Breathing Lessons

So then it was girls, girls, girls-a jostling parade of girls, all of them fair and slender and pretty, with soft, unformed faces and a tidy style of dressing. They called him on the phone and sent letters reeking of perfume and sometimes simply arrived on the doorstep, treating Maggie with a deference that made her feel ancient. They paid her vivacious compliments-"Oh, Mrs. Moran, I love that blouse!"-meanwhile searching behind her for Jesse. Maggie had to fight down the urge to bristle, to bar their entrance. Who would know better than she how deviously girls could behave? Why, a boy didn't stand a chance! But then Jesse would saunter out, not even rearranging his face at the sight of them, making no effort whatsoever, his T-shirt giving off the yeasty smell of fresh sweat and his hair obscuring his eyes. The girls would grow positively swaybacked with perkiness, and Maggie knew it was they who didn't stand a chance. She felt rueful and proud, both. She was ashamed of herself for feeling proud, and to make up for it she acted especially kind to every girl who came. Sometimes she acted so kind that the girls continued to visit her for months after Jesse had dropped them. They'd sit in the kitchen and confide in her, not just about Jesse but about other things as well, problems with their parents and such. Maggie enjoyed that.

Usually Daisy would be sitting there too, her head bent over her homework, and Maggie had the feeling they were all three part of a warm community of females, a community she had missed out on when she was growing up with her brothers.

Was it about that time that the music began? Loud music, with a hammering beat. One day it just flooded the house, as if Jesse's turning adolescent had opened a door through which the drums and electric guitars suddenly poured in. Let him merely duck into the kitchen for a sandwich and the clock radio would start blaring out "Lyin' Eyes." Let him dash up to his room for his catcher's mitt and his stereo would swing into "Afternoon Delight." And of course he never turned anything off again, so long after he'd left the house the music would still be playing. Maybe he intended it that way. It was his signature, his footprint on their lives. "I'll be out in the world now, but don't forget me," he was saying, and there they sat, two stodgy grownups and a prim little girl, while "When Will I Be Loved" jangled through the emptiness he left behind him.

Then he stopped liking what his classmates liked and he claimed the Top Forty was dentist music, elevator music. ("Oh," Maggie said sadly, for she had enjoyed that music-or some of it, at least.) The songs that filled the house grew whining and slippery or downright ill-tempered, and they were sung by scroungy, beatnik-looking groups dressed in rags and tags and bits of military uniforms. (Meanwhile the old albums filtered downstairs to line the shelf beneath the living room hi-fi, each new stage Jesse entered adding to Maggie's collection of castoffs, which she sometimes played secretly when she was all alone in the house.) And then he started writing his own songs, with peculiar modern names like "Microwave Quartet" and "Cassette Recorder Blues." A few of these he sang for Maggie when Ira wasn't around. He had a nasal, deadpan style of singing that was more like talking. To Maggie it sounded very professional, very much like what you might hear on the radio, but then, of course, she was only his mother. Although his friends were impressed, too; she knew that. His friend Don Burnham, whose second cousin had come this close to being hired as a roadie for the Ramones, said Jesse was good enough to form a group of his own and sing in public.

This Don Burnham was a perfectly nice, well-raised boy who had transferred to Jesse's school at the start of eleventh grade. When Jesse first brought him home, Don had made conversation with Maggie (not something you would take for granted, in a boy that age) and sat politely through Daisy's exhibit of her state-capitals postcard collection. "Next time I come," he'd told Maggie out of the blue, "I'll bring you my Doonesbury scrapbook." Maggie had said, "Oh, why, I'll look forward to that." But the next time he came he had his acoustic guitar along, and Jesse sang one of his songs for him while Don strummed beneath it. Seems like this old world is on fast forward nowadays . . . Then Don told Jesse he ought to sing in public, and from that moment ever afterward (or so it seemed in retrospect), Jesse was gone.

He formed a band called Spin the Cat-he and a bunch of older boys, high-school dropouts mostly. Maggie had no idea where he'd found them. He began to dress more heavily, as if for combat; he wore black denim shirts and black jeans and crumpled leather motorcycle boots. He came in at all hours smelling of beer and tobacco or, who knows, maybe worse than tobacco. He developed a following of a whole new type of girl, crisper and flashier, who didn't bother making up to Maggie or sitting in her kitchen. And in the spring it emerged that he hadn't attended school in some time, and would not be promoted from junior year to senior.

Seventeen and a half years old and he'd thrown away his future, Ira said, all for a single friendship. Never mind that Don Burnham wasn't even part of Jesse's band, and had passed smoothly on to senior year himself. In Ira's version of things, Don's one piece of advice had landed with a pingl and life had never been the same again. Don was some kind of providential instrument, fate's messenger. In Ira's version of things.

Shape up or ship out, Ira told Jesse. Earn the missing credits in summer school, or otherwise find a job and move to his own apartment. Jesse said he'd had a bellyful of school. He would be glad to get a job, he said, and he couldn't wait to move to his own apartment, where he could come and go as he pleased, with nobody breathing down his neck. Ira said, "Good riddance," and went upstairs without another word. Jesse left the house, tramping across the porch in his motorcycle boots. Maggie started crying.

How could Ira imagine Jesse's life? Ira was one of those people who are born competent. Everything came easy to him. There was no way he could fully realize how Jesse used to feel plodding off to school every morning-his shoulders already hunched against defeat, his jacket collar standing up crooked, and his hands shoved deep in his pockets. What it must be like to be Jesse! To have a perfectly behaved younger sister, and a father so seamless and infallible! Really his only saving grace was his mother, his harum-scarum klutzy mother, Maggie said to herself. She was making one of her wry private jokes but she meant it, all the same. And she wished he'd taken more from her. Her ability to see the best in things, for instance. Her knack for accepting, for adapting.

But no. Slit-eyed and wary, all his old light-heartedness gone, Jesse prowled the city in search of work. He was hoping for a job in a record store. He didn't even have pocket money (at this point that band of his still played for free-for the "exposure," was how they put it) and was forced to borrow bus fare from Maggie. And each day he came back glummer than the day before, and each evening he and Ira fought. ' 'If you showed up for your interviews dressed like a normal person-" Ira told him.

"A place puts that much stock in appearance, I wouldn't want to work there anyhow," Jesse said.

"Fine, then you'd better learn how to dig ditches, because that's the only job where they don't put stock in appearance."

Then Jesse would slam out of the house once again, and how flat things seemed after he left! How shallow, how lacking in spirit! Maggie and Ira gazed at each other bleakly across the living room. Maggie blamed Ira; he was too harsh. Ira blamed Maggie; she was too soft.

Sometimes, deep down inside, Maggie blamed herself too. She saw now that there was a single theme to every decision she had made as a parent: The mere fact that her children were children, condemned for years to feel powerless and bewildered and confined, filled her with such pity that to add any further hardship to their lives seemed unthinkable. She could excuse anything in them, forgive them everything. She would have made a better mother, perhaps, if she hadn't remembered so well how it felt to be a child.

She dreamed that Jesse was dead-that in fact he had died years ago, back when he was still a sunny, prankish little boy, and she had somehow failed to realize it. She dreamed she was sobbing uncontrollably; there was no way to survive such a loss. Then she saw in the crowd on deck (for she was taking a boat trip, all at once) a child who resembled Jesse, standing with his parents, whom she had never seen before. He glanced over at her and looked quickly away, but she could tell that he thought she seemed familiar. She smiled at him. He glanced at her again and then looked away again. She edged a few inches closer, meanwhile pretending to study the horizon. He had come back to life in another family; that was how she explained it to herself. He wasn't hers now, but never mind, she would start over. She would win him to her side. She felt his eyes alight on her once more and she sensed how puzzled he was, half remembering her and half not; and she knew it meant that underneath, he and she would always love each other.

Now, at this point Daisy was nine years old, or just about to turn nine-enough of a child still, you would think, to keep Maggie fully occupied.

But the fact was that at that very moment, Daisy took it into her head to start growing away too. She had always been a bit precocious. In her infancy Ira had called her Lady-Baby, because she was so mature and reserved, her small face a knot of opinion. At thirteen months she had undertaken her own toilet training. In first grade she had set her alarm for an hour earlier than anyone else in the household and slipped downstairs each morning to sort through the laundered clothes for a proper outfit. (She could iron better than Maggie even then, and liked to look neat as a pin and color-coordinated.) And now she seemed to have leapt ahead to that stage where the outside world took precedence over family. She had four very serious, like-minded friends, including one, Lavinia Murphy, whose mother was perfect. Perfect Mrs. Murphy headed the PTA and the Bake Sale and (since she didn't work) was free to drive the little girls to every kind of cultural event, and she hosted wonderful slumber parties, with treasure hunts. The spring of ', Daisy practically lived with the Murphys. Maggie would come home from work and call, "Daisy?" but all she found was a silent house and a note on the front-hall bookshelf.

Then one afternoon the house wasn't silent after all but murmury and conspiratorial, she could sense it the moment she entered, and upstairs, Jesse's bedroom door was closed. She knocked. After a startled pause, Jesse called, "Just a second." She heard rustles and whispers. When he came out he had a girl in tow. Her long blond hair was rumpled and her lips had a bruised look. She sidled past Maggie with her eyes downcast and descended the stairs behind Jesse. Maggie heard the front door open; she heard Jesse saying goodbye in a low voice. As soon as he came back upstairs (unashamedly heading straight to Maggie), she told him that the mother of that girl, whoever she was, would be horrified to know her daughter had been alone with a boy in his bedroom. Jesse said, "Oh, no, her mom lives in Pennsylvania somewhere. Fiona stays with her sister, and her sister doesn't mind."

"Well, I do," Maggie said.

Jesse didn't argue with that, and the girl stopped coming around. Or at least she was out of sight when Maggie returned from work each day.

Though Maggie had a feeling; she picked up certain clues. She noticed that Jesse was gone more than ever, that he returned abstracted, that his brief spells at home were marked by long private conversations on the upstairs telephone and it was always the same girl's voice-soft and questioning-when Maggie happened to lift the receiver.

He found a job in an envelope factory, finally, something to do with shipping, and started looking for an apartment. The only trouble was, the rents were so high and his paycheck was so puny. Good, Ira said. Now maybe he would have to face a few hard facts. Maggie wished Ira would just shut up. "Don't worry," she told Jesse. "Something will come along."

That was toward the end of June. In July he was still living at home. And one Wednesday evening in August, he caught Maggie alone in the kitchen and informed her, very calmly and directly, that he seemed to have got this girl he knew in trouble.

The air in the room grew oddly still. Maggie wiped her hands on her apron.

She said, "Is it that Fiona person?"

He nodded.

"So now what?" Maggie asked. She was as cool as he was; she surprised herself. This seemed to be happening to someone else. Or maybe she had expected it without knowing. Maybe it was something that had been heading their way all along, like a glacier bearing down on them.

"Well," Jesse said, "that's what I needed to discuss with you. I mean, what I want and what she wants are two different things."

"What is it you want?" Maggie asked, thinking she knew.

"I want her to keep the baby."

For a moment, that didn't register. Even the word itself-"baby"-seemed incongruous on Jesse's lips. It seemed almost, in an awful way, cute.

She said, "Keep it?"

"I thought I'd start hunting an apartment for the three of us."

"You mean get married?"

"Right."

"But you're not even eighteen years old," Maggie said. "And I bet the girl isn't, either. You're too young."

"My birthday's in two weeks, Ma, and Fiona's is not long after. And she doesn't like school anyway; half the time she skips class and hangs out with me instead. Besides, I've always looked forward to having a kid.

It's exactly what I've been needing: something of my own."

"Something of your own?"

"I'll just have to find a better-paying job, is all."

"Jesse, you've got a whole family of your own! What are you talking about?"

"But it's not the same," Jesse said. "I've just never felt ... I don't know. So anyhow, I've been looking for a job that pays more money. See, a baby takes a lot of equipment and such. I've written down a list from Dr.

Spock."

Maggie stared at him. The only question she could come up with was:

"Where on earth did you get hold of a Dr. Spock?"

"At the bookstore; where else?"

"You went into a bookstore and bought a baby-care book?"

"Sure."

That seemed the biggest surprise of all. She couldn't picture it.

"I've learned a lot," he told her. "I think Fiona oughtta breast-feed."

"Jesse-"

"I found these plans in Home Hobby Journal for building a cradle."

"Honey, you don't know how hard it is. You're children yourselves! You can't take on a baby."

"I'm asking you, Ma. I'm serious," Jesse said. And he did have that sharply etched look to his lips that he always got when he felt strongly about something.

"But just what are you asking me?" Maggie said.

"I want you to go and talk to Fiona."

"What? Talk about what?"

"Tell her you think she should keep it."

"You mean she wants to put it up for adoption," Maggie said. "Or else . .

. um . . . stop the pregnancy."

"Well, that's what she says, but-"

"Which?" Maggie asked.

"The second thing."

"Ah."

"But she doesn't really want that. I know she doesn't," he said. "It's just that she's so stubborn. She expects the worst of me, seems like. She takes it for granted I'm going to, like, ditch her or something. Well, first off, she didn't even tell me about it-can you believe it? Hid it from me! Went through weeks of worrying and never breathed a hint of it even though she saw me every day, near about. And then when the test came out positive, what does she do? Asks me for the money to get rid of the baby. I say. 'Huh? To do what? Now. hold on a sec.'

I tell her. 'Aren't you skipping over a few of the usual steps here?

Whatever happened to "What do you.think, Jesse?" and "Which decision are we two going to settle on?" Aren't you going to offer me a chance?' I ask her. She says, 'Chance for what?' 'Well, what about marriage?' I ask her.

'What about me taking on my proper responsibilities, for God's sake?' She says, 'Don't do me any favors, Jesse Moran.' I say, 'Favors? You're talking about my son, here.' She says, 'Oh, I have no illusions'- that is how she talks when she gets on her high horse. 'I have no illusions,' she says. 'I knew what you were when I first laid eyes on you. Footloose and fancy-free,' she says, 'lead singer in a hard-rock band. You don't have to explain yourself to me.' I felt I'd been, like, stenciled or something. I mean where did she get this picture of me? Not from anything that happened in real life, I can tell you. So I say, 'No, I will not give you the money; no, sir, no way,' and she says, 'I might have known to expect that'-purposely misunderstanding. I hate when people do that, purposely acting so wronged and martyred. 'I might have figured,' she says, 'that I couldn't count on you for the simplest little abortion fee.' Says the word right out, kind of like she cracked the air with it; I honestly couldn't speak for a second. I say, 'Goddammit, Fiona-' and she says, 'Oh, fine, great, just cuss at me too on top of everything else,' and I say-"

"Jesse. Honey," Maggie said. She rubbed her left temple. She had a sense that she was losing track of some important thread here. "I really think that if Fiona has made up her mind-" she said.

