I was doing?' You'd walk into your house and say, 'Well, I don't think all that much of my taste.' You'd go to a mirror and say, 'Goodness, my chin is starting to slope just the way my mother's did.' I mean you'd be looking at things without their curtains. You'd say, 'My husband isn't any Einstein, is he?' You'd say, 'My daughter certainly could stand to lose some weight.' "

Maggie cleared her throat. (All those observations were disconcertingly true. Serena's daughter, for instance, could stand to lose a lot of

.weight.) She reached for a paper towel and said, "I thought on the phone you said he died of cancer."

"He did," Serena said. "But it was everywhere before we knew about it.

Every part of him, even his brain."

"Oh, Serena."

"One day he was out selling radio ads the same as always and next day he was flat on his back. Couldn't walk right, couldn't see right; everything he did was onesided. He kept saying he smelled cookies. He'd say, 'Serena, when will those cookies be done?' I haven't baked cookies in years! He'd say, 'Bring me one, Serena, as soon as they're out of the oven.' So I would make a batch and then he'd look surprised and tell me he wasn't hungry."

"I wish you'd called me," Maggie said.

"What could you have done?"

Well, nothing, really, Maggie thought. She couldn't even say for certain that she knew what Serena was going through. Every stage of their lives, it seemed, Serena had experienced slightly ahead of Maggie; and every stage she'd reported on in her truthful, startling, bald-faced way, like some foreigner who didn't know the etiquette. Talk about stripping the curtains off! It was Serena who'd told Maggie that marriage was not a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie. It was Serena who'd said that motherhood was much too hard and, when you got right down to it, perhaps not worth the effort. Now this: to have your husband die. It made Maggie nervous, although she knew it wasn't catching.

She frowned into the jnirror and caught sight of the squinched blue chicory flower lolling above one ear. She plucked it off and dropped it in the wastebasket. Serena hadn't mentioned it-sure proof of her distracted state of mind.

"At first I wondered, 'How are we going to do this?' " Serena said. "

'How will the two of us manage?' Then I saw that it was only me who would manage. Max was just assuming that I would see him through it. Did the tax people threaten to audit us; did the car need a new transmission?

That was my affair; Max had left it all behind him. He'd be dead by the time the audit rolled around, and he didn't have any further use for a car. Really it's laughable, when you stop to think. Isn't there some warning about your wishes coming true? 'Be careful what you set your heart on'-isn't there some such warning? Here I'd vowed since I was a child that I wouldn't be dependent on a man. You'd never find me waiting around for some man to give me the time of day! I wanted a husband who'd dote on me and stick to me like glue, and that's exactly what I got.

Exactly. Max hanging on to the sight of me and following me with his eyes around the room. When he had to go to the hospital finally, he begged me not to leave him and so I stayed there day and night. But I started feeling mad at him. I remembered how I'd always been after him to exercise and take better care of his health, and he'd said exercise was nothing but a fad. Claimed jogging gave people coronaries. To hear him talk, the sidewalks were just littered with the piled-up corpses of joggers. I'd look at him in his bed and I'd say, 'Well, which do you prefer, Max: sudden death in a snazzy red warm-up suit or lying here stuck full of needles and tubes?' I said that, right out loud! I acted horrible to him."

"Oh, well," Maggie said unhappily, "I'm sure you didn't intend-"

"I intended every word," Serena said. "Why do you always have to gloss things over, Maggie? I acted horrible. Then he died."

"Oh, dear," Maggie said.

"It was nighttime, Wednesday night. I felt someone had lifted a weight off my chest, and I went home and slept twelve hours straight. Then Thursday Linda came down from New Jersey and that was nice; her and our son-in-law and the kids. But I kept feeling I ought to be doing something. There was something I was forgetting. I ought to be over at the hospital; that was it. I felt so restless. It was like that trick we used to try as children, remember? Where we'd stand in a doorway and press the backs of both hands against the frame and then when we stepped forward our hands floated up on their own as if all that pressure had been, oh, stored for future use; operating retroactively. And then Linda's kids started teasing the cat. They dressed the cat in their teddy bear's pajamas and Linda didn't even notice. She's never kept them properly in line. Max and I used to bite our tongues not to point that out. Anytime they'd come we wouldn't say a word but we'd give each other this look across the room: just trade a look, you know how you do? And all at once I had no one to trade looks with. It was the first I'd understood that I'd truly lost him."

She drew her tail of hair over one shoulder and examined it. The skin beneath her eyes was shiny. In fact, she was crying, but she didn't seem to realize that. "So I drank a whole bottle of wine," she said, "and then I phoned everyone I ever used to know, all the friends we had when Max and I were courting. You, and Sissy Par-ton, and the Barley twins-"

"The Barley twins! Are they coming?"

"Sure, and Jo Ann Dermott and Nat Abrams, whom she finally did end up marrying, you'll be interested to hear-"

"I haven't thought of Jo Ann in years!"

"She's going to read from The Prophet. You and Ira are singing."

"We're what?"

"You're singing 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.' "

"Oh, have mercy, Serena! Not 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.' "

"You sang it at our wedding, didn't you?"

"Yes, but-"

"That was what they were playing when Max first told me how he felt about me," Serena said. She lifted a corner of her shawl and delicately blotted the shiny places beneath her eyes. "October twenty-second, nineteen fifty-five. Remember? The Harvest Home Ball. I came with Terry Simpson, but Max cut in."

"But this is a funeral!" Maggie said.

"So?"

"It's not a ... request program," Maggie said.

Over their heads, a piano began thrumming the floorboards. Chord, chord, chord was plunked forth like so many place settings. Serena flung her shawl across her bosom and said, "We'd better get back up there."

"Serena," Maggie said, following her out of the bathroom, "Ira and I haven't sung in public since your wedding!"

"That's all right. I don't expect anything professional," Serena said.

"All I want is a kind of rerun, like people sometimes have on their golden anniversaries. I thought it would make a nice touch."

"Nice touch! But you know how songs, well, age," Maggie said, winding after her among the tables. "Why not just some consoling hymns? Doesn't your church have a choir?"

At the foot of the stairs, Serena turned. "Look," she said. "All I'm asking is the smallest, simplest favor, from the closest friend I've had in this world. Why, you and I have been through everything together! Our weddings and our babies! You helped me put my mother in the nursing home.

I sat up with you that time that Jesse got arrested."

"Yes, but-"

"Last night I started thinking and I said to myself, 'What am I holding this funeral for? Hardly anyone will come; we haven't lived here long enough. Why, we're not even burying him; I'm flinging his ashes on the Chesapeake next summer. We're not even going to have his casket at the service. What's the point of sitting in that church,' I said, 'listening to Mrs. Filbert tinkle out gospel hymns on the piano? "Stumbling up the Path of Righteousness" and "Death Is Like a Good Night's Sleep." I don't even know Mrs. Filbert! I'd rather have Sissy Par-ton. I'd rather have "My Prayer" as played by Sissy Parton at our wedding.' So then I thought, Why not all of it? Kahlil Gibran? 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing'?"

"Not everyone would understand, though," Maggie said. "People who weren't at the wedding, for instance."

Or even the people who were at the wedding, she thought privately. Some of those guests had worn fairly puzzled expressions.

"Let them wonder, then," Serena said. "It's not for them I'm doing it."

And she spun away and started up the stairs.

"Also there's Ira," Maggie called, following her. The fringe of Serena's shawl swatted her in the face. "Of course I'd move the earth for you, Serena, but I don't think Ira would feel comfortable singing that song."

"Ira has a nice tenor voice," Serena said. She turned at the top of the stairs. "And yours is like a silver bell; remember how people always told you that? High time you stopped keeping it a secret.''

Maggie sighed and followed her up the aisle. No use pointing out, she supposed, that that bell was nearly half a century old by now.

Several other guests had arrived in Maggie's absence. They dotted the pews here and there. Serena bent to speak to a hatted woman in a slim black suit. "Sugar?" she said.

Maggie stopped short behind her and said, "Sugar Tilghman?"

Sugar turned. She had been the class beauty and was beautiful still, Maggie supposed, although it was hard to tell through the heavy black veil descending from her hat. She looked more like a widow than the widow herself. Well, she always had viewed clothes as costumes. "There you are!" she said. She rose to press her cheek against Serena's. "I am so, so'sorry for your loss," she said. "Except they call me Elizabeth now."

"Sugar, you remember Maggie," Serena said.

"Maggie Daley! What a surprise."

Sugar's cheek was smooth and taut beneath the veil. It felt like one of those netted onions in a grocery store.

"If this is not the saddest thing," she said. "Robert would have come with me but he had a meeting in Houston. He said to send you his condolences, though. He said, 'Seems like only yesterday we were trying to find our way to their wedding reception.' "

"Yes, well, that's what I want to discuss with you," Serena said.

"Remember at our wedding? Where you sang a solo after the vows?"

" 'Born to Be with You,' " Sugar said. She laughed. "You two marched out to it; I can see you still. The march took longer than the song, and at the finish all we heard was your high heels."

"Well," Serena said, "I'd like you to sing it again today."

Shock made Sugar's face appear to emerge from the .netting. She was older-looking than Maggie had first realized. "Do what?" she said.

"Sing."

Sugar raised her eyebrows at Maggie. Maggie looked away, refusing to conspire. It was true the pianist was playing "My Prayer." But that couldn't be Sissy Parton, could it? That plump-backed woman with dimpled elbows like upside-down valentines? Why, she resembled any ordinary church lady.

"I haven't sung for twenty years or more," Sugar said. "I couldn't sing even then! All I was doing was showing off."

"Sugar, it's the last favor I'll ever ask of you," Serena said.

"Elizabeth."

"Elizabeth, one song! Among friends! Maggie and Ira are singing."

"No, wait-" Maggie said.

Sugar said, "And besides: 'Born to Be with You.' "

"What's wrong with it, I'd like to know?" Serena asked.

"Have you thought about the lyrics? By your side, satisfied? You want to hear that at a funeral?"

"Memorial service," Serena said, though she'd been calling it a funeral herself up till now.

"What's the difference?" Sugar asked.

"Well, it's not like there was a coffin present."

"What's the difference, Serena?"

"It's not like I'm by his side in the coffin or anything! It's not like I'm being ghoulish or anything! I'm by his side in a spiritual sense, is all I'm saying."

Sugar looked at Maggie. Maggie was trying to remember the words to "My Prayer." In a funeral context, she thought (or in a memorial-service context), even the blandest lines could take on a different aspect.

"You'd be the laughingstock of this congregation," Sugar said flatly.

"What do I care about that?"

