Breathing Lessons

"Let's go get me dressed," Serena told Maggie, and she led her away.

In Serena's room, which was really just half of Anita's room curtained off with a draggled aqua bed sheet, Serena sat down at her vanity table.

She said, "I thought of giving her a belt of whiskey, but I worried it might backfire."

Maggie said, "Serena, are you sure you ought to be marrying Max?"

Serena squawked and wheeled to face her. She said, "Maggie Daley, don't you start with me! I've already got my wedding cake frosted."

"But I mean how do you know? How can you be certain you chose the right man?"

"I can be certain because I've come to the end of the line," Serena said, turning back to the mirror. Her voice was at normal level now. She patted on liquid foundation, expertly dotting her chin and forehead and cheeks.

"It's just time to marry, that's all," she said. "I'm so tired of dating!

I'm so tired of keeping up a good front! I want to sit on the couch with a regular, normal husband and watch TV for a thousand years. It's going to be like getting out of a girdle; that's exactly how I picture it."

"What are you saying?" Maggie asked. She was almost afraid of the answer.

"Are you telling me you don't really love Max?"

"Of course I love him," Serena said. She blended the dots into her skin.

"But I've loved other people as much. I loved Terry Simpson our sophomore year-remember him? But it wasn't time to get married then, so Terry is not the one I'm marrying."

Maggie didn't know what to think. Did everybody feel that way? Had the grownups been spreading fairy tales? "The minute I saw Eleanor," her oldest brother had told her once, ' 'I said, 'That girl is going to be my wife someday.' " It hadn't occurred to Maggie that he might simply have been ready for a wife, and therefore had his eye out for the likeliest prospect.

So there again, Serena had managed to color Maggie's view of things.

"We're not in the hands of fate after all,"

she seemed to be saying. "Or if we are, we can wrest ourselves free anytime we care to."

Maggie sat down on the bed and watched Serena applying Tier rouge. In Max's shirt, Serena looked casual and sporty, like anybody's girl next doOr. "When this is over," she told Maggie, "I'm going to dye my wedding dress purple. Might as well get some use out of it."

Maggie gazed at her thoughtfully.

The wedding was due to start at eleven, but Anita wanted to get to the church much earlier, she said, in case of mishaps. Maggie rode with them in Anita's ancient Chevrolet. Serena drove because Anita said she was too nervous, and since Serena's skirt billowed over so much of the seat, Maggie and Anita sat in back. Anita was talking nonstop and sprinkling cigarette ashes across the lap of her shiny peach mother-of-the-bride dress. "Now that I think of it Serena I can't imagine why you're holding your reception in the Angels of Charity building which is so damn far away and every time IVe tried to find it I've gotten all turned around and had to ask directions from passing strangers ..."

They came to the Alluring Lingerie Shop, and Serena double-parked and heaved her cascades of satin out of the car in order to go model her dress for Mrs. Knowlton, her employer. While they waited for her, Anita said, "Honestly you'd suppose if you can rent a man to come tend your bar or fix your toilet or check on why your door won't lock it wouldn't be any problem at all to engage one for the five eentsy minutes it takes to walk your daughter down the aisle don't you agree?"

"Yes, ma'am," Maggie said, and she dug absently into a hole in the vinyl seat and pulled out a wad of cotton batting.

"Sometimes I think she's trying to show me up," Anita said.

Maggie didn't know how to answer that.

Finally Serena returned to the car, bearing a wrapped gift. "Mrs.

Knowlton told me not to open this till our wedding night," she said.

Maggie blushed and slid her eyes toward Anita. Anita merely gazed out the window, sending two long streamers of smoke from her nostrils.

In the church, Reverend Connors led Serena and her mother to a side room.

Maggie went to wait for the other singers. Mary Jean was already there, and soon Sissy arrived with her husband and her mother-in-law. No Ira, though. Well, there was plenty of time. Maggie took her long white choir robe from its hanger and slipped it over her head, losing herself in its folds, and then of course she emerged all tousled and had to go off to comb her hair. But even when she returned, Ira was not to be seen.

The first of the guests had arrived. Boris sat in one of the pews, uncomfortably close. He was listening to a lady in a spotted veil and he was nodding intelligently, respectfully, but Maggie felt there was something tense about the set of his head. She looked toward the entrance. Other people were straggling in now, her parents and the Wrights next door and Serena's old baton teacher. No sign of the long, dark shape that was Ira Moran.

After she had let him walk off alone the night before, he must have decided to vanish altogether.

"Excuse me," she said. She bumped down the row of folding chairs and hurried through the vestibule. One of her full sleeves caught on the knob of the open door and yanked her up short in a foolish way, but she shook herself loose before anybody noticed, she thought. She paused on the front steps. "Well, hi!" an old classmate said. "Um ..." Maggie murmured, and she shaded her eyes and looked up and down the street. All she saw were more guests. She felt a moment's impatience with them; they seemed so frivolous. They were smiling and greeting each other in that gracious style they used only at church, and the women turned their toes out fastidiously as they walked, and their white gloves glinted in the sunlight.

In the doorway, Boris said, "Maggie?"

She didn't turn around. She ran down the steps with her robe flowing behind her. The steps were the wide, exceptionally shallow sort unsuited for any normal human stride; she was forced to adopt a limping, uneven rhythm. "Maggie!" Boris cried, so she had to run on after reaching the sidewalk. She shouldered her way between guests and then was past them, skimming down the street, ballooning white linen like a sailboat in a wind.

Sam's Frame Shop -was only two blocks from the church,but they were long blocks and it was a warm June morning. She was damp and breathless when she arrived. She pulled open the plate-glass door and stepped into a close, cheerless interior with a worn linoleum floor. L-shaped samples of moldings hung from hooks on a yellowing pegboard wall, and the counter was painted a thick, cold gray. Behind this counter stood a bent old man in a visor, with shocks of white hair poking every which way. Ira's father.

She was surprised to find him there. The way she'd heard it, he never set foot in the shop anymore. She hesitated, and he said, "Can I help you, miss?"

She had always thought Ira had the darkest eyes she'd ever seen, but this man's eyes were darker. She couldn't even tell "where they were focused; she had the fleeting notion that he might be blind.

"I was looking for Ira," she told him.

"Ira's not working today. He's got some kind of event."

"Yes, a wedding; he's singing at a wedding," she said. "But he hasn't shown up yet, so I came to get him."

"Oh?" Sam said. He moved his head closer to her, leading with his nose, not lessening in the least his impression of a blind man. "You wouldn't be Margaret, would you?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," she said.

He thought that over. He gave an abrupt, wheezy chuckle.

"Margaret M. Daley," he said.

She stood her ground.

"So you assumed Ira was dead," he said.

"Is he here?" she asked.

"He's upstairs, dressing."

"Could you call him, please?"

"How did you suppose he'd died?" he asked her.

"I mistook him for someone else. Monty Rand," she said, mumbling the words. "Monty got killed in boot camp."

"Boot camp!"

"Could you call Ira for me, please?"

"You'd never find Ira in boot camp," Sam told her. "Ira's got dependents, just as much as if he was married. Not that he ever could be married in view of our situation. My heart has been acting up on me for years and one of his sisters is not quite right in the head. Why, I don't believe the army would have him even if he volunteered! Then me and the girls would have to go on welfare; we'd be a burden on the government. 'Get along with you,' those army folks would tell him. 'Go on back to them that need you. We've got no use for you here.' "

Maggie heard feet running down a set of stairs somewhere-a muffled, drumming sound. A door opened in the pegboard wall behind the counter and Ira said, "Pop-"

He stopped and looked at her. He wore a dark, ill-fitting suit and a stiff white shirt, with a navy tie dangling unknotted from his collar.

"We'll be late for the wedding," she told him.

He shot back a cuff and checked his watch.

"Come on!" she said. It wasn't only the wedding she was thinking of. She felt there was something dangerous about staying around Ira's father.

And sure enough, Sam said, "Me and your little friend here was just discussing you going into the army."

"Army?"

"Ira couldn't join the army, I told her. He's got us."

Ira said, "Well, anyhow, Pop, I ought to be back from this thing in a couple of hours."

"You really have to take that long? That's most of the morning!" Sam turned to Maggie and said, "Saturday's our busiest day at work."

Maggie wondered why, in that case, the shop was empty. She said, "Yes, well, we should be-"

"In fact, if Ira joined the army we'd just have to close this place up,"

Sam said. "Sell it off lock, stock, and barrel, when it's been in the family for forty-two years come October."

"What are you talking about?" Ira asked him. "Why would I want to join the army?"

"Your little friend here thought you'd gone into the army and got yourself killed," Sam told him.

"Oh," Ira said. Now the danger must have dawned on him too, for this time it was he who said, "We should be going."

"She thought you'd blown yourself up in boot camp," Sam told him. He gave another of his wheezy chuckles. There was something mole-like and relentless about that way he led with his nose, Maggie felt. "Ups and writes me a letter of condolence,'' he said. "Ha!" He told Maggie, '

'Gave me quite a start. I had this half-second or so where I thought, Wait a minute. Has Ira passed] First I knew of it, if so. And first I'd heard of you. First I'd heard of any girl, matter of fact, in years. I mean it's not like he has any friends anymore. His chums at school were that brainy crowd that went away to college and by now they've all lost touch with him and he doesn't see a soul his own age. 'Look here!' I told him. 'A girl at last!' After I'd withstood the shock. 'Better grab her while you got the chance,' I told him."

"Let's go," Ira said to Maggie.

He lifted a hinged section of the counter and stepped through it, but Sam went on talking. "Trouble is, now you know she can manage fine without you," he said.

Ira paused, still holding up the hinged section.

"She writes a little note of condolence and then continues with her life, as merry as pie," Sam told him.

"What did you expect her to do, throw herself in my grave?"

"Well, you got to admit she bore up under her grief mighty well. Writes me a nice little note, sticks a postage stamp in one corner, then carries on with her girlfriend's wedding arrangements.''

"Right," Ira said, and he lowered the counter and came over to Maggie.

Was he totally impenetrable? His eyes were flat, and his hand, when he took her arm, was perfectly steady.

"You're wrong," Maggie told Sam.

"Huh?"

"I wasn't doing fine without him! I was barely existing."

"No need to get all het up about it," Sam said.

"And for your information, there's any number of girls who think he's perfectly wonderful and I am not the only one and also it's ridiculous to say he can't get married. You have no right; anyone can get married if they want to."

"He wouldn't dare!" Sam told her. "He's got me and his sisters to think of. You want us all in the poorhouse? Ira? Ira, you wouldn't dare to get married!"

"Why not?" Ira asked calmly.

"You've got to think of me and your sisters!"

"I'm marrying her anyhow," Ira said.

Then he opened the door and stood back to let Maggie walk through it.

On the stoop outside, they stopped and he put his arms around her and drew her close. She could feel the narrow bones of his chest against her cheek and she heard his heart beating in her ear. His father must have been able to see everything through the plate-glass door, but even so Ira bent his head and kissed her on the lips, a long, warm, searching kiss that turned her knees weak.

Then they started off toward the church, although first there was a minor delay because the hem of her choir robe caught her up short. Ira had to open the door once again (not even glancing at his father) and set her loose.

But to look at Serena's movie, would you guess what had come just before?

They seemed an ordinary couple, maybe a bit mismatched as to height. He was too tall and thin and she was too short and plump. Their expressions were grave but they certainly didn't look as if anything earth-shattering had recently taken place. They opened and closed their mouths in silence while the audience sang for them, poking gentle fun, intoning melodramatically. " 'Love is Nature's way of giving, a reason to be living . . .' " Only Maggie knew how Ira's hand had braced the small of her back.

Then the Barley twins leaned into each other and sang the processional, their faces raised like baby birds' faces; and the camera swung from them to Serena all in white. Serena sailed down the aisle with her mother hanging on to her. Funny: From this vantage neither one of them seemed particularly unconventional. Serena stared straight ahead, intent.

Anita's makeup was a little too heavy but she could have been anybody's mother, really, anxious-looking and outdated in her tight dress. "Look at you!" someone told Serena, laughing. Meanwhile the audience sang, "

'Though I don't know many words to say . . .' "

But then the camera jerked and swooped and there was

Max, waiting next to Reverend Connors in front of the altar. One by one, the singers trailed off. Sweet Max, pursing his chapped lips and squinting his blue eyes in an attempt to seem fittingly dignified as he watched Serena approaching. Everything about him had faded except for his freckles, which stood out like metal spangles across his broad cheeks.

Maggie felt tears welling up. Several people blew their noses.

No one, she thought, had suspected back then that it would all turn out to be so serious.

But of course the mood brightened again, because the song went on too long and the couple had to stand in position, with Reverend Connors beaming at them, while the Barley twins wound down. And by the time the vows were exchanged and Sugar rose to sing the recessional, most of the people in the audience were nudging each other expectantly. For who could forget what came next?

Max escorted Serena back down the aisle far too slowly, employing a measured, hitching gait that he must have thought appropriate. Sugar's song was over and done with before they had finished exiting. Serena tugged at Max's elbow, spoke urgently in his ear, traveled almost backward for the last few feet as she towed him into the vestibule. And then once they were out of sight," what a battle there'd been! The whispers, rising to hisses, rising to shouts! "If you'd stayed through the goddamn rehearsal," Serena had cried, "instead of tearing off to Penn Station for your never-ending relatives and leaving me to practice on my own so you had no idea how fast to walk me-" The congregation had remained seated, not knowing where to look. They'd grinned sheepishly at their laps, and finally broke into laughter.

"Serena, honey," Max had said, "pipe down. For Lord's sake, Serena, everyone can hear you, -Serena, honey pie ..."

Naturally none of this was apparent from the movie, which was finished anyhow except for a few scarred numerals flashing by. But all around the room people were refreshing other people's recollections, bringing the scene back to life. "And then she stalked out-"

"Slammed the church door-"

"Shook the whole building, remember?"

"Us just staring back toward the vestibule wondering how to behave-"

Someone flipped a window shade up: Serena herself. The room was filled with light. Serena was smiling but her cheeks were wet. People were saying, "Arid then, Serena . . ." and, "Remember, Serena?" and she was nodding and smiling and crying. The old lady next to Maggie said, "Dear, dear Maxwell," and sighed, perhaps not even aware of the others' merriment.

Maggie rose and collected her purse. She wanted Ira; she felt lost without Ira. She looked around for him but saw only the others, meaningless and bland. She threaded her way to the dining alcove, but he wasn't among the guests who stood picking over the platters of food. She walked down the hall and peeked into Serena's bedroom.

And there he was, seated at the bureau. He'd pulled a chair up close and moved Linda's graduation picture out of the way so he could spread a solitaire layout clear across the polished surface. One angular brown hand was poised above a jack, preparing to strike. Maggie stepped inside and shut the door. She set her purse down and wrapped her arms around him from behind. ' 'You missed a good movie," she said into his hair. "Serena showed a film of her wedding."

"Isn't that just like her,'.' Ira said. He placed the jack on a queen.

His hair smelled like coconut-its natural scent, which always came through sooner or later no matter what shampoo he used.

"You and I were singing our duet," she said.

"And I suppose you got all teary and nostalgic."

"Yes, I did," she told him.

"Isn't that just like you," he said.

"Yes, it is," she said, and she smiled into the mirror in front of them.

She felt she was almost boasting, that she'd made a kind of proclamation.

If she was easily swayed, she thought, at least she had chosen who would sway her. If she was locked in a pattern, at least she had chosen what that pattern would be. She felt strong and free and definite. She watched Ira scoop up a whole row of diamonds, ace through ten, and lay them on the jack. "We looked like children," she told him. "Like infants. We were hardly older than Daisy is now; just imagine. And thought nothing of deciding then and there who we'd spend the next sixty years with."

"Mmhmm," Ira said.

He pondered a king, while Maggie laid her cheek on the top of his head.

She seemed to have fallen in love again. In love with her own husband!

The convenience of it pleased her-like finding right in her pantry all the fixings she needed for a new recipe.

"Remember the first year we were married?" she asked him. "It was awful.

We fought every minute."

"Worst year of my life," he agreed, and when she moved around to the front he sat back slightly so she could settle on his lap. His thighs beneath her were long and bony-two planks of lumber. "Careful of my cards," he told her, but she could feel he was getting interested. She laid her head on his shoulder and traced the stitching of his shirt pocket with one finger.

"That Sunday we invited Max and Serena to dinner, remember? Our very first guests. We rearranged the furniture five times before they got there," she said. "I'd go out in the kitchen and come back to find you'd shifted all the chairs into corners, and I'd say, 'What have you done" and shift them all some other way, and by the time the Gills arrived, the coffee table was upside down on the couch and you and I were having a shouting quarrel."

"We were scared to death, is what it was," Ira said. He had his arms around her now; she felt his amused, dry voice vibrating through his chest. "We were trying to act like grownups but we didn't know if we could pull it off."

"And then our first anniversary," Maggie said. "What a fiasco! Mother's etiquette book said it was either the paper anniversary or the clock anniversary, whichever I preferred. So I got this bright idea to construct your gift from a kit I saw advertised in a magazine: a working clock made out of paper."

"I don't remember that."

"That's because I never gave it to you," Maggie said.

"What happened to it?"

"Well, I must have put it together wrong," Maggie said. "I mean I followed all the directions, but it never really acted like it was supposed to. It dragged, it stopped and started, one edge curled over, there was a ripple under the twelve where I'd used too much glue. It was

. . . makeshift, amateur. I was so ashamed of it, I threw it in the trash."

"Why, sweetheart," he said.

"I was afraid it was a symbol or something, I mean a symbol of our marriage. We were makeshift ourselves, is what I was afraid of."

lie said, "Shoot, we were just learning back then. We didn't know what to do with each other."

"We know now," she whispered. Then she pressed her mouth into one of her favorite places, that nice warm nook where his jaw met his neck.

Meanwhile her fingers started traveling down to his belt buckle.

Ira said, "Maggie?" but he made no move to stop her. She straightened up to loosen his belt and unzip his fly.

"We can sit right here in this chair," she whispered. "No one will ever guess."

Ira groaned and pulled her against him. When he kissed her his lips felt smooth and very firm. She thought she could hear her own blood flooding through her veins; it made a rushing sound, like a seashell.

"Maggie Daley!" Serena said.

Ira started violently and Maggie jumped up from his lap. Serena stood frozen with one hand on the doorknob. She was gaping at Ira, at his open zipper and his shirttail flaring out.

Well, it could have gone in either direction, Maggie figured. You never knew with Serena. Serena could have just laughed it off. But maybe the funeral had been too much for her, or the movie afterward, or just widowhood in general. At any rate, she said, "I don't believe this, I do not believe it."

Maggie said, "Serena-"

"In my own house! My bedroom!"

"I'm sorry; please, we're both so sorry . . ." Maggie said, and Ira, hastily righting his clothes, said, "Yes, we honestly didn't-"

"You always were impossible," Serena told Maggie. "I suspect it's deliberate. No one could act so goofy purely by chance. I haven't forgotten what happened with my mother at the nursing home. And now this!

At a funeral gathering! In the bedroom I shared with my husband!"

"It was an accident, Serena. We never meant to-"

"An accident!" Serena said. "Oh, just go."

"What?"

"Just leave," she said, and she wheeled and walked away.

Maggie picked up her purse, not looking at Ira. Ira collected his cards.

She went through the doorway ahead of him and they walked down the hall to the living room.

People stood back a little to let them pass. She had no idea how much they had heard. Probably everything; there was something hushed and thrilled about them. She opened the front door and then turned around and said, "Well, bye now!"

"Goodbye," they murmured. "Bye, Maggie, bye, Ira . . ."

Outside, the sunlight was blinding. She wished they'd driven over from the church. She took hold of Ira's hand when he offered it and picked her way along the gravel next to the road, fixing her eyes on her pumps, which had developed a thin film of dust.

"Well," Ira said finally, "we certainly livened up that little gathering."

"I feel just terrible," Maggie said.

"Oh, it'll blow over," Ira told her. "You know how she is." Then he gave a snort and said, "Just look on the bright side. As class reunions go-"

"But it wasn't a class reunion; it was a funeral," Maggie said. "A memorial service. I went and ruined a memorial service! She probably thinks we were showing off or something, taunting her now that she's a widow. I feel terrible."

"She'll forgive us," he told her.