"She's got an appointment the first thing Monday morning, at this clinic over on Whitside Avenue. Monday is her sister's day off; her sister's going with her. See there? She doesn't invite me to go with her. And I have talked to her till I'm blue in the face. There's nothing more I can say. So here's what I'm asking: You be the one. You go to the clinic and stop her."

"Me?"

"You always get along so well with my girlfriends. You can do it; I know you can. Tell her about my job. I'm quitting at the envelope factory.

I've applied at this computer store, where they'll train me to fix computers, pay me while I'm learning. They said I have a good chance of getting hired. And also Dave in the band, his mother owns a house in Waverly near the stadium and the whole top floor's an apartment that'll be vacant by November, cheap as dirt, Dave says, with a little room for the baby. You're supposed to let the baby sleep in a separate room from its parents; I've been reading up on that. You'd be amazed how much I know! I've decided I'm for pacifiers. Some people don't like the looks of them, but if you give a baby a pacifier he won't suck his thumb later on.

Also, it is absolutely not true that pacifiers push their front teeth out of line."

He hadn't talked so much in months, but the sad part was that the more he talked, the younger he seemed. His hair was tangled where he'd run his fingers through it, and his body was all sharp angles as he tore around the kitchen. Maggie said, "Jesse, honey, I know you're going to make a wonderful father someday, but the fact of the matter is, this really has to be the girl's decision. It's the girl who has to go through the pregnancy."

"Not alone, though. I would support her. I would comfort her. I would take care of her. I want to do this, Ma."

She didn't know what more to say, and Jesse must have realized that. He stopped his pacing. He stood squarely in front of her. He said, "Look.

You're my only hope. All I'm asking is, you let her know how I feel. Then she can decide whichever way she likes. What could be the harm in that?"

"But why can't you let her know how you feel?" Maggie said.

"Don't you think I've tried? I've talked till I'm blue in the face. But everything I say seems to come out wrong. She takes offense, I take offense; we just get all tangled in knots, somehow. By now we're used up.

We're worn down into the ground."

Well, she certainly knew what that felt like.

"Couldn't you just consider it?" he asked.

She tilted her head.

"Just consider the possibility?"

"Oh," she said, "the possibility, maybe . . ."

He said, "Yes! That's all I'm asking! Thanks, Ma. Thanks a million."

"But, Jesse-"

"And you won't tell Dad yet, will you?"

"Well, not for the time being," she said lamely.

"You can picture what he would say," he said.

Then he gave her one of his quick hugs, and he was gone.

For the next few days she felt troubled, indecisive. Examples came to mind of Jesse's fickleness-how (like most boys his age) he kept moving on to new stages and new enthusiasms, leaving the old ones behind. You couldn't leave a wife and baby behind! But then other pictures came too: for instance, the year they'd all got the flu except for Jesse, and he had had to take care of them. She had glimpsed him blurrily through a haze of fever; he had sat on the edge of the bed and fed her a bowl of chicken soup, spoonful by spoonful, and when she fell asleep between swallows he had waited without complaint until she jerked awake, and then he fed her another spoonful.

"You haven't forgotten, have you?" Jesse asked now whenever he met up with her. And, "You won't go back on your promise, will you?"

"No, no . , ." she would say. And then, "What promise?" What had she let herself hi for, exactly? He tucked a slip of paper into her palm one evening-an address on Whitside Avenue. The clinic, she supposed. She dropped it in her skirt pocket. She said, "Now you realize I can't-" But Jesse had already evaporated, dexterous as a cat burglar.

Ira was in a good mood those days, because he'd heard about the computer job. It had come through, as Jesse had foreseen, and he was due to start training in September. "This is more like it," Ira told Maggie. "This is something with a future. And who knows? Maybe after a bit he'll decide to go back to school. I'm sure they'll want him to finish school before they promote him."

Maggie was quiet, thinking.

She had to work on Saturday, so that kept her mind off things, but Sunday she sat a long time on the porch. It was a golden hot day and everyone seemed to be out walking infants. Carriages and strollers wheeled past, and men lunged by with babies in backpacks. Maggie wondered if a backpack was one of the pieces of equipment Jesse considered essential. She would bet it was. She cocked her head toward the house, listening. Ira was watching a ball game on TV and Daisy was away at Mrs. Perfect's. Jesse was still asleep, having come in late from playing at a dance in Howard County. She'd heard him climb the stairs a little after three, singing underneath his breath. Girlie if I could I would put you on defrost , . .

"Music is so different now," she had said to Jesse once. "It used to be

'Love Me Forever" and now it's 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.' "

"Aw, Ma," he had said, "don't you get it? In the old days they just hid it better. It was always 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.' "

A line came to her from a song that was popular back when Jesse was a little boy. / must think of a way, it went, tactfully, tentatively, into your heart . . .

When Jesse was a little boy he liked to tell her stories while she cooked; he seemed to believe she needed entertaining. "Once there was a lady who never fed her children anything but doughnuts," he might begin, or, "Once there was a man who lived on top of a Ferris wheel." All of his stories were whimsical and inventive, and now that she considered, she saw that they had had in common the theme of joyousness, of the triumph of sheer fun over practicality. He strung one particular story out for weeks, something about a retarded father who bought an electric organ with the grocery money. The retarded part came from his aunt Dome, she supposed. But the way he told it, the father's handicap was a kind of virtue. The father said, "What do we need food for anyhow? I like better for my children to hear nice music." Maggie laughed when she repeated the story to Ira, but Ira hadn't seen the humor. He took offense first on Dome's account (he didn't like the word "retarded") and then on his own.

Why was it the father who was retarded? Why not the mother, was probably what he meant-much more realistic, given Maggie's shortcomings. Or maybe he didn't mean that at all, but Maggie imagined he did, and it developed into a quarrel.

They had quarreled over Jesse ever since he was born, it seemed now, always taking the same stances. Ira criticized, Maggie excused. Ira claimed that Jesse wouldn't keep a civil tongue in his head, refused to wipe that obstinate expression off his face, acted hopelessly inept when helping out at the shop. He just had to come into his own, Maggie said.

For some it took longer than for others. "Decades longer?" Ira asked. She said, "Have a little patience, Ira." (A switch. Ira was the one with the patience. Maggie was the rusher-in.)

How was it that she had never realized the power of the young back when she was young herself? She saw it now as a missed opportunity. In her girlhood she'd been so easily cowed; she hadn't dreamed that children were capable of setting up such storms in a family.

She and Ira tried to keep their own storms private, but no doubt Jesse overheard at least a little. Or maybe he just sensed how they felt; for more and more, as he entered his teens, it was to Maggie that he offered his few crumbs of conversation, while he grew steadily more distant from Ira. By the time he told her about the baby, Maggie felt fairly distant from Ira herself. They'd been through too many arguments, rehashed the subject of Jesse too many thousand times. It wasn't merely her promise that kept Maggie from telling Ira about the baby; it was battle fatigue.

Ira would hit the roof! And rightly so, of course.

But she thought of how Jesse had nudged her lips with the soup spoon, coaxing her to eat. Sometimes, at the height of her fever, she had wakened to hear thin, sad, faraway music emerging from the earphones on his head, and she had been convinced that they were the sounds of his innermost thoughts made clear to her at long last.

Monday morning she went to work as usual at seven but begged off sick at a quarter till nine and drove to Whitside Avenue. The clinic was a remodeled store of some kind, with a curtained plate-glass window. She spotted it first not by its street number but by the knot of picketers outside. There were three women, several children, and a small, dapper man. THIS CLINIC MURDERS THE INNOCENT, one sign said, and another showed a blown-up photo of a beautiful smiling baby with GIVE HER A CHANCE printed in white across her mop of black curls. Maggie parked in front of an insurance agency next door. The picketers glanced over at her and then went back to watching the clinic.

A car drew up and a girl in jeans got out, followed by a young boy. The girl bent to say something to the driver, after which she waved and the car moved on. The couple walked briskly toward the clinic, while the picketers swarmed around them. "God sees what you're about to do!" one woman called, and another blocked the girl's path, but she veered away. "Where is your conscience?" the man shouted after her.

She and the boy vanished behind the door. The picketers straggled back to their places. They were discussing something heatedly; they appeared to be disagreeing. Maggie had the impression that some of them felt they should have been more forceful.

A few minutes later, a woman alighted from a taxi. She was maybe Maggie's age, very well dressed and all by herself. The picketers seemed to feel they had to make up for past defeats. They circled her; they had so much to say that it came to Maggie's ears as a garble of bee sounds. They pressed pamphlets on her. The largest of the women put an arm around her shoulders. The patient, if that was what she was, cried, "Let go of me!"

and jabbed an elbow into the picketer's rib cage. Then she was gone too.

The picketer bent over-in pain, Maggie thought at first, but she was merely lifting one of the children. They returned to their original positions. In this heat, they moved so slowly that their indignation looked striven-for and counterfeit.

Maggie rooted through her purse for a piece of paper to fan herself with.

She would have liked to get out of the car, but then where would she stand? Alongside the picketers?

Footsteps approached, a double set, and she glanced up to see Fiona and a slightly older girl, who must have been her sister.

She had worried she wouldn't recognize Fiona, having caught sight of her only the once. But she knew her right off-the long fair hair, the pale face with nothing yet written upon it. She wore jeans and a bright, shrimp-pink

T-shirt. As it happened, Maggie had a prejudice against shrimp pink. She thought it was lower-class. (Oh, how strange it was to remember now that she had once viewed Fiona as lower-class! She had imagined there was something cheap and gimcrack about her; she had mistrusted the bland pallor of her face, and she had suspected that her sister's too-heavy makeup concealed the same unhealthy complexion. Pure narrow-mindedness!

Maggie could admit that now, having come to see Fiona's good points.) At any rate, she got out of the car. She walked over to them and said, "Fiona?"

The sister murmured, "Told you they'd try something." She must have thought Maggie was a picketer. And Fiona walked on, eyelids lowered so they were two white crescents.

"Fiona, I'm Jesse's mother," Maggie said.

Fiona slowed and looked at her. The sister came to a stop.

"I won't interfere if you're certain you know what you're doing," Maggie said, "but, Fiona, have you considered every angle?"

"Not all that many to consider," the sister said bluntly. "She's seventeen years old."

Fiona allowed herself to be led away then, still gazing at Maggie over her shoulder.

"Have you talked about it with Jesse?" Maggie asked. She ran after them.

"Jesse wants this baby! He told me so."

The sister called back, "Is he going to bear it? Is he going to walk it at night and change its diapers?"

"Yes, he is!" Maggie said. "Well, not bear it, of course ..."

They had reached the picketers by now. A woman held out one of the pamphlets. On the front was a color photo of an unborn baby who seemed a good deal past the embryo stage, in fact almost ready to be delivered. Fiona shrank away.

"Leave her alone," Maggie told the woman. She said, "Fiona, Jesse really cares about you. You have to believe me."

"I have seen enough of Jesse Moran to last me a lifetime," the sister said. She shoved past a fat woman with two toddlers and an infant in a sling.

"You're just saying that because you have- him cast in this certain role," Maggie told her, "this rock-band member who got your little sister pregnant. But it's not so simple! It's not so cut-and-dried! He bought a Dr. Spock book-did he mention that, Fiona? He's already researched pacifiers and he thinks you ought to breastfeed."

The fat woman said to Fiona, ' 'All the angels in heaven are crying over you."

"Listen," Maggie told the woman. "Just because you've got too many children is no reason to wish the same trouble on other people."

"The angels call it murder," the woman said.

Fiona flinched. Maggie said, "Can't you see you're upsetting her?" They had reached the door of the clinic now, but the dapper little man was barring their way. "Get out of here," Maggie told him. "Fiona! Just think it over! That's all I ask of you."

The man held his ground, which gave Fiona time to turn to Maggie. She looked a little teary. "Jesse doesn't care," she said.

"Of course he cares!"

"He says to me, 'Don't worry, Fiona, I won't let you down.' Like I am some kind of obligation! Some charitable cause!"

"He didn't mean it that way. You're misreading him. He honestly wants to marry you."

"And live on what money?" the sister asked. She had a braying, unpleasant voice, much deeper than Fiona's. "He doesn't even have a decent-paying job."

"He's getting one! Computers! Opportunity for advancement!" Maggie said.

She was forced to speak so telegraphically because Fiona's sister had somehow cleared the door of picketers and was tugging it open. A woman held a postcard in front of Fiona's face: the curly-haired baby again.

Maggie batted it aside. "At least come home with me so you and Jesse can talk it over," she told Fiona. "That won't commit you to anything."

Fiona hesitated. Her sister said, "For God's sake, Fiona," but Maggie seized her advantage. She took Fiona by the wrist and led her back through the crowd, keeping up a steady stream of encouragement. "He says he's building a cradle; he's already got the plans. It's enough to break your heart. Leave her alone, dammit! Do I have to call the police? Who gave you the right to pester us?"

"Who gave her the right to murder her baby?" a woman called.

"She has every right in the world! Fiona, this is a natural-born caretaker we're talking about here. You should have seen him during the Hong Kong flu."

"The what?"

"Or Bangkok, or Sing Sing, or one of those flus . . . Anyway, it's nothing to do with charity. He wants this baby more than anything."

Fiona peered into her face. She said, "And he's building a ... ?"

"He's building a cradle. A beautiful one, with a hood," Maggie said. If it turned out not to have a hood she could always say she had been mistaken.

Fiona's sister scurried alongside them, her heels clicking busily. She said, "Fiona, if you don't get back in there this instant I am washing my hands of this whole affair, I tell you. Fiona, they have scheduled you!"

And the picketers milled uncertainly a few feet behind. Fiona's wrist was smooth and impossibly thin, like a stalk of bamboo. Maggie released it, reluctantly, in order to open the car door. "Climb in," she said. "Buzz off," she told the picketers. And to the sister she said, "Nice meeting you."

The picketers dropped back. One said, "Now look, uh . . ."

"We have constitutional permission to do this, I'll have you know,"

Maggie said. The woman looked confused.

"I hunt up a clinic," Fiona's sister said, "I take her to be tested. I make the appointment, I sacrifice a perfectly good day off when I could have gone to Ocean City with my boyfriend-"

"You could still do that," Maggie said, checking her watch.