Maggie left them and walked on up the aisle. She was alert to the people she passed now; they could be old-time friends. But no one looked familiar. She stopped at Ira^s pew and gave him a nudge. "I'm back," she told him. He moved over. He was reading his pocket calendar-the part that listed birthstones and signs of the zodiac.

"Am I imagining things," he asked when she'd settled next to him, "or is that 'My Prayer' I'm hearing?"

"It's 'My Prayer,' all right," Maggie said. "And it's not just any old pianist, either. It's Sissy Parton."

"Who's Sissy Parton?"

"Honestly, Ira! You remember Sissy. She played at Se-rena's wedding."

"Oh, yes."

"Where you and I sang 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing,' " Maggie said.

"How could I forget that," he said.

"Which Serena wants us to sing again today."

Ira didn't even change expression. He said, "Too bad we can't oblige her."

"Sugar Tilghman won't sing, either, and Serena's giving her fits. I don't think she'll let us out of this, Ira."

"Sugar Tilghman's here?" Ira said. He turned and looked over his shoulder.

Boys had always been fascinated by Sugar.

"She's sitting back there in the hat," Maggie told him. , "Did Sugar sing at their wedding?"

"She sang 'Born to Be with You.' "

Ira faced forward again and thought a moment. He must have been reviewing the lyrics. Eventually, he gave a little snort.

Maggie said, "Do you recall the words to 'Love Is a Many Splendored Thing'?"

"No, and I don't intend to," Ira said.

A man paused in the aisle next to Maggie. He said, "How you doing, Morans?"

"Oh, Durwood," Maggie said. She told Ira, "Move over and let Durwood have a seat."

"Durwood. Hi, there," Ira said. He slid down a foot.

"If I'd known you were coming too, I'd have hitched a ride," Durwood said, settling next to Maggie. "Peg had to take the bus to work."

"Oh, I'm sorry, we should have thought," Maggie said. "Serena must have phoned everyone in Baltimore."

"Yes, I noticed old Sugar back there," Durwood said. He slipped a ballpoint pen from his breast pocket. He was a rumpled, quiet man, with wavy gray hair that he wore just a little too long. It trailed thinly over the tops of his ears and lay in wisps on the back of his collar, giving him the look of someone down on his luck. In high school Maggie had not much liked him, but over the years he'd stayed on in the neighborhood and married a Glen Burnie girl and raised a family, and now she saw more of him than anyone else she'd grown up with. Wasn't it funny how that happened, she thought. She couldn't remember now why they hadn't been close to begin with.

Durwood was patting all his pockets, hunting something. "You wouldn't have a piece of paper, would you?" he said.

All she found was her shampoo coupon. She gave him that and he laid it on a hymnbook. Clicking his pen point, he frowned into space. "What are you writing?" Maggie asked.

"I'm trying to think of the words to 'I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.' "

Ira groaned.

The church was filling now. A family settled in the pew just in front of theirs, the children arranged by height so that the line of round blond heads slanted upward like a question. Serena flitted from guest to guest, no doubt pleading and cajoling. The fringes of her shawl had gathered a row of dust mice from somewhere. "My Prayer" played over and over, turning dogged.

Now that she knew how many people from her past were sitting here, Maggie wished she'd given more thought to her appearance. She could have worn powder, for instance, or foundation of some kind-something to make her face less rosy. Maybe she'd have tried painting brown hollows on her cheeks, the way the magazines were always recommending. Also she'd have chosen a younger dress, an eye-catching dress like Serena's. Except that she didn't own such a dress. Serena had always been more flamboyant-the only girl in their school with pierced ears. She had teetered on the edge of downright gaudy, but had somehow brought it off.

How gloriously Serena had defied the stodgy times they'd grown up in! In third grade she'd worn ballet-style shoes, paper-thin, with a stunning spray of sequins across each toe, and the other girls (in their sensible brown tie oxfords and thick wool knee socks) had bitterly envied the tripping way she walked and the dancer-like grace of her bare legs, which came out in goose bumps and purple splotches at every recess period. She had brought adventurous lunches to the stewy-smelling cafeteria: one time, tiny silver sardines still in their flat silver tin. (She ate the tails. She ate the little bones. "Mm-mm! Crunch, crunch," she said, licking off each finger.) Every year on Parents' Day she proudly, officiously ushered around her scandalous mother, Anita, who wore bright-red, skin-tight toreador pants and worked in a bar. And she never hesitated to admit that she had no father. Or no father who was married, at any rate. Not married to her mother, at any rate.

In high school she had evolved her own personal fashion statement-rayon and machine embroidery and slinky blouses from the Philippines, when the other girls were wearing crinolines. You'd see the other girls wafting through the corridors, their skirts standing out like frilled lampshades; and then in their midst Serena's sultry, come-hither, plum-colored sheath handed down from Anita.

But wasn't it odd that the boys she went out with were never the sultry types themselves? They were not the dark Lotharios you would expect but the sunny innocents like Max. The plaid-shirt boys, the gym-sneaker boys: Those were the ones she'd gravitated toward. Maybe she'd coveted every day ness, more than she ever let on. Was that possible? Well, of course it was, but Maggie hadn't guessed it at the time. Serena had made such a point of being different. She was so thorny and spiky, so quick to get her hackles up and order you out of her sight forever. (How many times had she and Maggie stopped speaking-Serena swishing past as grandly as a duchess?) Even now, enfolding a funeral guest in her dramatic shawl, she gave off a rich, dark glow that made the people around her seem faded.

Maggie looked down at her hands. Lately, when she took a pinch of skin from the back of a hand and released it, she noticed the skin would stay pleated for moments afterward.

Durwood muttered to himself and scribbled phrases on her coupon. Then he muttered something else, staring at the hymnal rack in front of him.

Maggie felt a clutch of anxiety. She placed her fingertips together and whispered, " 'Love is a many splendored thing, it's the April rose that only grows in the-' "

"I am not going to sing that song, I tell you," Ira said.

Maggie wasn't, either, but she had a sense of being borne along by something. All through this church, she imagined, middle-aged people were mumbling sentimental phrases from the fifties.

Wondrously, love can see . . . and More than the buds on the May-apple tree . . .

Why did popular songs always focus on romantic love? Why this preoccupation with first meetings, sad partings, honeyed kisses, heartbreak, when life was also full of children's births and trips to the shore and longtime jokes with friends? Once Maggie had seen on TV where archaeologists had just unearthed a fragment of music from who knows how many centuries B.C., and it was a boy's lament for a girl who didn't love him back. Then besides the songs there were the magazine stories and the novels and the movies, even the hair-spray ads and the panty hose ads. It struck Maggie as disproportionate. Misleading, in fact.

A slim blade of black knelt at Durwood's elbow It was Sugar Tilghman, blowing at a swatch of net to free it from her lipstick. "If I'd known I was expected to provide the entertainment I never would have come," she said. "Oh, Ira. I didn't see you there."

"How you doing, Sugar," Ira said.

"Elizabeth."

"Pardon?"

"The Barley twins have the right idea," Sugar said. "They flat-out refuse to go along with this."

"Isn't that just like them," Maggie said. The Barley twins had always acted so snobbish, preferring each other to anybody else.

"And Nick Bourne wouldn't even come to the funeral."

"Nick Bourne?"

"Said it was too long a drive."

"/ don't recall Nick at the wedding," Maggie said.

"Well, he was in the chorus, right?"

"Oh, yes, I guess he was."

"And the chorus sang 'True Love,' remember? But if the Barley twins won't join in and Nick Bourne's not coming, there wouldn't be but the four of us, so she's going to skip the chorus part."

"You know," Durwood said, "I never understood why 'True Love' went so high on the charts. That was a really boring tune, when you think about it."

"And then 'Born to Be with You,' " Sugar said. "Wasn't it funny about Serena? Sometimes she kind of overdid. She'd take some run-of-the-mill pop song like 'Born to Be with You' that all the rest of us liked okay, and she would make so much of it, it would start to look weird. It would start to look bizarre. Things always got so exaggerated, with Serena."

"Like her wedding reception," Durwood said.

"Oh, her wedding reception! Her receiving line with just that mother of hers and one fat twelve-year-old girl cousin and Max's parents."

"Max's parents looked miserable."

"They never did approve of her."

"They thought she was sort of cheap."

"They kept asking who her people were."

"Better not to have a receiving line at all," Durwood said. "Shoot, better just to elope. I don't know why she went to so much trouble."

"Well, anyhow," Sugar said, "I told Serena I'd sing today if she insisted, but she'd have to make it some other piece. Something more appropriate. I mean I know we're supposed to be humoring the bereaved, but there are limits. And Serena said, well, all right, so long as it came from the time when they were first dating. Nineteen fifty-five, fifty-six, she said; nothing later."

" 'The Great Pretender,' " Durwood said suddenly. "Now, there was a song.

Remember, Ira? Remember 'The Great Pretender'?"

Ira put on a soulful look and crooned, "O-o-o-o-o-o- oh, yes . . ."

"Why not sing that?" Durwood asked Sugar.

"Oh, be serious," Sugar said.

"Sing 'Davy Crockett,' " Ira suggested.

He and Durwood started competing: "Sing 'Yellow Rose of Texas.' "

"Sing 'Hound Dog.' "

"Sing 'Papa Loves Mambo.' "

"Will you be serious for a minute?" Sugar said. "I'm going to get up there and open my mouth and nothing's going to come out."

"Or how about 'Heartbreak Hotel'?" Ira asked.

"Ssh, everybody. They're starting," Maggie said. She had glimpsed the family approaching from the rear. Sugar rose hastily and returned to her seat, while Serena, who was bedding over two women who could only be the Barley twins, settled next to them in a pew that was nowhere near the front and went on whispering. No doubt she still hoped to talk them into singing. Both twins wore their yellow hair in the short, curly, caplike style they'd favored in high school, Maggie saw, but the backs of their necks were scrawny as chicken necks and their fussy pink ruffles gave them a Minnie Pearl look.

An usher led the family up the aisle: Serena's daughter, Linda, fat and freckled, and Linda's bearded husband and two little boys in grownup suits, their expressions selfconsciously solemn. Behind them came a fair-haired man, most likely the brother, and various other people, severely, somberly dressed. Several had Max's wide face, which gave Maggie a start.

She seemed to have drifted away from the reason for this ceremony, and now all at once she remembered: Max Gill had actually gone and died. The striking thing about death, she thought, was its eventfulness. It made you see you were leading a real life. Real life at last! you could say.

Was that why she read the obituaries each morning, hunting familiar names? Was that why she carried on those hushed, awed conversations with the other workers when one of the nursing home patients was carted away in a hearse?