A car swished by and he changed places with her, setting her to the inside away from the traffic. Now they walked slightly apart, not touching. They were back to their normal selves. Or almost back. Not entirely. Some trick of light or heat blurred Maggie's vision, and the stony old house they were passing seemed to shimmer for a moment. It dissolved in a gentle, radiant haze, and then it regrouped itself and grew solid again.

For the past several months now, Ira had been noticing the human race's wastefulness. People were squandering their lives, it seemed to him. They were splurging their energies on petty jealousies or vain ambitions or longstanding, bitter grudges. It was a theme that emerged wherever he turned, as if someone were trying to tell him something. Not that he needed to be told. Didn't he know well enough all he himself had wasted?

He was fifty years old and had never accomplished one single act of consequence. Once he had planned to find a cure for some major disease and now he was framing petit point instead.

His son, who couldn't carry a tune, had dropped out of high school in hopes of becoming a rock star. His daughter was one of those people who fritter themselves away on unnecessary worries; she chewed her fingernails to nubbins and developed blinding headaches before exams and agonized so over hr grades that their doctor had warned of ulcers.

And-his wife! He loved her, but he couldn't stand how she refused to take her own life seriously. She seemed to believe it was a sort of practice life, something she could afford to play around with as if they offered second and third chances to get it right. She was always making clumsy, impetuous rushes toward nowhere in particular-side trips, random detours.

Like today, for instance: this Fiona business. Fiona was no longer any relation, not their daughter-in-law and not even an acquaintance, in Ira's opinion. But here Maggie sat, trailing a hand out the window as they whizzed down Route One toward home, and what did she return to (just when he was hoping she'd forgotten) but her whim to pay Fiona a visit.

Bad enough they'd lost their Saturday to Max Gill's funeral-a kind of side trip in itself-but now she wanted to plunge off in a whole new direction. She wanted to swing by Cartwheel, Pennsylvania, just so she could offer to baby-sit while Fiona went on her honeymoon. A completely pointless proposal; for Fiona did have a mother, didn't she, who'd been tending Leroy all along and surely could be counted on for the next little bit as well. Ira pointed that out. He said, "What's the matter with what's-her-name? Mrs. Stuckey?"

"Oh, Mrs. Stuckey," Maggie said, as if that were answer enough. She brought in her hand and rolled up the window. Her face glowed in the sunlight, round and pretty and intense. The breeze had ruffled her hair so it stood out in loops all over her head. It was a hot, gasoline-smelling breeze and Ira wasn't sorry to have lost it. However, this constant opening and shutting of the window was getting on his nerves.

She operated from second to second, he thought. She never looked any distance ahead. A spasm of irritation darted raggedly through his temples.

Here was a woman who had once let a wrong number consume an entire evening. "Hello?" she'd said into the phone, and a man had said, "Laverne, stay right there safe in your house. I just talked to Dennis and he's coming to fetch you." And then had hung up. Maggie cried, "Wait!"-speaking into a dead receiver; typical. Whoever it was, Ira had told her, deserved what he got. If Dennis and Laverne never managed to connect, why, that was their problem, not hers. But Maggie had gone on and on about it. "

'Safe,' " she moaned. " 'Safe in the house,' he told me. Lord only knows what that poor Laverne is going through." And she had spent the evening dialing all possible variations of their own number, every permutation of every digit, hoping to find Laverne. But never did, of course.

Cartwheel, Pennsylvania, was so close it could practically reach out and grab them, to hear her talk. "It's on that cutoff right above the state line. I forget the name," she was saying. "But I couldn't see it anywhere on that map you got at the service station."

No wonder she'd been so little help navigating; she'd been hunting Cartwheel instead.

Traffic was surprisingly sparse for a Saturday. Mostly it was trucks-small, rusty trucks carrying logs or used tires, not the sleek monsters you'd see on -. They were traveling through farm country at this point, and each truck as it passed left another layer of dust on the wan, parched, yellowing fields that lined the road.

"Here's what we'll do," Maggie told him. "Stop by Fiona's just for an instant. A teeny, eeny instant. Not accept even a glass of iced tea. Make her our offer and go."

"That much you could handle by telephone," Ira said.

"No, I couldn't!"

"Telephone when we get back to Baltimore, if you're so set on baby-sitting."

"That child is not but seven years old," Maggie told him, "and she must just barely remember us. We can't take her on for a week just cold! We have to let her get reacquainted first."

"How do you know it's a week?" Ira asked.

She was riffling through her purse now. She said, "Hmm?"

"How do you know the honeymoon will last a week, Maggie?"

"Well, I don't know. Maybe it's two weeks. Maybe even a month, I don't know."

He wondered, all at once, if this whole wedding was a myth-something she'd invented for her own peculiar reasons. He wouldn't put it past her.

"And besides!" he said. "We could never stay away that long. We've got jobs."

"Not away: in Baltimore. We'd take her back down to Baltimore."

"But then she'd be missing school," he said.

"Oh, that's no problem. We'll let her go to school near us," Maggie said.

"Second grade is second grade, after all, the same all over."

Ira had so many different arguments against that that he was struck speechless.

Now she dumped her purse upside down in her lap. "Oh, dear," she said, studying her billfold, her lipstick, her comb, and her pack of Kleenex.

"I wish I'd brought that map from home."

It was another form of wastefulness, Ira thought, to search yet again through a purse whose contents she already knew by heart. Even Ira knew those contents by heart. And it was wasteful to continue caring about Fiona when Fiona obviously had no feeling for them, when she had made it very clear that she just wanted to get on with her life. Hadn't she stated that, even? "I just want to get on with my life"-it had a familiar ring. Maybe she had shouted it during that scene before she left, or maybe later during one of those pathetic visits they used to pay after the divorce, with Leroy bashful and strange and Mrs. Stuckey a single accusatory eye glaring around the edge of the living room door. Ira winced. Waste, waste, and more waste, all for nothing. The long drive and the forced conversation and the long drive home again, for absolutely nothing.

And it was wasteful to devote your working life to people who forgot you the instant you left their bedsides, as Ira was forever pointing out. Oh, it was also admirably selfless, he supposed. But he didn't know how Maggie endured the impermanence, the lack of permanent results-those feeble, senile patients who confused her with a long-dead mother or a sister who'd insulted them back in .

It was wasteful too to fret so over the children. (Who were no longer children anyhow-not even Daisy.) Consider, for instance, the cigarette papers that Maggie had found last spring on Daisy's bureau. She had picked them up while she was dusting and come running to Ira. "What'll we do? What are we going to do?" she had wailed. "Our daughter's smoking marijuana; this is one of the telltale clues they mention in that pamphlet that the school gives out." She'd got Ira all involved and distressed; that happened more often than he liked to admit. Together they had sat up far into the night, discussing ways of dealing with the problem. "Where did we go wrong?" Maggie cried, and Ira hugged her and said, "There now, dear heart. I promise you we'll see this thing through." All for nothing yet again, it turned out. Turned out the cigarette papers were for Daisy's flute. You slid them under the keys whenever they started sticking, Daisy explained offhandedly. She hadn't even bothered to take umbrage.

Ira had felt ridiculous. He'd felt he had spent something scarce and real-hard currency.

Then he thought of how a thief had once stolen Maggie's pocketbook, marched right into the kitchen where she was shelving groceries and stolen it off the counter as bold-faced as you please; and she took after him. She could have been killed! (The efficient, the streamlined thing to do was to shrug and decide she was better off without that pocketbook-had never cared for it anyhow, and surely could spare the few limp dollars in the billfold.) It was February and the sidewalks were sheets of glare ice, so running was impossible. Ira, returning from work, had been astonished to see a young boy shuffling toward him at a snail's pace with Maggie's red pocket-book dangling from his shoulder, and behind him Maggie herself came jogging along inch by inch with her tongue between her teeth as she concentrated on her footing. The two of them had resembled those mimes who can portray a speedy stride while making no progress at all. In fact, it had looked sort of comical, Ira reflected now. His lips twitched. He smiled.

"What," Maggie ordered.

"You were crazy to go after that pocketbook thief," he told her.

"Honestly, Ira. How does your mind work?"

Exactly the question he might have asked her.

"Anyhow, I did get it back," she said.

"Only by chance. What if he'd been armed? Or a little bigger? What if he hadn't panicked when he saw me?"

"You know, come to think of it, I believe I dreamed about that boy just a couple of nights ago," Maggie said. "He was sitting in this kitchen that was kind of our kitchen and kind of not our kitchen, if you know what I mean. . . ."

Ira wished she wouldn't keep telling her dreams. It made him feel fidgety and restless.

Maybe if he hadn't gotten married. Or at least had not had children. But that was too great a price to pay; even in his darkest moods he realized that. Well, if he had put his sister Dome in an institution, then-something state-run that wouldn't cost too much. And told his father, "I will no longer provide your support. Weak heart or not, take over this goddamn shop of yours and let me get on with my original plan if I can cast my mind back far enough to remember what it was." And made his other sister venture into the world to find employment. "You think we're not all scared?" he would ask her. "But we go out anyway and earn our keep, and so will you."

But she would die of terror.

He used to lie in bed at night when he was a little boy and pretend he was seeing patients. His drawn-up knees were his desk and he'd look across his desk and ask, kindly, "What seems to be the trouble, Mrs.

Brown?" At one point he had figured he might be an orthopedist, because bonesetting was so immediate. Like furniture repair, he had thought. He had imagined that the bone would make a clicking sound as it returned to its rightful place, and the patient's pain would vanish utterly in that very instant.

"Hoosegow," Maggie said.

"Pardon?"

She scooped up her belongings and poured them back in her purse. She set the purse on the floor at her feet. "The cutoff to Cartwheel," she told him. "Wasn't it something like Hoosegow?"

"I wouldn't have the faintest idea."

"Moose Cow. Moose Lump."

"I'm not going there, whatever it's called," Ira told her.

"Goose Bump."

"I would just like to remind you," he said, "about those other visits.

Remember how they turned out? Leroy's second birthday, when you phoned ahead to arrange things, telephoned, and still Fiona somehow forgot you were coming. They went off to Hershey Park and we had to wait on the doorstep forever and finally turn around and come home."

Carrying Leroy's gift, he didn't say: a gigantic, blankly smiling Raggedy Ann that broke his heart.

"And her third birthday, when you brought her that kitten unannounced even though I warned you to check with Fiona beforehand, and Leroy started sneezing and Fiona said she couldn't keep it. Leroy cried all afternoon, remember? When we left, she was still crying."

"She could have taken shots for that," Maggie said, stubbornly missing the point. "Lots of children take allergy shots and they have whole housefuls of pets."

"Yes, but Fiona didn't want her to. She didn't want us interfering, and she really didn't want us visiting, either, which is why I said we shouldn't go there anymore."

Maggie cut her eyes over at him in a quick, surmising way. Probably she was wondering if he knew about those other trips, the ones she had made on her own. But if she had cared about keeping them secret you'd think she would have filled the gas tank afterward.

"What I'm saying is-" he said.

"I know what you're saying!" she cried. "You don't have to keep hammering at it!"

He drove in silence for a while. A row of dotted lines stitched down the highway ahead of him. Dozens of tiny birds billowed up from a grove of trees and turned the blue sky cindery, and he watched them till they disappeared.

"My Grandma Daley used to have a picture in her parlor," Maggie said. "A little scene carved in something yellowish like ivory, or more likely celluloid. It showed this old couple sitting by the fireplace in their rocking chairs, and the title was etched across the bottom of the frame:

'Old Folks at Home.' The woman was knitting and the man was reading an enormous book that you just knew was the Bible. And you knew there must be grown children away someplace; I mean that was the whole idea, that the old folks were left at home while the children went away. But they were so extremely old! They had those withered-apple faces and potato-sack bodies; they were people you would classify in an instant and dismiss. I never imagined that I would be an Old Folk at Home."

"You're plotting to have that child come live with us," Ira said. It hit him with a thump, as clearly as if she had spoken the words. "That's what you've been leading to. Now that you're losing Daisy you're plotting for Leroy to come and fill her place."

"I have no such intention!" Maggie said-too quickly, it seemed to him.

"Don't think I don't see through you," he told her. "I suspected all along there was something fishy about this baby-sitting business. You're counting on Fiona to agree to it, now that she's all caught up with a brand-new husband."

"Well, that just shows how little you know, then, because I have no earthly intention of keeping Leroy for good. All I want to do is drop in on them this afternoon and make my offer, which might just incidentally cause Fiona to reconsider a bit about Jesse."

"Jesse?"

"Jesse our son, Ira."

"Yes, Maggie, I know Jesse's our son, but I can't imagine what you think she could reconsider. They're finished. She walked out on him. Her lawyer sent him those papers to sign and he signed them every one and sent them back."

"And has never, ever been the same since," Maggie said. "He or Fiona, either. But anytime he makes a move to reconcile, she is passing through a stage where she won't speak to him, and then when she makes a move he has slammed off somewhere with hurt feelings and doesn't know she's trying. It's like some awful kind of dance, some out-of-sync dance where every step's a mistake."

"Well? So?" Ira said. "I would think that ought to tell you something."

"Tell me what?"

"Tell you those two are a lost cause, Maggie."

"Oh, Ira, you just don't give enough credit to luck," Maggie said. "Good luck or bad luck, either one. Watch out for that car in front of you."

She meant the red Chevy-an outdated model, big as a barge, its finish worn down to the color of a dull red rubber eraser. Ira was already watching it. He didn't like the way it kept drifting from side to side and changing speeds.

"Honk," Maggie instructed him.

Ira said, "Oh, I'll just-"

He would just get past the fellow, he was going to say. Some incompetent idiot; best to put such people far behind you. He pressed the accelerator and checked the rearview mirror, but at the same time Maggie reached over to jab his horn. The long, insistent blare startled him. He seized Maggie's hand and returned it firmly to her lap. Only then did he realize that the Chevy driver, no doubt equally startled, had slowed sharply just feet ahead. Maggie made a grab for the dashboard. Ira had no choice; he swerved right and plowed off the side of the road.

Dust rose around them like smoke. The Chevy picked up speed and rounded a curve and vanished.

"Jesus," Ira said.

Somehow their car had come to a stop, although he couldn't recall braking. In fact, the engine had died. Ira was still gripping the wheel, and the keys were still swinging from the ignition, softly jingling against each other.

"You just had to butt in, Maggie, didn't you," he said.

"Me? You're blaming this on me? What did I do?"

"Oh, nothing. Only honked the horn when I was the one driving. Only scared that fellow so he lost what last few wits he had. Just once in your life, Maggie, I wish you would manage not to stick your nose in what doesn't concern you."

"And if I didn't, who would?" she asked him. "And how can you say it doesn't concern me when here I sit in what's known far and wide as the death seat? And also, it wasn't my honking that caused the trouble; it was that crazy driver, slowing down for no apparent reason."

Ira sighed. "Anyway," he said. "Are you all right?"

"I could just strangle him!" she said.

He supposed that meant she was fine.

He restarted the engine. It coughed a couple of times and then took hold.

He checked for traffic and pulled out onto the highway again. After the gravelly roadside, the pavement felt too frictionless, too easy. He noticed how his hands were shaking on the steering wheel.

"That man was a maniac," Maggie said.

"Good thing we had our seat belts fastened."

"We ought to report him."

"Oh, well. So long as no one was hurt."

"Go faster, will you., Ira?"

He glanced over at her.

"I want to get his license number," she said. Her tangled curls gave her the look of a wild woman.

Ira said, "Now, Maggie. When you think about it, it was really as much our doing as his."

"How can you say that? When he was driving by fits and starts and wandering every which way; have you forgotten?"

Where did she find the energy? he wondered. How come she had so much to expend? He was hot and his left shoulder ached where he'd slammed against his seat belt. He shifted position, relieving the pressure of the belt across his chest.

"You don't want him causing a serious accident, do you?" Maggie asked.

"Well, no."

"Probably he's been drinking. Remember that public-service message on TV?

We have a civic duty to report him. Speed up, Ira."

He obeyed, mostly out of exhaustion.

They passed an electrician's van that had passed them earlier and then, as they crested a hill, they caught sight of the Chevy just ahead. It was whipping right along as if nothing had happened. Ira was surprised by a flash of anger. Damn fool driver. And who said it had to be a man? More likely a woman, strewing chaos everywhere without a thought. He pressed harder on the accelerator. Maggie said, "Good," and rolled down her window.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Go faster."

"What did you open your window for?"

"Hurry, Ira! We're losing him."

"Be funny if we got a ticket for this," Ira said.

But he let the speedometer inch up to sixty-five, to sixty-eight. They drew close behind the Chevy. Its rear window was so dusty that Ira had trouble seeing inside. All he could tell was that the driver wore a hat of some kind and sat very low in the seat. There didn't seem to be any passengers. The license plate was dusty too-a Pennsylvania plate, navy and yellow, the yellow mottled with gray as if mildewed.

"Y two eight-" Ira read out.

"Yes, yes, I have it," Maggie said. (She was the type who could still reel off her childhood telephone number.) "Now let's pass him," she told Ira.

"Oh, well . . ."

"You see what kind of driver he is. I think we ought to pass."

Well, that made sense. Ira veered left.

Just as they came alongside the Chevy, Maggie leaned out her window and pointed downward with her index finger. "Your wheel!" she shouted. "Your wheel! Your front wheel is falling off!"

"Good grief," Ira said.

He checked the mirror. Sure enough, the Chevy had slowed and was moving toward the shoulder.

"Well, he believed you," he said.

He had to admit it was sort of a satisfaction.

Maggie twisted around in her seat, gazing out the rear window. Then she turned to Ira. There was a stricken look on her face that he couldn't account for. "Oh, Ira," she said.

"Now what."

"He was old, Ira."

Ira said, "These goddamn senior-citizen drivers ..."

"Not only was he old," she said. "He was black."

"So?"

"I didn't see him clearly till I'd said that about the wheel," she said.

"He didn't mean to run us off the road! I bet he doesn't even know it happened. He had this wrinkled, dignified face and when I told him about the wheel his mouth dropped open but still he remembered to touch the brim of his hat. His hat! His gray felt hat like my grandfather wore!"

Ira groaned.

Maggie said, "Now he thinks we played a trick on him. He thinks we're racist or something and lied about his wheel to be cruel."

"He doesn't think any such thing," Ira said. "As a ' matter of fact, he has no way of knowing his wheel isn't falling off. How would he check it? He'd have to watch it in motion."

"You mean he's still sitting there?"

"No, no," Ira said hastily. "I mean he's probably back on the road by now but he's traveling a little slower, just to make sure it's all right."

"I wouldn't do that," Maggie said.

"Well, you're not him."

"He wouldn't do that, either. He's old and confused and alone and he's sitting there in his car, too scared to drive another inch."

"Oh, Lord," Ira said.

"We have to go back and tell him."

Somehow, he'd known that was coming.

"We won't say we deliberately lied," Maggie said. "We'll tell him we just weren't sure. We'll ask him to make a test drive while we watch, and then we'll say, 'Oops! Our mistake. Your wheel is fine; we must have misjudged.' "

"Where'd you get this 'we' business?" Ira asked. "I never told him it was loose in the first place."

"Ira, I'm begging you on bended knee, please turn around and go rescue that man."

"It is now one-thirty in the afternoon," Ira said. "With luck we could be home by three. Maybe even two-thirty. I could open the shop for a couple of hours, which may not be much but it's better than nothing."

"That poor old man is sitting in his car staring straight in front of him not knowing, what to do," Maggie said. "He's still hanging on to the steering wheel. I can see him as plain as day."

So could Ira. >

He slowed as they came to a large, prosperous-looking farm. A grassy lane led toward the barn, and he veered onto that without signaling first, in order to make the turn seem more sudden and more exasperated. Maggie's sunglasses scooted the length of the dashboard. Ira backed up, waited for a stream of traffic that all at once materialized, and then spun out onto Route One again, this time heading north.

Maggie said, "I knew you couldn't be heartless."

"Just imagine," Ira told her. "All up and down this highway, other couples are taking weekend drives together. They're traveling from Point A to Point B. They're holding civilized discussions about, I don't know, current events. Disarmament.

Apartheid."

"He probably thinks we belong to the Ku Klux Klan," Maggie said. She started chewing her lip the way she always did when she was worried.

"No stops, no detours," Ira said. "If they take any break at all, it's for lunch in some classy old inn. Someplace they researched ahead of time, where they even made reservations."

He was starving, come to think of it. He hadn't eaten a thing at Serena's.

"It was right about here," Maggie said, perking up. "I recognize those silos. It was just before those mesh-looking silos. There he is."