She hurried around to the driver's side, fearful that Fiona would try to escape, but when she got in, Fiona was sitting there limply with her head tipped back and her eyes closed. Her sister bent in through the open window. "Fiona, just tell me this much," she said. "If Jesse Moran was so hot for this baby, how come it wasn't him who came down here to fetch you?"

Fiona raised her lids and looked over at Maggie. "Well, he tried," Maggie told her. "He's been trying for days, you know he has, but somehow you're always at cross-purposes."

Fiona closed her eyes again. Maggie started the car and drove off.

The strange part was that having won-at least temporarily-she didn't feel a bit triumphant. Just worn out. And slightly confused, to tell the truth. How was it things had ended up this way, when all along she'd been telling Jesse he was nowhere near old enough? Oh, Lord. What had she gone and done? She glanced secretly at Fiona. Fiona's skin seemed slick, almost glazed. "Are you feeling ill?" Maggie asked her.

"I believe I might upchuck," Fiona said, barely moving her lips.

"You want me to stop the car?"

"Let's just get there."

Maggie drove more carefully, as if transporting a basket of eggs.

In front of the house she parked, got out, and came around to help Fiona from her seat. Fiona was a dead weight. She leaned heavily against Maggie. But she had a young smell-fresh-ironed cotton and those sugary beginner cosmetics you find in dime stores-and that gave Maggie some reassurance. Oh, this girl was not bad at heart!,She was barely older than Daisy; she was an ordinary, open-face child bewildered by what had happened to her.

They crossed the sidewalk slowly and climbed the steps to the porch.

Their shoes made a hollow sound on the floorboards. "Sit here," Maggie said, and she helped Fiona into the chair where she herself had sat all yesterday afternoon. "You need the air," she said. "Take deep, deep breaths. I'm going to go find Jesse."

Fiona closed her eyes.

Inside, the rooms were cool and dark. Maggie climbed the stairs to Jesse's room and knocked on his door. She poked her head in. "Jesse?" she said.

"Mmf."

His window shades were lowered so she could barely make out the shapes of the furniture. His bed was a tangle of twisted sheets. "Jesse, I've brought Fiona," she said. "Could you come down to the porch?"

"Huh?"

"Could you come down to the porch and talk with Fiona?"

He stirred a little and raised his head, so she knew she could leave him.

She went back downstairs and into the kitchen, where she poured a glass of iced tea from a pitcher in the refrigerator. She put the glass on a china plate, encircled it with saltine crackers, and carried it out to Fiona. "Here," she said. "Take little bites of these saltines. Take tiny sips of tea."

Fiona was already looking better, sitting upright now in her chair, and she said, "Thank you," when Maggie laid the plate on her knees. She nibbled at a corner of a cracker. Maggie settled in a rocker next to her.

"When I was expecting Daisy," Maggie said, "I lived on tea and saltines for two solid months. It's a wonder we didn't both get malnutrition. I was so sick with Daisy I thought I would die, but with Jesse I never had a moment's discomfort. Isn't that funny? You'd think it would have been the other way around."

Fiona set down her cracker. ' 'I should've stayed at the clinic," she said.

"Oh, honey," Maggie said. She felt suddenly depressed. She had an instantaneous, chillingly clear vision of how Ira's face would look when he learned what she had done. "Fiona, it's not too late," she said.

"You're only here to discuss it all, right? You're not committed to a thing." Although even as she spoke she saw the clinic receding steadily.

This was something like rushing toward a jump rope, she imagined. Miss that split second where entry is possible and you've flubbed up everything. She reached out and touched Fiona's arm. "And after all," she said, "you do love each other, don't you? Don't you love each other?"

"Yes, but maybe if we got married he would start to hold it against me,"

Fiona said. "I mean, he's a lead singer! He'll probably want to go to England or Australia or some such after he gets famous. And meanwhile, his band has just barely started earning any money. Where would we live?

How would we work this?"

"At first you could live here with us," Maggie said.

' 'Then in November you can move to an apartment Jesse knows about in Waverly. Jesse has it all figured out."

Fiona stared toward the street. "If I had stayed on at the clinic everything would be over by now," she said after a minute.

"Oh, Fiona. Please. Oh, tell me I didn't do wrong!" Maggie said. She looked around for Jesse. What was keeping him? It shouldn't be up to her to carry on this courtship. "Wait here," she said. She got up and hurried into the house. "Jesse!" she cried. But he didn't answer, and she heard the shower running. That boy would insist on showering first if the house were on fire, she thought. She ran upstairs and pounded on the bathroom door. "Jesse, are you coming?" she called.

He cut the water off. "What?" he said.

"Come out, I tell you!"

No answer. But she heard the shower curtain screech across the rod.

She went into his bedroom and snapped up both window shades. She wanted to find his Dr. Spock book. It would serve as a kind of selling point till he came downstairs; or at least it would provide a topic of conversation. But she couldn't find it-just dirty clothes, French-fry cartons, records left out of their jackets. She looked for the cradle plans then. What would they be-blueprints? Not a sign of them. Well, of course, he'd have taken them to the basement, where Ira kept his tools.

She tore back down the stairs, calling toward the porch as she passed, "He's on his way!" (She could picture Fiona getting up and leaving.) Through the kitchen, down a set of narrow wooden steps, over to Ira's workbench. No plans there, either. Ira's tools hung neatly on the backboard, each matching its own painted outline-a sure sign Jesse had not been near them. On the workbench itself were two squares of sandpaper and a sheaf of doweling rods still bound together by rubber bands, part of a drying rack that Ira had promised to build into a corner of the back porch. She seized the doweling rods and raced back up the basement steps. "Look," she told Fiona, slamming out the screen door. "Jesse's cradle."

Fiona lowered her glass. She accepted the rods and gazed at them.

"Cradle?" she said doubtfully.

"It's going to have . . . spindles; that's what they are," Maggie said.

"Antique style."

You would think those rods could be read, the way Fiona studied them.

Then Jesse came out, bringing with him the fragrance of shampoo. His hair was wet and tousled and his skin was radiant. He said, "Fiona? You didn't go through with it?" and she lifted her face, still holding the rods like a kind of scepter, and said, "Well, all right, Jesse, if you want. I guess we could get married if you want."

Then Jesse wrapped his arms around her and dropped his head to her shoulder, and something about that picture-his dark head next to her blond one-reminded Maggie of the way she used to envision marriage before she was married herself. She had thought of it as more different than it really was, somehow, more of an alteration in people's lives-two opposites drawn together with a dramatic crashing sound. She had supposed that when she was married all her old problems would fall away, something like when you go on vacation and leave a few knotty tasks incomplete as if you'd never have to come back and face them. And of course, she had been wrong. But watching Jesse and Fiona, she could almost believe that that early vision was the right one. She slipped into the house, shutting the screen door very softly behind her, and she decided everything was going to work out after all.

They were married in Cartwheel, in Mrs. Stuckey's living room. Just family attended. Ira was grim-faced and silent, Maggie's mother sat stiff with outrage, and Maggie's father seemed befuddled. Only Mrs. Stuckey showed the proper festive attitude.

She wore a fuchsia corduroy pantsuit and a corsage as big as her head, and before the ceremony she told everybody that her one regret was that Mr. Stuckey had not lived to see this day. Although maybe, she said, he was here in spirit; and then she went on at some length about her personal theory of ghosts. (They were the completions of the dead's intended gestures, their unfinished plans still hanging in the air-something like when you can't remember what it was you went to the kitchen for and so you pantomime the motion, a twist of the wrist perhaps, and that reminds you you had come out to turn the dripping faucet off. So wasn't there a chance that Mr. Stuckey was right here in the living room, having dreamed of walking both his precious daughters down the aisle someday?) Then she said that to her mind, marriage was just as educational as high school and maybe more so. "I mean I dropped out of school myself," she said, "and have never once regretted it."

Fiona's sister rolled her eyes. But it was a good thing Mrs. Stuckey felt that way, since Fiona wouldn't turn eighteen till January and required parental permission for a marriage license.

Fiona herself wore a beige, loose-waisted dress that she and Maggie had gone shopping for together, and Jesse looked very distinguished in a suit and tie. He looked like a grownup, in fact. Daisy acted shy around him, and kept hanging on to Maggie's arm and looking over at him. "What's the matter with you? Straighten up," Maggie told her. She was feeling very irritable, for some reason. She worried that Ira was going to be angry at her forever. He seemed to be holding her solely accountable for this entire situation.

After the wedding, Jesse and Fiona went to Ocean City for a week. Then they came home to Jesse's room, where Maggie had moved in an extra bureau and exchanged his old bunks for a double bed from J. C. Penney. The house grew more crowded, of course, but it was a pleasant sort of crowdedness, cheerful and expectant. Fiona seemed to fit right in; she was so agreeable, so ready to let Maggie take charge-more so than Maggie's own children had ever been. Jesse set off happily every morning for his computer job, and returned every evening with some new baby-care gadget-a pack of bunny-shaped diaper pins or an ingenious spouted training cup. He was reading up on childbirth and kept embracing different theories, each more peculiar than the last. (For instance, at one point he proposed that the delivery take place underwater, but he couldn't find a doctor who would agree to it.)

Daisy and her friends forgot Mrs. Perfect entirely and camped in Maggie's living room-five dumbstruck, enchanted little girls reverently eyeing Fiona's stomach. And Fiona played up to them, sometimes inviting them to her room to admire her growing layette, after which she might seat them one by one at the mirror and experiment with their hair. (Her sister was a beautician and had taught Fiona everything she knew, Fiona said.) Then in the evening, if Jesse's band had an engagement somewhere, he and Fiona would go out together and not return till or a.m., and Maggie, half waking, would hear their whispers on the stairs. The lock on their bedroom door would click stealthily and Maggie would sink back into sleep, contented.

Even Ira seemed resigned, after he'd got over the shock. Oh, at first he was so disgusted that Maggie had feared he would walk out of the house forever. For days he had not spoken, and when Jesse entered the room he would leave. But gradually he came around. He was most comfortable, Maggie thought, when he could act tolerant and long-suffering, and surely he had the opportunity for that now. Here all his apprehensions had been confirmed: His son had got a girl in trouble and his wife had meddled unforgivably and now the girl was living in Jesse's bedroom among the Iggy Pop posters. He could sigh and say, "Didn't I tell you? Didn't I always warn you?" (Or at least he could give that impression; not that he said it aloud.) Fiona drifted past him into the bathroom every morning, wearing her fluffy pink robe and her big pink powder-puff slippers and carrying her tortoiseshell soapbox, and Ira flattened himself against the wall as if she were .twice as big as she was. But he treated her with unfailing courtesy. He even taught her his complicated brand of solitaire, when the boredom of sitting at home got to be too much for her, and he lent her his Mariner's Library books-a whole row of memoirs by people who had sailed alone around the world and such. He had been trying to press them on his children for years. ("As far as I'm concerned," Fiona told Maggie, "those books are just more of that 'How I took Route So-and-so' that men always think is so fascinating." But she didn't let on to Ira.) And by November, when the Waverly apartment was supposed to become available, Ira didn't ask why they weren't moving out.

Nor did Maggie; she carefully avoided the subject. In fact, for all she knew, the apartment had fallen through somehow. Maybe the current tenants had changed their plans. At any rate, Jesse and Fiona said nothing about leaving. Fiona followed Maggie around now the way the children had followed her when they were tiny. She trailed her from room to room, asking fractious questions. "Why do I feel so logy?" she asked, and, "Am I ever going to have anklebones again?" She had started attending childbirth classes and wanted Maggie to go with her to the labor room.

Jesse, she said, might pass out or something. Maggie said, "Why, Jesse's dying to go with you," but Fiona said, "I don't want him to see me like that! He isn't even kin."

Nor was Maggie, Maggie could have said. Although it seemed she really was, in some ways.

In Jesse's company, Fiona began to take on an aggrieved and nagging tone.

She complained about the unfairness-how Jesse got to go off to work every day while she sat home growing fatter. She should have stayed in school after all, she said, at least through fall semester; but no, no, Jesse had to have things his way: homebody wife, the Little Mother act. When she spoke like this there was something old-ladyish in her voice, and Jesse when he answered sounded sullen. "Have you heard one word I've been saying?" Fiona would ask, and Jesse would say, "I heard, I heard." What was it that struck Maggie as so familiar? It was a tune, almost. It was the tune of the arguments Jesse used to have with his parents; that was it. Jesse and Fiona were more like a boy and his mother than husband and wife.

But Fiona wasn't feeling well; no wonder she was snappish. That early-pregnancy sleepiness never left her, even in her seventh and eighth months, when most women were bundles of energy. Jesse would say, "Put on your clothes! We're booked at the Granite Tavern tonight and they're paying us real money," and she would say, "Oh, I don't know; maybe I'll let you go on without me."

"Without you?" he would ask. "You mean alone?" And his face would get all hurt and surprised. But he would go. Once, he didn't even eat supper-just left the minute she told him she wasn't coming with him, although it was barely p.m. Then Fiona didn't eat, either, but sat there at the table playing with her food, a tear slipping down her cheek from time to time, and afterward she put on the hooded windbreaker that didn't button over her stomach anymore and she went for a long, long walk. Or she might have gone to visit her sister; Maggie had no idea. At eight or so Jesse phoned and Maggie had to tell him she was out someplace. "What do you mean, out?" he asked.

"Just out, Jesse-. I'm sure she'll be coming back soon."

"She said she was too tired to go out. She couldn't come to the Granite Tavern because she was too tired."

"Oh, maybe she-"

But he had already hung up, a metallic clunk in her ear.

Well, these things happened. (Didn't Maggie know they happened?) And the next morning Jesse and Fiona were fine-had reconciled at some point and acted more loving than ever. Maggie had been anxious for no reason, it turned out.

The baby was due in early March, but on February first Fiona woke up with a backache. Maggie was excited the instant she heard. "This is it, I bet," she told Fiona.

"It can't be!" Fiona said. "I'm not ready."

"Of course you're ready. You've got your layette; your suitcase is packed-"

"But Jesse hasn't built the cradle yet."

It was true. Whatever other equipment he'd laid in, that cradle had not materialized. Maggie-said, "Never mind; he can do it while you're in the hospital."

"This is a plain old backache anyhow," Fiona said. "I've had this feeling often, before I was pregnant, even."

At noon, though, when Maggie phoned from work, Fiona sounded less certain. "I'm getting these cramps, like, in my stomach," she said. "Can you please come home early?"

"I'll be there," Maggie told her. "Have you called Jesse yet?"