The family settled in the frontmost pew. Linda glanced back at Serena, but Serena was too busy arguing with the Barley twins to notice. Then the piano fell silent, and a door near the altar opened and a lean, bald-headed minister appeared in a long black robe. He crossed behind, the pulpit. He seated himself in a dark wooden armchair and arranged the skirt- of his robe fastidiously over his trousers.

"That's not Reverend Connors, is it?" Ira whispered.

"Reverend Connors is dead" Maggie told him.

She was louder than she'd meant to be. The row of blond heads in front of her swiveled.

Now the piano trudged off on "True Love." Evidently Sissy was filling in for the chorus. Serena was giving the Barley twins a pointed, accusing glare, but they faced stubbornly forward and pretended not to notice.

Maggie remembered Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby singing "True Love" in a movie. They'd been perched on a yacht or a sailboat or something. Both of them were dead too, come to think of it.

If the minister found the music surprising, he gave no sign. He waited till the last note had faded and then he stood and said, "Turning now to the Holy Word ..." His voice was high-pitched and stringy. Maggie wished he were Reverend Connors. Reverend Connors had shaken the rafters. And she didn't think he'd read any Holy Word at Serena's wedding, at least not that she could recollect.

This man read a psalm, something about a lovely dwelling place, which came as a relief to Maggie because of her experience, most of the Book of Psalms tended to go on in a sort of paranoid way about enemies and evil plots. She pictured Max reclining in a lovely dwelling place with Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, his crew cut glinting against the sunlit sails. He would be telling them one of his jokes. He could tell jokes for hours, one after the other. Serena used to say, "All right already, Gill, enough." They'd often called each other by their last names-Max using Serena's maiden name even after they were married. "Watch it there, Palermo." Maggie could hear him now. It had made the two of them look more amiable than other married couples. They'd seemed like easygoing buddies, unaware of that dark, helpless, angry, confined feeling that Maggie's own marriage descended to frorn time to time.

In fact, if Serena believed that marriage was not a Doris Day movie, she had certainly never proved it in public, for her grownup life had looked from outside like the cheeriest of domestic comedies: Serena ironic and indulgent and Max the merry good-time guy. They had appeared to remain focused exclusively upon each other even after becoming parents; Linda had seemed more or less extraneous. Maggie envied that. So what if Max was a bit of a failure in the outside world? "If I just didn't feel I had to carry him; always be the one to carry the household," Serena had confided once. But then she had turned breezy and waved a hand, clanging her bangle bracelets. "Oh, well! But he's my sweetie, right?" she'd said, and Maggie had agreed. He was as sweet as they came.

(And she remembered, if Serena didn't, how she and Serena had spent the summer after fifth grade spying on the gracious Guilford home of the man who was Serena's father, and how they had cunningly shadowed his teenaged sons and his ladylike wife. "I could bring that woman's world crashing around her ears," Serena had said. "I could knock on her door and she would go, 'Why, hello, dear, whose little girl are you?' and I could tell her." But she bad said this while hidden behind one of the two complacent stone lions that guarded the front walk, and she had made no move to show herself. And then she had whispered, "I will never be like her, I tell you." A stranger would think she meant the wife, but Maggie knew better: She meant her mother. "Mrs." Palermo-love's victim. A woman whose every trait-even the tilted, off-center way she carried her waterfall of black curls-hinted at permanent injuries.)

The minister seated himself, orchestrating his robe. Sissy Parton weighed in with a few ominous notes. She looked toward the congregation and Durwood said, "Me?" right out loud. The blond heads swiveled again.

Durwood rose and headed up the aisle. Apparently you were expected to remember on your own when your song was due. Never mind that you had to cast your thoughts back twenty-nine years.

Durwood struck a pose beside the piano, resting one arm on the lid. He nodded at Sissy. Then he started off in a throbbing bass: "Hold me close.

Hold me tight ..."

A lot of parents had forbidden that song in their houses. All this wanting and needing really didn't sound very nice, they had said. So Maggie and her classmates had had to go to Serena's, or to Oriole Hi Fidelity, where you could still, in those days, pile into a listening booth and play records all afternoon without making a purchase.

And now she recalled why she hadn't liked Durwood; his operatic tremolo brought it all back. Once upon,a time he'd been considered quite a catch, with his wavy dark hair and his deep-brown eyes and that habit he had of beseechingly crinkling his brow. He'd sung "Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms" in the high school auditorium on every conceivable occasion, always the same song, the same theatrical gestures, the same fifties crooner style, where the voice breaks with feeling.

Sometimes Durwood's voice broke so extremely that the first syllable of a line was silent, and even on the second syllable he kicked in a touch late, while the plump, bespectacled music teacher gazed up at him mistily from her piano. "Dreamboat," his entry in the yearbook had read. "Man I'd Most Like to Be Shipwrecked With," he'd been voted in the school paper. He'd asked Maggie for a date and Maggie had said no and her girlfriends had told her she was crazy. "You turned down Durwood? Durwood Clegg?"

"He's too soft," she'd said, and they had repeated the word and passed it among themselves for consideration. "Soft," they'd murmured tentatively.

He was too pliant, she meant; too supplicating. She failed to see the appeal. For if Serena had made her resolutions about who not to be, why, so had Maggie; and in order not to be her mother, she planned to avoid any man remotely like her father-the person she loved best in the world.

No one mild and clumsy for Maggie, thank you; no one bumbling and well-meaning and sentimental, who would force her to play the heavy. You'd never find her sitting icily erect while her husband, flushed with merriment, sang nonsense songs at the dinner table.

So Maggie had refused Durwood Clegg and had watched with no regrets as he went on to date Lu Bern Parsons instead. She could see Lu Beth as clear as day this very minute, clearer than Peg, whom he'd ended up marrying.

She could see Durwood's khaki trousers with the Ivy League buckle in back buckled up ("attached," that signified; "going steady") and his button-down shirt and natty brown loafers decorated with bobbing leather acorns.

But of course this morning he was wearing a suit- baggy and unfashionable, inexpensive, husbandly. For a moment he shifted back and forth like those trick portraits that change expression according to where you're standing: the old lady-killer Durwood meaningfully lingering on darling, you're all that I'm living for, with his eyebrows quirked, but then the present-day, shabby Durwood searching for the next stanza on Maggie's shampoo coupon, which he held at arm's length, with his forehead wrinkled, as he tried to make out the words.

The blond children in front were tittering. They probably found this whole event hilarious. Maggie had an urge to slam the nearest one flat over the head with a hymn-book.

When Durwood finished singing, someone mistakenly clapped-just two sharp explosions-and Durwood nodded in a grimly relieved way and returned to his seat. He settled next to Maggie with a sigh. His face was filmed with sweat and he fanned himself with the coupon. Would it seem mercenary if she asked for it back? Twenty-five cents off, at double-coupon rates . .

.

Jo Ann Dermott stepped up to the pulpit with a small book covered in tooled leather. She had been a gawky girl, but middle age had filled out her corners or something. Now she was willowy and attractive in a fluid, pastel dress and subtle makeup. "At Max's and Serena's wedding," she announced, "I read Kahlil Gibran on marriage. Today, at this sadder occasion, I'll read what he says about death."

At the wedding, she had pronounced Gibran with a hard G. Today the G was soft. Maggie had no idea which was correct.

Jo Ann started reading in a level, teacher-like voice, and immediately Maggie was overcome by nervousness. It took her a moment to realize why: She and Ira were next on the program. Just the cadence of The Prophet had reminded her.

At the wedding they'd sat on folding chairs behind the altar, and Jo Ann had sat in front of the altar with Reverend Connors. When Jo Ann began reading, Maggie had felt that breathless flutter high in her chest that foretold stage fright. She had taken a deep, trembly breath, and then Ira had unobtrusively set a hand at the small of her back. That had steadied her. When it was time for them to sing, they had begun at the same split second, on exactly the same note, as if they were meant for each other. Or so Maggie had viewed it at the time.

Jo Ann closed her book and returned to her pew. Sissy flipped pages of sheet music, the puffed flesh swinging from her valentine elbows. She flounced a bit on the bench, and then she played the opening bars of "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing."

Maybe if Maggie and Ira stayed seated, Sissy would just go on playing.

She would cover for them as she had covered for the chorus.

But the piano notes died away and Sissy glanced back toward the congregation. Her hands remained on the keys. Serena turned too and, knowing exactly where to find Maggie, gave her a fond, expectant look in which there was not the slightest suspicion that Maggie would let her down.

Maggie stood up. Ira just sat there. He might be anyone-a total stranger, someone who merely happened to have chosen the same pew.

So Maggie, who had never sung a solo in her life, clutched the seat ahead of her and called out, '' 'Love!' ''

A bit squeakily.

The piano sailed into it. The blond children pivoted and stared up into her face.

" '. . . is a many splendored thing,' " she quavered.

She felt like an orphaned, abandoned child, with her back held very straight and her round-toed pumps set resolutely together.

Then there was a stirring at her side, not her right side, where Ira sat, but her left, where Durwood sat. Durwood hastily unfolded himself as if all at once reminded of something. " 'It's the April rose,' " he sang, "

'that only grows . . .' " This near, his voice had a resonant sound. She thought of sheets of vibrating metal.

" 'Love is Nature's way of giving . . .' " they sang together.

They knew all the words straight through, which Maggie found surprising, because earlier she had forgotten what it was that makes a man a king. "

'It's the golden crown,' " she sang confidently. You had to sort of step forth, she decided, and trust that the words would follow. Durwood carried the melody and Maggie went along with it, less quavery now although she could have used a little more volume. It was true that her voice had once been compared to a bell. She had sung in the choir for years, at least till the children came along and things got complicated; and she had taken real joy in rounding out a note just right, like a pearl or a piece of fruit that hung in the air a moment before it fell away. Though age had certainly not helped. Did anyone else hear the thread of a crack running through her high notes? Hard to tell; the congregation faced decorously forward, except for those confounded little blonds.

She thought time had gone into one of its long, slow, taffy-like stretches. She was acutely conscious of each detail of her surroundings.

She felt the fabric of Dur-wood's sleeVe just brushing her arm, and she heard Ira absentmindedly twanging a rubber band. She saw how accepting and uninterested her audience was, taking it for granted that this song would of course be sung and then some other song after that. " 'Then your fingers touched my silent heart,' " she sang, and she remembered how she and Serena had giggled over that line when they sang it themselves-oh, long before that fateful Harvest Home Ball-because where else was your heart but in your chest? Weren't they saying the lover had touched their chests! Serena was facing the pulpit but her head had a listening stillness to it. Her tail of hair was gathered into one of those elastic arrangements secured by two red plastic marbles, the kind of thing very young girls wore. Like a very young girl, she had summoned all her high-school friends around her-no one from a later time, no one from the dozen small towns Max had lugged her to during their marriage, for they hadn't stayed in any of those places long enough. Maggie decided that that was the saddest thing about this whole event.