Yes, there he was, not sitting in his car after all but walking around it in a wavery circle-a stoop-shouldered man the color of a rolltop desk, wearing one of those elderly suits that seem longer in front than in back. He was studying the tires of the Chevy, which might have been abandoned years ago; it had a settled, resigned appearance. Ira signaled and make a U-turn, arriving neatly behind so the two cars' bumpers almost touched. He opened the door and stepped out. "Can we help?" he called.

Maggie got out too but seemed willing for once to let Ira do the talking.

"It's my wheel," the old man said. "Lady back up the road a ways pointed out my wheel was falling off."

"That was us," Ira told him. "Or my wife, at least. But you know, I believe she might have been wrong. That wheel seems fine to me."

The old man looked at him directly now. He had a skull-like, deeply lined face, and the whites of his eyes were so yellow they were almost brown.

"Oh, well, surely, seems fine," he said. "When the car is setting stark still like it is."

"But I mean even before," Ira told him. "Back when you were still on the road."

The old man appeared unconvinced. He prodded the tire with the toe of his shoe. "Anyhow," he said. "Mighty nice of you folks to stop."

Maggie said, "Nice! It's the least we could do." She stepped forward.

"I'm Maggie Moran," she said. "This is my husband, Ira."

"My name's Mr. Daniel Otis," the old man said, touching the brim of his hat.

"Mr. Otis, see, I had this sort of, like, mirage as we were driving past your car," Maggie said. "I thought I noticed your wheel wobbling. But then the very next instant I said, 'No, I believe I imagined it.' Didn't I, Ira? Just ask Ira. 'I believe I made that driver stop for no good reason,' I told him."

"They's all kindly explanations why you might have seen it wobble," Mr.

Otis said.

"Why, certainly!" Maggie cried. "Heat waves, maybe, rippling above the pavement. Or maybe, I don't know-"

"Might have been a sign, too," Mr. Otis said.

"Sign?"

"Might have been the-Lord was trying to warn me."

"Warn you about what?"

"Warn me my left front wheel was fixing to drop off."

Maggie said, "Well, but-"

"Mr. Otis," Ira said. "I think it's more likely my wife just made a mistake."

"Now, you can't know that."

"An understandable mistake," Ira said, "but all the same, a mistake. So what we ought to do is, you get into your car and drive it just a few yards down the shoulder. Maggie and I will watch. If your wheel's not loose, you're free and clear. If it is, we'll take you to a service station."

"Oh, why, I appreciate that," Mr. Otis said. "Maybe Buford, if it ain't too much trouble."

"Pardon?"

"Buford Texaco. It's up ahead a piece; my nephew works there."

"Sure, anywhere," Ira said, "but I'm willing to bet-"

"In fact, if it ain't too much trouble you might just go on and carry me there right now," Mr. Otis said.

"Now?"

"I don't relish driving a car with a wheel about to drop off."

"Mr. Otis," Ira said. "We'll test the wheel. That's what I've been telling you."

"I'll test it," Maggie said.

"Yes, Maggie will test it. Maggie? Honey, maybe I should be the one."

"Shoot, yes; it's way too risky for a lady," Mr. Otis told her.

Ira had been thinking of the risk to the Chevy, but he said, "Right. You and Mr. Otis watch; I'll drive."

"No, sir, I can't allow you to do that," Mr. Otis said. "I appreciate it, but I can't allow it. Too much danger. You folks just carry me to the Texaco, please, and my nephew will come fetch the car with the tow truck.''

Ira looked at Maggie. Maggie looked back at him helplessly. The sounds of traffic whizzing past reminded him of those TV thrillers where spies rendezvoused in modern wastelands, on the edges of superhighways or roaring industrial complexes.

"Listen," Ira said. "I'll just come right out with this-"

"Or don't carry me! Don't," Mr. Otis cried. "I already inconvenienced you-all enough, I know that."

"The fact is, we feel responsible," Ira told him. "What we said about your wheel wasn't so much a mistake as a plain and simple, um, exaggeration."

"Yes, we made it up," Maggie said.

"Aw, no,"'Mr. Otis said, shaking his head, "you just trying to stop me from worrying."

"A while back you kind of, like, more or less, slowed down too suddenly in front of us," Maggie said, "and caused us to run off the road. Not intending to, I realize, but-"

"I did that?"

"Not intending to," Maggie assured him.

"And besides," Ira said, "you probably slowed because we accidentally honked. So it's not as if-"

"Oh, I declare. Florence, that's my niece, she is all the time after me to turn in my driver's license, but I surely never expected-"

"Anyhow, I did a very inconsiderate thing," Maggie told him. "I said your wheel was falling off when really it was fine."

"Why, I call that a very Christian thing," Mr. Otis said. "When I had caused you to run off the road! You folks been awful nice about this."

"No, see, really the wheel was-"

"Many would've let me ride on to my death," Mr. Otis said.

"The wheel was fine!" Maggie told him. "It wasn't wobbling in the slightest."

Mr. Otis tipped his head back and studied her. His lowered eyelids gave him such a haughty, hooded expression that it seemed he might finally have grasped her meaning. But then he said, "Naw, that can't be right.

Can it? Naw. I tell you: Now that I recollect, that car was driving funny all this morning. I knew it and yet didn't know it, you know? And I reckon it must've hit you-all the same way-kindly like you half glimpsed it out of the comer of your vision so you were moved to say what you did, not understanding just why."

That settled it; Ira took action. "Well, then," he said, "nothing to do but test it. Keys inside?" And he strode briskly to the Chevy and opened the door and slid in.

"Aw, now!" Mr. Otis cried. "Don't you go risking your neck for me, mister!"

"He'll be all right," Maggie told him.

Ira gave Mr. Otis a reassuring wave.

Even though the window was open, the Chevy was pulsing with heat. The clear plastic seat cover seemed to have partially melted, and there was a strong smell of overripe banana. No wonder: The remains of a bag lunch sat on the passenger seat-a crumpled sack, a banana peel, and a screw of cellophane.

Ira turned the key in the ignition. When the engine roared up he leaned out toward Maggie and Mr. Otis and said, "Watch carefully."

They said nothing. For two people who looked so little alike, they wore oddly similar expressions: wary and guarded, as if braced for the worst.

Ira put the car in gear and started rolling along the shoulder. He felt he was driving something that stood out too far on all sides-a double bed, for instance. Also, there was a rattle in the exhaust system.

After a few yards, he braked and cocked his head out the window. The others had not moved from where they stood; they'd merely turned their faces in his direction.

"Well?" he called.

There was a pause. Then Mr. Otis said, "Yessir, seem like I did see a bit of jiggling motion to it."

"You did?" Ira asked.

He quirked an eyebrow at Maggie.

"But you didn't," he said.

"Well, I'm not certain," Maggie told him.

"Excuse me?"

"Maybe I just imagined it," she said, "but I thought there was a little, sort of, I don't know ..."

Ira shifted gears and backed up with a jolt. When he was alongside them once more he said, "Now I want you both to watch very, very closely."

He drove farther this time, a dozen yards or so. They were forced to follow him. He glanced in the side-view mirror and saw Maggie scurrying along with her arms folded beneath her bosom. He stopped the car and climbed out to face them.

"Oh, that wheel is loose, all right," Mr. Otis called as he arrived.

Ira said, "Maggie?"

"It reminded me of a top, just before it stops spinning and falls over,"

Maggie said.

"Now listen here, Maggie-"

"I know! I know!" she said. "But I can't help it, Ira; I really saw it wobble. And also it looked kind of squashy."

"Well, that's a whole different problem," Ira said. "The tire may be underinflated. But that wheel is on tight as a drum, I swear it. I could feel it. I can't believe you're doing this, Maggie."

"Well, I'm sorry," she said stubbornly, "but I refuse to say I didn't see what I saw with my own two eyes. I just think we're going to have to take him to that Texaco."

Ira looked at Mr. Otis. "You got a lug wrench?" he asked.

"A ... sir?"

"If you've got a lug wrench, I could tighten that wheel myself."

"Oh, why ... Is a lug wrench like a ordinary wrench?"

"You probably have one in your trunk," Ira told him, "where you keep your jack."

"Oh! But where do I keep my jack, I wonder," Mr. Otis said.

"In your trunk," Ira repeated doggedly, and he reached inside the car for the keys and handed them over. He was keeping his face as impassive as possible, but inwardly he felt the way he felt anytime he stopped by Maggie's nursing home: utterly despairing. He couldn't see how this Mr.

Otis fellow made it from day to day, bumbling along as he did.

"Lug wrench, lug wrench," Mr. Otis was murmuring. He unlocked the trunk and flung the lid up. "Now let me just . . ."

At first glance, the trunk's interior seemed a solid block of fabric.

Blankets, clothes, and pillows had been packed inside so tightly that they had congealed together. "Oh, me," Mr. Otis said, and he plucked at a corner of a graying quilt, which didn't budge.

"Never mind," Ira told him. "I'll get mine."

He walked back to the Dodge. It suddenly seemed very well kept, if you overlooked what Maggie had done to the left front fender. He took his keys from the ignition and unlocked the trunk and opened it.

Nothing.

Where once there'd been a spare tire, tucked into the well beneath the floor mat, now there was an empty space. And not a sign of the gray vinyl pouch in which he kept his tools.

He called, "Maggie?"

She turned lazily from her position by the Chevy and tilted her head in his direction.

"What happened to my spare tire?" he asked.

"It's on the car."

"On the car?"

She nodded vigorously.

"You mean it's in use?"

"Right."

"Then where's the original tire?"

"It's getting patched at the Exxon back home."

"Well, how did ... ?"

No, never mind; better not get sidetracked. "So where are the tools, then?" he called.

"What tools?"

He slammed the lid down and walked back to the Chevy. There was no point shouting; he could see his lug wrench was not going to be anywhere within reach. "The tools you changed the tire with," he told her.

"Oh, I didn't change the tire. A man stopped and helped me."

"Did he use the tools in the trunk?"

"I guess so, yes."

"Did he put them back?"

"Well, he must have," Maggie said. She frowned, evidently trying to recall.

"They're not there, Maggie."

"Well, I'm sure he didn't steal them, if that's what you're thinking. He was a very nice man. He wouldn't even accept any money; he said he had a wife of his own and-"

"I'm not saying he stole them; I'm just asking where they are."

Maggie said, "Maybe on the . . ." and then mumbled something further, he wasn't sure what.

"Pardon?"

"I said, maybe on the corner of Charles Street and Northern Parkway!" she shouted.

Ira turned to Mr. Otis. The old man was watching him with his eyes half closed; he appeared to be falling asleep on his feet.

"I guess we'll have to unpack your trunk," Ira told him.

Mr. Otis nodded several times but made no move to begin.

"Shall we just unload it?" Ira asked.

"Well, we could do that," Mr. Otis said doubtfully.

There was a pause.

Ira said, "Well? Shall we start?"

"We could start if you like," Mr. Otis told him, "but I'd be very much surprised if we was to find a wheel wrench."

"Everybody has a wheel wrench. Lug wrench," Ira said. "It comes with the car."

"I never saw it."

"Oh, Ira," Maggie said. "Can't we just drive him to the Texaco and get his nephew to fix it properly?"

"And how do you think he would do that, Maggie? He'd take a wrench and tighten the lug nuts, not that they need it."

Mr. Otis, meanwhile, had managed to remove a single item from the trunk: a pair of flannel pajama bottoms. He held them up and considered them.

Maybe it was the dubious expression on his face, or maybe it was the pajamas themselves-crinkled and withered, trailing a frazzled drawstring-but at any rate, Ira all at once gave in. "Oh, what the hell," he said.

"Let's just go to the Texaco."

"Thank you, Ira," Maggie told him sweetly.

And Mr. Otis said, "Well, if you sure it ain't too much trouble."

"No, no . . ." Ira passed a hand across his forehead. "So I guess we'd better lock up the Chevy," he said.

Maggie said, "What Chevy?"

"That's what kind of car this is, Maggie."

"Ain't hardly no point locking it with a wheel about to fly off," Mr.

Otis said.

Ira had a brief moment when he wondered if this whole situation might be Mr. Otis's particularly passive, devilish way of getting even.

He turned and walked back to his own car. Behind him he heard the Chevy's trunk lid clanging shut and the sound of their feet on the gravel, but he didn't wait for them to catch up.

Now the Dodge was as hot as the Chevy, and the chrome shaft of the gearshift burned his fingers. He sat there with the motor idling while Maggie helped Mr. Otis settle in the back seat. She seemed to know by instinct that he would require assistance; he had to be folded across the middle in some complicated fashion. The last of him to enter was his feet, which he gathered to him by lifting both knees with his hands. Then he let out a sigh and took his hat off. In the mirror Ira saw a bony, plated-looking scalp, with two cottony puffs of white hair snarling above his ears.

"I surely do appreciate this," Mr. Otis said.

"Oh, no trouble!" Maggie told him, flouncing onto the front seat.

Speak for yourself, Ira thought sourly.

He waited for a cavalcade of motorcyclists to pass (all male, unhelmeted, swooping by in long S-curves, as free as birds), and then he pulled onto the highway. "So whereabouts are we headed?" he asked.

"Oh, why, you just drive on past the dairy farm and make a right," Mr.

Otis told him. "It ain't but three, four miles."

Maggie craned around in her seat and said, "You must live in this area."

"Back-air a ways on Dead Crow Road," Mr. Otis told her. "Or used to, till last week. Lately I been staying with my sister Lurene."

Then he started telling her about his sister Lurene, who worked off and on at the K Mart when her arthritis wasn't too bad; and that of course led to a discussion of Mr. Otis's own arthritis, the sneaky slow manner it had crept up on him and the other things he had thought it was first and how the doctor had marveled and made over his condition when Mr. Otis finally thought to consult him.

"Oh, if you had seen what I have seen," Maggie said. "People in the nursing home where I work just knotted over; don't I know it." She had a tendency to fall into other people's rhythms of speech while she was talking to them. Close your eyes and you could almost fancy she was black herself, Ira thought.

"It's a evil, mean-spirited ailment; no two ways about it," Mr. Otis said. "This here is the dairy farm, mister. You want to take your next right."

Ira slowed down. They passed a small clump of cows moonily chomping and staring, and then they turned onto a road not two full lanes wide. The pavement was patchy, with hand-painted signs tilting off the grassy embankment: DANGER LIVESTOCK MAY BE LOOSE and SLOW THIS MEANS YOU and HOUNDS AND HORSES CROSSING.

Now Mr. Otis was explaining how arthritis had forced him to retire. He used to be a roofer, he said, down home in North Carolina. He used to walk those ridgepoles as nimble as a squirrel and now he couldn't manage the lowest rung of a ladder.

Maggie made a clucking sound.

Ira wondered why Maggie always had to be inviting other people into their lives. She didn't feel a mere husband was enough, he suspected. Two was not a satisfactory number for her. He remembered all the strays she had welcomed over the years-her brother who spent a winter on their couch when his wife fell in love with her dentist, and Serena that time that Max was in Virginia hunting work, and of course Fiona with her baby and her mountains of baby equipment, her stroller and her playpen and her wind-up infant swing. In his present mood, Ira thought he might include their own children as well, for weren't Jesse and Daisy also outsiders-interrupting their most private moments, wedging between the two of them? (Hard to believe that some people had children to hold a marriage together.) And neither one had been planned for, at least not quite so soon. In the days before Jesse was born, Ira had still had hopes of going back to school. It was supposed to be the next thing in line, after paying off his sister's medical bills and his father's new furnace.

Maggie would keep on working full time. But then she found out she was pregnant, and she had to take leave from her job. And after that Ira's sister developed a whole new symptom, some kind of seizures that required hospitalization; and a moving van crashed into the shop one Christmas Eve and damaged the building. Then Maggie got pregnant with Daisy, another surprise. (Had it been unwise, perhaps, to leave matters of contraception to someone so accident-prone?) But that was eight years after Jesse, and Ira had more or less abandoned his plans by then anyhow.

Sometimes-on a day like today, say, this long, hot day in this dusty car-he experienced the most crushing kind of tiredness. It was an actual weight on his head, as if the ceiling had been lowered. But he supposed that everybody felt that way, now and again.

Maggie was telling Mr. Otis the purpose of their trip. "My oldest, closest friend just lost her husband," she was saying, "and we had to go to his funeral. It was the saddest occasion.''

"Oh, gracious. Well, now, I want to offer my sincere condolences," Mr.

Otis said.

Ira slowed behind a round-shouldered, humble-looking car from the forties, driven by an old lady so hunched that her head was barely visible above the steering wheel. Route One, the nursing home of highways. Then he remembered that this wasn't Route One anymore, that they had drifted sideward or maybe even backward, and he had a dreamy, floating sensation. It was like that old spell during a change of seasons when you momentarily forge> what stage the year is going through. Is it spring, or is it fall? Is the summer just beginning, or is it coming to an end?

They passed a modern, split-level house with two plaster statues in the yard: a Dutch boy and girl bobbing delicately toward each other so their lips were almost touching. Then a trailer park and assorted signs for churches, civic organizations, Al's Lawn and Patio Furnishings. Mr. Otis sat forward with a grunt, clutching the back of the seat. "Right up-air is the Texaco," he said. "See it?"

Ira saw it: a small white rectangle set very close to the road. Mylar balloons hovered high above the pumps-three to each pump, red, silver, and blue, twining lazily about one another.

He turned onto the concrete apron, carefully avoiding the signal cord that stretched across it, and braked and looked back at Mr. Otis. But Mr.

Otis stayed where he was; it was Maggie who got out. She opened the rear door and set a hand beneath the old man's elbow while he uncurled himself. "Now, just where is your nephew?" she asked.

Mr. Otis said, "Somewheres about."

"Are you sure of that? What if he's not working today?"

"Why, he must be working. Ain't he?"

Oh, Lord, they were going to prolong this situation forever. Ira cut the engine and watched the two of them walking across the apron.

Over by the full-service island, a white boy with a stringy brown ponytail listened to what they asked and then shook his head. He said something, waving an arm vaguely eastward. Ira groaned and slid down lower in his seat.

Then here came Maggie, clicking along, and Ira took heart; but, when she reached the car all she did was lean in through the passenger window. "We have to wait a minute," she told him.

"What for?"

"His nephew's out on a call but he's expected back in no time."

"Then why can't we just leave?" Ira asked.

"I couldn't do that! I wouldn't rest easy. I wouldn't know how it came out."

"What do you mean, how it came out? His wheel is perfectly fine, remember?"

"It wobbled, Ira. I saw it wobble."

He sighed.

"And maybe his nephew won't show up for some reason," she said, "so Mr.Otis will be stranded here. Or maybe it will cost money. I want to make sure he's not out any money."

'' Look here, Maggie-''

"Why don't you fill the tank? Surely we could use some gas."

"We don't have a Texaco credit card," he told her.

"Pay cash. Fill the tank and by then I bet Lamont will be pulling into the station."

"Lamont," already. Next thing you knew, she'd have adopted the boy.

He restarted the engine, muttering, and drew up next to the self-serve island and got out. They had an older style of pump here that Baltimore no longer used-printed flip-over numerals instead of LED, and a simple pivot arrangement to trip the switch. Ira had to readjust, cast his mind back a couple of years in order to get the thing going. Then while the gas flowed into the tank he watched Maggie settle Mr. Otis on a low, whitewashed wall that separated the Texaco from someone's vegetable garden. Mr. Otis had his hat back on and he was hunkered under it like a cat under a table, peering forth reflectively, chewing on a mouthful of air, as old men were known to do.

He was ancient, and yet probably not so many years older than Ira himself. It was a thought to give you pause. Ira heard the jolt as the gas cut off, and he turned back to the car. Overhead, the balloons rustled against each other with a sound that made him think of raincoats.

While he was paying inside the station he noticed a snack machine, so he walked over to the others to see if they wanted something. They were deep in conversation, Mr. Otis going on and on about someone named Duluth.

"Maggie, they've got potato chips," Ira said. "The kind you like: barbecue.''

Maggie waved a hand at him. "I think you were absolutely justified," she told Mr. Otis.

"And bacon rinds!" Ira said. "You hardly ever find bacon rinds these days." .

She gave him a distant, abstracted look and said, "Have you forgotten I'm on a diet?"

"How about you, then; Mr. Otis?"