"Jesse? No."

"Why don't you call him."

"Okay, but promise you'll come home? Start right now."

"I'm on my way."

She arrived to find Jesse timing Fiona's contractions, using an official-looking stopwatch he'd bought especially for this occasion. He was jubilant. "We're moving right along!" he told Maggie.

Fiona looked scared. She kept giving little moans, not during the contractions but between them. "Hon, I don't think you're breathing right," Jesse told her.

Fiona said, "Lay off about my breathing! I'll breathe any way I choose."

"Well, I just want you to be comfortable. Are you comfortable? Is the baby moving?"

"I don't know."

' 'Is he moving or isn't he? Fiona? You must have some idea."

"I don't know, I tell you. No. He's not."

"The baby isn't moving," Jesse told Maggie.

"Don't worry. He's just getting ready," Maggie said.

"Something must be wrong."

"Nothing's wrong, Jesse. Believe me."

But he didn't believe her, which is why they ended up leaving for the hospital far too early. Maggie drove. Jesse said he might crash the car if he drove, but then he spent the whole trip protesting every move Maggie made. "What possessed you to get behind a bus? Switch lanes. Not now, for God's sake! Check your rearview mirror. Oh, God, we'll all be killed and they'll have to cut the baby out of her stomach in the middle of Franklin Street."

Fiona shrieked at this, which so unnerved Maggie that she slammed on the brakes and threw all three of them against the windshield. Jesse said, "Let us out! Better we go by foot! Let her give birth on the sidewalk!''

"Fine," Maggie said. "Get out of the car."

Fiona said, "What?"

"Now, Ma, just cool it," Jesse said. "No need to get hysterical. Depend on Ma to fall apart in any little emergency," he told Fiona.

They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Maggie left them at the hospital entrance and went off to park.

When she located them in Admissions, Fiona was just settling into a wheelchair. "I want my mother-in-law to come with me," she told the nurse.

"Only Daddy can come with you," the nurse said. "Grandma has to stay in the waiting room."

Grandma?

"I don't want Daddy, I want Grandma!" Fiona cried, sounding about six years old.

"Here we go now," the nurse said. She wheeled her away. Jesse followed, wearing that hurt, undefended expression Maggie had seen so often lately.

Maggie went to the waiting room, which was the size of a football field.

A vast expanse of beige carpeting was broken up by clustered arrangements of beige vinyl couches and chairs. She settled on an empty couch and chose a ruffle-edged magazine from the beige wooden end table. "How to Keep the Zing! in Your Marriage," the first article was called. It instructed her to be unpredictable; greet her husband after work wearing nothing but a black lace apron. Ira would think she had lost her mind.

Not to mention Jesse and Fiona and the five enchanted little girls. She wished she had thought to bring her knitting. She wasn't that much of a knitter-her stitches had a way of galloping along for a few inches and then squinching up in tight little puckers, reminding her of a car that bucks and stalls-but lately she had thrown herself into a purple football jersey for the baby. (It was going to be a boy; everybody assumed so, and only boys' names had been considered.)

She set the magazine aside and went over to the flank of pay phones that lined one wall. First she dialed the number at home. When no one answered-not even Daisy, who was usually back from school by three-she checked her watch and discovered it was barely two o'clock. She had thought it was much later. She dialed Ira's work number. "Sam's Frame Shop," he answered.

"Ira?" she said. "Guess what-I'm at the hospital."

"You are? What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. Fiona's having her baby."

"Oh," he said. "I thought you'd crashed the car or something."

"You want to come wait with me? It's going to be a while yet."

"Well, maybe I should go home to watch Daisy," Ira said.

Maggie sighed. "Daisy's at school," she told him. "And anyhow, she hasn't needed watching in years."

"You'll want someone to put supper on, though."

She gave up on him. (Lord forbid her deathbed should be in a hospital; he would probably not attend it.) She said, "Well, suit yourself, Ira, but I would think you'd want to see your own grandchild."

"I'll see him soon enough, won't I?" Ira asked.

Maggie glimpsed Jesse across the waiting room. "I have to go now," she said, and she hung up. "Jesse?" she said, hurrying toward him. "What's the news?"

"Everything's fine. Or so they claim."

"How's Fiona?"

"She's scared," he said, "and I try to calm her down, but those hospital people keep shooing me out. Anytime someone official comes they ask me to leave."

So much for modern developments, Maggie thought. Men were still being shielded from everything truly important.

Jesse went back to Fiona but kept Maggie posted, reappearing every half hour or so to speak knowingly of stages and centimeters. "It's going pretty fast now," he said once, and another time, "Many people believe that an eight-months baby is more at risk than a seven-months baby, but that's an old wives' tale. It's just a superstition." His hair stood up in thick tufts, like wind-tossed grass. Maggie restrained herself from reaching out to smooth it. Unexpectedly, he reminded her of Ira. However different the two might be in other ways, they both had this notion that reading up on something, getting equipped for something, would put them in control.

She considered going home for a while (it was nearly five o'clock) but she knew she would only fret and pace, so she stayed where she was and kept in touch by telephone. Daisy reported that Ira was fixing a pancake supper. "No green vegetable?" Maggie asked. "Where's the green vegetable?" Ira got on the phone to assure her that he was serving spiced crab-apple rings on the side. "Spice crab-apple rings are not green, Ira," Maggie said. She felt herself growing weepy. She ought to be at home supervising her family's nutrition; she ought to be storming the labor room to comfort Fiona; she ought to take Jesse in her arms and rock him because he was nothing but a child still, much too young for what was happening to him. But here she stood, clutching a salty-smelling receiver in a public phone hutch. Her stomach felt all knotted and tight. It hadn't been so long since she was a patient in the labor room herself, and her muscles recalled it exactly.

She told Ira goodbye and went through the doors where Jesse kept disappearing. She traveled down a corridor, hoping for, oh, at least a nursery full of newborns to cheer her up. She passed another, smaller waiting room, perhaps leading to some lab or private office. An elderly couple sat there on two molded plastic chairs, and across from them sat a burly man in paint-spattered coveralls. As Maggie slowed to glance in, a nurse called, "Mr. Plum?" and the elderly man rose and went toward a back room, leaving behind a brand new magazine. Maggie breezed in as if she had a perfect right to be there and scooped up the magazine, at the same time performing a clumsy half-curtsy to show the old woman she meant no intrusion. She settled beside the man in coveralls. Never mind that this was just another ladies' magazine; at least the pages still gave off a shellacked, unused smell and the movie stars spilling their secrets were wearing up-to-date hairdos. She skimmed an article about a new kind of diet. You picked one favorite food and ate all you wanted, three times a day, nothing else besides. Maggie would have chosen beef-and-bean burritos from Lexington Market.

In the back room, the nurse said, "Now, Mr. Plum, I'm giving you this jar for urine."

"My what?"

"Urine."

"How's that?"

"It's for urine!"

"Speak up-I can't hear you."

"Urine, I said! You take this jar home! You collect all your urine! For twenty-four hours! You bring the jar back!"

In the chair across from Maggie, the wife gave an embarrassed titter.

"He's deaf as a doorknob," she told Maggie. "Has to have everything shouted out for all and sundry to hear."

Maggie smiled and shook her head, not knowing how else to respond. Then the man in coveralls stirred. He placed his great, furry fists on his knees. He cleared his throat. "You know," he said, "it's the funniest thing. I can catch that nurse's voice all right but I don't understand a single word she's saying."

Maggie's eyes filled with ears. She dropped her magazine and groped in her purse for a Kleenex, and the man said, "Lady? You okay?"

She couldn't tell him it was his kindness that had undone her-such delicacy, in such an unlikely-looking person-and so she said, "It's my son, he's having a baby. I mean my son's wife is."

The man and the old woman waited, their faces prepared to take on the proper look of shock and pity as soon as they heard the bad part. And she couldn't tell them, "It's all my fault, I set everything pell-mell in motion not once considering the consequences," so instead she said, "It's months and months too early, it's nowhere near her due date ..."

The man clicked his tongue. His forehead furrowed upon itself like cloth.

The old woman said, "Oh, my stars, you must be worried sick. But don't you give up hope, because my nephew Brady's wife, Angela ..."

And that was why, when Jesse passed down the corridor from the delivery room a few minutes later, he found his mother in a little side cubicle surrounded by a huddle of strangers. They were patting her and murmuring consolations-an old woman, a workman of some sort, a nurse with a clipboard, and a stooped old man clutching a gigantic empty jar. "Ma?"

Jesse said, stepping in. "The baby's here, and both of them are fine."

"Praise Jesus!" the old woman shouted, flinging her hands toward the ceiling.

"The only trouble is," Jesse said, eyeing the woman dubiously, "it's a girl. I wasn't counting on a girl, somehow. ''

"You would let a thing like that bother you?" the old woman demanded. "At a moment such as this? That child was snatched from the jaws of death!''

"From . . . ?" Jesse said. Then he said, "No, it's just a superstition that an eight-months-"

"Let's get out of here," Maggie said, and she fought her way free of the huddle to grab his arm and steer him away.

How that baby took over the house! Her cries of fury and her mourning-dove coos, her mingled smells of powder and ammonia, her wheeling arms and legs. She had

Fiona's coloring but Jesse's spirit and his feistiness (no Lady-Baby this time). Her small, fine features were scrunched very close together low down in her face, so when Fiona combed her bit of hair into a sprout on top of her head she resembled a Kewpie doll; and like a doll she was trundled everywhere by the enchanted little girls, who would have cut school if permitted, just to lug her about by the armpits and shake her rattle too close to her eyes and hang over her, breathing heavily, while Maggie bathed her. Even Ira showed some interest, although he pretended not to. "Let me know when she's big enough to play baseball," he said, but as early as the second week, Maggie caught him taking sidelong peeks into the bureau drawer where Leroy slept, and by the time she had learned to sit up, the two of them were deep in those exclusive conversations of theirs.

And Jesse? He was devoted-always offering to help out, sometimes making a nuisance of himself, to hear Fiona tell it. He walked Leroy during her fussy spells, and he left his warm bed to burp her and then carry her back to Maggie's room after the two o'clock feeding. And once, when Maggie took Fiona shopping, he spent a whole Saturday morning solely in charge, returning Leroy none the worse for wear, although the careful way he had dressed her-with her overall straps mistakenly clamping down her collar, severely mashing the double row of ruffles-made Maggie feel sad, for some reason. He claimed that he had never wanted a boy at all; or if he had, he couldn't remember why. "Girls are perfect," he said. "Leroy is perfect. Except, you know ..."

"Except?" Maggie asked.

"Well, it's just that . . . shoot, before she was born I had this sort of, like, anticipation. And now I've got nothing to anticipate, you know?"

"Oh, that'll pass," Maggie said. "Don't worry."

But later, to Ira, she said, "I never heard of a father getting postpartum blues."

Maybe if the mother didn't, the father did; was that the way it worked?

For Fiona herself was cheerful and oblivious. Often as she flitted around the baby she seemed more like one of the enchanted little girls than like a mother. She paid too much heed to Leroy's appurtenances, Maggie felt-to her frilly clothes, her ribboned sprout of hair. Or maybe it just seemed so. Maybe Maggie was jealous. It was true that she hated to relinquish the baby when she went off to work every morning. "How can I leave her?"

she wailed to Ira. "Fiona doesn't know the first little bit about child care."

"Well, only one way she's ever going to learn," Ira said. And so Maggie left, hanging back internally, and called home several times a day to see how things were going. But they were always going fine.

In the nursing home one afternoon she heard a middle-aged visitor talking to his mother-a vacant, slack-jawed woman in a wheelchair. He told her how his wife was, how the kids were. His mother smoothed her lap robe. He told her how his job was. His mother plucked at a bit of lint and flicked it onto the floor. He told her about a postcard that had come for her at the house. The church was holding an Easter bazaar and they wanted her to check off which task she would volunteer for. This struck the son as comical, in view of his mother's disabilities. "They offered you your choice," he said, chuckling. "You could clerk at the needlework booth or you could tend the babies." His mother's hands grew still. She raised her head. Her face lit up and flowered. "Oh!" she cried softly. "I' tend the babies!"

Maggie knew just how she felt.

Leroy was a long, thin infant, and Fiona worried she was outgrowing the bureau drawer she slept in. "When are you going to get started on that cradle?" she asked Jesse, and Jesse said, "Any day now."

Maggie said, "Maybe we should just buy a crib. A cradle's for a newborn; she wouldn't fit it for long."

But Fiona said, "No, I set my heart on a cradle." She told Jesse. "You promised."

"I don't remember promising."

"Well, you did," she said.

"All right! I'll get to it! Didn't I tell you I would?"

"You don't have to shout at me," she said.

"I'm not shouting."

"Yes, you are."

"Am not."

"Are too."

"Children! Children!" Maggie said, pretending she was joking.

But only pretending.

Once, Fiona spent the night at her sister's, snatching up the baby and stomping out after a fight. Or not a fight exactly but a little misunderstanding: The band was playing at a club in downtown Baltimore and Fiona planned to come along, as usual, till Jesse worried aloud that Leroy had a cold and shouldn't be left. Fiona said Maggie would tend her just fine and Jesse said a baby with a cold needed her mother and then Fiona said it was amazing how he was so considerate of that baby but so inconsiderate of his wife and then Jesse said . . .

Well.

Fiona left and did not come back until morning; Maggie feared she was gone for good, endangering that poor sick baby, who needed much more nursing than Fiona could provide. She must have been planning to desert them all along, in fact. Why, just look at her soapbox! Wasn't it odd that for almost a year now she had borne off to the bathroom twice daily a tortoiseshell soapbox, a tube of Aim toothpaste (not the Morans' brand), and a toothbrush in a plastic cylinder? And that her toilet supplies were continually stored in a clear vinyl travel case on the bureau? She might as well be a guest. She had never meant to settle in permanently.

"Go after her," Maggie told Jesse, but Jesse asked, "Why should I? She's the one who walked out." He was at work when Fiona returned the next day, wan and puffy-eyed. Strands of her uncombed hair mingled with the fake-fur trim of her windbreaker hood, and Leroy was wrapped clumsily in a garish daisy-square afghan that must have belonged to the sister.

What Maggie's mother said was true: The generations were sliding downhill in this family. They were descending in every respect, not just in their professions and their educations but in the way they reared their children and the way they ran their households. ("How have you let things get so common?" Maggie heard again in her memory.) Mrs. Daley stood over the sleeping Leroy and pleated her lips in disapproval. "They would put an infant in a bureau drawer? They would let her stay in here with you and Ira? What can they be thinking of? It must be that Fiona person.