The song came to an end. Maggie and Durwood sat down.

Sissy Parton moved directly into "Friendly Persuasion," but the Barley twins, who used to harmonize as closely as the Lennon Sisters, stayed seated. Serena seemed resigned by now; she didn't even give them a look.

Sissy played just one stanza, and then the minister rose and said, "We are gathered here today to mourn a grievous loss."

Maggie felt she had turned to liquid. She was so exhausted that her knees were shaking.

The minister had a lot to say about Max's work for the Furnace Fund. He didn't seem to know him personally, however. Or maybe that was all Max had amounted to, in the end: a walking business suit, a firm handshake.

Maggie switched her attention to Ira. She wondered how he could sit there, so impervious. He'd have let her slog through that entire song alone; she knew that. She could have stumbled and stuttered and broken down; he would have watched as coolly as if she had nothing to do with him. Why not? he would say. What obligated him to sing some corny fifties song at a semi-stranger's funeral? As usual, he'd be right. As usual, he'd be forcing Maggie to do the giving in.

She made up her mind that when the funeral was over, she would stride off in her own direction. She would certainly not drive back with him to Baltimore. Maybe she'd hitch a ride with Durwood. Gratitude rushed over her at the thought of Durwood's kindness. Not many people would have done what he had done. He was a gentle, sympathetic, softhearted man, as she should have realized from the start.

Why, if she had accepted that date with Durwood she'd be a whole different person now. It was all a matter of comparison. Compared to Ira she looked silly and emotional; anybody would have. Compared to Ira she talked too much and laughed too much and cried too much. Even ate too much! Drank too much! Behaved so sloppily and mawkishly!

She'd been so intent on not turning into her mother, she had gone and turned into her father.

The minister sat down with an audible groan. There was a rustle of linen a few pews back and then here came Sugar Tilghman, bearing her black straw hat as smoothly as a loaded tray. She tip-tapped up front to Sissy and bent over her, conferring. They murmured together. Then Sugar straightened and took a stance beside the piano with her hands held just the way their choir leader used to insist-loosely clasped at waist level, no higher-and Sissy played a bar of music that Maggie couldn't immediately name. An usher approached Serena and she rose and accepted his arm and let him escort her down the aisle, eyes lowered.

Sugar sang, '' 'When I was just a little girl . . .' "

Another usher crooked his arm toward Serena's daughter, and one by one the family members filed out. Up front, Sugar gathered heart and swung gustily into the chorus: Que sera sera, Whatever will be will be. The future's not ours to see, Que sera sera.

When they stepped out of the church it was like stepping out of a daytime movie-that sudden shock of sunshine and birdsong and ordinary life that had been going on without them. Serena was hugging Linda. Linda's husband stood awkwardly by with the children, looking like a visitor who hoped to be invited in. And all around the churchyard, members of the class of ' were recognizing each other. "Is that you?" they asked. And, "How long has it been?" And, "Can you believe this?" The Barley twins told Maggie she hadn't changed a bit. Jo Ann Der-mott announced that everyone had changed, but only for the better. Wasn't it odd, she said, how much younger they were than their parents had been at the very same age. Then Sugar Tilghman appeared in the doorway and asked the crowd at large what other song she possibly could have sung. "I mean I know it wasn't perfect," she said, "but look what I had to choose from! Was it just too absolutely inappropriate?"

They all swore it wasn't.

Maggie said, "Durwood, I owe you the world for coming to my rescue."

-"My pleasure," he told her. "Here's your coupon, by the way. None the worse for wear."

This wasn't quite true; it was limp around the edges and slightly damp.

Maggie dropped it into her purse.

Ira stood near the parking lot with Nat Abrams. He and Nat had been a couple of classes ahead of the others; they were the outsiders. Not that Ira seemed to mind. He looked perfectly at ease, in fact. He was discussing auto routes. Maggie overheard snatches of "Triple A" and "Highway Ten." You would think the man was obsessed.

"Funny little place, isn't it?" Durwood said, gazing around him.

"Funny?"

"You couldn't even call it a town."

"Well, it is kind of small," Maggie said.

"I wonder if Serena will be staying on here."

They both looked over at Serena, who seemed to be trying to put her daughter back together. Linda's face was streaming with tears, and Serena had set her at a distance and was patting down various parts of her clothes. ^'Doesn't she still have relatives in Baltimore?" Durwood asked.

"None that claim her," Maggie said.

"I thought she had that mother."

"Her mother died a few years ago."

"Aw, really?" Durwood said.

"She got one of those diseases, some muscular something."

"Us boys were all just, like, fixated on her, once upon a time," Durwood said.

This startled Maggie, but before she could comment she saw Serena heading toward them. She had her shawl clasped tightly around her. "I want to thank you both for singing," she said. "It meant a lot to me."

"That Ira is just so stubborn I could spit," Maggie said, and Durwood said, "Beautiful service, Serena."

"Oh, be honest, you thought it was crazy," Serena said. "But you were nice to humor me. Everyone's been so nice!" Her lips took on a blurred look. She drew a knot of Kleenex from her V neckline and pressed it first to one eye and then to the other. "Sorry," she said. "I keep changing moods. I feel like, I don't know, a TV screen in a windstorm. I'm so changeable."

"Most natural thing in the world," Durwood assured her, Serena blew her nose and then tucked the Kleenex away again. "Anyhow," she said. "A neighbor's setting out some refreshments back at the house.

Can you all come? I need to have people around me right now."

"Well, certainly," Maggie told her, and Durwood said, "Wouldn't miss it, Serena," both at the same time. "Just let me get my car," Durwood said.

"Oh, never mind that; we're all walking. It's just over there through the trees, and anyway there's not a lot of parking space."

She took Maggie's elbow, leaning slightly. "It did go well, didn't it?"

she said. She steered her toward the road, while Durwood dropped behind with Sugar Tilgh-man. "I'm so glad I had the idea. Reverend Orbison threw a fit, but I said, 'Isn't this for me? Isn't a memorial service meant to comfort the living?' So he said yes, he guessed it was. And that's not the end of it, either! Wait till you see the surprise I've got up at the house."

"Surprise? What kind?" Maggie asked.

"I'm not telling," Serena said.

Maggie started chewing her lower lip.

They turned onto a smaller street, keeping to the shoulder because there wasn't a sidewalk. The houses here had a distinctly Pennsylvanian air, Maggie thought. They were mostly tall stone rectangles, flat-faced, set close to the road, with a meager supply of narrow windows. She imagined spare wooden furniture inside, no cushions or frills or modern conveniences, which of course was silly because a television antenna was strapped to every chimney.

The other guests were following in a leisurely parade-the women tiptoeing through the gravel in their high heels, the men strolling with their hands in their pockets. Ira brought up the rear between Nat and Jo Ann. He gave no sign of minding this change in plans; or if he had at some earlier point, Maggie had luckily missed it.

"Durwood was wondering if you'd be staying on here," she told Serena.

"Any chance you might move back to Baltimore?"

"Oh," Serena said, "Baltimore seems so far away by now. Who would I know anymore?"

"Me and Ira, for one thing," Maggie said. "Durwood Clegg. The Barley twins."

The Barley twins were walking just behind them, clinging to each other's arms. Both wore clip-on sunglasses over their regular glasses.

"Linda has been after me to move to New Jersey," Serena said. "Get an apartment close to her and Jeff."

"That would be nice."

"Well, I'm not so sure," Serena said. "Seems anytime we spend a few days together I begin to realize we haven't got a thing in common."

"But if you lived close by you wouldn't be spending days together," Maggie said. "You'd be dropping in and out. You'd be leaving when the conversation ran down. And besides, you'd see more of your grandchildren."

"Oh, well, grandchildren. I've never felt they had all that much to do with me."

"You wouldn't say that if someone kept them away from you," Maggie told her.

"How's your grandchild, Maggie?"

"I have no idea," Maggie said. "Nobody tells me a thing. And Fiona's getting married again; I found that out purely by accident."

"Is that so! Well, it'll be good for Larue to have a man around."

"Leroy," Maggie said. "But see, Fiona's true love is still Jesse. She's said as much, in so many words. There's just something gone wrong between them temporarily. It would be a terrible mistake for her to marry someone else! And then poor little Leroy ... oh, I hate to think of all that child has been through. Living in that run-down house, secondhand smoking-"

"Smoking! A six-year-old?"

"Seven-year-old. But it's her grandmother who smokes."

"Well, then," Serena said.

"But it's Leroy's lungs getting coated with tar."

"Oh, Maggie, let her go," Serena said. "Let it all go! That's what I say.

I was watching Linda's boys this morning, climbing our back fence, and first I thought, Oh-oh, better call them in; they're bound to rip those sissy little suits, and then I thought, Nah, forget it. It's not my affair, I thought. Let them go."

"But I don't want to let go," Maggie said. "What kind of talk is that?"

"You don't have any choice," Serena told her. She stepped over a branch that lay across their path. "That's what it comes down to in the end, willy-nilly: just pruning and disposing. Why, you've been doing that all along, right? You start shucking off your children from the day you give birth; that's the whole point. A big, big moment is when you can look at them and say, 'Now if I died they could get along without me. I'm free to die,' you say. 'What a relief!' Discard, discard! Throw out the toys in the basement. Move to a smaller house. Menopause delighted me."

"Menopause!" Maggie said. "You've been through menopause?"

"Gladly," Serena told her.

-"Oh, Serena!" Maggie said, and she stopped short, nearly causing the Barley twins to bump into her.

"Well, goodness," Serena said, "why should that bother you?"

"But I remember when we first got our periods," Maggie said. "Remember how we all waited? Remember," she said, turning to the Barley twins, "how that was once the only thing we talked about? Who had started and who had not? What it must feel like? How on earth we'd keep it secret from our husbands when we married?"

The Barley twins nodded, smiling. Their eyes were invisible behind their dark glasses.

"And now she's gone and stopped," Maggie told them.

"We haven't stopped," Jeannie Barley caroled.

"She's gone through change of life!" Maggie cried.

"Wonderful; announce it to the world," Serena said. She linked arms with Maggie and they resumed walking. "Believe me, I barely gave it a thought.