"Oh, why, no, thank you, sir; thank you kindly, sir," Mr. Otis said. He turned to Maggie and went on: "So anyways, I axes her, 'Duluth, how can you hold me to count for that, woman?' "

"Mr. Otis's wife is mad at him for something he did in her dream," Maggie told Ira.

Mr. Otis said, "Here I am just as unaware as a babe and I come down into the kitchen, I axes, 'Where my breakfast?' She say, 'Fix it yourself.' I say, 'Huh?' "

"That is just so unfair," Maggie told him.

Ira said, "Well, I believe I'll have a snack," and he walked back toward the station, hands stuffed into his pockets, feeling left out.

Dieting too, he thought; dieting was another example of Maggie's wastefulness. The water diet and the protein diet and the grapefruit diet. Depriving herself meal after meal when in Ira's opinion she was just exactly right as she was-not even what you'd call plump; just a satisfying series of handfuls, soft, silky breasts and a creamy swell of bottom. But since when had she ever listened to Ira? He dropped coins glumly into the snack machine and punched the key beneath a sack of pretzels.

When he got back, Maggie was saying, "I mean think if we all did that!

Mistook our dreams for real life. Look at me: Two or three times a year, near-about, I dream this neighbor and I are kissing. This totally bland neighbor named Mr. Simmons who looks like a salesman of something, I don't know, insurance or real estate or something. In the daytime I don't give him a thought, but at night I dream we're kissing and I long for him to unbutton my blouse, and in the morning at the bus stop I'm so embarrassed I can't even meet his eyes but then I see he's just the same as ever, bland-faced man in a business suit."

"For God's sake, Maggie," Ira said. He tried to picture this Simmons character, but he had no idea who she could be talking about.

"I mean what if I was held to blame for that?" Maggie asked. "Some thirty-year-old . . . kid I don't have the faintest interest in! I'm not the one who designed that dream!"

"No, indeed," Mr. Otis said. "And anyways, this here of Duluth's was Duluth's dream. It weren't even me that dreamed it. She claim I was standing on her needlepoint chair, her chair seat she worked forever on, so she order me off but when I stepped down I was walking on her crocheted shawl and her embroidered petticoat, my shoes was dragging lace and ruffles and bits of ribbon. 'If that ain't just like you,' she tell me in the morning, and I say, 'What did do? Show me what I did. Show me where I ever trampled on a one of them things.' She say, 'You are just a mowing-down type of man, Daniel Otis, and if I knew I'd have to put up with you so long I'd have made a more thoughtful selection when I married.' So I say, 'Well, if that's how you feel, I'm leaving,' and she say, 'Don't forget your things,' and off I go."

"Mr. Otis has been living in his car these last few days and moving around among relatives," Maggie told Ira.

"Is that right," Ira said.

"So it matters quite a heap to me that my wheel not pop off," Mr. Otis added.

Ira sighed and sat down on the wall next to Maggie. The pretzels were the varnished kind that stuck in his teeth, but he was so hungry that he went on eating them.

Now the ponytailed boy walked toward them, so direct and purposeful in his tap-heeled leather boots that Ira stood up again, imagining they had some business to discuss. But all the boy did was coil the air hose that had been hissing on the concrete all this time without their noticing. In order not to look indecisive, Ira went on over to him anyhow. "So!" he said. "What's the story on this Lamont?"

"He's out," the boy told him.

"No chance we could get you to come, I guess. Run you over to the highway in our car and get you to look at Mr. Otis here's wheel for us."

"Nope," the boy said, hanging the hose on its hook.

Ira said, "I see."

He returned to the wall, and the boy walked back to the station.

"I think it might be Moose Run," Maggie was telling Mr. Otis. "Is that the name? This cutoff that leads into Cartwheel."

"Now, I don't know about no Moose Run," Mr. Otis said, "but I have heard tell of Cartwheel. Just can't say right off exactly how you'd get there.

See, they's so many places hereabouts that sound like towns, call theyselves towns, but really they ain't much more than a grocery store and a gas pump."

"That's Cartwheel, all right," Maggie said. "One main street. No traffic lights. Fiona lives on a skinny little road that doesn't even have a sidewalk. Fiona's our daughter-in-law. Ex-daughter-in-law, I suppose I should say. She used to be our son Jesse's wife, but now they're divorced."

"Yes, that is how they do nowadays," Mr. Otis said. "Lament is divorced too, and my sister Florence's girl Sally. I don't know why they bother getting married."

Just as if his own. marriage were in perfect health.

"Have a pretzel," Ira said. Mr. Otis shook his head absently but Maggie dug down deep in the bag and came up with half a dozen.

"Really it was all a misunderstanding," she told Mr. Otis. She bit into a pretzel. "They were perfect for each other. They even looked perfect: Jesse so dark and Fiona so blond. It's just that Jesse was working musician's hours and his life was sort of, I don't know, unsteady. And Fiona was so young, and inclined to fly off the handle. Oh, I used to just ache for them. It broke Jesse's heart when she left him; she took their little daughter and went back home to her mother. And Fiona's heart was broken too, I know, but do you think she would say so? And now they're so neatly divorced you would think they had never been married."

All true, as far as it went, Ira reflected; but there was a lot she'd left out. Or not left out so much as slicked over, somehow, like that image of their son-the "musician" plying his trade so busily that he was forced to neglect his "wife" and his "daughter." Ira had never thought of Jesse as a musician; he'd thought of him as a high-school dropout in need of permanent employment. And he had never thought of Fiona as a wife but rather as Jesse's teenaged sidekick-her veil of gleaming blond hair incongruous above a skimpy T-shirt and tight jeans- while poor little Leroy had not been much more than their pet, their stuffed animal won at a carnival booth.

He had a vivid memory of Jesse as he'd looked the night he was arrested, back when he was sixteen. He'd been picked up for public drunkenness with several of his friends-a onetime occurrence, as it turned out, but Ira had wanted to make sure of that and so, intending to be hard on him, he had insisted Maggie stay home while he went down alone to post bail. He had sat on a bench in a public waiting area and finally there came Jesse, walking doubled over between two officers. Evidently his wrists had been handcuffed behind his back and he had attempted, at some point, to step through the circle of his own arms so as to bring his hands in front of him. But he had given up or been interrupted halfway through the maneuver, and so he hobbled out lopsided, twisted like a sideshow freak with his wrists trapped between his legs. Ira had experienced the most complicated mingling of emotions at the sight: anger at his son and anger at the authorities too, for exhibiting Jesse's humiliation, and a wild impulse to laugh and an aching, flooding sense of pity. Jesse's jacket sleeves had been pushed up his forearms in the modem style (something boys never did in Ira's day) and that had made him seem even more vulnerable, and so had his expression, once he was unlocked and could stand upright, although it was a fiercely defiant expression and he wouldn't acknowledge Ira's presence. Now when Ira thought of Jesse he always pictured him as he'd been that night, that same combination of infuriating and pathetic. He wondered how Maggie pictured him. Maybe she delved even farther into the past. Maybe she saw him at age four or age six, a handsome, uncommonly engaging little kid with no more than the average kid's problems. At any rate, she surely didn't view him as he really was.

No, nor their daughter, either, he thought. Maggie saw Daisy as a version of Maggie's mother-accomplished, efficient-and she fluttered around her, looking inadequate. She had fluttered ever since Daisy was a little girl with an uncannily well-ordered room and a sheaf of color-coded notebooks for her homework. But Daisy was pitiable too, in her way. Ira saw that clearly, even though she was the one he felt closer to. She seemed to be missing out on her own youth-had never even had a boyfriend, so far as Ira could tell. .Whenever Jesse got into mischief as a child Daisy had taken on a pinch-faced expression of disapproval, but Ira would almost rather she had joined in the mischief herself. Wasn't mat how it was supposed to work? Wasn't that how it worked in other families, those jolly, noisy families Ira used to watch wistfully when he was a little boy? Now she was packed for college- had been packed for weeks-and had no clothes left but the throwaways that she wasn't taking with her; and she walked around the house looking bleak and joyless as a nun in her limp, frayed blouses and faded skirts. But, Maggie thought she was admirable. "When I was her age I hadn't even begun to decide what I wanted to be," she said. Daisy wanted to be a quantum physicist. "I'm just so impressed with that,"

Maggie said, till Ira said, "Maggie, just what is a quantum physicist?"-honestly wanting to know. "Do you have the foggiest inkling?" he asked.

Then Maggie thought he was belittling her and she said, "Oh, I admit I'm not scientific! I never said I was scientific! I'm just a geriatric nursing assistant, I admit it!" and Ira said, "All I meant was- Jesus!

All I meant was-" and Daisy poked her head in the door and said, "Would you please, please not have another one of your blowups; I'm trying to read."

"Blowup!" Maggie cried. "I make the simplest little remark-"

And Ira told Daisy, "Listen here, miss, if you're so easily disturbed as all that, you can just go read in th library."

So Daisy had withdrawn, pinch-faced once again, and Maggie had buried her head in her hands.

"Same old song and dance"-that was how Jesse had once referred to marriage. This was one morning when Fiona had left the breakfast table in tears, and Ira had asked Jesse what was wrong. "You know how it is,"

Jesse had answered. "Same old song and dance as always." Then Ira (who had asked not out of empty curiosity but as a means of implying This matters, son; pay her some heed) had wondered what that "you know" signified. Was Jesse saying that Ira's marriage and his own had anything in common? Because if so, he was way out of line. They were two entirely different institutions. Ira's marriage was as steady as a tree; not even he could tell how wide and deep the roots went.

Still, Jesse's phrase had stuck in his memory: same old song and dance.

Same old arguments, same recriminations. The same jokes and affectionate passwords, yes, and abiding loyalty and gestures of support and consolations no one else knew how to offer; but also the same old resentments dragged up year after year, with nothing ever totally forgotten: the time Ira didn't act happy to hear Maggie was pregnant, the time Maggie failed to defend Ira in front of her mother, the time Ira refused to visit Maggie in the hospital, the time Maggie forgot to invite Ira's family to Christmas dinner.

And the unvaryingness-ah, Lord; who could blame Jesse for charing against that? Probably the boy had been watching his parents sideways all the years of his childhood, swearing he would never put up with such a life: plugging along day after day, Ira heading to his shop every morning, Maggie to the nursing home. Probably those afternoons that Jesse had spent helping out at the shop had been a kind of object lesson. He must have recoiled from it-Ira sitting endlessly on his high wooden stool, whistling along with his easy-listening radio station as he measured a mat or sawed away at his miter box. Women came in asking him to frame their cross-stitched homilies and their amateur seascapes and their wedding photos (two serious people in profile gazing solely at each other). They brought in illustrations torn from magazines-a litter of puppies or a duckling in a basket. Like a tailor measuring a half-dressed client, Ira remained discreetly sightless, appearing to form no judgment about a picture of a sad-faced kitten tangled in a ball of yarn. "He wants a pastel-colored mat of some kind, wouldn't you say?" the women might ask. (They often used personal pronouns, as if the pictures were animate.)

"Yes, ma'am," Ira would answer.

"Maybe a pale blue that would pick up the blue of his ribbon."

"Yes, we could do that."

And through Jesse's eyes he would see himself all at once as a generic figure called The Shopkeeper: a drab and obsequious man of indeterminate age.

Above the shop he could usually hear the creak, pause, creak of his father's rocking chair, and the hesitant footsteps of one of his sisters crossing the living room floor. Their voices, of course, weren't audible, and for this reason Ira had fallen into the habit of imagining that his family never spoke during the day-that they were keeping very still till Ira came. He was the backbone of their lives; he knew that. They depended on him utterly.

In his childhood he had been extraneous-a kind of afterthought, half a generation younger than his sisters. He had been so much the baby that he'd called every family member "honey," because that was how all those grownups or almost-grownups addressed him and he'd assumed it was a universal term. "I need my shoes tied, honey," he would tell his father.

He didn't have the usual baby's privileges, though; he was never the center of attention. If any of them could be said to occupy that position it was his sister Dorrie-mentally handicapped, frail and jerky, bucktoothed, awkward-although even Dorrie had a neglected air and tended to sit by herself on the outskirts of a room. Their mother suffered from a progressive disease that killed her when Ira was fourteen, that left him forever afterward edgy and frightened in the presence of illness; and anyhow she had never shown much of a talent for mothering. She devoted herself instead to religion, to radio evangelists and inspirational pamphlets left by door-to-door missionaries. Her idea of a meal was saltines and tea, for all of them. She never got hungry like ordinary mortals or realized that others could be hungry, but simply took in sustenance when the clock reminded her. If they wanted real food it was up to their father, for Dorrie was not capable of anything complicated and Junie was subject to some kind of phobia that worsened over the years till she refused to leave the house for so much as a quart of milk. Their father had to see to that when he was finished down at the shop. He would trudge upstairs for the grocery list, trudge out again, return with a few tin cans, and putter around the kitchen with the girls. Even after Ira was old enough, his assistance was not required. He was the interloper, the one rude splash of color in a sepia photograph. His family gave him a wide berth while addressing him remotely and kindly. "You finish your homework, honey?" they would ask, and they asked this even in the summer and over the Christmas holidays.

Then Ira graduated-had already paid his deposit at the University of Maryland, with dreams of going on to medical school-and his father suddenly abdicated. He just . . . imploded, was how Ira saw it. Declared he had a weak heart and could not continue. Sat down in his platform rocker and stayed there. Ira took over the business, which wasn't easy because he'd never played the smallest part in it up till then. All at once he was the one his family turned to. They relied on him for money and errands and advice, for transportation to the doctor and news of the outside world. It was, "Honey, is this dress out of style?" and, "Honey, can we afford a new rug?" In a way, Ira felt gratified, especially at the beginning, when this seemed to be just a temporary, summer-vacation state of affairs. He was no longer on the sidelines; he was central. He rooted through Dorrie's bureau drawers for the mate to her favorite red sock; he barbered Junie's graying hair; he dumped the month's receipts into his father's lap, all in the knowledge that he, Ira, was the only one they could turn to.

But summer stretched into fall, and first the university granted him a semester's postponement and then a year's postponement, and then after a while the subject no longer came up.

Well, face it, there were worse careers than cutting forty-five-degree angles in strips of gilded molding. And he did have Maggie, eventually-dropping into his lap like a wonderful gift out of nowhere. He did have two normal, healthy children. Maybe his life wasn't exactly what he had pictured when he was eighteen, but whose was? That was how things worked, most often.

Although he knew that Jesse didn't see it that way.

No compromises for Jesse Moran, no, sir. No modifications, no lowering of sights for Jesse. "I refuse to believe that I will die unknown," he had said to Ira once, and Ira, instead of smiling tolerantly as he should have, had felt slapped in the face.

Unknown.

Maggie said, "Ira, did you happen to notice a soft-drink machine inside the station?"

He looked at her.

"Ira?"

, .

He pulled himself together and said, "Why, yes, I think so."

"With diet soft drinks?"

"Urn . . ."

"I'll go check," Maggie said. "Those pretzels made me thirsty. Mr. Otis?

Want something to drink?"

"Oh, no, I'm doing all right," Mr. Otis told her.

She tripped off toward the building, her skirt swinging. Both men watched her go.

"A fine, fine lady," Mr. Otis said.

Ira let his eyes close briefly and rubbed the ache in his forehead.

"A real angel of mercy," Mr. Otis said.

In stores sometimes Maggie would bring her selections to a clerk and say, ' 'I suppose you expect me to pay for these," in the fake-tough tone that her brothers used when they were joking. Ira always worried she had overstepped, but the clerk would laugh and say something like: "Well, that thought had occurred to me." So the world was not as Ira had perceived it, evidently. It was more the way Maggie perceived it. She was the one who got along in it better, collecting strays who stuck to her like lint and falling into heart-to-heart talks with total strangers.

This Mr. Otis, for instance: his face alight with enthusiasm, his eyes stretched into crepe-edged triangles. "She puts me in mind of the lady with the chimney," he was telling Ira. "I knew it was someone; just couldn't think who."

"Chimney?"

"White lady I did not know from Adam," Mr. Otis said. "She was leaking round her chimney she say and she call me to come give a estimate. But I misstepped somehow and fell right off her roof while I was walking about.

Only knocked the wind out as it happened, but Lordy, for a while there I thought I was a goner, laid there on the ground not able to catch my breath, and this lady she insist on driving me to the hospital. On the way, though, my breath come back to me and so I say, 'Mrs., let's not go after all, they'll only take my life savings to say I got nothing wrong with me,' so she say fine but then has to buy me a cup of coffee and some hash browns at McDonald's, which happen to lie next to a Toys R Us, so she axes would I mind if we run in afterwards and bought a little red wagon for her nephew whose birthday it was tomorrow?

And I say no and in fact she buy two, one for my niece's son Elbert also, and next to that is this gardening place-"

"Yes, that is Maggie, all right," Ira said.

"Not a straight-line kind of person."

"No indeedy," Ira said.

That seemed to use up all their topics of conversation. They fell silent and focused on Maggie, who was returning with a soft-drink can held at arm's length. "Darn thing just bubbled up all over me," she called cheerfully. "Ira? Want a sip?"

"No, thanks."

"Mr. Otis?"

"Oh, why, no, I don't believe I do, thanks anyhow."

She settled between them and tipped her head back for a long, noisy swig.

Ira started wishing for a game of solitaire. All this idleness was getting to him. Judging from the way those balloons were bobbing about, though, he guessed his cards might blow away, and so he tucked his hands in his armpits and slouched lower on the wall.

They sold balloons like that at Harborplace, or next to it. Lone, grim men stood on street corners with trees of Mylar lozenges floating overhead. He remembered how entranced his sister Junie had been when she first saw them. Poor Junie: in a way more seriously handicapped than Dorrie, even-more limited, more imprisoned. Her fears confounded them all, because nothing very dreadful had ever befallen her in the outside world, at least not so far as anyone knew. In the beginning they tried to point that out. They said useless things like: "What's the worst that could happen?" and "I'll be with you." Then gradually they stopped.

They gave up on her and let her stay where she was.

Except for Maggie, that is. Maggie was too obstinate to give up. And after years of failed attempts, one day she conceived the notion that Junie might be persuaded to go out if she could go in costume. She bought Junie a bright-red wig and a skin-tight dress covered with poppies and a pair of spike-heeled patent-leather shoes with ankle straps. She plastered Junie's face with heavy makeup. To everyone's astonishment, it worked. Giggling in a terrified, unhappy way, Junie allowed Maggie and Ira to lead her to the front stoop. The next day, slightly farther. Then finally to the end of the block. Never without Ira, though. She wouldn't do it with just Maggie; Maggie was not a blood relation. (Ira's father, in fact, wouldn't even call Maggie by name but referred to her as

"Madam." "Will Madam be coming too, Ira?"-a title that exactly reflected the mocking, skeptical attitude he had assumed toward her from the start.)

"You see what's at work here," Maggie said of Junie. "When she's in costume it's not she who's going out; it's someone else. Her real self is safe at home."

Evidently she was right. Clinging to Ira's arm with both hands, Junie walked to the pharmacy and requested a copy of Soap Opera Digest. She walked to the grocery store and placed an order for chicken livers in an imperious, brazen manner as if she were another kind of woman entirely-a flamboyant, maybe even trampish woman who didn't care what people thought of her. Then she collapsed into giggles again and asked Ira how she was doing. Well, Ira was pleased at her progress, of course, but after a while the whole thing got to be a nuisance. She wanted to venture this place and that, and always it was such a production-the preparations, the dress and the makeup, the assurances he was forced to offer. And those ridiculous heels hampered her so. She walked like someone navigating a freshly mopped floor. Really it would have been simpler if she'd gone on staying home, he reflected. But he was ashamed of himself for the thought.

Then she got this urge to visit Harborplace. She had watched on TV when Harborplace first opened and she had somehow come to the conclusion that it was one of the wonders of the world. So naturally, after she'd gained some confidence, nothing would do but that she must see it in person.

Only Ira didn't want to take her. To put it mildly, he was not a fan of Harborplace. He felt it was un-Baltimorean-in fact, a glorified shopping mall. And parking would be bound to cost an arm and a leg. Couldn't she settle for somewhere else? No, she couldn't, she said. Couldn't just Maggie take her, then? No, she needed Ira. He knew she needed him; how could he suggest otherwise? And then their father wanted to come too, and then Dome, who was so excited that she already had her "suitcase" (a Hutzler's coat box) packed for the occasion. Ira had to set his teeth and agree to it.