Really, Maggie, that Fiona is so ... Why, she isn't even a Baltimore girl! Anyone who would pronounce Wicomico as Weeko-Meeko! And what is that racket I'm hearing?"

Maggie tilted her head to listen. "It's Canned Heat," she decided.

"Candide? I'm not asking the name of it; I mean why is it playing? When you children were small I played Beethoven and Brahms, I played all of Wagner's operas!"

Yes, and Maggie could still recall her itch of boredom as Wagner's grandiose weight crashed through the house. And her frustration when, beginning some important story with "Me and Emma went to-" she had been cut short by her mother. (" 'Emma and I,' if you please.") She had sworn never to do that to her own children, preferring to hear what it was they had to say and let the grammar take care of itself. Not that it had done so, at least not in Jesse's case.

Maybe her own downhill slide was deliberate. If so, she owed Jesse an apology. Maybe he was just carrying out her secret scheme for revolution, and would otherwise-who knows?-have gone on to be a lawyer like Mrs.

Daley's father.

Well, too late now.

Leroy learned to crawl and she crawled right out of her bureau drawer, and the next day Ira came home with a crib. He assembled it, without comment, in his and Maggie's bedroom. Without comment, Fiona watched from the doorway. The skin beneath her eyes had a sallow, soiled look.

On a Saturday in September, they celebrated Ira's father's birthday.

Maggie had made it a tradition to spend his birthday at the Pimlico Race Track-all of them together, even though it meant closing the frame shop.

They would take a huge picnic lunch and a ten-dollar bill for each person to bet with. In times past the whole family had squeezed into Ira's car, but of course that was no longer possible. This year they had Jesse and Fiona (who had been away on their honeymoon the year before), and Leroy too, and even Ira's sister Junie decided she might brave the trip. So Jesse borrowed the van that his band used to transport their instruments, SPIN THE CAT was lettered across its side, the S and the C striped like tigers' tails. They loaded the back with picnic hampers and baby supplies, and then they drove to the shop to pick up Ira's father and sisters. Junie wore her usual going-out costume, everything cut on the bias, and carried a parasol that wouldn't collapse, which caused some trouble when she climbed in. And Dorrie was hugging her Hutzler's coat box, which caused even more trouble. But everyone acted good-natured about it-even Ira's father, who always said he was way too old to make a fuss over birthdays.

It was a beautiful day, the kind that starts out cool until sunlight gently warms your outer layers and then your inner layers. Daisy was trying to get them to sing "Camp-town Races," and Ira's father wore a grudging, self-conscious smile. This was how families ought to be, Maggie thought. And in the bus that carried them in from the parking lot-a bus they half filled, if you counted the picnic hampers balanced on empty seats and the diaper bag and folded stroller blocking the aisle-she felt sorry for their fellow passengers who sat alone or in pairs. Most of them had a workaday attitude. They wore sensible clothes and stern, purposeful expressions, and they were here to win. The Morans were here to celebrate.

They spread out over one whole row of bleachers, parking Leroy alongside in her stroller. Then Mr. Moran, who prided himself on his knowledge of horseflesh, went off to the paddocks to size things up, and Ira went too, to keep him company. Jesse found a couple he knew-a man in motorcycle gear and a slip of a girl in fringed buckskin pants-and disappeared with them; he wasn't much of a gambler. The women settled down to select their horses by the ring of their names, which was a method that seemed to work about as well as any other. Maggie favored one called Infinite Mercy, but Junie disagreed. She said that didn't sound to her like a horse with enough fight to it.

Because of the baby, who was teething or something and acted a little fretful, they staggered their trips to the betting window. Fiona went first with Ira's sisters, while Maggie stayed behind with Leroy and Daisy. Then the others came back and Maggie and Daisy went, Daisy bristling with good advice. "What you do," she said, "is put two dollars to show. That's safest." But Maggie said, "If I'd wanted safe I'd be sitting at home," and bet all ten dollars on Number Four to win. (In the past she'd argued for the family to pool every bit of their money and head straight for the fifty-dollar-minimum window, a dangerous and exciting spot she'd never so much as approached, but she knew by now not to bother trying.) Along the way they ran into Ira and his father, who were discussing statistics. The jockeys' weights, their previous records, the horses' fastest times and what kind of turf they did best on-there was plenty to consider, if you cared. Maggie bet her ten dollars and left, while Daisy joined the men, and the three of them stood deliberating.

"This kid is wearing me out," Fiona said when Maggie got back. Leroy evidently didn't want to be carried and she kept straining toward the ground, which was littered with beer-can tabs and cigarette butts.

Dorrie, who was supposed to be helping, had opened her coat box instead and was laying an orderly row of marshmallows from one end of the bleacher to the other. Maggie said, "Here, I'll take her, poor lamb," and she bore Leroy off to the railing to admire the horses, which were just assembling at the starting gate with skittery, mincing steps. "What do horses say?" Maggie asked. "Nicker-nicker-nicker!" she supplied. Ira and his father returned, still arguing. Their subject now was the sheet of racing tips that Mr. Moran had purchased from a man with no teeth. "Which ones did you vote for?" Maggie asked them.

"You don't vote, Maggie," Ira told her. The horses took off, looking somehow quaint and toylike. They galloped past with a sound that reminded her of a flag ruffling in the wind. Then, just like that, the race was finished. "So soon!" Maggie lamented. She never could get over how quickly it all happened; there was hardly anything to watch. "Really baseball gives a better sense of time," she told the baby.

The results lit up the electric billboard: Number Four was nowhere to be seen. That struck Maggie as a relief, in a way. She wouldn't need to make any more choices. In fact, the only person who came out ahead was Mr. Moran. He had won six dollars on Number Eight, a horse his tip sheet had recommended. "See there?" he asked Ira.

Daisy hadn't bet at all; she was saving for a race she felt surer of.

Maggie gave the baby to Daisy and started unpacking their lunch. "There's ham on rye, turkey on white, roast beef on whole wheat," she announced.

"There's chicken salad, deviled eggs, potato salad, and coleslaw.

Peaches, fresh strawberries, and melon balls. Don't forget to save room for the birthday cake." The people nearby were munching on junk food bought right there at the track. They stared curiously at the hampers, each one of which Daisy lined with a starched checkered cloth tucked into little pleats around the edges. Maggie passed out napkins. " Where's Jesse?" she asked, searching the crowd.

"I have no idea," Fiona said. Somehow, she had ended up with Leroy again.

She jiggled her sharply against her shoulder, while Leroy screwed up her face and made fussing noises. Well, Maggie could have predicted as much.

You don't use such a rapid rhythm with a baby; shouldn't Fiona have learned that by now? Wouldn't simple instinct have informed her? Maggie felt an edgy little poke of irritation in the small of her back. To be fair, it wasn't Fiona who annoyed her so much as the fussing-Leroy's jagged "eh, eh." If Maggie weren't loading paper plates she could have taken over herself, but as it was, all she could do was make suggestions.

"Try putting her in the stroller, Fiona. Maybe she'll fall asleep."

"She won't fall asleep; she'll just climb out again," Fiona said. "Oh, where is Jesse?"

"Daisy, go look for your brother," Maggie commanded.

"I can't; I'm eating."

"Go anyway. For goodness' sake, I can't do everything."

"Is it my fault he went off with his dumb friends somewhere?" Daisy asked. "I just got started on my sandwich."

"Now listen, young lady . . . Ira?"

But Ira and his father had left again for the betting windows. Maggie said, "Oh for-Dorrie, could you please go and hunt Jesse for me?''

"Well, but I am dealing out these here marshmallows," Dorrie said.

The marshmallows traveled in a perfect, unbroken row the length of their bleacher, like a dotted line. As a result, none of them could sit down.

People kept pausing at the far end, meaning to take a seat, but then they saw the marshmallows and moved on. Maggie sighed. Behind her back, a bugle call floated on the clear, still air, but Maggie, facing the bleachers, went on searching the crowd for Jesse. Then Junie nudged a few of Dome's marsh-mallows out of line and sat down very suddenly, clutching her parasol with both hands. "Maggie," she murmured, "I am feeling just so, I don't know, all at once. ..."

"Take a deep breath," Maggie said briskly. This happened, from time to time. "Remind yourself you're here as someone else."

"I believe I'm going to faint," Junie said, and without warning she swung her spike-heeled sandals up and lay down flat upon the bleacher. The parasol remained in both her hands, rising from her chest as if planted there. Dorrie rushed distractedly around her, trying to retrieve as many marshmallows as possible.

"Daisy, is that your brother up there with those people?" Maggie asked.

Daisy said, "Where?" but Fiona was quicker. She wheeled and said, "It most certainly is." Then she shrieked, "Jesse Moran! You get your ass on down here!"

Her voice was that stringy, piercing kind. Everybody stared. Maggie said, "Oh, well, I wouldn't-"

"Your hear me?" Fiona shrieked, and Leroy started crying in earnest.

"There's no need to shout, Fiona," Maggie said.

Fiona said, "What?"

She glared at Maggie, ignoring the squalling baby. It was one of those moments when Maggie just wanted to back up and start over. (She had always felt paralyzed in the presence of an angry woman.) Meanwhile Jesse, who couldn't have missed hearing his name, began to thread his way toward them. Maggie said, "Oh, here he comes!"

"You're telling me not to shout at my own husband?" Fiona asked.

She was shouting even now. She had to, over the cries of the baby.

Leroy's face was red, and spikes of damp hair were plastered to her forehead. She looked sort of homely, to be frank. Maggie felt an urge to walk off from this group, pretend they had nothing to do with her; but instead she made her voice go light and she said, "No, I only meant he wasn't that far from us, you see-"

"You meant nothing of the sort," Fiona said, squeezing the baby too tightly. "You're trying to run us, just like always; trying to run our lives."

"No, really, Fiona-"

"What's up?" Jesse asked breezily, arriving among them.

"Ma and Fiona are having a fight," Daisy said. She took a dainty nibble from her sandwich.

"We are not!" Maggie cried. "I merely suggested-"

"A fight?" Ira said. "What?"

He and Mr. Moran were all at once standing in the aisle behind Jesse.

"What's going on here?" he asked above Leroy's cries.

Maggie told him, "Nothing's going on! For Lord's sake, all I said was-"

"Can't you folks be left to your own devices for even a minute?" Ira asked. "And why is Junie lying down like that? How do these things happen so fast."

Unfair, unfair. To hear him talk, you would think they had such scenes every day. You would think that Ira himself was in line for the Nobel Peace Prize. "For your information," Maggie told him, "I was just standing here minding my own business-"

"You have never once in all the time I've known you managed to mind your own business," Fiona said.

"Now cool it, Fiona," Jesse said.

"And you!" Fiona screeched, turning on him. "You think this baby is just mine? How come I always get stuck with her while you go off with your buddies, answer me that!"

"Those weren't my buddies; they were only-"

"He was drinking with them too," Daisy murmured, with her eyes on her sandwich.

"Well, big deal," Jesse told her.

"Drinking from this silver flat kind of bottle that belonged to that girl."

"So what if I was, Miss Goody-Goody?"

"Now listen," Ira said. "Let's just all sit down a minute and get a hold of ourselves. We're blocking people's view."

He sat, setting an example. Then he looked behind him.

"My marshmallows!" Dorrie squawked.

"You can't leave your marshmallows here, Dorrie. No one has room to sit."

"You messed up my marshmallows!"

"I believe I'm going to be ill," Junie said, speaking upward into the spokes of her parasol.

Leroy's crying had reached the stage where she had to fight for each breath.

Ira stood up again, dusting off the seat of his pants. He said, "Now listen, folks-"

"Will you stop calling us/o/fa?" Fiona demanded.

Ira halted, looking startled.

Maggie felt a tug on her sleeve and turned. It was Mr. Moran, who had at some point worked around behind her. He held up a ticket. "What?" she asked.

"I won."

"Won what?"

"I won that last race! My horse came in first."

"Oh, the race," she said. "Well, isn't that ..."

But her attention veered toward Fiona, who was reeling off a list of wrongs that she seemed to have been saving up for Jesse all these months.

"... knew from the start I'd be a fool to marry you; didn't I say so? But you were so gung-ho, you and your pacifiers and your Dr. Spock . . ."

The people in the bleachers behind them were gazing pointedly in different directions, but they sent each other meaningful glances and small, secret smiles. The Morans had turned into spectacles. Maggie couldn't bear it. She said, "Please! Can't we just sit down?"

"You and your famous cradle," Fiona told Jesse, "that you didn't build one stick of after you promised, you swore to me-"

"I never swore to you! Where do you keep coming up with this cradle business from?"

"You swore on the Bible," Fiona told him.

"Well, good God Almighty! I mean, maybe it crossed my mind once to build one, but I'd have had to be crazy to go through with it, I can see it now: Dad standing there criticizing every little hammer blow, letting me know what a hopeless clod I am, and you'd be agreeing with him just like always, I bet, by the time I was finished. No way would I let myself in for that!"

"Well, you bought the wood, didn't you?"

"What wood?"

"You bought those long wooden rods."

"Rods? For a cradle? I never bought any rods."

"You mother told me-"

"How would I use rods to build a cradle?"

"Spindles, she told me."

They both looked at Maggie. Coincidentally, the baby paused just then for a deep, hiccuping breath. A bass voice rumbled over the loudspeaker, announcing that Misappropriation had been scratched.

Ira cleared his throat and said, "Are you talking about doweling rods?

Those were mine."

"Ira, no," Maggie wailed, because there was still a chance they could smooth things over, if only he wouldn't insist on spelling out every boring little fact. "They were the spindles for your cradle," she told Jesse. "You already had the blueprints. Right?"

"What blueprints? All I said was-"

"If I remember correctly," Ira interrupted in his stuffy way, "those rods were purchased for the drying rack I built on the back porch. You've all seen that drying rack."

"Drying rack," Fiona said. She continued looking at Maggie.

"Oh, well," Maggie said, "this cradle business is so silly, isn't it? I mean, it's like the dime-store necklace that relatives start quarreling over after the funeral. It's just a ... And besides, Leroy couldn't even use a cradle anymore! She's got that nice crib Ira bought."

Leroy remained quiet, still hiccuping, gazing at Maggie intently.

"I married you for that cradle," Fiona told Jesse.

"Well, that's plain ridiculous!" Maggie said. "For a cradle! I never heard such a-"

"Maggie, enough," Ira said.

She stopped, with her mouth open.

"If you married Jesse for a cradle," Ira told Fiona, "you were sadly mistaken."