'Well, good,' I told myself. 'Just one more thing to let go of.' "

Maggie said, "I don't feel I'm letting go; I feel they're taking things away from me. My son's grown up and my daughter's leaving for college and they're talking at the nursing home about laying off some of the workers.

It's something to do with the new state regulations-they're going to hire on more professionals and lay off people like me."

"So? That job was always beneath you anyway," Serena said. "You were a straight-A student, remember? Or near about."

"It is not beneath me, Serena; I love it. You sound just like my mother.

I love that job!"

"Then go back to school and get to be a professional yourself," Serena said.

Maggie gave up on her. She was too tired, all at once, to argue.

They turned in through a little gate, onto a flagstone path. Serena's house was newer than the others-raw brick, one story, modern and compact.

Someone stood at the front window, drawing back a curtain to gaze out, but when the guests approached she dropped the curtain and vanished. She reappeared at the door, a buttressed and corseted woman in a stiff navy dress. "Oh, you poor thing!" she cried to Serena. "You come right on in. Everybody, come in! There's lots to eat and drink. Anyone want to freshen up?"

Maggie did. She followed the woman's directions and passed through the living room, which was filled with heavy furniture in a wagon-wheel motif, and down a short hall to the bedroom. The decor seemed purely Max's doing: a bedspread patterned with multicolored license plates, a beer stein collection lining the bookshelf. On the bureau, a photo of Linda in cap and gown stood next to a bronze cowboy boot stuffed with pencils and gnawed plastic swizzle sticks. But someone had hung guest towels in the bathroom and set out a bowl of rosette-shaped soaps. Maggie washed up, using the bar of Ivory she found in a cabinet beneath the sink. She dried her hands on a grayish bath towel draped behind the shower curtain, and then she peered into the mirror. The walk had not done anything for her appearance. She tried to flatten her bangs down.

She stood sideways to the mirror and sucked in her stomach. Meanwhile the Barley twins were discussing Linda's photograph: "Isn't it a pity she got Max's looks and not Serena's." Nat Abrams said, "Would this be the line for the John?" and Maggie called, "Just coming out."

She emerged to find Ira waiting with Nat; now their topic was gas mileage. She returned to the living room. The guests were gathered in the dining alcove, where platters of food covered a table-sandwiches and cakes and drinks. Sissy Parton's husband was serving as bartender. Maggie recognized him by his violent pink hair, the color of freshly cut cedarwood. It hadn't dimmed in the slightest. She went over to him and said, "Hello, Michael."

"Maggie Daley! Nice singing," he said. "But what became of Ira?"

"Oh, well . . ." she said vaguely. "Could I have a gin and tonic, please?"

He made her one, pouring the gin with a flourish. "I hate these affairs," he told her. "This is my second funeral this week."

"Who else died?" Maggie asked.

"Oh, an old poker buddy. And last month my Aunt Linette, and the month before that ... I tell you, first I went to all my kids' school plays, and no sooner was I done with those than we start (>n this."

A stranger came up and asked him for a Scotch. Maggie started circulating through the living room. She didn't hear much talk of Max. People were discussing the World Series, the prevalence of crime, the proper depth for tulip bulbs. Two women Maggie had never seen before were assembling a composite portrait of some couple they both knew. "He was a bit of a drinker," one said.

"Yes, but he adored her."

"Oh, he'd never have managed without her."

"Were you at that Easter brunch they gave?"

"Was I there! The one with the chocolate centerpiece?"

"It was a present from him to her, she said. He'd surprised her with it that morning."

"A hollow chocolate rabbit. He'd filled it with rum."

"She didn't know he'd filled it with rum."

"He said he'd wanted it to be like those Swiss candies they fill with liqueurs."

"Rum seeped out the bottom."

"Little melty holes in the chocolate."

"Worst mess you ever saw, all across the tablecloth."

"Lucky it was only one of those Hallmark paper tablecloths for holidays."

Back in the dining alcove, the Barley twins were talking with Michael.

They had flipped up their clip-on shades, which stuck out above their glasses like the perky antennas of some sharp-faced, cute little creatures from outer space, and they were nodding earnestly, in unison.

Jo Ann and Sugar were discussing mixed marriages-the consuming interest of Jo Ann's life for years before her wedding to Nat and evidently afterward as well. "But tell me the truth," Sugar was saying. "Doesn't it sometimes seem to you like every marriage is mixed?'' And Serena's two little grandsons were surreptitiously bombarding each other with bits of cake. It looked good: angel food. Maggie thought about trying a slice but then she remembered her diet. She had a virtuous, empty feeling in the center of her rib cage. She traveled around the table surveying what was offered, resisting even the bowl of Fritos. "The dump salad is mine," Serena's neighbor said at her elbow.

"Dump salad?"

"You take a packet of orange Jell-O powder, a can of crushed pineapple, a carton of Cool Whip ..."

Some woman in a bouffant hairdo said hello and the neighbor turned to greet her, leaving Maggie with the gritty feeling of Jell-O powder on her teeth.

Serena was over by the buffet, beneath an oil painting of a dead bird with a basket of olive-drab fruit. Linda and her husband stood next to her. "When all these people leave, Mom," Linda was saying, "we're taking you out to dinner, anyplace your heart desires." She spoke a little above normal volume, as if Serena were hard of hearing. "We're going to buy you a real meal," she said.

"Oh, well, there's so much food right here in the house," Serena said.

"And I'm honestly not all that hungry anyhow."

Her son-in-law said, "Now, Mother Gill, just tell us your favorite restaurant.'' Jeff, that was it. Maggie couldn't think of his last name.

Serena said, "Um ..." She glanced around, as if hoping for a suggestion.

Her eyes brushed Maggie and traveled on. Finally she said, "Oh, well, maybe the Golden Chopsticks. That's a good place."

"What kind is it, Chinese?"

"Well, yes, but they also have-"

"Oh, I just don't care for Chinese food," Linda said. "Not Chinese or Japanese, either one, I'm sorry to say."

"Or any other Oriental," Jeff pointed out. "You don't like Thai food either."

"No, that's true. Or Filipino or Burmese."

Serena said, "But-"

"And you can't eat Indian; don't forget Indian," Jeff said.

"No; Indian has those spices."

"Spices affect her digestion," Jeff told Serena.

"I guess I'm just sensitive or something," Linda said.

"Same goes for Mexican."

"But we don't have any Mexican," Serena said. "We don't have any of those places."

Linda said, "What I'd like to know is how the Mexicans themselves can stand all those spicy seasonings."

"They can't," Jeff told her. "They come down with this awful condition that coats the insides of their mouths like plates of armor."

Serena blinked. "Well," she said, "what kind of restaurant did you two have in mind?"

"We thought maybe that steak house off of Route One," Jeff told her.

"MacMann's? Oh."

"That is, if it's all right with you."

"Well, MacMann's is kind of ... noisy, isn't it?" Serena asked.

"I never thought it was noisy," Linda said.

"I mean it's always so noisy and crowded."

"Just take it or leave it, Mom," Linda told her, raising her chin. "We were only trying to be nice, for God's sake."

Maggie, standing just outside their little circle, waited for Serena to toss her one of her wry, eye-rolling expressions. But Serena didn't even glance at her. She seemed shrunken, somehow; she had lost her dash..She lifted her drink to her lips and sipped reflectively.

Then Max's brother called, "Serena? You ready for this?"

He was gesturing toward a mildewed black leatherette case that stood on the coffee table. It looked familiar; Maggie couldn't think why. Serena brightened. She turned to Maggie and said, "That there is my surprise."

"What is it?" Maggie asked.

"We're going to show a movie of my wedding."

Of course: a film projector. Maggie hadn't seen one of those in years.

She watched as Max's brother unsnapped the silver clasps. Meanwhile Serena moved away to lower the window shades. "We'll use this biggest shade for the screen," she called. "Oh, I hope the film hasn't just disintegrated or bleached out or whatever it is that old film does."

"You mean your and Max's wedding?" Maggie asked, following her.

"His uncle Oswald took it."

"I don't remember a camera at the wedding."

"I was thinking back over the songs last night and I all at once remembered. 'If it's still in one piece,' I said to myself, 'wouldn't it be fun to watch?' "

Fun? Maggie wasn't so sure. But she wouldn't have missed it, all the same; so she found herself a seat on the rug. She set down her glass and curled her legs to one side. A very old lady was sitting in a chair next to her, but at this level all Maggie saw were her thick beige cotton anklets melting over the tops of her shoes.

Now the guests had got wind of what was about to take place. Serena's classmates were settling around the projector, while the others started flowing distractedly in different directions, like something under a microscope. A few edged toward the door, mentioning baby-sitters and appointments elsewhere, promising Serena they would keep in touch.

Several returned to the bar, and since Michael had deserted, they began mixing their own drinks. Michael was in the living room now, and so was Nat. Ira wasn't anywhere that Maggie could see. Nat was asking Sugar, "Am I in this, do you think?"

"You are if you sang at the wedding."

"Well, I didn't," he said glumly.

With just a little stretch of the imagination, Maggie thought, this could be Mr. Alden's civics class. (You had to overlook the old lady, who had remained contentedly seated with her tinkling cup of tea.) She glanced around and saw a semicircle of graying men and women, and there was something so worn down about them, so benign and unassuming, that she felt at that moment they were as close to her as family. She wondered how she could have failed to realize that they would have been aging along with her all these years, going through more or less the same stages-rearing their children and saying goodbye to them, marveling at the wrinkles they discovered in the mirror, watching their parents turn fragile and uncertain. Somehow, she had pictured them still fretting over Prom Night.

Even the sound of the projector came straight from Mr. Alden's class-the clickety-click as the reels started spinning and a square of flawed, crackled light was cast upon the window shade. What would Mr. Alden say if he could see them all together again? He was probably dead by now. And anyway, this movie wasn't showing how democracy worked or how laws were born, but-Why, Sissy! Sissy Parton! Young and slender and prim, wearing a tight chignon encircled with artificial daisies like a French maid's frill. She was playing the piano, her wrists so gracefully arched that you could believe it was only the delicacy of her touch that caused the film to remain soundless. Above the white choir robe, the Peter Pan collar of her blouse was just visible, a pale salmon pink (in real life a deep rose, Maggie recalled). She lifted her head and looked purposefully toward a certain point, and the camera followed her gaze and the screen was suddenly filled with a double row of ridiculously clean-cut young people in pleated robes. They sang silently, their mouths perfect ovals. They resembled the carolers on a Christmas card. It was Serena who identified the tune. " 'True love,' " she sang, " 'true-' " And then she broke off to say, "Oh! Would you look? Mary Jean Bennett! I never even thought to invite her. I forgot all about her. Does anybody know where Mary Jean lives now?"