They scheduled the trip for a Sunday-Ira's only day off. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a misty, lukewarm morning, with showers predicted for afternoon. Ira suggested a postponement but no one would hear of it, not even Maggie, who had become as fired up as the others. So he drove them all downtown, where by some miracle he found a parking spot on the street, and they got out and started walking. It was so foggy that buildings just a Jew yards away were invisible. When they reached the corner of Pratt and Light streets and looked across to Harborplace they couldn't even see the pavilions; they were merely dense patches of gray.

The traffic signal, turning green, was the one little pinprick of color.

And nobody else was in sight except for a single balloon man, who took shape eerily on the opposite comer as they approached.

It was the balloons that snagged Junie's attention. They seemed made of liquid metal; they were silver-toned and crushy, puckered around the edges like sofa cushions. Junie cried, "Oh!" She stepped up onto the curb, gaping all the while. "What are those?" she cried.

"Balloons, of course," Ira said. But when he tried to lead her past, she craned back to look at them and so did Dorrie, who was hanging on his other arm.

He could see what the problem was. TV had kept Junie informed of the world's important developments but not the trivial ones, like Mylar; so those were what stopped her in her tracks. It was perfectly understandable. At that moment, though, Ira just didn't feel like catering to her. He didn't want to be there at all, and so he rushed them forward and around the first pavilion. Junie's hand was like a claw on his arm. Dorrie, whose left leg had been partially paralyzed after her latest seizure, leaned on his other arm and hobbled grotesquely, her Hutzler's coat box slamming against her hip at every step. And behind them, Maggie murmured encouragement to his father, whose breathing was growing louder and more effortful.

"But those are not any balloons have had experience of!" Junie said.

"What material is that? What do they call it?"

By then they had reached the promenade around the water's edge, and instead of answering, Ira gazed pointedly toward the view. "Isn't this what you were dying to see?" he reminded her.

But the view was nothing but opaque white sheets and a fuzzy-edged U.S.S.

Constellation riding on a cloud, and Harborplace was a hulking, silent concentration of vapors.

Well, the whole trip ended in disaster, of course. Junie said everything had looked better on TV, and Ira's father said his heart was flapping in his chest, and then Dorrie somehow got her feelings hurt and started crying and had to be taken home before they'd set foot inside a pavilion. Ira couldn't remember now what had hurt her feelings, but what he did remember, so vividly that it darkened even this glaringly sunlit Texaco, was the sensation that had come over him as he stood there between his two sisters. He'd felt suffocated. The fog had made a tiny room surrounding them, an airless, steamy room such as those that house indoor swimming pools. It had muffled every sound but his family's close, oppressively familiar voices. It had wrapped them together, locked them in, while his sisters' hands dragged him down the way drowning victims drag down whoever tries to rescue them. And Ira had thought, Ah, God, I have been trapped with these people all my life and I am never going to be free.

And he had known then what a failure he'd been, ever since the day he took over his father's business.

Was it any wonder he was so sensitive to waste? He had given up the only serious dream he'd ever had. You can't get more wasteful than that.

"Lamont!" Maggie said.

She was looking toward a revolving yellow light over by the gas pumps-a tow truck, towing nothing. It stopped with a painful screeching sound and the engine died. A black man in a denim jacket swung out of the cab.

"That's him, all right," Mr. Otis said, rising by inches from his seat.

Lamont walked to the rear of the truck and examined something. He kicked a tire and then started toward the cab. He was not as young as Ira had expected-no mere boy but a solidly built, glowering man with plum-black skin and a heavy way of walking.

"Well, hey there!" Mr. Otis called.

Lamont halted and looked over at him. "Uncle Daniel?" he said.

"How you been, son?"

"What you doing here?" Lamont asked, approaching.

When he reached the wall, Maggie and Ira stood up, but Lament didn't glance in their direction. "Ain't you gone back to Aunt Duluth yet?" he asked Mr. Otis.

"Lamont, I'm going to need that truck of yourn," Mr. Otis said.

"What for?"

"Believe my left front wheel is loose."

"What? Where's it at?"

"Out on Route One. This here fellow kindly give me a lift."

Lamont briefly skimmed Ira with his eyes.

"We just happened to be driving past," Ira told him.

"Hmm," Lamont said in an unfriendly tone, and then, turning again to his uncle, "Now let's see what you telling me. Your car is out on the highway someplace ..."

"It was Mrs. here caught on to it," Mr. Otis said, and he gestured toward Maggie, who beamed up at Lamont trustfully. A slender thread of soft-drink foam traced her upper lip; it made Ira feel protective.

"I won't offer you my hand," she told Lamont. "This Pepsi has just fizzed all over me."

Lamont merely studied her, with the corners of his mouth pulled down.

"She lean out her window and call, 'Your wheel!' " Mr. Otis said. " 'Your front wheel is falling off!' "

"Really that was a fabrication," Maggie told Lamont. "I made it up."

Sweet Jesus.

Lamont said, "Say what?"

"I fibbed," Maggie said blithely. "We admitted as much to your uncle, but I don't know, it was kind of hard to convince him."

"You saying you told him a lie?" Lamont asked.

"Right."

Mr. Otis smiled self-consciously down at his shoes.

"Well, actually-" Ira began.

"It was after he almost stopped dead in front of us," Maggie said. "We had to veer off the road, and I was so mad that as soon as we caught up with him I said that about his wheel. But I didn't know he was old! I didn't know he was helpless!"

"Helpless?" Mr. Otis asked, his smile growing less certain.

"And besides, then it did seem his wheel was acting kind of funny,"

Maggie told Lament. "So we brought him here to the Texaco."

Lamont looked no more threatening than he'd seemed all along, Ira was relieved to see. In fact, he dismissed the two of them entirely. He turned instead to his uncle. "Hear that?" he asked. "See there? Now it comes to you running folks off the road."

"Lamont, I'll tell you the truth," Mr. Otis said. "I do believe when I think back on it that wheel has not been acting properly for some days now.''

"Didn't I say you ought to give up driving? Didn't we all say that?

Didn't Florence beg you to hand in your license? Next time you might not be so lucky. Some crazy white man going to shoot your head off next time."

Mr. Otis appeared to shrink, standing there quietly with his hat brim shielding his face.

"If you'd've stayed home with Aunt Duluth where you belong, none of this wouldn't be happening," Lamont told him. "Cruising about on the interstate! Sleeping here and there like some hippie!"

"Well, I had thought I was driving real cautious and careful," Mr. Otis said.

Ira cleared his throat. "So about the wheel-" he said.

"You just got to go on back home and make up," Lamont told Mr. Otis.

"Quit drawing this thing out and apologize to Aunt Duluth and get that rust heap out of folkses' way."

"I can't apologize! I ain't done nothing to be sorry for," Mr. Otis said.

"What's the difference, man? Apologize even so."

"See, I couldn't have done it; it was only in her dream. Duluth went and had this dream, see-"

"You been married fifty-some years to that woman," Lamont said, "and half of those years the two of you been in a snit about something. She ain't speaking to you or you ain't speaking to her or she moves out or you moves out. Shoot, man, one time you both moves out and leaves your house standing empty. Plenty would give their right arms for a nice little house like you-all's, and what do you do? Leave it stand empty while you off careening about in your Chevy and Aunt Duluth's sleeping on Florence's couch discommoding her family."

A reminiscent smile crossed Mr. Otis's face. "It's true," he said. "I had thought I was leaving her, that time, and she thought she was leaving me."

"You two act like quarrelsome children," Lamont told him.

"Well, at least I'm still married, you notice!" Mr. Otis said. "At least I'm still married, unlike some certain others I could name!"

Ira said, "Well, at any rate-"

"Even worse than children," Lamont went on, as if he hadn't heard.

"Children at least got the time to spare, but you two are old and coming to the end of your lives. Pretty soon one or the other of you going to die and the one that's left behind will say, 'Why did I act so ugly? That was who it was; that person was who I was with; and here we threw ourselves away on spitefulness,' you'll say."

"Well, it's probably going to be me that dies first," Mr. Otis said, "so I just ain't going to worry about that."

"I'm serious, Uncle."

"I'm serious. Could be what you throw away is all that really counts; could be that's the whole point of things, wouldn't that be something? Spill it! Spill it all, I say! No way not to spill it. And anyhow, just look at the times we had. Maybe that's what I'll end up thinking. 'My, we surely did have us a time. We were a real knock-down, drag-out, heart-and-soul type of couple,' I'll say. Something to reflect on in the nursing home."

Lament rolled his eyes heavenward.

Ira said, "Well, not to change the subject, but is this wheel business under control now?"

Both men looked over at him. "Oh," Mr. Otis said finally. "I reckon you two will want to be moving on."

"Only if you're sure you're all right," Maggie told him.

"He'll be fine," Lament said. "Get on and go."

"Yes, don't you give me another thought," Mr. Otis said. "Let me squire you to your car." And he walked off between the two of them. Lament stayed behind, looking disgusted.

"That boy is just so cranky," Mr. Otis told Ira. "I don't know who he takes after."

"You think he'll be willing to help you?"

"Oh, surely. He just want to rant and carry on some first."

They reached the Dodge, and Mr. Otis insisted on opening Maggie's door for her. It took longer than if she had done it herself; he had to get positioned just right and gain some leverage. Meanwhile he was saying to Ira, "And it ain't like he had room to criticize. A divorced man! Handing out advice like a expert!"

He closed the door after Maggie with a loose, ineffectual sound so that she had to reopen it and give it a good slam. "A man who ups and splits at the first little setback," he told Ira. "Lives alone all pruned and puckerish, drying out like a raisin. Sets alone in front of the TV, night after night, and won't go courting nobody new for fear she'll do him like his wife did."

"Tsk!" Maggie said, looking up at him through her window. "That is always so sad to see."

"But do you think he sees it?" Mr. Otis asked. "Naw." He followed Ira around to the driver's side of the car. "He believe that's just a regular life," he told Ira.

"Well, listen," Ira said as he slid behind the wheel. "If there's any kind of expense with the tow truck I want to hear about it, understand?"

He shut the door and leaned out the window to say, "I'd better give you our address."

"There won't be no expense," Mr. Otis said, "but I appreciate the thought." He tipped his hat back slightly and scratched his head. "You know I used to have this dog," he said. "Smartest dog I ever owned.

Bessie. She just loved to chase a rubber ball. I would throw it for her and she would chase it. Anytime the ball landed on a kitchen chair, though, Bessie would poke her nose through the spindles of the chair-back and whine and moan and whimper, never dreaming she could just walk around and grab the ball from in front."

Ira said, "Urn ..."

"Puts me in mind of Lament," Mr. Otis said.

"Lament."

"Blind in spots."

"Oh! Yes, Lamont!" Ira said. He was relieved to find the connection.

"Well, I don't want to hold you up," Mr. Otis told him, and he offered Ira his hand. It felt very light and fragile, like the skeleton of a bird. "You-all take care driving now, hear?" He bent forward to tell Maggie, "Take care!"

"You too," she told him. "And I hope things work out with Duluth."

"Oh, they will, they will. Sooner or later." He chuckled and stepped back as Ira started the engine. Like a host seeing off his guests, he stood there gazing after them till they pulled out onto the road and he disappeared from Ira's rearview mirror.

"Well!" Maggie said, bouncing into a more comfortable position in her seat. "So anyhow . . ."

As if that whole excursion had been only a little hiccup in the midst of some long story she was telling.

Ira turned on the radio but all he could find was the most local kind of news-crop prices, a fire in a Knights of Columbus building. He turned it off. Maggie was rooting through her purse. "Now, where on earth?" she said.

"What're you looking for?"

"My sunglasses."

"On the dashboard."

"Oh, right."

She reached for them and perched them on the end of her nose. Then she rotated her face, staring all around as if testing their effectiveness.

"Doesn't the sunlight bother your eyes?" she asked him finally.

"No, I'm fine."

"Maybe / should drive."

"No, no . . ."

"I haven't taken a single turn this whole day," she said.

"That's all right. Thanks anyhow, sweetheart."

"Well, you just let me know if you change your mind," she told him, and she sank back in her seat and gazed out at the view.

Ira cocked an elbow on the window ledge. He started whistling a tune.

Maggie stiffened and looked over at him.

"You just think I'm some sort of harum-scarum lady driver," she told him.

"Huh?" he said.

"You're just wondering what kind of fool you are even to consider allowing me behind the wheel."

He blinked. He had assumed the subject was concluded. "Lord, Maggie," he said, "why do you always take things so personally?"

"I just do, that's why," she told him, but she spoke without heat, as if uninterested in her own words, and then returned to studying the scenery.

Once they were back on Route One, Ira picked up speed. Traffic had grown heavier, but it was moving briskly. The farms gave way to patches of commercial land-a mountain of bald tires, a stepped, angular cliff of cinder blocks, a field of those windowed enclosures that fit over the beds of pickup trucks and turn them into campers. Ira wasn't sure what those were called. It bothered him; he liked to know the names of things, the specific, accurate term that would sum an object up.

"Spruce Gum," Maggie said.

"Pardon?"

She was twisted around in her seat, gazing behind her. She said, "Spruce Gum! That was the cutoff to Fiona's! We just now passed it."

"Oh, yes, Spruce Gum," he said. It did ring a bell.

"Ira," Maggie said.

"Hmm?"

"It's not so far out of the way."

He glanced at her. She had her hands pressed together, her face set toward him, her mouth bunched up a little as if she were willing certain words from him (the way she used to will the right answer out of Jesse when she was drilling him on his multiplication tables).

"Is it?" she said.

"No," he said.

She misunderstood him; she drew in a breath to start arguing. But he said, "No, I guess it's not."

"What: You mean you'll take me there?"

"Well," he said. And then he said, "Oh, well, we've already pretty much shot the day, right?" And he flicked his blinker on and looked for a place to turn the car around.

"Thank you, Ira," she told him, and she slid over as far as her seat belt allowed and planted a little brush stroke of a kiss below his ear.

Ira said, "Hmf," but he sounded more grudging than he really felt.

After he'd reversed the car in a lumberyard, he headed back up Route One and took a left onto Spruce Gum Road. They were facing into the sun now.

Dusty shafts of light filmed the windshield. Maggie pushed her glasses higher on her nose, and Ira flipped his visor down.

Was it the haze on the windshield that made him think again of their trip to Harborplace? At any rate, for some reason he suddenly remembered why Dorrie had started crying that day.

Standing at the water's edge, hemmed in by fog, she had been moved to open her suitcase and show him its contents. None of what she'd brought was much different from any other time. There were the usual two or three comic books, he recalled, and probably a snack for her sweet tooth-a squashed Hostess cupcake perhaps, with the frosting smashed into the cellophane-and of course the rhinestone hatband that had once belonged to their mother. And finally her greatest treasure: a fan magazine with Elvis Presley on the cover. King of Rock, the title read. Dorrie worshiped Elvis Presley. Ordinarily Ira humored her, even bought her posters whenever he came across them, but on that particular morning he was feeling so burdened, he just hadn't had the patience. "Elvis," Dorrie said happily, and Ira said, "For God's sake, Dorrie, don't you know the guy is dead and buried?"

Then she had stopped smiling and her eyes had filled with tears, and Ira had felt pierced. Everything about her all at once saddened him-her skimpy haircut and her chapped lips and her thin face that was so homely and so sweet, if only people would see. He put an arm around her. He hugged her bony little body close and gazed over her head at the Constellation floating in the fog. The tops of the masts had dwindled away and the ropes and chains had dissolved and the old ship had looked its age for once, swathed in clouds of mist you could mistake for the blurring of time. And Junie had pressed close to his other side and Maggie and Sam had watched steadfastly, waiting for him to say what to do next. He had known then what the true waste was; Lord, yes. It was not his having to support these people but his failure to notice how he loved them. He loved even his worn-down, defeated father, even the memory of his poor mother who had always been so pretty and never realized it because anytime she approached a mirror she had her mouth drawn up lopsided with shyness.

But then the feeling had faded (probably the very next instant, when Junie started begging to leave) and he forgot what he had learned. And no doubt he would forget again, just as Dorrie had forgotten, by the time they reached home, that Elvis Presley was no longer King of Rock.

Three

I

Maggie had a song that she liked to sing with Ira when they were traveling. "On the Road Again," it was called-not the Willie Nelson chestnut but a blues-sounding piece from one of Jesse's old Canned Heat albums, stomping and hard-driving. Ira did the beat: "Boom-da-da, boom-da-da, boom-da-da, boom! boom!" Maggie sang the melody. " 'Take a hint from me, Mama, please! don't you cry no more,' " she sang. The telephone poles appeared to be flashing by in rhythm. Maggie felt rangy and freewheeling. She tipped her head back against the seat and swirled one ankle, keeping time, In the old days, when she'd driven this road alone, the countryside had seemed unwelcoming-enemy territory. Among these woods and stony pastures her only grandchild was being held hostage, and Maggie (smothered in scarves, or swathed in an anonymous trench coat, or half obscured by Junie's bubbly red wig) had driven as if slipping between something.

She'd had a sense of slithering, evading. She had fixed her mind on that child and held her face firmly before her: a bright baby face as round as a penny, eyes that widened with enthusiasm whenever Maggie walked into the room, dimpled fists revving up at the sight of her. I'm coming, Leroy! Don't forget me! But then over and over again those trips had proved so unsatisfactory, ending with that last awful time, when Leroy had twisted in her stroller and called, "Mom-Mom?"-hunting her other grandmother, her lesser grandmother, her pretender grandmother; and Maggie had finally given up and limited herself thereafter to the rare official visits with Ira. And even those had stopped soon enough. Leroy had begun to fade and dwindle, till one day she was no larger than somebody at the wrong end of a telescope-still dear, but very far removed.

Maggie thought of last summer when her old cat, Pumpkin, had died. His absence had struck her so intensely that it had amounted to a presence-the lack of his furry body twining between her ankles whenever she opened the refrigerator door, the lack of his motorboat purr in her bed whenever she woke up at night. Stupidly, she had been reminded of the time Leroy and Fiona had left, although of course there was no comparison. But here was something even stupider: A month or so later, when cold weather set in, Maggie switched off the basement dehumidifier as she did every year and even that absence had struck her. She had mourned in the most personal way the silencing of the steady, faithful whir that used to thrum the floorboards. What on earth was wrong with her? she had wondered. Would she spend the rest of her days grieving for every loss equally-a daughter-in-law, a baby, a cat, a machine that dries the air out?

Was this how it felt to grow old?

Now the fields were a brassy color, as pretty as a picture on a calendar.

They held no particular significance. Maybe it helped that Ira was with her-an ally. Maybe it was just that sooner or later, even the sharpest pain became flattened.

" 'But I ain't going down that long old lonesome road all by myself,' " she sang automatically, and Ira sang, "Boom-da-da, boom-da-da-"

If Fiona remarried she would most likely acquire a new mother-in-law.

Maggie hadn't considered that. She wondered if Fiona and this woman would be close. Would they spend their every free moment together, as cozy as two girlfriends?

"And suppose she has another baby!" Maggie said.

Ira broke off his boom-das to ask, "Huh?"

"I saw her through that whole nine months! What will she do without me?"

"Who're you talking about?"

"Fiona, of course. Who do you think?"

"Well, I'm sure she'll manage somehow," Ira said.

Maggie said, "Maybe, and maybe not." She turned away from him to look out at the fields again. They seemed unnaturally textureless. "I drove her to her childbirth classes," she said. "I drilled her in her exercises. I was her official labor coach."

"So now she knows all about it," Ira said.

"But it's something you have to repeat with each pregnancy," Maggie told him. "You have to keep at it."

She thought of how she had kept at Fiona, whom pregnancy had turned lackadaisical and vague, so that if it hadn't been for Maggie she'd have spent her entire third trimester on the couch in front of the TV. Maggie would clap her hands briskly-"Okay!"-and snap off the Love Boat rerun and fling open the curtains, letting sunshine flood the dim air of the living room and the turmoil of rock magazines and Fresca bottles. "Time for your pelvic squats!" she would cry, and Fiona would shrink and raise one arm to shield her eyes from the light.

"Pelvic squats, good grief," she would say. "Abdominal humps. It all sounds so gross." But she would heave to her feet, sighing. Even in pregnancy, her body was a teenager's-slender and almost rubbery, reminding Maggie of those scantily clad girls she'd glimpsed on beaches who seemed to belong to a completely different species from her own. The mound of the baby was a separate burden, a kind of package jutting out in front of her.