"Oh, Ira!" Maggie cried.

"Shut up, Maggie. She had no business telling you that," Ira said to Fiona. "It's Maggie's weakness: She believes it's all right to alter people's lives. She thinks the people she loves are better than they really are, and so then she starts changing things around to suit her view of them."

"That's not one bit true," Maggie said.

"But the fact is," Ira told Fiona calmly, "Jesse is not capable of following through with anything, not even a simple cradle. He's got some lack; I know he's my son, but he's got some lack, and you might as well face up to it. He's not a persevering kind of person. He lost that job of his a month ago and he hangs out every day with his pals instead of looking for work.''

Maggie and Fiona, together, said, "What?"

"They found out he wasn't a high school graduate," Ira told them. And then, as an afterthought: "He's seeing another girl too."

Jesse said, "What are you talking about? That girl is just a friend."

"I don't know her name," Ira said, "but she belongs to a rock group called Babies in Trouble."

"We're just good friends, I tell you! That girl is Dave's girl!"

Fiona seemed to be made of china. Her face was dead white and still; her pupils were black pinpoints.

"If you knew this all along," Maggie demanded of Ira, "why didn't you say something?"

"I didn't feel right about it. I for one don't hold with changing people's worlds around," Ira said. And then (just as Maggie was getting ready to hate him) his face sagged and he dropped wearily onto the bleacher. "I shouldn't have done it now, either," he said.

He had dislodged a whole section of marshmallows, but Dorrie, who could be sensitive to atmospheres, merely bent in silence to collect them.

Fiona held out her palm. "Give me the keys," she told Jesse.

"Huh?"

"The keys to the van. Hand them over."

"Where are you going?" Jesse asked her.

"I don't know! How would I know? I just have to get out of here."

"Fiona, I only ever talked to that girl because she didn't think I was some kind of clod like everyone else seems to do. You've got to believe me, Fiona."

"The keys," Fiona said.

Ira said, "Let her have them, Jesse."

"But-"

"We'll take a bus."

. Jesse reached into the rear pocket of his jeans. He brought out a cluster of keys attached to a miniature black rubber gym shoe. "So will you be at the house? Or what," he said.

"I have no idea," Fiona told him, and she snapped the keys out of his grasp.

"Well, where will you be? At your sister's?"

"Anywhere. None of your business. / don't know where. I just want to get on with my life," she said.

And she hoisted the baby higher on her hip and stalked off, leaving behind the diaper bag and the stroller and her paper plate of lunch with the potato salad turning a pathetic shade of ivory.

"She'll come around," Maggie told Jesse. Then she said, "I will never forgive you for this, Ira Moran."

She felt another tug on her sleeve and she turned. Ira's father was still holding up his ticket. ' 'I was right to buy that tip sheet," he said.

"What does Ira know about tip sheets?"

"Nothing," Maggie said furiously, and she started re-wrapping Fiona's sandwich.

All around her she heard murmuring, like ripples widening across a pond:

"What'd he say?"

"Tip sheet."

"What'd she say?"

"Nothing."

"She did say something, I saw her lips move."

"She said, 'Nothing.' "

"But I thought I saw-"

Maggie straightened and faced the rows of people on the bleachers. "I said, 'Nothing,' is what I said," she called out clearly.

Somebody sucked in a breath. They all looked elsewhere.

It was amazing, Ira often said, how people fooled themselves into believing what they wanted to. (How Maggie fooled herself, he meant.) He said it when Maggie threatened to sue the Police Department that time they charged Jesse with Drunk and Disorderly. He said it when she swore that Spin the Cat sounded better than the Beatles. And he said it again when she refused to accept that Fiona was gone for good.

That evening after the races Maggie sat up late with Jesse, pretending to be knitting although she ripped out as much as she added. Jesse drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. "Can't you sit still for once?"

Maggie asked him, and then she said, "Maybe you should try calling her sister again."

"I already tried three times, for God's sake. They must be just letting it ring."

"Maybe you should go in person."

"That would be worse," Jesse said. "Pounding on the door while they hid inside and listened. I bet they'd be laughing and looking over at each other and making these goggly eyes."

"They wouldn't do that!"

"I guess I'll take the van back to Dave," Jesse said.

He rose to leave. Maggie didn't try to stop him, because she figured he was secretly going to the sister's place after all.

The van had been parked out front when they returned from Pimlico. For one relieved moment, everyone assumed Fiona was in the house. And the keys were on top of the bookcase just inside the door, where the family always left keys and stray gloves and notes saying when they'd be back.

But there wasn't any note from Fiona. In the room she shared with Jesse, the unmade bed had a frozen look. Every hillock of the sheets appeared to have hardened. In Maggie's and Ira's room the crib was empty and desolate. However, this couldn't be a permanent absence. Nothing was packed; nothing was missing. Even Fiona's toilet articles still sat on the bureau in their travel case. "See there?" Maggie told Jesse, because he was worried too, she could tell; and she pointed to the travel case.

"Oh. Right," he said, reassured. She crossed the hall to the bathroom and found the usual fleet of rubber ducks and tugboats. "You people," she said happily. Emerging, passing Jesse's room once more, she found him standing in front of the bureau with his eyes half shut and his nose buried deep in Fiona's soapbox. She understood him perfectly. Smells could bring a person back clearer than pictures, even; didn't she know that?

When the night stretched on and Jesse didn't return, she told herself that he must have found Fiona. They must be having a nice long talk. She ripped out all her garbled rows of knitting and rewound her ball of yarn and went to bed. In the dark, Ira mumbled, "Jesse back yet?"

"No, nor Fiona, either one," she said.

"Oh, well, Fiona," he said. "Fiona's gone for good."

There was a sudden clarity to his voice. It was the voice of someone talking in his sleep, which made his words seem oracular and final.

Maggie felt a clean jolt of anger. Easy for him to say! He could toss off people without a thought.

It struck her as very significant that Ira's idea of entertainment was those interminable books about men who sailed the Atlantic absolutely alone.

He was right, though: In the morning, Fiona was still missing. Jesse came down to breakfast with that same stunned expression on his face. Maggie hated to ask, but finally she said, "Honey? You didn't find her?"

"No," he said shortly, and then he requested the marmalade in a way that shut off all further questions.

Not till that afternoon did the notion of foul play occur to her. How could they have missed it? Of course: No one traveling with an infant would leave behind all Fiona had left-the diaper bag, the stroller, the pink plastic training cup Leroy liked to drink her juice from. Someone must have kidnapped them, or worse: shot them during a street crime. The police would have to be notified this instant. She said as much to Ira, who was reading the Sunday paper in the living room. Ira didn't even look up. "Spare yourself the embarrassment, Maggie," he said quietly.

"Embarrassment?"

"She's walked out of her own free will. Don't bother the police with this."

"Ira, young mothers do not walk out with just their purses. They pack.

They have to! Think," she said. "Remember all she took with her on a simple trip to Pimlico. You know what I suspect? I suspect she came back here, parked the van, carried Leroy to the grocery store for teething biscuits-I heard her say yesterday morning she was low on teething biscuits-and stepped smack into a holdup scene. You've read how robbers always choose women and children for hostages! It's more effective that way. It gets results."

Ira regarded her almost absently over the top of his paper, as if he found her just marginally interesting.

"Why, she's even left behind her soap! Her toothbrush!" she told Ira.

"Her travel case," Ira pointed out.

"Yes, and if she'd gone of her own free will-"

"Her travel case, Maggie, like she'd use in a hotel. But now she's back at, I don't know, her sister's or her mother's, where her real belongings are, and she doesn't need a travel case."

"Oh, that's nonsense," Maggie said. "And just look at her closet. It's full of clothes."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Of course. It's the first thing I checked."

"Are you sure there's nothing missing? Her favorite sweater? That jacket she's so keen on?"

Maggie considered a moment. Then she stood up and went down the hall to Jesse's room.

Jesse lay on the bed, fully dressed, with his arms folded behind his head. He glanced over at her as she entered. "Excuse me a moment," she told him, and she opened the door of his closet.

Fiona's clothes hung inside, all right, but not her wind-breaker or that big striped duster she liked to wear around the house. There were only two or three skirts (she hardly ever wore skirts), a few blouses, and a ruffled dress that she'd always claimed made her look fat. Maggie spun around and went to Fiona's bureau. Jesse watched from the bed. She jerked open a drawer and found a single pair of blue jeans (artificially whitened with bleach, a process that was no longer stylish) and below them two turtle-necks from last winter and below those a pair of maternity slacks with an elastic panel in front. It was like the layers in an archaeological dig. Maggie had the fleeting fantasy that if she delved farther she would find cheerleader sweaters, then grade-school pinafores, then Fiona's baby clothes. She smoothed the layers down again and shut the drawer.

"But where would she be?" she asked Jesse.

It seemed for a long while that he wasn't going to answer. Finally, though, he said, "I guess her sister's."

"You said you didn't find her there."

"I didn't go there."

She thought that over. Then she said, "Oh, Jesse."

"I'll be damned if I make a fool of myself."

"Jesse, honey-"

"If I have to beg her then I'd sooner not have her," he said.

And he turned over with his face to the wall, ending the conversation.

It was two or three days afterward that Fiona's, sister called. She said, "Mrs. Moran?" in that braying voice that Maggie instantly recognized.

"This is Crystal Stuckey," she said. "Fiona's sister?"

"Oh, yes!"

"And I want to know if you'll be home for the next little bit so we can come by and pick up her things."

"Yes, of course, come right away," Maggie said. Because Jesse was home too, as it happened-lying on his bed again. She went to find him as soon as she hung up. "That was Fiona's sister," she said. "Christina?"

He slid his eyes toward her. "Crystal," he said.

"Crystal. They're coming to get her things."

He sat up slowly and swung his boots over the side of the bed.

"I'll go out and do some shopping," Maggie told him.

"What? No, wait."

"You'll have the place to yourselves."

"Wait, don't go. How will I-? Maybe we'll need you."

"Need me? What for?"

"I don't want to say the wrong thing to her," he said.

"Honey, I'm sure you won't say the wrong thing."

"Ma. Please," he said.

So she stayed, but she went to her own room, out of the way. Her room was at the front of the house, which was why, when a car drove up, she was able to draw aside the curtain and see who was coming. It was Crystal and a beefy young man, no doubt the famous boyfriend Fiona was always referring to. That was whom Crystal had meant by "we"; Fiona was nowhere in evidence. Maggie dropped the curtain. She heard the doorbell ring; she heard Jesse shout, "Coming!" and clatter down the stairs two at a time.

Then, after a pause, she heard a brief mumble. The door slammed shut again. Had he kicked them out, or what? She lifted the curtain once more and peered down, but it was Jesse she saw, not the guests-Jesse tearing off down the sidewalk, shrugging himself into his black leather jacket as he went. In the downstairs hall, Crystal called, "Mrs. Moran?"-her voice less braying now, more tentative.

"Just a minute," Maggie said.

Crystal and her boyfriend had brought cartons from the liquor store, and Maggie helped fill them. Or tried to help. She slid a blouse from a hanger and folded it slowly, regretfully, but Crystal said, "You can just give those blouses to the veterans. Don't bother with nothing synthetic, Fiona told me. She's living back at home now and she hasn't got much closet room."

Maggie said, "Ah," and laid the blouse aside. She felt a twinge of envy.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to save only what was first-class and genuine and pure, and walk out on everything else! When Crystal and the boyfriend drove off, all they left behind was the chaff.

Then Jesse found a job at a record store and stopped lying around on his bed so much of the time; and Daisy and the enchanted little girls returned to Mrs. Perfect, Maggie was on her own again. Just like that, she was deprived of all the gossip and eventfulness and the peeks into other households that children can provide. It was then she started making her spy trips to Cartwheel, not that those were ever very satisfying; or sometimes after work she would choose to walk to the frame shop rather than continue sitting in an empty house. But then she would wonder why she had come, for Ira was usually too busy to talk to her and anyhow, he said, he'd be home in just a couple of hours, wouldn't he? What was it she was hanging about for?

So she would climb the stairs to his family's apartment, and she'd pass a bit of time listening to his sisters recount the latest soap opera or his father list his aches and pains. In addition to his so-called weak heart, Mr. Moran suffered from arthritis and his vision was failing. He was over eighty, after all. The men in that family had traditionally fathered their children so late in life that when Mr. Moran talked about his great-grandfather, he was referring to a man who'd been born in the s.

That had never struck Maggie before, but now it seemed positively creepy.

What an elderly, faltering atmosphere she lived in! Her mornings at the nursing home, her afternoons at the Morans', her evenings with Ira's solitaire games . . . She drew her sweater more tightly around her and clucked at news of her father-in-law's indigestion. "Used to be I could eat anything," he told her. "What has happened here?" He peered at her with his glintless eyes, as if expecting an answer. Lately his upper lids had developed heavy, pouched folds; his Cherokee grandmother emerged more clearly year by year. "Rona never had the remotest inkling," he told Maggie. Rona was Ira's mother. "She died before she went through all this," he said. "Wrinkles and gnarls and creaky joints and heartburn-she missed out on it."

"Well, but she had other pains," Maggie reminded him. "Maybe worse ones."

"It's like she didn't live a real life," he said, not listening. "I mean all of life, the whole messy kit and caboodle that comes at the end."

He sounded peevish; he seemed to think his wife had got away with something. Maggie clucked again and patted his hand. It felt the way she imagined an eagle's foot would feel.

Eventually she would go back downstairs to Ira, coax him to close shop a few minutes early and walk her home. He would slouch along in a kind of dark fog, something inward-turned in his gaze. When they passed the Larkin sisters' house, Maggie always glanced toward it and then looked quickly away. In the old days, wheeling Leroy homeward in her stroller, they would find a rocking horse waiting hopefully on the Larkins's front porch. It would have appeared by magic at the top of the steps where earlier there'd been nothing: a tiny, faded wooden animal with a bashful smile and long black lowered lashes. But now there was no sign of it; even those two ancient ladies knew somehow that the Morans hadn't managed to keep their family together.

Oh, how would Fiona summon the constant vigilance that child required? It wasn't merely a matter of feeding her and changing her. Leroy was one of those dauntless babies who fling themselves brazenly off stair landings and chair edges, trusting someone will be there to catch them. Fiona was nowhere near alert enough. And she had hardly any sense of smell, Maggie had noticed. Why, Maggie could scent a fire before it started, almost.

Maggie could walk through a mall and unerringly detect the smell of foods improperly handled-a musty, etherish sharpness not unlike the smell of a child with a fever. Everybody else would be oblivious, but, "Stop!"