No one answered, although several, hi low, dreamy murmurs, carried on with " "... for you and I have a guardian angel . . .' "

"There's Nick Bourne, the rat," Serena said. "He claimed it was too far to come to the funeral."

She was sitting on the arm of a chair, craning her neck toward the movie.

In profile she looked commanding, almost glorious, Maggie thought, with that silver line of light from the screen running down her large, straight nose and the curve of her lips.

Maggie herself stood in the front row of the chorus, next to Sugar Tilghman. Her hair was in tiny squiggles all over her head; it made her face look too big. Oh, this was humiliating. But no doubt the others felt the same way. She distinctly heard Sugar groan. And when the camera switched to Durwood, with his wet, black, towering pompadour like the crest on the top of a Dairy Queen cone, he gave a sharp bark of laughter. This younger Durwood strode over to the piano with his robe flapping behind him. He assumed his position and paused importantly. Then he embarked on a silent "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" with his eyes closed more often than open, his left arm gesturing so passionately that once he swatted a lily in a papier-mach vase. Maggie wanted to laugh but she held it in. So did everyone else, although the old lady said, "Well! My goodness," and rattled her teacup. A couple of people were humming along with this song too, which Maggie thought was charitable of them.

Next the camera swung dizzyingly to Jo Ann Dermott at the front of the church. She gripped the edges of the pulpit and read from a book that the audience couldn't see. Since she wasn't in the chorus, her dress was completely exposed-stiff, square-shouldered, full-skirted, more matronly than anything she would ever wear again. Her lowered eyes looked naked.

No one could hum along with The Prophet, so the reading just went on and on in total silence. Out in the dining alcove the other guests talked and laughed and clinked ice cubes. "Good Lord, fast-forward it, someone," Jo Ann said, but evidently Max's brother didn't know how (if you could fast-forward these old films), and so they had to sit through it.

Then the camera swooped again and there was Sissy playing the piano, with one damp curl plastered to her forehead. Maggie and Ira, side by side, stood watching Sissy gravely. (Ira was a boy, a mere child.) They drew a breath. They started singing. Maggie Was slightly bunchy in her robe-she'd been fighting her extra ten pounds even then-and Ira had a plucked, fledgling look. Had he really worn his hair that short? In those days, he'd seemed totally unreadable. His unreadability was his greatest attraction. He'd reminded her of those math geniuses who don't need to write out the process but simply arrive at the answer.

He was twenty-one when that movie was filmed. Maggie was nineteen. Where they'd met, she had no idea, because at the time it hadn't mattered. They had probably passed each other in the halls in high school, maybe even elementary school. He might have visited her house, hanging out with her brothers. (He and her brother Josh were nearly the same age.) Certainly he'd sung with her at church; she knew that much. His family were members there, and Mr. Nichols, always short on male voices, had somehow talked Ira into joining the choir. But he hadn't lasted long. About the time he graduated from high school, he quit. Or maybe it was the year after.

Maggie hadn't noticed exactly when it was he'd stopped appearing.

Her boyfriend in high school had been a classmate named Boris Drumm. He was short and dark, with rough skin and a frizz of cropped black hair-manly even at that age, everything she'd been looking for. It was Boris who taught Maggie to drive, and one of his exercises involved her speeding alone across the Sears, Roebuck parking lot till he loomed suddenly in front of the car to test her braking skills. Her clearest picture of him, to this day, was the determined stance he had taken in her path: arms straight out, feet wide apart, jaw set. Rock-hard, he'd seemed. Indestructible. She had had the feeling she could run him over, even, and he'd have bobbed up again untouched, like one of those plastic toy men weighted with lead at the base.

He planned on attending a college in the Midwest after graduation, but it was understood that as soon as he got his degree he and Maggie would marry. Meanwhile Maggie would live at home and go to Goucher. She wasn't much looking forward to it; it was her mother's idea. Her mother, who had taught English before she married, filled out all the application forms and even wrote Maggie's essay for her. It was very important to her that her children should rise in the world.

(Maggie's father installed garage doors and had not had any college at all.) So Maggie resigned herself to four years at Goucher. In the meantime, to help with tuition, she took a summer job washing windows.

This was at the Silver Threads Nursing Home, which hadn't yet officially opened. It was a brand-new, modern building off Erdman -Avenue, with three long wings and one hundred and eighty-two windows. Each of the larger windows had twelve panes of glass; the smaller windows /had six.

And in the left-hand corner of each pane was a white paper snowflake reading KRYSTAL KLEER MFG. co. These snowflakes clung to the glass with a force that Maggie had never seen before or since. Whatever substance held them on, she thought later, should have been adopted by NASA. If you peeled off the top layer of paper a lower, fuzzy layer remained, and if you soaked that in hot water and then scraped it with a razor blade there were still gray shreds of rubbery glue, and after those were gone the whole pane, of course, was a mess, fingerprinted and streaky, so it had to be sprayed with Win-dex and buffed with a chamois skin. For one whole summer, from nine in the morning till four in the afternoon, Maggie scraped and soaked and scraped again. The tips of her fingers were continually sore. She felt her nails had been driven back into their roots. She didn't have anyone to talk to while she worked, because she was the only window-washer they'd hired. Her sole company was the radio, playing "Moonglow" and "I Almost Lost My Mind."

In August the home started admitting a few patients, although not all the work was finished yet. Of course they were settled in those rooms where the windows were fully scraped, but Maggie got in the habit of taking a break from time to time and going visiting. She would stop at one bed or another to see how people were doing. "Could you move my water pitcher a little closer, doll?" a woman would ask, or, "Would you mind pulling that curtain?" While performing these tasks, Maggie felt valuable and competent. She began attracting a following of those patients who were mobile. Someone in a wheelchair would discover which room she was working in and suddenly there'd be three or four patients sitting around her talking. Their style of conversation was to ignore her presence and argue heatedly among themselves. (Was it the blizzard of ' or the blizzard of

'? And which number counted more in the blood pressure reading?) But they conveyed an acute awareness of their audience; she knew it was all for lier benefit. She would laugh at appropriate moments or make sounds of sympathy, and the old people would take on gratified expressions.

No one in her family understood when she announced that she wanted to forget about college and become an aide in the nursing home instead. Why, an aide was no better than a servant, her mother pointed out; no better than a chambermaid. And here Maggie had such a fine mind and had graduated at the top of her class. Did she want to be just ordinary? Her brothers, who had made the same kind of choice themselves (three were involved in some phase of the construction business, while the fourth welded locomotives at the Mount Clare railyards), claimed they had been looking to her to go further. Even her father wondered half audibly whether she knew what she was doing. But Maggie remained firm. What did she want with college? What did she want with those pointless, high-flown bits of information like the ones she'd learned in high school-Ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny and Synecdoche is the use of the part to symbolize the whole? She enrolled in a Red Cross training program, which in those days was all that was needed, and took a job at Silver Threads.

So there she was, eighteen and a half years old, working among old people and living with two elderly parents and her one unmarried brother, who was elderly himself, in a way. Boris Drumm had to earn his own school expenses, so he came back to Baltimore only at Christmas and spent the other holidays selling menswear in a shop near his campus. He wrote lengthy letters describing how his studies were altering his perceptions of the universe. The world was so full of injustice! he wrote. He had never realized. Writing back was hard because Maggie had very little to report. She didn't run into many of their friends anymore. Some had gone away to college, and when they returned they had changed. Some had married, which caused an even bigger change. Pretty soon the only people she saw regularly were Sugar and the Barley twins-just because they still sang in the choir-and, of course, Serena, her best friend. But Boris had never thought much of Serena, so Maggie seldom mentioned her in her letters.

Serena worked in a lingerie shop, clerking. She brought home translucent, lacy underwear in colors that made no sense. (Wouldn't a bright-red bra advertise itself through almost any piece of clothing you owned?) Modeling a black nightgown with a see-through bodice, she announced that she and Max were marrying in June, after he had finished his freshman year at UNC. UNC was a deal he had made with his parents. He had promised to try one year of college and then if he really, truly hated it they would let him drop out. What they were hoping, of course, was that he would meet a nice Southern girl and get over his infatuation with Serena.

Not that they would admit it.

Max said that after they were married she could quit her job at the lingerie shop and never work again, Serena said; and also, she said (languorously lowering a black lace strap and admiring her own creamy shoulder), he was pleading with her to accompany him to the Blue Hen Motel the next time he came home.

They wouldn't do anything, he said; just be together. Maggie was impressed and envious. It sounded very romantic to her. "You're going, aren't you?" she asked, but Serena said, "What do you think: I'm insane?

I'd have to be out of my mind."

"But, Serena-" Maggie began. She was about to say that this was nothing like Anita's situation, nothing whatsoever, but Serena's fierce expression stopped her.

"I'm no sucker," Serena said.

Maggie wondered what she herself would do if Boris ever invited her to the Blue Hen Motel. She didn't think that would occur to him, though.

Maybe it was just because she was forced to rely on his long, stuffy letters for any sense of him these days, but lately Boris had begun to seem less . . . crisp, you might say; less hard-edged. In his letters now he was talking about entering law school after college and then going into politics. Only in politics, he said, did you have the power to right the world's wrongs. But it was funny: Maggie had never seen politicians as powerful. She saw them as beggars. They were always begging for votes, altering themselves to satisfy their public, behaving spinelessly and falsely in a pathetic bid fof popularity. She hated to think that Boris was that way.

She wondered if Serena ever had second thoughts about Max. No, probably not. Serena and Max seemed perfectly suited. Serena was so lucky.

Maggie's nineteenth birthday-Valentine's Day, - fell on a Thursday, which was choir practice night. Serena brought a cake and after practice she passed out slices, along with paper cups of ginger ale, and everyone sang

"Happy Birthday." Old Mrs. Britt, who really should have retired from singing years before but no one had the heart to suggest it, looked around her and sighed. "Isn't it sad,*' she said, "how the young folks are drifting away. Why, Sissy hardly comes at all since she married, and Louisa's moving to Montgomery County, and now I hear the Moran boy's gone and got himself killed."

"Killed?" Serena said. "How did that happen?"

"Oh, one of those freak training accidents," Mrs. Britt said. "I don't know the details."

Sugar, whose fiance' was at Camp Lejeune, said, "Lord, Lord, all I want is for Robert to come back safe and in one piece' '-as if he were off waging hand-to-hand combat someplace, which of course he wasn't. (It happened to be one of those rare half-minutes in history when the country was not engaged in any serious hostilities.) Then Serena offered seconds on the birthday cake, but everyone had to go home.