"-really," she said, dropping to the floor with a thud. "Don't they reckon I must know how to breathe by now?"

"Oh, honey, you're just lucky they offer such things," Maggie told her.

"My first pregnancy, there wasn't a course to be found, and I was scared to death. I'd have loved to take lessons! And afterward: I remember leaving the hospital with Jesse and thinking, 'Wait. Are they going to let me just walk off with him? I don't know beans about babies! I don't have a license to do this. Ira and I are just amateurs.' I mean you're given all these lessons for the unimportant things-piano-playing, typing.

You're given years and years of lessons in how to balance equations, which Lord knows you will never have to do in normal life. But how about parenthood? Or marriage, either, come to think of it. Before you can drive a car you need a state-approved course of instruction, but driving a car is nothing, nothing, compared to living day in and day out with a husband and raising up a new human being."

Which had not been the most reassuring notion, perhaps; for Fiona had said, "Jiminy," and dropped her head in her hands.

"Though I'm certain you'll do fine," Maggie said in a hurry. "And of course you have me here to help you."

"Oh, jiminy," Fiona said.

Ira turned down a little side road called Elm Lane-a double string of tacky one-story cottages with RVs in most of the driveways and sometimes a sloping tin trailer out back. Maggie asked him, ' 'Who will wake up in the night now and bring her the baby to nurse?"

"Her husband, one would Jiope," Ira said. "Or maybe she'll keep the baby in her room this time, the way you should have had her do last time."

Then he gave his shoulders a slight shake, as if ridding himself of something, and said, "What baby? Fiona's not having a baby; she's just getting married, or so you claim. Let's put first things first here."

Well, but first things weren't put first the time before; Fiona had been two months pregnant when she married Jesse. Not that Maggie wanted to remind him of that. Besides, her thoughts were on something else now. She was caught by an unexpected, piercingly physical memory of bringing the infant Leroy in to Fiona for her a.m. feeding-that downy soft head wavering on Maggie's shoulder, that birdlike mouth searching the bend of Maggie's neck inside her bathrobe collar, and then the close, sleep-smelling warmth of Jesse's and Fiona's bedroom. "Oh," she said without meaning to, and then, "Oh!" For there in Mrs. Stuckey's yard (hard-packed earth, not really a yard at all) stood a wiry little girl with white-blond hair that stopped short squarely at her jawline. She had just let go of a yellow Frisbee, which sailed shuddering toward their car and landed with a thump on the hood as Ira swung into the driveway.

"That's not-" Maggie said. "Is that-?"

"Must be Leroy," Ira told her.

"It's not!"

But of course, it had to be. Maggie was forced to make such a leap across time, though-from the infant on her shoulder to this gawky child, all in two seconds. She was experiencing some difficulty. The child dropped her hands to her sides and stared at them. Frowning gave her forehead a netted look. She wore a pink tank top with some kind of red stain down the front, berry juice or Kool-Aid, andjbaggy shorts in a blinding Hawaiian print. Her face was so thin it was triangular, a cat's face, and her arms and legs were narrow white stems.

"Maybe it's a neighbor girl," Maggie told Ira-a last-ditch effort.

He didn't bother replying.

As soon as he switched the ignition off, Maggie opened the door and stepped out. She called "Leroy?"

"What."

"Are you Leroy?"

The child deliberated a moment, as if uncertain, and then nodded.

"So," Maggie said. "Well, hi there!" she cried.

Leroy went on staring. She didn't seem one grain less suspicious.

Actually, Maggie reflected (already adjusting to new developments), this was one of the most interesting ages. Seven and a half-old enough to converse with but not yet past willing to admire a grownup, provided the grownup played her cards right. Cagily, Maggie rounded the car and approached the child with her purse in both hands, resisting the urge to fling out her arms for a hug. "I guess you must not remember me," she said, stopping a measured distance away.

Leroy shook her head.

"Why, sweetie, I'm your grandma!"

"You are?" Leroy said. She reminded Maggie of someone peering through a veil.

"Your other grandma. Your Grandma Moran."

It was crazy to have to introduce herself to her own flesh and blood. And crazier still, Maggie thought, that Jesse would have needed to do the same thing. He had not laid eyes on his daughter since-when? Since just after he and Fiona split up-before Leroy was a year old, even. What a sad, partitioned life they all seemed to be living!

"I'm from your father's side of the family," she told Leroy, and Leroy said, "Oh."

So at least she did know she had a father.

"And this is your grandpa," Maggie said.

Leroy shifted her gaze to Ira. In profile, her nose was seen to be tiny and extremely pointed. Maggie could have loved her for her nose alone.

Ira was out of the car by now, but he didn't come over to Leroy immediately. Instead he reached for the Frisbee on the hood. Then he crossed the yard to them, meanwhile studying the Frisbee and turning it around and around in his hands as if he'd never seen one before. (Wasn't this just like him? Allowing Maggie to rush in while he hung back all reserved, but you notice he did tag along, and would share the benefit of anything she accomplished.) When he arrived in front of Leroy he tossed the Frisbee toward her lightly, and both her hands came up like two skinny spiders to grab it.

"Thanks," she said.

Maggie wished she had thought of the Frisbee.

"We don't seem familiar at all?" she asked Leroy.

Leroy shook her head.

"Why! I was standing by when you were born, I'll have you know. I was waiting in the hospital for you to be delivered. You stayed with us the first eight or nine months of your life."

"I did?"

"You don't remember staying with us?"

"How could she, Maggie?" Ira asked.

"Well, she might," Maggie said, for she herself had a very clear memory of a scratchy-collared dress she used to hate being stuffed into as an infant. And besides, you would think all that loving care had to have left some mark, wouldn't you? She said, "Or Fiona might have told her about it."

"She told me I lived in Baltimore," Leroy said.

"That was us," Maggie said. "Your parents lived with us in your daddy's old boyhood room in Baltimore."

"Oh."

"Then you and your mother moved away." r Leroy rubbed her calf with the instep of her bare foot.

She was standing very straight, militarily straight, giving the impression she was held there only by a sense of duty.

"We visited on your birthdays afterward, remember that?"

"Nope."

"She was just a little thing, Maggie," Ira said.

"We came for your first three birthdays," Maggie persisted. (Sometimes you could snag a memory and reel it in out of nowhere, if you used the proper hook.) "But your second birthday you were off at Hershey Park, and so we didn't get to see you."

"I've been to Hershey Park six times," Leroy said. "Mindy Brant has only been twice."

"Your third birthday, we brought you a kitten."

Leroy tilted her head. Her hair wafted to one side- corn silk, lighter than air. "A tiger kitten," she said.

"Right."

"Stripy all over, even on its tummy."

"You do remember!"

"That was you-all brought me that kitten?"

"That was us," Maggie said.

Leroy looked back and forth between the two of them. Her skin was delicately freckled, as if dusted with those sugar sprinkles people put on cakes. That must come from the Stuckey side. Maggie's family never freckled, and certainly Ira's didn't, with their Indian connections. "And then what happened?" she was asking.

"What happened when?"

"What happened to the kitten! You must've took it back."

"Oh, no, honey, we didn't take it back. Or rather, we did but only because you turned out to be allergic. You started sneezing and your eyes got teary."

"And after that, what?" Leroy asked.

"Well, I wanted to visit again," Maggie said, "but your grandpa told me we shouldn't. I wanted to with all my heart, but your grandpa told me-"

"I meant, what did you do with the kitten," Leroy said.

"Oh. The kitten. Well. We gave it to your grandpa's two sisters, your . .

. great-aunts, I suppose they'd be; goodness."

"So have they still got it?"

"No, actually it was hit by a car," Maggie said.

"Oh."

"It wasn't used to traffic and somehow it slipped out when someone left the door open."

Leroy stared ahead, fixedly. Maggie hoped she hadn't upset her. She said, "So tell me! Is your mother home?"

"My mother? Sure." -"Could we see her, maybe?"

Ira said, "Maybe she's busy."

"No, she's not busy," Leroy said, and she turned and started toward the house. Maggie didn't know if they were supposed to follow or not. She looked over at Ira. He was standing there slouched with his hands in his trouser pockets, so she took her cue from him and stayed where she was.

"Ma!" Leroy called, climbing the two front steps. Her voice had a certain mosquito quality that went with her thin face. "Ma? You in there?" She opened the screen door. "Hey, Ma!"

Then all at once there was Fiona leaning in the doorway, one arm outstretched to keep the screen door from banging shut again. She wore cutoff denim shorts and a T-shirt with some kind of writing across it.

"No need to shout," she said. At that moment she saw Maggie and Ira. She stood up straighter.

Maggie moved forward, clutching her purse. She said, "How are you, Fiona?"

"Well . . . fine," Fiona said.

And then she looked beyond them. Oh, Maggie was not mistaken about that.

Her eyes swept the yard furtively and alighted on the car for just the briefest instant. She was wondering if Jesse had come too. She still cared enough to wonder.

Her eyes returned to Maggie.

"I hope we're not disturbing you," Maggie said.

"Oh, urn, no . . ."

"We were just passing through and thought we'd stop by and say hello."

Fiona lifted her free arm and smoothed her hair off her forehead with the back of her hand-a gesture that exposed the satiny white inner surface of her wrist, that made her seem distracted, at a loss. Her hair was still fairly long but she had done something to it that bushed it out more; it didn't hang in sheets now. And she had gained a bit of weight. Her face was slightly broader across the cheekbones, the hollow of her collarbone was less pronounced, and although she was translucently pale, as always, she must have started using makeup, for Maggie detected a half-moon of powdered shadow on each eyelid-that rose-colored shadow that seemed to be so popular lately, that made women look as if they were suffering from a serious cold.

Maggie climbed the steps and stood next to Leroy, continuing to hold her purse in a way that implied she wasn't expecting so much as a handshake.

She was able now to read the writing on Fiona's shirt: LIME SPIDERS, it said- whatever that meant. "I heard you on the radio this morning," she said.

"Radio," Fiona said, still distracted.

"On AM Baltimore."

"Baltimore," Fiona said.

Leroy, meanwhile, had ducked under her mother's arm and then turned so she was facing Maggie, side by side with Fiona, gazing up with the same unearthly clear-aqua eyes. There wasn't a trace of Jesse in that child's appearance. You'd think at least his coloring would have won out.

"I told Ira, 'Why not just stop off and visit,' " Maggie said. "We were up this way anyhow, for Max Gill's funeral. Remember Max Gill? My friend Serena's husband? He died of cancer. So I said, 'Why not stop off and visit Fiona. We wouldn't stay but a minute.' "

"It feels funny to see you," Fiona said.

"Funny?"

"I mean . . . Come inside, why don't you?"

"Oh, I know you must be busy," Maggie said.

"No, I'm not busy. Come on in."

Fiona turned and led the way into the house. Leroy followed, with Maggie close behind. Ira took a little longer. When Maggie looked over her shoulder she found him kneeling in the yard to tie his shoe, a slant of hair falling over his forehead. "Well, come on, Ira," she told him.

He rose in silence and started toward her. Her annoyance changed to something softer. Sometimes Ira took on a gangling aspect, she thought, like a bashful young boy not yet comfortable in public.

The front door opened directly into the living room, where the sun slipping through the Venetian blinds striped the green shag rug. Heaps of crocheted cushions tumbled across a couch upholstered in a fading tropical print. The coffee table bore sliding stacks of magazines and comic books, and a green ceramic ashtray shaped like a row-boat. Maggie remembered the ashtray from earlier visits. She remembered staring at it during awkward pauses and wondering if it could float, in which case it would make a perfect bathtub toy for Leroy. Now that came back to .her, evidently having lurked all these years within some cupboard in her brain.

"Have a seat," Fiona said, plumping a cushion. She asked Ira, "So how're you doing?" as he ducked his head in the doorway.

"Oh, passably," he told her.

Maggie chose the couch, hoping Leroy would sit there too. But Leroy dropped to the rug and stretched her reedy legs out in front of her.

Fiona settled in an armchair, and Ira remained standing. He circled the room, pausing at a picture of two basset puppies nestled together in a hatbox. With the tip of one finger, he traced the gilded.molding that lined the frame.

"Would you like some refreshments?" Fiona asked.

Maggie said, "No, thank you."

"Maybe a soda or something."

"We're not thirsty, honestly."

Leroy said, "/ could use a soda."

"You're not who I was asking," Fiona told her.

Maggie wished she'd brought Leroy some sort of present. They had so little time to make connections; she felt pushed and anxious. "Leroy," she said too brightly, "is Frisbee a big interest of yours?"

"Not really," Leroy told her bare feet.

"Oh."

"I'm still just learning," Leroy said. "I can't make it go where I want yet."

"Yes, that's the tricky part, all right," Maggie said.

Unfortunately, she had no experience with Frisbees herself. She looked hopefully at Ira, but he had moved on to some kind of brown metal appliance that stood in the corner-a box fan, perhaps, or a heater. She turned back to Leroy. "Does it glow in the dark?" she asked after a pause.

Leroy said, "Huh?"

"Excuse me," Fiona reminded her.

"Excuse me?"

"Does your Frisbee glow in the dark? Some do, I believe."

"Not this one," Leroy said.

"Ah!" Maggie cried. "Then maybe we should buy you one that does."

Leroy thought about that. Finally she asked, "Why would I want to play Frisbee in the dark?"

"Good question," Maggie said.

She sat back, spent, wondering where to go from there. She looked again at Ira. He was hunkered over the appliance now, inspecting the controls with total concentration.

Well, no point avoiding this forever. Maggie made herself smile. She tilted her head receptively and said, "Fiona, we were so surprised to hear about your wedding plans."

"My what?"

"Wedding plans."

' 'Is that supposed to be a joke?''

"Joke?" Maggie asked. She faltered. "Aren't you getting married?"

"Not that I'm aware of."

"But I heard it on the radio!"

Fiona said, "What is this radio business? I don't know what you're talking about."

"On WNTK," Maggie said. "You called in and said-"

"The station I listen to is WXLR," Fiona told her.

"No, this was-"

"Excellent Rock Around the Clock. A Brittstown station."

"This was WNTK," Maggie said.

"And they claimed I was getting married?"

"You claimed it. You called in and claimed your wedding was next Saturday."

"Not me," Fiona said.

There was a kind of alteration of rhythm in the room.

Maggie experienced a surge of relief, followed by acute embarrassment. How could she have been so sure? What on earth had got into her, not even to question that the voice she'd heard was Fiona's?

And on such a staticky, inadequate radio; she'd known perfectly well how inadequate it was, with those dinky little auto speakers that didn't begin to approach high fidelity.

She braced herself for Ira's I-told-you-so. He still seemed absorbed in the appliance, though, which was nice of him.

"I guess I made a mistake," she said finally.

"I guess you did," Fiona said.

And Leroy said, "Married!" and uttered a little hiss of amusement and wiggled her toes. Each toenail, Maggie saw, bore the tiniest dot of red polish, almost completely chipped off.

"So who was the lucky guy?" Fiona asked.

"You didn't say," Maggie told her.

"What: I just came on the air and announced my engagement?"

"It was a call-in talk show," Maggie said. She spoke slowly; she was rearranging her thoughts. All at once Fiona was not getting married.

There was still a chance, then! Things could still be worked out! And yet in some illogical way Maggie continued to believe the wedding really had been planned, so that she wondered at the girl's inconsistency. "People called in to discuss their marriages with the host," she said.

Fiona knit her pale brows, as if considering the possibility that she might have been one of them.

She was so pretty, and Leroy was so endearingly spiky and unusual; Maggie felt how thirsty her eyes were, drinking them in. It was like the early days with her children, when every neck-crease, every knuckle-dent, could send her into a reverie. Look at Fiona's hair shining like ribbons, like bands of crinkle gift ribbon! Look at the darling little gold studs in Leroy's earlobes!

Ira, speaking into the grille of the appliance, said, "This thing really do much good?" His voice rang back at them tinnily.

"So far as I know," Fiona said.

"Fairly energy-efficient?"

She lifted both hands, palms up. "Beats me."

"How many BTUs does it give off?"

' 'That's just something Mom runs in the wintertime to keep her feet warm," Fiona said. "I never have paid it much heed, to tell the truth."

Ira leaned farther forward to read a decal on the appliance's rear.

Maggie seized on a change of subject. She said, "How is your mother, Fiona?"

"Oh, she's fine. Right now she's at the grocery store."

"Wonderful," Maggie said. Wonderful that she was fine, she meant. But it was also wonderful that she was out. She said, "And you're looking well too. You're wearing your hair a little fuller, aren't you?"

"It's crimped," Fiona said. "I use this special iron, like; you know bigger hair has a slimming effect."

"Slimming! You don't need slimming."

"I most certainly do. I put on seven pounds over this past summer."

"Oh, you didn't, either. You couldn't have! Why you're just a-"

Just a twig, she was going to say; or just a stick. But she got mixed up and combined the two words: "You're just a twick!"

Fiona glanced at her sharply, and no wonder; it had sounded vaguely insulting. "Just skin and bones, I mean," Maggie said, fighting back a giggle. She remembered now how fragile their relationship had been, how edgy and defensive Fiona had often seemed. She folded her hands and placed her feet carefully together on the green shag rug.

So Fiona was not getting married after all, "How's Daisy?" Fiona asked.

"She's doing well."

Leroy said, "Daisy who?"

"Daisy Moran," Fiona said. Without further explanation, she turned back to Maggie. "All grown up by now, I bet."

"Daisy is your aunt. Your daddy's little sister," Maggie told Leroy.

"Yes; tomorrow she leaves for college," she said to Fiona.

"College! Well, she always was a brain."

"Oh, no ... but it's true she won a full scholarship."

"Little bitty Daisy," Fiona said. "Just think."

Ira had finished with the appliance, finally. He moved on to the coffee table. The Frisbee rested on a pile of comic books, and he picked it up and examined it all over again. Maggie stole a peek at him. He still had not said, "I told you so," but she thought she detected something noble and forbearing in the set of his spine.

"You know, I'm in school myself, in a way," Fiona said.

"Oh? What kind of school?"

"I'm studying electrolysis."

"Why, that's lovely, Fiona," Maggie said.

She wished she could shake off this fulsome tone of voice. It seemed to belong to someone else entirely-some elderly, matronly, honey-sweet woman endlessly marveling and exclaiming.

"The beauty parlor where I'm a shampoo girl is paying for my course,"

Fiona said. "They want their own licensed operator. They say I'm sure to make heaps of money.''

"That's just lovely!" Maggie said. "Then maybe you can move out and find a place of your own."

And leave the pretender grandma behind, was what she was thinking. But Fiona gave her a blank look.

Leroy said, "Show them your practice kit, Ma."

"Yes, show us," Maggie said.

"Oh, you don't want to see that," Fiona said.

"Yes, we do. Don't we, Ira?"

Ira said, "Hmm? Oh, absolutely." He held the Frisbee up level, like a tea tray, ,and gave it a meditative spin.

"Well, then, wait a sec," Fiona said, and she got up and left the room.

Her sandals made a dainty slapping sound on the wooden floor of the hallway.

"They're going to hang a sign in the beauty parlor window," Leroy told Maggie. "Professionally painted with Ma's name."

"Isn't that something!"

"It's a genuine science, Ma says. You've got to have trained experts to teach you how to do it."

Leroy's expression was cocky and triumphant. Maggie resisted the urge to reach down and cup the complicated small bones of her knee.

Fiona returned, carrying a rectangular yellow kitchen sponge and a short metal rod the size of a ballpoint pen. "First we practice with a dummy instrument," she said. She dropped onto the couch beside Maggie. "We're supposed to work at .getting the angle exactly, perfectly right."

She set the sponge on her lap and gripped the rod between her fingers.

There was a needle at its tip, Maggie saw. For some reason she had always thought of electrolysis as, oh, not quite socially mentionable, but Fiona was so matter-of-fact and so skilled, targeting one of the sponge's pores and guiding the needle into it at a precisely monitored slant; Maggie couldn't help feeling impressed. This was a highly technical field, she realized- maybe something like dental hygiene. Fiona said, "We travel into the follicle, see, easy, easy ..." and then she said, "Oops!" and raised the heel of her hand an inch or two. "If this was a real person I'd have been leaning on her eyeball," she said. "Pardon me, lady," she told the sponge. "I didn't mean to smush you." Mottled black lettering was stamped across the sponge's surface: STABLER'S DARK BEER. MADE WITH MOUNTAIN SPRING WATER.