Maggie would call, holding up a palm as the others drifted toward a sandwich stand. "Not there! Anywhere but there!"

She had so much to offer, if only someone would take it.

It seemed pointless to cook a real supper now. Jesse was always out and Daisy most often ate at Mrs. Perfect's, or if forced to eat at home would sulk so that it wasn't worth having her around. So Maggie just heated a couple of frozen dinners or a can of soup. Sometimes she didn't even do that. One evening, when she had sat two hours at the kitchen table staring into space instead of making the trip to the frame shop, Ira walked in and said, "What's for supper?" and she said, "I can't deal with supper! I mean look at this!" and she waved at the can of soup in front of her. "Two and three quarters servings," she read out. "What do they expect, I have two and three quarters people to feed? Or three, and I'll just give one of them less? Or maybe I'm supposed to save the rest for another meal, but do you know how long it would take me to come out even?

First I'd have an extra three quarters of a serving and then six quarters and then nine. I'd have to open four cans of soup before I had leftovers that weren't in fractions. Four cans, I tell you! Four cans of the same single flavor!"

She started crying, letting the tears roll down her cheeks luxuriously.

She felt the way she had felt as a child when she knew she was behaving unreasonably, knew she was shocking the grownups and acting like a perfect horror, but all at once wanted to behave unreasonably and even took some pleasure in it.

Ira might have turned on his heel and walked out; she was half expecting that. Instead, he sank into a chair across from her. He put his elbows on the table and lowered his head into his hands.

Maggie stopped crying. She said, "Ira?"

He didn't answer.

"Ira, what is it?" she asked him.

She rose and bent over him and hugged him. She squatted next to him and tried to peer-up into his face. Had something happened to his father? To one of his sisters? Was he just so disgusted with Maggie that he couldn't endure it? What was it?

The answer seemed to arrive through his back-through the ripple of knobby vertebrae down his C-shaped, warm, thin back. Her fingers felt the answer first.

He was just as sad as Maggie was, and for just the same reasons. He was lonely and tired and lacking in hope and his son had not turned out well and his daughter didn't think much of him, and he still couldn't figure where he had gone wrong.

He let his head fall against her shoulder. His hair was thick and rough, strung through with threads of gray that she had never noticed before, that pierced her heart in a way that her own few gray hairs never had.

She hugged him tightly and nuzzled her face against his cheekbone. She said, "It will be all right. It will be all right."

And it was, eventually. Don't ask her why. Well, for one thing, Jesse really liked his new job, and he seemed bit by bit to recover some of his old spirit. And then Daisy announced at last that Mrs. Perfect was "too tennis-y" and returned to her place in the family. And Maggie gave up her spy trips, as if Leroy and Fiona had been put to rest in her mind somehow. But none of those reasons was the most important one. It was more to do with Ira, she believed-that moment with Ira in the kitchen.

Although they never referred to it afterward, and Ira didn't act any different, and life continued just the same as always.

She straightened in her seat and peered through the windshield, looking for the others. They should be about ready by now. Yes, here came Leroy, just backing out of the house with a suitcase bigger than she was. Ira thudded among things in the trunk and whistled a cheerful tune. "King of the Road," that's what he was whistling. Maggie got out to open the rear door. It seemed to her now that unknowingly, she'd been aiming ever since she woke up this morning toward this single purpose: bringing Leroy and Fiona home at last.

The way Mrs. Stuckey's car was parked behind theirs, they had just enough room to maneuver around it. Or so Ira claimed. Maggie thought he was wrong. "You could manage if the mailbox wasn't there," she said, "but it is there, and you are going to hit it when you veer out."

"Only if I were deaf, dumb, and blind," Ira said.

In the back seat, Fiona gave a small sigh.

"Look," Ira told Maggie. "You go stand beside the mailbox. Let me know when I come close. All I have to do is swing into the yard a few feet, take a sharp right back.onto the driveway-"

"I'm not going to be responsible for that! You'll hit the mailbox and blame me."

"Maybe we should just ask Mom to move the Maverick," Fiona suggested.

Maggie said, "Oh, well," and Ira said, "No, I'm sure we can make it."

Neither one of them wanted Mrs. Stuckey marching out all put-upon.

"All right, then you get behind the wheel," Ira told Maggie, "and I'll direct you."

"Then I'll be the one to hit the mailbox, and I'll still get blamed."

' 'Maggie. There's a good ten feet between the mailbox and the Maverick.

So once you're past the Maverick you just nip back onto the driveway and you're free and clear. I'll tell you when."

Maggie thought that over. She said, "Promise you won't yell if I hit the mailbox?"

"You won't hit the mailbox."

"Promise, Ira."

"Lord above! Fine, I promise."

"And you won't look up at the heavens, or make that hissing noise through your teeth-"

"Maybe I should just go get Mom," Fiona said.

"No, no, this is a cinch," Ira told her. "Any imbecile could handle it; believe me."

Maggie didn't like the sound of that.

Ira climbed out of the car and went to stand by the mailbox. Maggie slid over on the seat. She gripped the steering wheel with both hands and checked the rearview mirror. It was angled wrong, set for Ira's height instead of hers, and she reached up to adjust it. The top of Leroy's head flashed toward her, gleaming dully like the back of a watch case, followed by Ira's lean figure with his elbows cocked and his hands jammed into his rear pockets. The mailbox was a little Quonset hut beside him.

The driver's seat had been set for Ira also, way too far back, but Maggie figured it wouldn't matter for such a short distance. She shifted into reverse. Ira called, "Okay, bring her hard to your left ..."

How come he always referred to difficult tasks as feminine? This car was not a she until it had to perform some complicated maneuver. It was the same for stubborn screws and tight jar lids, and for bulky pieces of furniture as they were being moved.

She swung onto the packed dirt yard and around the Maverick, proceeding perhaps a bit too fast but still in control. Then she reached with her foot for the brake. There wasn't one. Or there was, but it was positioned wrong, closer than she had expected considering that the seat was moved back. Her foot hit the shaft instead of the pedal and the car raced on unimpeded. Ira shouted, "What the-?" Maggie, with her gaze still fixed on the rearview mirror, saw the blur as she drove for cover.

Whap\ the mailbox said when she hit it. Leroy said, "Golly," in an awed tone of voice.

Maggie shifted into Park and poked her head out the window. Ira was hauling himself up from the dirt. He dusted off his hands. He said, "You just had to prove you were right about that mailbox, Maggie, didn't you."

"You promised, Ira!"

"Left taillight is smashed all to hell," he said, bending to examine it.

He prodded something. There was a clinking sound. Maggie pulled her head in and faced forward.

"He promised he wouldn't say a word," she told Fiona and Leroy. "Watch how he goes back on that."

Fiona absently patted Leroy's bare knee.

"Smashed to smithereens," Ira called.

"You promised you wouldn't make a fuss!"

He grunted; she saw that he was righting the mailbox. From here, it didn't even look dented. "I don't suppose we need to tell your mother about this," Maggie said to Fiona.

"She already knows," Leroy said. "She's watching from the house."

It was true there was a suspicious slant to one of the Venetian blind slats. Maggie said, "Oh, this day has seemed just so ... I don't know

..." and she slid down in her seat till she was more or less sitting on her shoulder blades.

Then Ira appeared in the window. "Try your lights," he told her.

"Hmm?"

"Your lights. I want to see if she works or not."

There he went with that "she" again. Maggie reached out wearily, not bothering to sit up straight, and pulled the knob.

"Just as I thought," Ira called from the rear. "No left taillight."

"I don't want to hear about it," Maggie told the ceiling.

Ira reappeared at the window and motioned for her to -move over. "We'll be ticketed for this-what do you bet?" he said, opening the door and getting in.

"I really couldn't care less," she said.

"Late as we're running now," he said (another reproach), "it'll be dark before we're halfway home, and the state police are going to nail us for driving without a taillight."

"Stop off and get it fixed, then," Maggie said.

"Oh, well, you know those highway service stations," Ira told her. He shifted gears, pulled forward a little, and then backed smoothly out of the driveway. It didn't seem to cause him any difficulty whatsoever. '

'They charge an arm and a leg for something I could pick up almost free at Rudy's Auto Supply," he said. "I'm going to take my chances."

"You could always explain that your wife was a blithering idiot."

He didn't argue that.

As they started down the road, Maggie glanced at the mailbox, which was standing at a slight tilt but otherwise seemed fine. She twisted in her seat till she was looking at Fiona and Leroy-their pale, staring faces unsettlingly alike. "You two all right?" she asked them.

"Sure," Leroy answered for both of them. She was hugging her baseball glove to her chest.

Ira said, "Bet you didn't expect us to have a wreck before we'd left your driveway, did you?"

"Didn't expect you to go asking for a wreck, either," Fiona told him.

Ira glanced over at Maggie with his eyebrows raised.

By now the sun had dropped out of sight and the sky had lost its color.

All the pastures were turning up their undersides in a sudden breeze.

Leroy said, "How long is this trip going to take us anyhow?"

"Just an hour or so," Fiona told her. "You remember how far it is to Baltimore."

Maggie said, "Leroy remembers Baltimore?"

"From visiting my sister."

"Oh. Of course," Maggie said.

She watched the scenery for a while. Something about the fading light gave the little houses a meek, defeated look. Finally she forced herself to ask, "How is your sister, Fiona?"

"She's fine, considering," Fiona said. "You knew she lost her husband."

"I didn't realize she was married, even."

"Well, no, I guess you wouldn't," Fiona said. "She married her boyfriend?

Avery? And he died not six weeks later in a construction accident."

"Oh, poor Crystal," Maggie said. "What is happening here? Everyone's losing their husbands. Did I tell you we've just come from Max Gill's funeral?"

"Yes, but I don't think I knew him," Fiona said.

"You must have known him! He was married to my friend Serena that I went to school with. The Gills. I'm positive you met them."

"Well, those people were old, though," Fiona said. "Or not old, maybe, but you know. Crystal and Avery, there were barely back from their honeymoon. When you've been married only six weeks everything is still perfect.''

And later it is not, was her implication. Which Maggie couldn't argue with. Still, it saddened her to realize they all took such a thing for granted.

A stop sign loomed ahead and Ira slowed and then turned onto Route One. After the country roads they had been traveling, Route One seemed more impressive. Trucks were streaming toward them, a few with their headlights already on. Someone had set a hand-lettered signboard on the porch of a little cafe: SUPPER NOW BEING SERVED. Good farm food, no doubt-corn on the cob and biscuits. Maggie said, "I suppose we should stop for groceries on the way home. Leroy, are you starved?"

Leroy nodded emphatically.

"I haven't had a thing but chips and pretzels since morning," Maggie said.

"That and a beer in broad daylight," Ira reminded her.

Maggie pretended not to hear him. "Leroy," she said, "tell me what your favorite food is."

Leroy said, "Oh, I don't know."

"There must be something."

Leroy poked a fist into the palm of her baseball glove.

"Hamburgers? Hot dogs?" Maggie asked. "Charcoaled steaks? Or how about crabs?"

Leroy said, "Crabs in their shells, you mean? Ick!"

Maggie felt suddenly at a loss.

"She's partial to fried chicken," Fiona said. "She asks Mom to fix that all the time. Don't you, Leroy?"

"Fried chicken! Perfect," Maggie said. "We'll pick up the makings on our way into town. Won't that be nice?"

Leroy remained silent, and no wonder; Maggie knew how chirpy and artificial she sounded. An old person, trying too hard. But if only Leroy could see that Maggie was still young underneath, just peering out from behind an older face mask!

Now all at once Ira cleared his throat. Maggie tensed. Ira said, "Um, Fiona, Leroy . . . you heard we're taking Daisy to college tomorrow."

"Yes, Maggie told me," Fiona said. "I can't believe it: eentsy little Daisy."

"I mean, we two are going to be driving her. We're starting early in the morning."

"Not that early," Maggie said quickly.

"Well, eight or nine o'clock, Maggie."

"What's your point?" Fiona asked Ira. "You don't think we ought to be visiting?"

Maggie said, "Good heavens, no! He didn't mean that at all."

"Well, it sounded to me like he did," Fiona said.

Ira said, "I just wanted to be sure you knew what you were getting into.

That it would have to be such a short stay, I mean."

"That's no problem, Ira," Maggie told him. "If she wants she can go on over to her sister's in the morning."

"Well, fine then, but it's getting dark and we're not even halfway home.

I would think-"

"Maybe we better just stop right here and go back where we came from,"

Fiona said.

"Oh, no, Fiona!" Maggie cried. "We had this all settled!"

"I can't remember now why I said we'd come in the first place," Fiona said. "Lord! What must I have been thinking of?"

Maggie unbuckled her seat belt and twisted around so she was facing Fiona. "Fiona, please," she said. "It's only for a little while, and it's been so long since we've seen Leroy. I've got all these things I want to show her. I want her to meet Daisy and I was planning to take her by the Larkin sisters'; they won't believe how she's grown."

"Who're the Larkin sisters?" Leroy asked.

"These two old ladies; they used to set out their rocking horse for you to ride on."

Fiona said, "I don't remember that."

"We'd pass by their porch and it would be empty, and then when we turned around to come home the horse would be sitting there waiting."

"I don't remember a thing about it," Fiona said.

Leroy said, "Me neither."

"Well of course you wouldn't," Fiona told her. "You were just a baby. You didn't live there hardly any time at all."

This struck Maggie as unfair. She said, "Well, goodness, she was nearly a year old when you left, Fiona."

"She was not! She was barely seven months."

"That's not right; she had to have been, oh, eight months at least. If you left in September-"

"Seven months, eight months, what's the difference?" Ira asked. "Why make a federal case of it?" He found Leroy's face in the mirror and said, "I bet you don't remember how your grandma tried to teach you to say

'Daddy,' either."

"I did?" Maggie asked.

"It was going to be a surprise for his birthday," Ira told Leroy. "She would clap her hands-and you were supposed to say 'Daddy' on cue. But when she clapped her hands all you'd do was laugh. You thought it was some kind of game."

Maggie tried to picture that. Why did her memories never coincide with Ira's? Instead they seemed to dovetail-one moment his to recall and the next hers, as if they had agreed to split their joint life between them.

(Illogically, she always worried about whether she had behaved right during those moments she had forgotten.)

"So did it work, or not?" Leroy was asking Ira.

"Work?"

"Did I learn to say 'Daddy'?"

"Well, no, actually," Ira said. "You were way too little to be talking yet."

"Oh."