That night in bed Maggie started thinking about the Moran boy, for some reason. Although "she hadn't known him well, she found she had a clear mental picture of him: a sloucher, tall and high-cheekboned, with straight, oily black hair. She should have guessed he was doomed to die young. He'd been the only boy in the choir who didn't horse around while Mr. Nichols was talking to them. He had had an air of self-possession.

She remembered too that he drove a car that ran on pure know-how, on junkyard parts and friction tape. Now that she thought of it, she believed she could envision his hands on the steering wheel. They were tanned and leathery, unusually wide across the base of the thumb, and the creases of his knuckles were deeply ingrained with mechanic's grease. She saw him in an army uniform with knife-sharp creases down the front of the trousers-a man who drove headlong to his death without even changing expression.

It was her first inkling that her generation was part of the stream of time. Just like the others ahead of them, they would grow up and grow old and die. Already there was a younger generation prodding them from behind.

Boris wrote and said he would try his very best to come home for spring vacation. Maggie wished he wouldn't sound so effortful. He had none of Ira Moran's calm assurance.

Serena got an engagement ring with a diamond shaped like a heart. It was dazzling. She began to plan and replan a great involved wedding production scheduled for the eighth of June, a date toward which she moved majestically, like a ship, with all her girlfriends fluttering in her wake. Maggie's mother said it was absurd to make such a fuss about a wedding. She said that people who lived for their weddings experienced a big letdown afterward, and then she said, changing her tone, "That poor, sad child, going to such lengths; I have to say I pity her." Maggie was shocked. (Pity! It seemed to her that Serena was already beginning her life, while she, Maggie, waited on a side rail.) Meanwhile Serena chose an ivory lace wedding dress but then changed her mind and decided white satin would be better, and she selected first an assortment of sacred music and then an assortment of secular music, and she notified all her friends that her kitchen would have a strawberry motif.

Maggie tried to remember what she knew of Ira Moran's family. They must be devastated by their loss. His mother, she seemed to recall, was dead.

His father was a vague, seedy man with Ira's stooped posture, and there had been some sisters-two or three, perhaps. She could point exactly to which pew they'd always occupied in church, but now that she thought to look, she found they weren't there anymore. She watched for them all the resi of February and most of March, but they never showed up.

Boris Drumm came home for spring break and accompanied her to church that Sunday. Maggie stood in the choir section looking down at where he sat, between her father and her brother Elmer, and it occurred to her that he fit in very well. Too well.

Like all the men in her family, he assumed a sort of hangdog expression during hymns and muttered them rather than sang them, or perhaps merely mouthed the words, letting his eyes skate to one side as if hoping not to be noticed. Only Maggie's mother actually sang, jutting her chin forward and enunciating clearly.

After Sunday dinner with her family, Maggie and Boris went out on the porch. Maggie lazily toed the porch swing back and forth while Boris discussed his political aspirations. He said he figured he would start small, maybe just get on the school board or something. Then he would work up to senator. "Hmm," Maggie said. She swallowed a yawn.

Then Boris gave a little cough and asked if she had ever thought of going to nursing school. That might be a good plan, he said, if she was so all fired up about taking care of old people. Probably this too had some connection with his career; senators' wives didn't empty bedpans. She said, "But I don't want to be a nurse."

"You were always so smart at your studies, though," he told her.

"I don't want to stand at a nursing station filling out forms; I want to deal with folks!" Maggie said.

Her voice was sharper than she had intended. He drew away.

"Sorry," she said.

She felt too big. She was taller than he when they were seated, especially when he hunkered down, as he was doing now.

He said, "Is something troubling you, Maggie? You haven't seemed yourself all spring vacation."

"Well, I'm sorry," she said, "but I've had a ... loss. A very close friend of mine has passed away."

She didn't feel she was exaggerating. It did seem, by now, that she and Ira had been close. They just hadn't consciously understood that.

"Well, why didn't you say so?" Boris asked. "Who was it?"

"No one you knew."

"You can't be sure of that! Who was it?"

"Oh, well," she said, "his name was Ira."

"Ira," Boris said. "You mean Ira Moran?"

She nodded, keeping her eyes down.

"Skinny guy? Couple of classes ahead of us?"

She nodded.

"Wasn't he part Indian or something?"

She hadn't been aware of this but it sounded right. It sounded perfect.

"Of course I knew him," Boris said. "Just to say hello to, I mean. I mean, he wasn't actually a friend or anything. I didn't realize he was your friend, either."

Where does she get these characters, his beetled expression was saying.

First Serena Palermo and now a red Indian.

"He was one of my favorite people," she said.

"He was? Oh. Is that right. Well. Well, you have my condolences, Maggie,"

Boris said. "I just wish you'd told me earlier." He considered a minute.

He said, "How did it happen, anyway?"

"It was a training accident," Maggie said.

"Training?"

"In boot camp."

"I didn't even know he'd enlisted," Boris said. "I thought he worked in his father's frame shop. Isn't that where I got our prom photo framed?

Sam's Frame Shop? Seems to me Ira was the one who waited on me."

"Really?" Maggie said, and she thought of Ira behind a counter, another image to add to her small collection.

"Well, he did," she said. "Enlist, I mean. And then he had this accident."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Boris said.

A few minutes later she told him she'd prefer to spend the rest of the day alone, and Boris said that of course he understood.

That night in bed she started crying. Speaking of Ira's death out loud was what had done it. She hadn't mentioned it before, not even to Serena, who would say, "What are you talking about? You barely knew the guy."

She and Serena were growing apart, Maggie realized. She cried harder, blotting her tears on the hem of her sheet.

The next day Boris went back to school. Maggie had the morning off and so she was the one who drove him to the bus station. She felt lonesome after she had said goodbye. It suddenly seemed very sad that he had come all this way just to see her. She wished she had been nicer to him.

At home, her mother was spring cleaning. She had already rolled up the carpets and laid down the sisal mats for summer, and now she stripped the curtains from the windows with a snapping sound. A bleak white light gradually filled the house. Maggie climbed the stairs to her room and flung herself on her bed. For the rest of her life, probably, she was doomed to live on unmarried in this tedious, predictable family.

After a few minutes, she got up and went to her parents' room. She took the yellow pages from under the telephone. Frames, no. Picture frames, yes. Sam's Frame Shop. She had thought she just wanted to see it in print, but eventually she scribbled the address on a memo pad and took it back to her room.

She owned no black-bordered stationery, so she chose the plainest of what she'd been given for graduation-white with a single green fern in one corner. Dear Mr. Moran, she wrote.

/ used to sing in the choir with your son and I had to let you know how sad I am to hear of his death. I'm not writing just out of politeness. I thought Ira was the most wonderful person I've ever met. There was something special about him and I wanted to tell you that as long as I live, I'm going to remember him fondly.

With deepest sympathy, Margaret M. Daley

She sealed and addressed the envelope and then, before she could change her mind, she walked to the corner and dropped it in the mailbox.

At first she didn't think about Mr. Moran's answering, but later on, at work, it occurred to her that he might. Of course: People were supposed to answer sympathy notes. Maybe he would say something personal about Ira that she could store up and treasure. Maybe he would say that Ira had mentioned her name. That wasn't completely impossible. Or, seeing how she had been one of the few who had properly valued his son, he might even send her some little memento-maybe an old photo. She would love a photo.

She wished now she had thought to ask for one.

Since she'd mailed the letter Monday, it would probably reach Ira's father Tuesday. So his answer could come on Thursday. She hurried through her work Thursday morning in a fever of impatience. At lunch hour she phoned home, but her mother said the mail hadn't arrived yet. (She also said, "Why? What are you expecting?" which was the kind of thing that made Maggie long to get married and move out.) At two she phoned again, but her mother said there'd been nothing for her.

That evening, walking to choir practice, she counted up the days once more and realized that Mr. Moran might not have received her letter on Tuesday after all. She hadn't mailed it till nearly noon, she remembered.

This, made her feel better. She started walking faster, waving at Serena when she spotted her on the steps of the church.

Mr. Nichols was late, and the choir members joked and gossiped while they waited for him. They were all a little heady now that spring was here-even old Mrs. Britt. The church windows were open and they could hear the neighborhood children playing out on the sidewalk. The night air smelled of newly cut grass. Mr. Nichols, when he arrived, wore a sprig of lavender in his buttonhole. He must have bought it from the street vendor, who had only that morning appeared with his cart for the first time that year. "Sorry, ladies and gentlemen," Mr. Nichols said. He set his briefcase on a pew and rooted through it for his notes.

The church door opened again and in walked Ira Mo-ran.

He was very tall and somber, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and slim black trousers. He wore a stern expression that lengthened his chin, as if there were something lumpy in his mouth. Maggie felt her heart stop. She felt icy at first and then overheated, but she stared through him blankly with dry, wide eyes, keeping her thumb in place in the hymnbook. Even in that first moment, she knew he wasn't a ghost or a mirage. He was as real as the gummy varnished pews, not so flawlessly assembled as she had pictured but more intricately tex-tured-more physical, somehow; more complicated.

Mr. Nichols said, "Oh, Ira. Glad to see you."

"Thanks," Ira said. Then he filed through the folding chairs toward the rear, where the men sat, and he took a seat. But Maggie saw how his gaze first skimmed the women in front, resting finally on her. She could tell he knew about the letter. She felt a flush pass over her face. Ordinarily graceful out of pure caution, pure timidity, she had been caught in an error so clumsy that she didn't believe she could ever again meet another person's eyes.

She sang numbly, standing and sitting as ordered. She sang "Once to Every Man and Nation" and "Shall We Gather at the River." Then Mr. Nichols had the men do "Shall We Gather at the River" on their own, and then he asked the accompanist to repeat a certain passage. While this was going on, Maggie leaned toward Mrs. Britt and whispered, "Wasn't that the Moran boy? The one who came in late?"

"Why, yes, I believe it was," Mrs. Britt said pleasantly.

"Didn't you tell us he'd been killed?"

"I did?" Mrs. Britt asked. She looked surprised and sat back in her chair. A moment later, she sat forward again and said, "That was the Rand boy who was killed. Monty Rand."

"Oh," Maggie said.

Monty Rand had been a little pale dishcloth of a person with an incongruously deep bass voice. Maggie had never much liked him.

After choir practice she gathered her belongings as quickly as possible and was first out the door, scuttling down the sidewalk with her purse hugged to her chest, but she hadn't even reached the corner when she heard Ira behind her. "Maggie?" he called.