Ira stood over them now, with the Frisbee dangling from his fingers. He asked, "Does the school provide the sponge?"

"Yes, it's included in the tuition," Fiona said.

"They must get it free," he reflected. "Courtesy of Stabler's.

Interesting.''

"Stabler's? Anyhow, first we practice with the dummy and then with the real thing. Us students all work on each other: eyebrows and mustache and such. This girl that's my partner, Hilary, she wants me to do her bikini line."

Ira pondered that for a moment and then backed off in a hurry.

"You know these high-cut swimsuits nowadays, they show everything you've got," Fiona told Maggie.

"Oh, it's becoming impossible!" Maggie cried. "I'm just making do with my old suit till the fashions change."

Ira cleared his throat and said, "Leroy, what would you say to a game of Frisbee."

Leroy looked up at him.

' 'I could show you how to make it go where you want,'' he told her.

She took so long deciding that Maggie felt a pang for Ira's sake, but finally she said, "Well, okay," and unfolded herself from the floor.

"Tell about the professionally painted sign," she told Fiona. Then she followed Ira out of the room. The screen door made a sound like a harmonica chord before it banged shut.

So.

This was the first time Maggie had been alone with Fiona since that awful morning. For once the two of them were free of Ira's hampering influence and the hostile, suspicious presence of Mrs. Stuckey. Maggie edged forward on the couch.

She clasped her hands tightly; she pointed her knees intimately in Fiona's direction.

"The sign's going to read FIONA MORAN," Fiona was saying. "LICENSED

ELECTROLOGIST. PAINLESS REMOVAL OF

SUPERFLUOUS HAIR."

"I can't wait to see it," Maggie said.

She thought about that last name: Moran. If Fiona really hated Jesse, would she have kept his name all these years?

"On the radio," she said, "you told the man you were marrying for security."

"Maggie, I swear to you, the station I listen to is-"

"WXLR," Maggie said. "Yes, I know. But I just had it in my head that that was you, and so I . . ."

She watched Fiona set the sponge and needle in the rowboat ashtray.

"Anyway," she said. "Whoever it was who called, she said the first time she'd married for love and it hadn't worked out. So this time she was aiming purely for security. ''

"Well, what a ninny," Fiona said. "If marriage was such a drag when she loved the guy, Avhat would it be like when she didn't?"

"Exactly," Maggie said. "Oh, Fiona, I'm so glad that wasn't you!"

"Shoot, I don't even have a steady boyfriend," Fiona said.

"You don't?"

But Maggie found the phrasing of that a bit worrisome. She said, "Does that mean . . . you have somebody not steady?"

"I just barely get to date at all," Fiona said.

"Well! What a pity," Maggie said. She put on a sympathetic expression.

"This one guy? Mark Derby? I went out with him for about three months, but then we had a fight. I bashed his car in after I had borrowed it, was the reason. But it really wasn't my fault. I was starting to make a left turn, when these teenage boys came up from behind and passed me on the left and so of course I hit them. Then they had the nerve to claim it was all my doing; they claimed I had my right-turn signal on instead of my left."

"Well, anyone who'd get mad about that you don't want to date anyhow,"

Maggie told her.

"I said, 'I had my left-turn signal on. Don't you think I know my left from my right?' "

"Of course you do," Maggie said soothingly. She lifted her left hand and flicked an imaginary turn signal, testing. "Yes, left is down and right is ... or maybe it's not the same in every model of car."

"It's exactly the same," Fiona told her. "At least, I think it is."

"Then maybe it was the windshield wipers," Maggie said. "I've done that, lots of times: switched on my wipers instead of my blinkers."

Fiona considered. Then she said, "No, because something was lit up.

Otherwise they wouldn't say I was signaling a right turn."

"One time I had my mind elsewhere and I went for my blinkers and shifted gears instead," Maggie said. She started laughing. "Going along about sixty miles an hour and shifted into reverse. Oh, Lord." She pulled the corners of her mouth down, recollecting herself. "Well," she told Fiona, "I'd say you're better off without the man."

"What man? Oh. Mark," Fiona said. "Yes, it's not like we were in love or anything. I only went out with him because he asked me. Plus my mom is friends with his mom. He has the nicest mother; real sweet-faced woman with a little bit of a stammer. I always feel a stammer shows sincerity of feeling, don't you?"

Maggie said, "Why, c-c-certainly I do."

It took Fiona a second to catch on. Then she laughed. "Oh, you're such a card," she said, and she tapped Maggie's wrist. "I'd forgotten what a card you are."

"So is that the end of it?" Maggie asked.

"End of what?"

"This . . . thing with Mark Derby. I mean suppose he asks you out again?"

"No way," Fiona said. "Him and his precious Subaru; no way would I go out with him." - "That's very wise of you," Maggie told her.

"Shoot! I'd have to be a moron."

"He was a moron, not to appreciate you," Maggie said.

Fiona said, "Hey. How's about a beer."

"Oh, I'd love a beer!"

Fiona jumped up, tugging down her shorts, and left the room. Maggie sank lower on the couch and listened to the sounds drifting in through the window-a car swishing past and Leroy's throaty chuckle. If this house were hers, she thought, she would get rid of all this clutter. You couldn't see the surface of the coffee table, and the layers of sofa cushions nudged her lower back uncomfortably.

"Only thing we've got is Bud Light-is that okay?" Fiona asked when she returned. She was carrying two cans and a sack of potato chips.

"It's perfect; I'm on a diet," Maggie said.

She accepted one of the cans and popped the tab, while Fiona settled next to her on the couch. "/ ought to go on a diet," Fiona said. She ripped open the cellophane sack. "Snack foods are my biggest downfall."

"Oh, mine too," Maggie said. She took a sip of her beer. It was crisp-tasting and bitter; it brought memories flooding in the way the smell of a certain perfume will. How long had it been since she'd last had a beer?

Maybe not since Leroy was a baby. Back then (she recalled as she waved away the potato chips), she sometimes drank as many as two or three cans a day, keeping Fiona company because beer was good for her milk supply, they'd heard. Now that would probably be frowned upon, but at the time they had felt dutiful and virtuous, sipping their Miller High Lifes while the baby drowsily nursed. Fiona used to say she could feel the beer zinging directly to her breasts. She and Maggie would start drinking when Maggie came home from work-midafternoon or so, just the two of them. They would grow all warm and confiding together. By the time Maggie got around to fixing supper she would be feeling, oh, not drunk or anything but filled with optimism, and then later at the table she might act a bit more talkative than usual. It was nothing the others would notice, though.

Except perhaps for Daisy. "Really, Mom. Honestly," Daisy would say. But then, she was always saying that.

As was Maggie's mother, come to think of it. "Honestly, Maggie." She had stopped by late one afternoon and caught Maggie lounging on the couch, a beer balanced on her midriff, while Fiona sat next to her singing "Dust in the Wind" to the baby. "How have you let things get so common!" Mrs.

Daley had asked, and Maggie, looking around her, had all at once wondered too. The cheap, pulpy magazines scattered everywhere, the wadded wet diapers, the live-in daughter-in-law-it did look common. How had it happened?

"I wonder if Claudine and Peter ever married," Maggie said now, and she took another sip of her beer.

"Claudine? Peter?" Fiona asked.

"On that soap opera we used to watch. Remember? His sister Natasha was trying to split them up."

"Oh, Lord, Natasha. She was one mean lady," Fiona said. She dug deep into the sack of potato chips.

"They had just got engaged when you left us," Maggie said. "They were planning to throw a big party and then Natasha found out about it-remember?"

"She looked kind of like this girl I always detested in elementary school," Fiona said.

"Then you left us," Maggie said.

Fiona said, "Actually, now that you mention it she must not have managed to split them up after all, because a couple of years later they had this baby that was kidnapped by a demented airline stewardess."

"At first I couldn't believe you had really gone for good," Maggie said.

"Whole months passed by when I'd come home and switch on the TV and check what was happening with Claudine and Peter, just so I could fill you in when you got back."

"Anyhow," Fiona said. She set her beer on the coffee table.

"Silly of me, wasn't it? Wherever you had gone, you surely would have been near a TV. It's not like you had abandoned civilization. But I don't know; maybe I just wanted to keep up with the story for my own sake, so that after you came back we could carry on like before. I was positive you'd be coming back."

"Well, anyhow. What's past is past," Fiona said.

"No, it's not! People are always saying that, but what's past is never past; not entirely," Maggie told her. "Fiona, this is a marriage we're talking about. You two had so much sunk into it; such an exhausting amount was sunk in. And then one day you quarreled over nothing whatsoever, no worse than any other time, and off you went. As easy as that! Shrugged your shoulders and walked away from it! How could that be possible?"

"It just was, all right?" Fiona said. "Jiminy! Do we have to keep rehashing this?" And she reached for her beer can and drank, tipping her head far back. She wore rings on every one of her fingers, Maggie saw-some plain silver, some set with turquoise stones. That was new. But and then mails it without a letter or a note, not even my full name on the envelope but only F. Moran?"

"Well, that's pure pride, Fiona. Both of you are way too-"

"And when he hasn't laid eyes on his daughter since her fifth birthday?

Try explaining that to a child. 'Oh, he's just proud, Leroy, honey-' "

"Fifth birthday?" Maggie said.

"Here she keeps wondering why all the other kids have fathers. Even the kids whose parents are divorced-at least they get to see their fathers on weekends."

"He visited on her fifth birthday?" Maggie asked.

"Look at that! He didn't even bother telling you."

"What: He just showed up? Or what?"

"He showed up out of the blue in a car packed to the teeth with the most unsuitable presents you ever saw," Fiona said. "Stuffed animals and dolls, and a teddy bear so big he had to strap it in the front seat like a human because it wouldn't fit through the rear door. It was much too big for a child to cuddle, not that Leroy would have wanted to. She isn't a cuddly type of person. She's more the sporty type. He should have brought her athletic equipment; he should have brought her-"

"But, Fiona, how was he to know that?" Maggie asked. She felt an ache beginning inside her; she grieved for her son with his earful of wrongheaded gifts that he must have spent his last penny on, because heaven knows he wasn't well off. She said, "He was trying his best, after all. He just didn't realize."

"Of course he didn't realize! He didn't have the faintest idea; the last time he visited, she was still a baby. So here he comes with this drink-and-wet doll that cries 'Mama,' and when he catches sight of Leroy in her dungarees he stops short; you can see he's not pleased. He says, 'Who is that?' He says, 'But she's so-' I had had to run fetch her from the neighbor's and quick smooth down her hair on the way through the alley. In the alley I told her, "luck your shirt in, honey. Here, let me lend you my barrette,' and Leroy stood still for it, which she wouldn't do ordinarily, believe me. And when I had fastened the barrette I said, 'Stand back and let me look at you,' and she stood back and licked her lips and said, 'Am I okay? Or not.' I said, 'Oh, honey, you're beautiful,' and then she walks into the house and Jesse says, 'But she's so-' "

"He was surprised she had grown, that's all it was," Maggie said.

"I could have cried for her," Fiona said.

"Yes," Maggie said gently. She knew how that felt.

Fiona said, " 'She's so what, Jesse?' I ask him. 'She's so what? How dare you come tramping in here telling me she's so something or other when the last time you sent us a check was December? And instead you waste your money on this trash, this junk,' I tell him, 'this poochy-faced baby doll when the only doll she'll bother with is G.I. Joe.' "

"Oh, Fiona," Maggie said.

"Well, what did he expect?"

"Oh, why does this always happen between you two? He loves you, Fiona. He loves you both. He's just the world's most inept at showing it. If you knew what it must have cost him to make that trip! I can't tell you how often I've asked him, I've said, 'Are you planning to let your daughter just drift on out of your life? Because that's what she's bound to do, Jesse; I'm warning you,' and he said, 'No, but I don't . . . but I can't figure how to ... I can't stand to be one of those artificial fathers,' he said, 'with those busywork visits to zoos and small-talk suppers at McDonald's.' And I said, 'Well, it's better than nothing, isn't it?' and he said, 'No, it is not better than nothing. It's not at all. And what do you know about the subject, anyhow?'-that way he does, you've seen how he does, where he acts so furious but if you look at his eyes you'll notice these sudden dark rings beneath them that he used to get when he was just a little fellow trying not to cry."

Fiona ducked her head. She started tracing the rim of her beer can with one finger.

"On Leroy's first birthday," Maggie said, "he was all set to come with us and visit, I told you that. I said, 'Jesse, I really feel it would mean a lot to Fiona if you came,' and he said, 'Well, maybe I will, then. Yes,' he said, 'I could do that, I guess,' and he asked me about fifty times what kind of present a year-old baby might enjoy. Then he went shopping all Saturday and brought back one of those shape-sorter boxes, but Monday after work he exchanged it for a woolen lamb because, he said, he didn't want to seem like he was pushing her intellectually or anything. 'I don't want to be like Grandma Daley, always popping up with these educational toys,' he said, and then on Thursday-her birthday was a Friday that year, remember?-he asked me exactly how you had phrased your invitation. 'I mean,' he said, 'did it sound to you like maybe she was expecting me to stay on over the weekend? Because if so then I might borrow Dave's van and drive up separately from you and Dad.' And I said, 'Well, you could do that, Jesse. Yes, what a good idea; why don't you.' He said, 'But how did she word it, is what I'm asking,' and I said, 'Oh, I forget,' and he said, 'Think.' I said, 'Well, as a matter of fact . . .' I said, 'Um, in fact, she didn't actually word it any way, Jesse, not directly straight out,' and he said, 'Wait. I thought she told you it would mean a lot to her if I came.' I said, 'No, it was me who said that, but I know it's true. I know it would mean a great deal to her.' He said, 'What's going on here? You told me clearly that it was Fiona who said that.' I said, 'I never told you any such thing! Or at least I don't think I did; unless maybe perhaps by accident I-' He said, 'Are you saying she didn't ask for me?' 'Well, I just know she would have,' I told him, 'if the two of you were not so all-fired careful of your dignity. I just know she wanted to, Jesse-' But by then he was gone. Slammed out of the house and vanished, did not come home all Thursday night, and Friday we had to set off without him. I was so disappointed."

"You were disappointed!" Fiona said. "You had promised you would be bringing him. I waited, I dressed up, I got myself a make-over at the beauty parlor. Then you turn into the driveway and he's not with you."

"Well, I told him when we got home," Maggie said, "I told him, 'We tried our best, Jesse, but it wasn't us Fiona dressed up for, you can be certain. It was you, and you should have seen her face when you didn't get out of the car.' "

Fiona slapped a sofa cushion with the flat of her palm. She said, "I might have known you would do that."

"Do What?"

"Oh, make me look pitiful in front of Jesse."

"I didn't make you look pitiful! I merely said-"

"So then he calls me on the phone. I knew that was why he called me.

Says, 'Fiona? Hon?' I could hear it in his voice that he was sorry for me. I knew what you must have told him. I say, 'What do you want? Are you calling for a reason?' He says, 'No, um, no reason . . .' I say, 'Well, then, you're wasting your money, aren't you?' and I hang up."

"Fiona, for Lord's sake," Maggie said. "Didn't it occur to you he might have called because he missed you?"

Fiona said, "Ha!" and took another swig of beer.

"I wish you could have seen him the way I saw him," Maggie said. "After you left, I mean. He was a wreck! A shambles. His most cherished belonging was your tortoiseshell soapbox."

"My what?"

"Don't you remember your soapbox, the one with the tortoiseshell lid?"

"Well, yes."

"He would open it sometimes and draw a breath of it," Maggie said. "I saw him! I promise! The day you left, that evening, I found Jesse in the bedroom with his nose buried deep in your soapbox and his eyes closed."

"Well, what in the world?" Fiona said.

"I believe he must have inherited some of my sense of smell," Maggie told her.

"You're talking about that little plastic box. The one I used to keep my face soap in."

"Then as soon as he saw me he hid it behind his back," Maggie said. "He was embarrassed I had caught him. He always liked to act so devil-may-care; you know how he acted. But a few days later, when your sister came for your things, I couldn't find your soapbox anywhere. She was packing up your cosmetic case, is how I happened to mink of it, so I said, 'Let's see, now, somewhere around . . .' but that soapbox seemed to have vanished. And I couldn't ask Jesse because he had walked out as soon as your sister walked in, so I started opening his bureau drawers and that's where I found it, in his treasure drawer among the things he never throws away-his old-time baseball cards and the clippings about his band. But I didn't give it to your sister. I just shut the drawer again. In fact, I believe he has kept that soapbox to this day, Fiona, and you can't tell me it's because he feels sorry for you. He wants to remember you. He goes by smell, just the way I do; smell is what brings a person most clearly to his mind."

Fiona gazed down at her beer can. That eye shadow was oddly attractive, Maggie realized. Sort of peach-like. It gave her lids a peach's pink blush.

"Does he still look the same?" Fiona asked finally.

"The same?"

"Does he still look like he used to?"

"Why, yes."

Fiona gave a sharp sigh.

There was a moment of quiet, during which Leroy said, "Durn! Missed." A car passed, trailing threads of country music. I've had some bad times, lived through some sad times . . .

"You know," Fiona said, "there's nights when I wake up and think, How could things have gotten so twisted? They started out perfectly simple.

He was just this boy I was crazy about and followed anyplace his band played, and everything was so straightforward. When he didn't notice me at first, I sent him a telegram, did he ever mention that? Fiona Stuckey would like to go with you to Deep Creek Lake, that's what it said, because I knew he was planning to drive there with his friends. And so he took me along, and that's where it all began. Wasn't that straightforward? But then, I don't know, everything sort of folded over on itself and knotted up, and I'm not even sure how it happened. There's times I think, Shoot, maybe I ought to just fire off another telegram.

Jesse, I'd say, / love you still, and it begins to seem I always will. He wouldn't even have to answer; it's just something I want him to know. Or I'll be down in Baltimore at my sister's and I'll think, Why not drop by and visit him? Just walk in on him? Just see what happens?"

"Oh, you ought to," Maggie said.

"But he'd say, 'What are you doing here?' Or some such thing. I mean it's bound and determined to go wrong. The whole cycle would just start over again."

"Oh, Fiona, isn't it time somebody broke that cycle?" Maggie asked.

"Suppose he did say that; not that I think he would. Couldn't you for once stand your ground and say, 'I'm here because I want to see you, Jesse'? Cut through all this to-and-fro, these hurt feelings and these misunderstandings. Say, 'I'm here because I've missed you. So there!' "

"Well, maybe I should do that," Fiona said slowly.

"Of course you should."

"Maybe I should ride back down with you."

"With us?"

"Or maybe not."

"You're talking about . . . this afternoon?"

"No, maybe not; what am I saying? Oh, Lord. I knew I shouldn't drink in the daytime; it always makes my head so muzzy-"

"But that's a wonderful idea!" Maggie said.

"Well, if Leroy came with me, for instance; if we just made a little visit. I mean visiting you two, not Jesse. After all, you're Leroy's grandparents, right? What could be more natural? And then spent the night at my sister's place-" — "No, not at your sister's. Why there? We have plenty of room at our house."

There was a crunch of gravel outside-the sound of a car rolling up.

Maggie tensed, but Fiona didn't seem to hear. "And then tomorrow after lunch we could catch the Greyhound bus," she was saying, "or let's see, midafternoon at the latest. The next day's a working day and Leroy has school, of course-"

A car door clunked shut. A high, complaining voice called, "Leroy?"

Fiona straightened. "Mom," she said, looking uneasy.

The voice said, "Who's that you got with you, Leroy?" And then, "Why, Mr.

Moran."

What Ira answered, Maggie had no idea. All that filtered through the Venetian blinds was a brief rumble.

"My, my," Mrs. Stuckey said. "Isn't this . . ." something or other.

"It's Mom," Fiona told Maggie.

"Oh, how nice; we'll get to see her after all," Maggie said unhappily.

"She is going to have a fit."

"A fit?"

"She would kill me if I was to go and visit you."

Maggie didn't like the uncertain sound of that verb construction.

The screen door opened and Mrs. Stuckey plodded in- a gray, scratchy-haired woman wearing a ruffled sundress. She was lugging two beige plastic shopping bags, and a cigarette drooped from her colorless, cracked lips. Oh, Maggie had never understood how such a woman could have given birth to Fiona-finespun Fiona. Mrs. Stuckey set the bags in the center of the shag rug. Even then, she didn't glance up. "One thing I despise," she said, removing her cigarette, "is these new-style plastic grocery bags with the handles that cut your fingers in half."

"How are you, Mrs. Stuckey?" Maggie asked.

"Also they fall over in the car trunk and spill their guts out," Mrs.

Stuckey said. "I'm all right, I suppose."

"We just stopped by for a second," Maggie said. "We had to go to a funeral in Deer Lick."

"Hmm," Mrs. Stuckey said. She took a drag of her cigarette. She held it like a foreigner, pinched between her thumb and her index finger. If she had calculated outright, she could not have chosen a more unbecoming dress. It completely exposed her upper arms, which were splotched and doughy.

Maggie waited for Fiona to mention the trip to Baltimore, but Fiona was fiddling with her largest turquoise ring. She slid it up past her first knuckle, twisted it, and slid it down again. So Maggie had to be the one.

She said, "I've been trying to talk Fiona into coming home with us for a visit."

"Fat chance of that," Mrs. Stuckey said.

Maggie looked over at Fiona. Fiona went on fiddling with her ring.

"Well, she's thinking she might do it," Maggie said finally.

Mrs. Stuckey drew back from her cigarette to glare at the long tube of ash at its tip. Then she stubbed it out in the rowboat, perilously close to the yellow sponge. A strand of smoke wound toward Maggie.

"Me and Leroy might go just for the weekend," Fiona said faintly.

"For the what?"

"For the weekend."

Mrs. Stuckey stooped for the grocery bags and started wading out of the room, bending slightly at the knees so her arms looked too long for her body. At the door she said, "I'd sooner see you lying in your casket."

"But, Mom!"

Fiona was on her feet now, following her into the hallway. She said, "Mom, the weekend's half finished anyhow. We're talking about just one single night! One night at Leroy's grandparents' house."

"And Jesse Moran would be nowhere about, I suppose," Mrs. Stuckey said at a distance. There was a crash-presumably the grocery bags being dumped on a counter.

"Oh, Jesse might be around maybe, but-"

"Yah, yah," Mrs. Stuckey said on an outward breath.

"Besides, so what if he is? Don't you think Leroy should get to knew her daddy?"

Mrs. Stuckey's answer to that was just a mutter, but Maggie heard it clearly. "Anyone whose daddy is Jesse Moran is better off staying strangers."

Well! Maggie felt her face grow hot. She had half a mind to march out to the kitchen and give Mrs. Stuckey what for. "Listen," she would say. "You think there haven't been times I've cursed your daughter? She hurt my son to the bone. There were times I could have wrung her neck, but have you ever heard me speak a word against her?"

In fact, she even stood up, with a sudden, violent motion that creaked the sofa springs, but then she paused. She smoothed down the front of her dress. The gesture served to smooth her thoughts as well, and instead of heading for the kitchen she collected her purse and went off to find a bathroom, clamping her lips very tightly. Please, God, don't let the bathroom lie on the other side of the kitchen. No, there it was-the one open door at the end of the hall. She caught the watery green of a shower curtain.

After she had used the toilet, she turned on the sink faucet and patted her cheeks with cool water. She bent closer to the mirror. Yes, definitely she had a flustered look. She would have to get hold of herself. She hadn't finished even that one beer, but she thought it might be affecting her. And it was essential just now to play her cards right.

For instance, about Jesse. Although she had failed to mention it to Fiona, Jesse lived in an apartment uptown now, and therefore they couldn't merely assume that he would happen by while Fiona was visiting.

He would have to be expressly invited. Maggie hoped he hadn't made other plans. Saturday: That could mean trouble. She checked her watch. Saturday night he might very well be singing with his band, or just going out with his friends. Sometimes he even dated-no one important, but still. . .

She flushed the toilet, and under cover of the sound she slipped out of the bathroom and opened the door next to it. This room must be Leroy's.

Dirty clothes and comic books lay everywhere. She closed the door again and tried the one opposite. Ah, a grownup's room. A decorous white candlewick bedspread, and a telephone on the nightstand.

"After all you done to free yourself, you want to go back to that boy and get snaggled up messy as ever," Mrs. Stuckey said, clattering tin cans.

"Who says I'm getting snaggled? I'm just paying a weekend visit."

"He'll have you running circles around him just like you was before."

"Mom, I'm twenty-five years old. I'm not that same little snippet I used to be."

Maggie closed the door soundlessly behind her and went over to lift the receiver. Oh, dear, no push buttons. She winced each time the dial made its noisy, rasping return to home base. The voices in the kitchen continued, though. She relaxed and pressed the receiver to her ear.

One ring. Two rings.

It was a good thing Jesse was working today. For the last couple of weeks, the phone in his apartment had not been ringing properly. He could call other people all right, but he never knew when someone might be calling him. "Why don't you get it fixed? Or buy a new one; they're dirt cheap these days," Maggie had said, but he said, "Oh, I don't know, it's kind of a gas. Anytime I pass the phone I just pick it up at random. I say, 'Hello?' Twice I've actually found a person on the other end."

Maggie had to smile now, remembering that. There was something so ... oh, so lucky about Jesse. He was so fortunate and funny and haphazard.

"Chick's Cycle Shop," a boy said.

"Could I speak to Jesse, please?"

The receiver at the other end clattered unceremoniously against a hard surface. "Jess!" the boy called, moving off. There was a silence, overlaid by the hissing sound of long distance.

Of course this was stealing, if you wanted to get picky about it-using someone else's phone to call out of state. Maybe she ought to leave a couple of quarters on the nightstand. Or would that be considered an insult? With Mrs. Stuckey, there was no right way to do a thing.

Jesse said, "Hello."

"Jesse?"

"Ma?"

His voice was Ira's voice, but years younger.

"Jesse, I can't talk long," she whispered.

"What? Speak up, I can barely hear you."

"I can't," she said.

"What?"

She cupped the mouthpiece with her free hand. "I was wondering," she said. "Do you think you could come to supper tonight?"

"Tonight? Well, I was sort of planning on-"

"It's important," she said.

"How come?"

"Well, it just is," she said, playing for time.

She had a decision to make, here. She could pretend it was on Daisy's account, for Daisy's going away. (That was safe enough. In spite of their childhood squabbles he was fond of Daisy, and had asked her only last week whether she would forget him after she left.) Or she could tell him the truth, in which case she might set in motion another of those ridiculous scenes.

But hadn't she just been saying it was time to cut through all that?

She took a deep breath. She said, "I'm having Fiona and Leroy to dinner."

"You're what?"

"Don't hang up! Don't say no! This is your only daughter!" she cried in a rush.

And then glanced anxiously toward the door, fearing she'd been too loud.

"Now, slow down, Ma," Jesse said.

"Well, we're up here in Pennsylvania," she said more quietly, "because we happened to be going to a funeral. Max Gill died-I don't know if Daisy's had a chance to tell you. And considering that we were in the neighborhood . . . and Fiona told me in so many words that she wanted very much to see you."

"Oh, Ma. Is this going to be like those other times?"

"What other times?"

"Is this like when you said she phoned and I believed you and phoned her back-"

"She did phone then! I swear it!"

"Somebody phoned, but you had no way of knowing who. An anonymous call.

You didn't tell me that part, did you?"

Maggie said, "The telephone rang, I picked it up. I said, 'Hello?' No answer. It was just a few months after she left; who else could it have been? I said, 'Fiona?' She hung up. If it wasn't Fiona, why did she hang up?"

"Then all you tell me is: 'Jesse, Fiona called today,* and I break my neck getting to the phone and make a total fool of myself. I say, 'Fiona?

What did you want?' and she says, 'To whom am I speaking, please?' I say, 'Goddamn it, Fiona, you know perfectly well this is Jesse,' and she says, 'Don't you use that language with me, Jesse Moran,' and I say, 'Now, look here. It wasn't me who called you, may I remind you,' and she says, 'But it was you, Jesse, because here you are on the line, aren't you,' and I say, 'But goddamn it-' "

"Jesse," Maggie said. "Fiona says she sometimes thinks of sending you another telegram."

"Telegram?"

"Like the first one. You remember the first one."

"Yes," Jesse said. "I remember."

"You never told me about that. But at any rate," she hurried on, "the telegram would read, Jesse, I love you still, and it begins to seem I always will.''

A moment passed.

Then he said, "You just don't quit, do you?"

"You think I'd make such a thing up?"

"If she really wanted to send it, then what stopped her?" he asked. "Why didn't I ever get it? Hmm?"

"How could I make it up when I didn't even know about the first one, Jesse? Answer me that! And I'm quoting her exactly; for once I'm able to tell you exactly how she worded it. I remember because it was one of those unintentional rhymes. You know the way things can rhyme when you don't want them to. It's so ironic, because if you did want them to, you'd have to rack your brain for days and comb through special dictionaries. ..."

She was babbling whatever came to mind, just to give Jesse time to assemble a response. Was there ever anyone so scared of losing face? Not counting Fiona, of course.

Then she imagined she heard some change in the tone of his silence-a progression from flat disbelief to something less certain. She let her voice trail off. She waited.

"If I did happen to come," he said finally, "what time would you be serving supper?"

"You'll do it? You will? Oh, Jesse, I'm so glad! Let's say six-thirty," she told him. "Bye!" and she hung up before he could proceed to some further, more resistant stage.

She stood beside the bed a moment. In the front yard, Ira called, "Whoa, there!"

She picked up her purse and left the room.

Fiona was kneeling in the hallway, rooting through the bottom of a closet. She pulled out a pair of galoshes and threw them aside. She reached in again and pulled out a canvas tote bag.

"Well, I talked to Jesse," Maggie told her.

Fiona froze. The tote bag was suspended in midair.

"He's really pleased you're coming," Maggie said.

"Did he say that?" Fiona asked.

"He certainly did."

"I mean in so many words?"

Maggie swallowed. "No," she said, because if there was a cycle to be broken here, she herself had had some part in it; she knew that. She said, "He just told me he'd be there for supper. But anyone could hear how pleased he was."

Fiona studied her doubtfully.

"He said, Til be there!' " Maggie told her.

Silence.

" Til be there right after work, Ma! You can count on me!' " Maggie said.

" 'Goddamn! I wouldn't miss it for the world!' "

"Well," Fiona said finally.

Then she unzipped the tote bag.

"If I were traveling alone I'd make do with just a toothbrush," she told Maggie. "But once you've got a kid, you know how it is. Pajamas, comics, storybooks, coloring books for the car . . . and she has to have her baseball glove, her everlasting baseball glove. You never know when you might rustle up a game, she says."

"No, that's true, you never do," Maggie said, and she laughed out loud for sheer happiness.

Ira had a way, when he was truly astonished, of getting his face sort of locked in one position. Here Maggie had worried he'd be angry, but no, he just took a step backward and stared at her and then his face locked, blank and flat like something carved of hardwood.

He said, "Fiona's what?"

"She's coming for a visit," Maggie said. "Won't that be nice?"

No reaction.

"Fiona and Leroy, both," Maggie told him.

Still no reaction.

Maybe it would have been better if he'd got angry.

She moved past him, keeping her smile. "Leroy, honey, your mother wants you," she called. "She needs you to help her pack.''

Leroy was less easily surprised than Ira, evidently. She said, "Oh.

Okay," and gave the Frisbee an expert flip in Ira's direction before skipping toward the house. The Frisbee ricocheted off Ira's left knee and landed in the dirt. He gazed down at it absently.

"We should have cleaned the car out," Maggie told him. "If I'd known we would be riding so many passengers today ..."

She went over to the Dodge, which was blocked now by a red Maverick that must be Mrs. Stuckey's. You could tell the Dodge had recently traveled some distance. It had a beaten-down, dusty look. She opened a rear door and tsked. A stack of library books slumped across the back seat, and a crocheted sweater that she had been hunting for days lay there all squinched and creased, no doubt from being sat upon by Otis. The floor was cobbled with cloudy plastic lids from soft-drink cups. She reached in to gather the books-major, important novels by Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann. She had checked them out in a surge of good intentions at the start of the summer and was returning them unread and seriously overdue. "Open the trunk, will you?" she asked Ira.

He moved slowly toward the trunk and opened it, not changing his expression. She dumped in the books and went back for the sweater.

"How could this happen?" Ira asked her.

"Well, we were discussing her soapbox, see, and-"

"Her what? I mean it came about so quickly. So all of a sudden. I leave you alone for a little game of Frisbee and the next thing I know you're out here with beer on your breath and a whole bunch of unexpected house-guests."

"Why, Ira, I would think you'd be glad," she told him. She folded the sweater and laid it in the trunk.

"But it's like the second I shut the door behind me, you two got down to business," he said. "How do you accomplish these things?"

Maggie started collecting soft-drink lids from the floor of the car. "You can close the trunk now," she told him.

She carried a fistful of lids around to the rear of the house and dropped them in a crumpled garbage can. The cover was only a token cover, a battered metal beret that she replaced crookedly on top. And the house's siding was speckled with mildew, and rust stains trailed from a fuel tank affixed beneath the window.

"How long will they be staying?" Ira asked when she returned.

"Just till tomorrow."

"We have to take Daisy to college tomorrow, did you forget?"

"No, I didn't forget."

"Aha," he said. "Your fiendish plot: Throw Jesse and Fiona together on their own. I know you, Maggie Mo-ran."

"You don't necessarily know me at all," she told him.

If things went the way she hoped they would this evening, she would have no need of plots for tomorrow.

She opened the front door of her side of the Dodge and sank onto the seat. Inside, the car was stifling. She blotted her upper lip on the hem of her skirt.

"So how do we present this?" Ira asked " 'Surprise, surprise, Jesse boy!

Here's your ex-wife, here's your long-lost daughter. Never mind that you legally parted company years ago; we've decided you're getting back together now.' "

"Well, for your information," she said, "I've already told him they're coming, and he'll be at our house for supper."

Ira bent to look in on her. He said, "You told him?"

"Right."

"How?" he asked.

"By phone, of course."

"You phoned him? You mean just now?"

"Right."

"And he'll be there for supper?"

"Right."

He straightened up and leaned against the car. "I don't get it," he said finally.

"What's to get?"

"There's something too simple about it."

All she could see of him was his midsection-a hollow-looking white shirt wilting over a belt. Wouldn't he be baking? This metal must radiate heat like a flatiron. Although it was true that the air had grown cooler now and the sun was slightly less direct, already starting to slip behind a faraway scribble of trees.

"I'm worried about that Maverick," she said, speaking to Ira's belt buckle.

"Hmm?"

"Mrs. Stuckey's Maverick. I'd hate to ask her to move it, and I'm not sure we have room to get around it."

That caught him, as she'd guessed it would-a question of logistics. He left, abruptly; she felt the car rock. He wandered off to check the Maverick's position, and Maggie tipped her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.

Why was Ira so negative about Jesse? Why did he always have that skeptical twist to his voice when he discussed him? Oh, Jesse wasn't perfect-good heavens, no-but he had all kinds of endearing qualities. He was so generous and affectionate. And if he lost his temper easily, why, he regained it easily too, and had never been known to bear a grudge, which was more than you could say for Ira.

Was it plain old envy-a burdened, restrained man's envy of someone who was constitutionally carefree?

When Jesse was just a baby Ira- was always saying, "Don't pick him up every time he cries. Don't feed him every time he's hungry. You'll spoil him."

"Spoil him?" Maggie had asked. "Feeding him when he's hungry is spoiling him? That's nonsense."

But she had sounded more confident than she'd felt. Was she spoiling him?

This was her very first experience with an infant. She had been the youngest in her family and never had the casual contact with babies that some of her friends had had. And Jesse was such a puzzling baby-colicky, at the start, giving no hint of the merry little boy he would later turn out to be. He had flown into tiny, red-faced rages for no apparent reason in the middle of the night. Maggie had had to walk him endlessly, wearing an actual path in the rug around the dining room table. Was it possible, she had wondered, that this baby just plain didn't like her? Where was it written that a child was always compatible with his parents? When you thought about it, it was amazing that so many families got along as well as they did. All they had to rely on was luck-the proper personality genes turning up like dice. And in Jesse's case, maybe the luck had been poor. She felt he was chafing against his parents. They were too narrow, too sedate, too conservative.

Once, carrying a squalling Jesse down the aisle of a city bus, Maggie had been surprised to feel him suddenly relax in her arms. He had hushed, and she had looked at his face. He was staring at a dressed-up blonde in one of the seats. He started smiling at her. He held out his arms. His kind of person, at last! Unfortunately, though, the blonde was reading a magazine and she never gave him so much as a glance.

And then the minute he discovered other children-all of whom instantly loved him-why, he hit the streets running and was hardly seen at home anymore. But that, too, Ira found fault with, for Jesse missed his curfews, forgot to appear for dinner, neglected his schoolwork in favor of a pickup basketball game in the alley. Mr. Moment-by-Moment, Ira used to call him. And Maggie had to admit the name was justified. Were some people simply born without the ability to link one moment to the next? If so, then Jesse was one of them: a disbeliever in consequences, mystified by others' habit of holding against him things that had happened, why, hours ago! days ago! way last week, even! He was genuinely perplexed that someone could stay angry at something he himself had immediately forgotten.

Once when he was eleven or twelve he'd been horsing around with Maggie in the kitchen, punching his catcher's mitt while he teased her about her cooking, and the telephone rang and he answered and said, "Huh? Mr.

Bunch?" Mr. Bunch was his sixth-grade teacher, so Maggie assumed the call was for Jesse and she turned back to her work. Jesse said, "Huh?" He said, "Wait a minute! You can't blame me for that!" Then he slammed the phone down, and Maggie, glancing over, saw those telltale dark rings beneath his eyes. "Jesse? Honey? What's the matter?" she had asked.

"Nothing," he told her roughly, and he walked out. He left his catcher's mitt on the table, worn and deeply pocketed and curiously alive. The kitchen echoed.

But not ten minutes later she noticed him in the front yard with Herbie Albright, laughing uproariously, crashing through the little boxwood hedge as he'd been told not to a hundred times.

Yes, it was his laughter that she pictured when she thought of him-his eyes lit up and dancing, his teeth very white, his head thrown back to show the clean brown line of his throat. (And why was it that Maggie remembered the laughter while Ira remembered the tantrums?) In a family very nearly without a social life, Jesse was intensely, almost ridiculously social, knee-deep in friends. Classmates came home with him from school every afternoon, and sometimes as many as seven or eight stayed over on weekends, their sleeping bags taking up all the floor space in his room, their cast-off jackets and six-guns and model airplane parts spilling out into the hallway. In the morning when Maggie went to wake them for pancakes the musky, wild smell of boy hung in the doorway like curtains, and she would blink and back off and return to the safety of the kitchen, where little Daisy, swathed to her toes in one of Maggie's aprons, stood on a chair earnestly stirring batter.

He took up running one spring and ran like a maniac, throwing himself into it the way he did with everything that interested him, however briefly. This was when he was fifteen and not yet licensed to drive, so he sometimes asked Maggie for a lift to his favorite track, the Ralston School's cedar-chip-carpeted oval in the woods out in Baltimore County.

Maggie would wait for him in the car, reading a library book and glancing up from time to time to check his progress. She could always spot him, even when the track was crowded with middle-aged ladies in sweat suits and Ralston boys in numbered uniforms. Jesse wore tattered jeans and a black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, but it wasn't only his clothes that identified him; it was his distinctive style of running. His gait was free and open, as if he were holding nothing in reserve for the next lap. His legs flew out and his arms made long reaching motions, pulling in handfuls of the air in front of him. Every time Maggie located him, her heart would pinch with love. Then he would vanish into the forested end of the track and she would go back to her book.

But one day he didn't come out of the forest. She waited but he didn't appear. And yet the others came, even the slowest, even the silly-looking Swedish-walker people with their elbows pumping like chicken wings. She got out of the car finally and went over to the track, shading her eyes.

No Jesse. She followed the bend of the oval into the woods, her crepe-soled work shoes sinking into the cedar chips so her calf muscles felt weighted. People pounded past her, glancing over momentarily, giving her the impression they were leaving their faces behind. In the woods to her left, she noticed a flash of white. It was a girl in a white shirt and shorts, lying on her back in the leaves, and Jesse was lying on top of her. He was fully clothed but, yes, smack on top of her, and the girl's white arms were twined around his neck. "Jesse, I have to be getting home soon," Maggie called. Then she turned and walked back toward the car, feeling plain and clumsy. A moment later cedar chips crunched behind her and Jesse overtook her and sped past, his amazingly long gym shoes landing deftly, plop-plop, and his muscular brown arms scooping the air.