She slowed beneath a streetlight and then stopped, not looking around. He came up next to her. His legs made a shadow like scissors on the sidewalk.

"Mind if I walk your way?" he said.

"Do what you like," she told him shortly. He fell into step beside her.

"So how've you been?" he asked.

"I'm okay."

"You're out of school now, right?"

She nodded. They crossed a street.

"Got a job?" he asked.

"I work at the Silver Threads Nursing Home."

"Oh. Well, good."

He started whistling the last hymn they had practiced: "Just a Closer Walk with Thee." He sauntered beside her with his hands in his pockets.

They passed a couple kissing at a bus stop. Maggie cleared her throat and said, "Silly me! I mixed you up with the Rand boy."

"Rand?"

"Monty Rand; he got killed in boot camp and I thought they said it was you."

She still didn't look at him, although he was near enough so she could smell his fresh-ironed shirt. She wondered who had ironed it. One of his sisters, probably. What did that have to do with anything? She tightened her hold on her purse and walked faster, but Ira kept up with her. She was conscious of his dark, hooked presence at her elbow.

"So now will you write to Monty's father?" he asked her.

When she risked a sidelong glance she saw the humorous pleat at the corner of his mouth.

"Go ahead and laugh," she told him.

"I'm not laughing."

"Go ahead! Tell me I made a fool of myself."

"Do you hear me laughing?"

They had reached her block now. She could see her house up ahead, part of a string of row houses, the porch glowing orange beneath the bugproof light. This time when she stopped she looked directly into his face, and he returned the look without a hint of a smile, keeping his hands shoved in his pockets. She hadn't expected his eyes to be so narrow. He could have been Asian, rather than Indian.

"Your father must have split his sides," she said.

"No, he was just ... he just asked me what it could mean."

She tried to think what words she had used in the letter. Special, she'd written. Oh, Lord. And worse yet: wonderful. She wished she could disappear.

"I remember you from choir practice," Ira said. "You're Josh's sister, right? But I guess we never really knew each other."

"No, of course not," she said. "Goodness! We were total strangers." She tried to sound brusque and sensible.

He studied her a moment. Then he said, "So do you think we might get to know each other now?"

"Well," she said, "I do go out with someone."

"Really? Who?"

"Boris Drumm," she said.

"Oh, yes."

She looked off toward her house. She said, "We'll probably get married."

"I see," he said.

"Well, goodbye," she told him.

He lifted a hand in silence, thought a moment, and then turned and walked away.

That Sunday, though, he came to sing with the choir at the morning service. Maggie felt relieved, almost lightweight with relief, as if she'd been given a second chance, and then her heart sank when he just melted into the crowd again after church. But Thursday night he was at choir practice again and he walked her home when it was over. They talked about trivial subjects-Mrs. Britt's splintery voice, for instance. Maggie grew more comfortable. When they reached her house she saw her neighbor's dog out front, peeing on Maggie's mother's one rosebush, with the neighbor standing there watching; so she called, "Hey, lady! Get your dog out of our yard, you hear?" She was joking; it was the rough style of humor she had picked up from her brothers. But Ira didn't know that and he looked taken aback. Then Mrs. Wright laughed and said, '^You and who else going to make me, kid?" and Ira relaxed. But Maggie felt she'd been clumsy once again, and she murmured a hasty good night and went inside.

Soon enough it became a pattern-Thursday nights and Sunday mornings.

People started to notice. Maggie's mother said, "Maggie? Does Boris know about this new friendship of yours?" and Maggie snapped, "Of course he knows"-a lie, or at best a half-truth. (Maggie's mother thought Boris was God's gift to women.) But Se-rena said, "Good for you! High time you dumped Mr. Holier-than-Thou."

"I haven't dumped him!"

"Why not?" Serena asked. "When you compare him to Ira! Ira's so mysterious."

"Well, he is part Indian, of course," Maggie said.

"And you have to admit he's attractive."

Oh, Jesse was not the only one who'd been swayed by a single friend!

Certainly Serena had more than a little to do with all that happened afterward.

She asked Maggie and Ira to sing a duet at her wedding, for instance. Out of the blue (for Ira had never been thought to have a particularly striking voice), she took it into her head that they should sing "Love Is a Many Splendored Thing" before the exchange of vows. So of course they had to practice; so of course he had to come to her house. They commiserated with each other and they clucked over Serena's musical taste, but it never occurred to them to refuse her. Maggie's mother kept tip-tapping in and out with folded laundry that had no business in the living room. " 'Once,' " they sang, " 'on a high and windy hill,' " and then Maggie sputtered into laughter, but Ira remained sober. Maggie seemed to be turning into someone else, those days-someone giddy and unstable and accident-prone. Sometimes she imag\ ined that that sympathy note had thrown her permanently off balance.

She knew by then that Ira ran his father's frame shop single-handed-Sam's "weak heart" had got to him the day after Ira's high-school graduation-and that he lived above the shop with his father and his two much older sisters, one of whom was a little slow and the other just shy or retiring or something. He wanted to go to college, though, if he could ever scrape together the money. He'd had hopes since childhood, of becoming a doctor.

He told her this in a neutral tone; he didn't seem discouraged about the way his life was turning out. Then he said maybe she'd like to come home with him sometime and meet his sisters; they didn't get to talk to very many people. But Maggie said, "No!" and then flushed and said, "Oh, I guess I'd better not," and pretended not to notice his amusement. She was afraid she'd run into his father. She wondered if his sisters knew about the letter too, but she didn't want to ask.

Never, not once in all this time, did he act any more than mildly friendly. When necessary he would take her arm-just to steer her through a crowd, say-and his hand felt firm and warm on her bare skin; but as soon as they'd passed the crowd he would release her. She wasn't even sure what he thought of her. She wasn't sure what she thought of him, either. And after all, there was Boris to consider. She went on writing Boris regularly-if anything, a little more often than usual.

Serena's wedding rehearsal was a Friday evening. It wasn't a very formal rehearsal. Max's parents, for instance, didn't even bother attending, although Serena's mother showed up with her hair in a million pink rollers. And events happened out of order, with Maggie (standing in for the bride, for good luck) coming down the aisle ahead of all the musical selections because Max had a trainload of relatives to meet in half an hour. She walked alongside Anita, which was one of Serena's more peculiar innovations.

"Who else could give me away?" Serena asked. "You surely don't imagine my father would do it." Anita herself, however, didn't seem so happy with this arrangement. She teetered and staggered in her spike-heeled shoes and dug her long red nails into Maggie's wrist in order to keep her balance. At the altar Max slung an arm around Maggie and said, shoot, maybe he'd just settle for her instead; and Serena, sitting in a center pew, called, "That'll be quite enough of that, Max Gill!" Max was the same freckled, friendly, overgrown boy he'd always been. It was hard for Maggie to picture him married.

After the vows Max left for Penn Station and the rest of them practiced the music. They all performed in a fairly amateurish style, Maggie thought, which was fine with her because she and Ira didn't sound their best that night. They started off raggedly, and Maggie forgot that they had planned to split up the middle verse. She sailed right into the first two lines along with Ira, then stopped in confusion, then missed her own cue and fell into a fit .of giggles. At that moment, the laughter not yet faded from her face, she saw Boris Drumm in the foremost pew. He wore a baffled, rumpled frown, as if someone had just awakened him.

Well, she'd known he was due home for the summer, but he hadn't told her which day. She pretended not to recognize him. She and Ira finished their song, and then she reverted to Serena's role and marched back up the aisle, minus Max, so Sugar could practice the timing on "Born to Be with You." After that Serena clapped her hands and shouted, "Okay, gang!" and they prepared to leave, all talking at once. They were thinking of going out for pizza. They swarmed toward Maggie, who waited at the rear of the church, but Boris stayed where he was, facing forward. He would be expecting Maggie to join him. She studied the back of his head, which was blocklike and immobile.

Serena handed her her purse and said, "You've got company, I see." Right behind Serena was Ira. He stopped in front of Maggie and looked down at her. He said, "Will you be going for pizza?"

Maggie said, "I guess not."

He nodded, blank-faced, and left. But he walked in a different direction from the others, as if he didn't feel they would welcome him without Maggie. Which of course was nonsense.

Maggie went back up the aisle and sat next to Boris, and they kissed. She said, "How was your trip?" and he said, "Who was that you were singing with?" at exactly the same instant. She pretended she hadn't heard. "How was your trip?" she asked again, and he said, "Wasn't that Ira Moran?"

"Who, the one singing?" she asked.

"That was Ira Moran! You told me he was dead!"

"It was a misunderstanding," she said.

"I heard you say it, Maggie."

"I mean I misunderstood that he was dead. He was only, um, wounded."

"Ah," Boris said. He turned that over in his mind.

"It was only a flesh wound, was all," Maggie told him. "A scalp wound."

She wondered if the two terms contradicted each other. She riffled quickly through various movies she had seen.

"So then what? He just comes walking in one day?" Boris asked. "I mean he just pops up, like some kind of ghost? How did it happen, exactly?"

"Boris," Maggie said, "I fail to comprehend why you keep dwelling on this in such a tiresome fashion."

"Oh. Well. Sorry," Boris said.

(Had she really sounded so authoritative? She found it hard to imagine, looking back.)

On the morning of the wedding, Maggie got up early and walked to Serena's apartment-the second floor of a formstone row house-to help her dress. Serena seemed unruffled but her mother was all in a dither. Anita's habit when she was nervous was to speak very fast and with practically no punctuation, like someone in a hard-sell commercial. "Why she won't roll her hair like everybody else when I told her way last week I said hon nobody wears long hair anymore you ought to go to the beauty shop and get you a nice little flip to peek out under your veil ..." She was rushing around the shabby, sparsely equipped kitchen in a dirty pink satin.bathrobe, with a cigarette dangling from her lips. She was making a great clatter but not much was getting accomplished. Serena, lazy and nonchalant in one of Max's big shirts, said, "Take it easy, Mom, will you?" She told Maggie, "Mom thinks we ought to change the whole ceremony."

"Change it how?" Maggie asked.

"She doesn't have any bridesmaids!" Anita said. "She doesn't have a maid of honor even and what's worse there's no kind of masculine person to walk her down the aisle!"

"She's upset she has to walk me down the aisle," Serena told Maggie.

"Oh if only your uncle Maynard would come and do it instead!" Anita cried. "Maybe we should move the wedding up a week and give him another chance because the way you have it now is all cockeyed it's too oddball I can just picture how those hoity-toity Gills will be scru-pulizing me and smirking amongst themselves and besides that last perm I got scorched the tip-ends of my hair / can't walk down the aisle."