Leroy seemed to be digesting that. Then she sat for-ward so she was practically nose to nose with Maggie. Her eyes had darker blue specks in them, as if even they were freckled. "I am going to get to see him, aren't I?" she said. "He's not giving a concert or anything, is he?"

"Who?" Maggie asked, although of course she knew.

"My ... Jesse."

"Well, certainly you are. You'll see him at supper after he gets off work. He loves fried chicken, just like you. It must be genetic."

"The thing of it is-" Ira began.

Maggie said, "What do you like for dessert, Leroy?"

"The thing of it is," Ira said, "this is Saturday night. What if Jesse has other plans and he can't make supper?"

"But he can make supper, Ira; I already told you that."

"Or if he has to leave right after. I mean what are we doing here, Maggie? We don't have any toys anymore or any sports equipment and our TV is on the blink. We don't have anything to keep a child occupied. And would you please face forward and fasten your seat belt? You're making me nervous."

"I'm just trying to figure out what to buy for dessert," Maggie said. But she turned around and reached for her seat belt. "Your daddy's favorite dessert is mint chocolate chip ice cream," she told Leroy.

"Oh, mine too," Leroy said.

Fiona said, "What are you talking about? You hate mint chocolate chip."

"I love it," Leroy told her.

"You absolutely do not!"

"Yes, I do, Ma. It was only when I was little I didn't like it."

"Well, you must have been little just last week, then, missy."

Maggie said hastily, "What other flavors do you like, Leroy?"

"Well, fudge ripple, for instance," Leroy said.

"Oh, what a coincidence! Jesse is crazy about fudge ripple."

Fiona rolled her eyes. Leroy said, "Really? I think fudge rippie is just excellent."

"I have seen you go without any dessert whatsoever if the only choice was mint chocolate chip ice cream," Fiona told Leroy.

"You don't know every little thing about me!" Leroy cried.

Fiona said, "Geeze, Leroy," and slumped down low in her seat with her arms tightly folded.

They were in Maryland now, and Maggie imagined that the country here looked different-more luxurious. The hillsides, emptied of livestock, had turned a deep, perfect green, and in the faded light the long white fences gave off a moony glimmer. Ira was whistling "Sleepytime Gal."

Maggie couldn't think why, for a second. Did it signify he was tired, or what? But then she realized he must still have his mind on Leroy's baby days. That was the song they used to sing her to sleep with-he and Maggie, harmonizing. Maggie leaned her head against the back of the seat and silently followed the lyrics as he whistled.

When you're a stay-at-home, play-at-home, eight-o'clock Sleepytime gal.

. .

All at once she looked down at her wrist and saw that she wore two watches. One was her regular watch, a little Timex, and the other was a big old chunky man's watch with a wide leather band. In fact, it belonged to her father, but it had been lost or broken years ago. The face was a rectangle, pinkish, and the numerals were a pale blue that would glow in the dark. She cupped her hand over her wrist and bent close, making a little cave of darkness so she could see the numbers light up. Her fingers smelled of bubble gum. Beside her, Serena said, "Just another five minutes, that's all I ask. If nothing happens by then, I promise we can go."

Maggie raised her head and stared through the leaves at the two stone lions across the street. Between them lay a white sidewalk, curving across an immaculate lawn and arriving finally at a stately brick colonial house, and within the house lived the man who was Serena's father. The front door was the kind without a window, without even those tiny glass panes that are placed too high to be useful. Maggie wondered how Serena could stare so intently at something so blank and ungiving.

They were crouched uncomfortably among the twisted branches of a rhododendron bush. Maggie said, "That's what you told me half an hour ago. No one's going to come."

Serena laid a hand on her arm, hushing her. The door was swinging open.

Mr. Barrett stepped out and then turned back to say something. His wife appeared, tugging at her gloves. She wore a slim brown dress with long sleeves, and Mr. Barren's suit was almost the same shade of brown.

Neither Maggie nor Serena had even seen him in anything but a suit, not even on weekends. He was like a dollhouse doll, Maggie thought-one of those jointed plastic figures with the clothes painted on, nonremovable, and a clean-cut, anonymous face. He shut the door and took his wife's elbow and they moved down the sidewalk, their heels gritty-sounding. When they passed between the stone lions they seemed to be looking directly at Maggie and Serena; Maggie could see the needles of silver in Mr.

Barrett's crew cut. But his expression told her nothing, and neither did his wife's. They turned sharply to their left and headed toward a long blue Cadillac parked at the curb. Serena let her breath out. Maggie felt a sense of frustration that was almost suffocating. How sealed off these people were! You could study them all day and still not know them. (Or any other married couple either, maybe.) There were moments-the first time they had made love, say, or say a conversation they'd once had when one of them woke up frightened in the middle of the night-that nobody else in the world had any inkling of.

Maggie turned to Serena and said, "Oh, Serena, I'm so sorry for your loss." Serena wore her red funeral dress and she was blotting her tears on the fringe of her black shawl. "Dear heart, I am so sorry," Maggie said, and when she woke up, she was crying too. She thought she was home in bed and Ira was asleep beside her, his breath as steady as tires hissing past on a pavement and his warm bare arm supporting her head, but that was the back of the car seat she felt. She sat up and brushed at her eyes with her fingertips.

The light had slipped yet another notch downward into dusk and they had reached that long, tangled commercial stretch just, above Baltimore.

Blazing signs streaked by, HI-Q PLUMBING SUPPLIES and CECIL'S GRILL and EAT EAT

EAT. Ira was just a gray profile, and when Maggie turned to see Leroy and Fiona she found all the color washed out of them except for what flashed across their faces from the neon. "I must have been asleep," she told them, and they nodded. She asked Ira, "How much further?"

"Oh, another fifteen minutes or so. We're already inside the Beltway."

"Don't forget we need to stop at a grocery store." She was cross with herself for missing out on part of the conversation. (Or hadn't there been any? That would be worse.) Her head felt cottony and nothing seemed completely real. They passed a house with a lighted, glassed-in porch on which drum sets were displayed, smaller drums stacked on top of larger, some gold-spangled like a woman's evening gown and all of them glittering with chrome, and she wondered if she were dreaming again. She turned to follow the house with her eyes. The drums grew smaller but stayed eerily bright, like fish in an aquarium.

"I had the weirdest dream," she said after a moment.

"Was I in it?" Leroy wanted to know.

"Not that I can remember. But you might have been."

"Last week my friend Valerie dreamed I had died," Leroy said.

"Ooh, don't even say such a thing!"

"She dreamed I got run over by a tractor trailer," Leroy said with satisfaction.

Maggie swiveled to catch Fiona's eye. She wanted to assure her that such a dream meant nothing, or maybe she wanted the assurance for herself. But Fiona wasn't listening. She was gazing at the clutter of convenience stores and pizza parlors.

"Mighty Value Supermarket," Ira said. He flicked his left turn signal on.

Maggie said, "Mighty what? I never heard of it."

"It's handy, is what counts," Ira told her. He was delayed by a stream of oncoming traffic, but finally he found an opening and darted across the street and into a lot littered with abandoned shopping carts. He parked beside a panel truck and switched off the engine.

Leroy said she wanted to come too. Maggie said, "Well, of course," and then Ira, who had just started to slouch down behind the wheel, straightened and opened his door as if he'd been planning to go with them all along. This made Maggie smile. (Don't try and tell her he didn't care about his grandchild!) Fiona said, "Well, I certainly don't want to sit here by myself," and she stepped out of the car to follow them. She had never been fond of grocery shopping, as Maggie recalled.

The Mighty Value turned out to be one of those vast, cold, white, shiny places with rank upon rank of checkout counters, most of them closed.

Some syrupy love song was playing over the loudspeaker. Against her will, Maggie slowed down, keeping time with the music. She drifted past the fruits and vegetables, dreamily swinging her pocketbook, while the others went ahead. Leroy took a run with an empty cart and then hopped on the back and coasted until she caught up with Ira, who had already reached the poultry counter. He turned and smiled at her. From Maggie's angle his profile looked sharp and wolfish-hungry, really. It was something about the way he jutted his face toward Leroy. Maggie bypassed Fiona and arrived next to him. She slipped her arm through his and lightly brushed her cheek against his shoulder.

"Dark meat or white?" Ira was asking Leroy.

"Dark," Leroy said promptly. "Me and Ma like drumsticks."

"Us too," Ira told her, and he picked out a pack and dropped it into her cart.

"And sometimes me and Ma eat thighs, but we don't think wings are worth the bother," Leroy said.

"Me and Ma" this, "me and Ma" that-how long had it been since Maggie herself was so central to anyone's world? And this "Ma" was only Fiona, fragile-boned Fiona sashaying up the aisle in her cutoff shorts.

Humming along with the loudspeaker music, Ira placed a pack of thighs on top of the drumsticks in the cart. "Now for the ice cream," he said.

Leroy coasted away on the cart and Maggie and Ira followed. Maggie still had her arm linked through Ira's. Fiona trailed behind.

In the freezer section they had no trouble deciding on fudge ripple, but then there were so many different fudge ripples to choose from: Mighty Value's house brand and the standard brands and then the fancy, foreign-sounding brands that Ira called "designer desserts." He was opposed to designer desserts on principle; he wanted to get the Mighty Value. Fiona, who had discovered the Hair Care section, offered no opinion, but Leroy said that she and Ma had always favored Breyer's. And Maggie voted to go all out and choose something foreign. They could have discussed it forever, except that by now the loudspeaker was playing "Tonight You Belong to Me," and halfway through the song Ira began muttering along with it. " 'Way down,' " he rumbled absently, " 'by the stream . . .' "So then Maggie couldn't resist chiming in on that airy little soprano part:

" 'How sweet, it will seem

It started as a spoof, but it developed into a real production. " 'Once more, just to dream, in the moonlight!' " Their voices braided together on the chorus and then sailed apart, only to reunite and twine around each other once again. Fiona forgot the box of hair dye she was studying; Leroy clasped her hands admiringly under her chin; an old woman paused in the aisle to smile at them. It was the old woman who brought Maggie back to earth. All at once she imagined some deception in this scene, some lie that she and Ira were collaborating in with their compliant harmonizing and the romantic gaze they trained upon each other. She broke off in the middle of a solo line. "Patience and Prudence," she informed Leroy briskly. "Nineteen fifty-seven."

"Fifty-six," Ira said.

Maggie said, "Whatever."

They turned their attention back to the ice cream.

In the end they decided on Breyer's, with chocolate sauce from the shelf above the freezer. "Hershey's chocolate sauce, or Nestle's?" Ira asked.

"I'll leave it up to you two."

"Or here's a Mighty Value brand. What do you say we go for that?"

"Just not Brown Cow," Leroy told him. "I can't abide Brown Cow."

"Definitely not Brown Cow," Ira said.

"Brown Cow smells like candle wax," Leroy told Maggie.

Maggie said, "Ah." She looked down at Leroy's pointy little face and smiled.

Fiona asked Maggie, "Have you ever considered using a mousse?"

"A what?"

"A styling mousse. On your hair."

"Oh, on my hair," Maggie said. She had thought they were talking about some kind of ice-cream sauce. "Why, no, I don't believe I have."

"A lot of our beauticians recommend it."

Was Fiona recommending it to Maggie? Or maybe she was only speaking generally. "Just what would it do for a person?" Maggie asked.

"Well, in your case it would give your hair a little, I don't know, a little shape or something. It would kind of organize it."

"I'll buy some," Maggie decided.

She picked up a silvery container, along with a bottle of Affinity shampoo since she still had that coupon. (Brings back that fullness that time has taken away, a display card promised.) Then they all went to the express lane, rushed along by Maggie because it was after six, according to her watch, and she had told Jesse six-thirty. Ira said, "Do you have enough money? I could go get the car while you're paying."

She nodded, and he left them. Leroy laid their purchases neatly on the counter. The customer in front of them was buying nothing but breads. Rye bread, white bread, biscuits, whole wheat rolls. Maybe he was trying to fatten up his wife. Say he was the jealous type, and his wife was very thin and beautiful. The customer departed, taking his breads with him.

Leroy said, "Double bags, please," in a bossy, experienced voice. The boy at the cash register grunted without looking. He was muscular and good-looking, deeply tanned, and he wore a gold razor blade on a chain inside the open collar of his shirt.

What on earth could that mean? He rang up their items swiftly, his fingers stabbing the keys. Last came the shampoo. Maggie dug through her purse for the coupon and handed it to him. "Here," she said, "this is for you."

He took it and turned it over. He read it narrowly, not quite moving his lips. Then he gave it back to her. He said, "Well, uh, thanks," and then, "That'll be sixteen forty-three."

Maggie felt confused, but she counted out the money and picked up the bag. As they left the register she asked Fiona, "Does Mighty Value not accept coupons, or what?"

"Coupons? I wouldn't know," Fiona said.

"Maybe it's expired," Maggie said. She shifted her grocery bag in order to peer at the expiration date. But the print was covered over at right angles by Durwood Clegg's heavy blue script: Hold me close, hold me tight, make me thrill with delight . . .

Maggie's face grew hot. She said, "Well! Of all the conceit!"

"Pardon?" Fiona asked, but Maggie didn't answer. She screwed up the coupon and dropped it into the grocery bag.

Outside, it was much darker now. The air was a deep, transparent blue and insects were flitting around the lights high above the parking lot. Ira leaned against the car by the curb. "You want to put the groceries in the trunk?" he asked Maggie, but she said, "No, I'll just hold them." She suddenly felt old and weary. It seemed they would never reach home. She got into the car and sat down hard, with the grocery bag slumped any which way on her knees.

St. Michael the Archangel. Charlie's Fine Liquors. Used-car dealers, one after the other. Gatch Memorial Church. Dead Man's Fingers Crab House.

HAPPY HOUR NITELY, with red and blue neon bubbles fizzing above a neon cocktail glass. Cemeteries and shabby frame houses and fast-food restaurants and empty playgrounds. They took a right off Belair Road-finally, finally leaving Route One-and headed down their own street. The frame houses grew more numerous. Their windows were squares of yellow light, some gauzy with curtains and some fully exposed, revealing ornate decorative lamps or china figurines meticulously centered on the sills.

For no good reason, Maggie was reminded of rides she had taken with Ira during their courtship, driving past houses where every other couple in the world, it seemed, had a space to be alone in. What she would have given, back then, for even the smallest of those houses, even just four walls and a bed! She felt a sweet, sad fullness in her chest now, remembering that long-ago ache.

They passed the Seeing Eye Palmistry Parlor, really just a private home with a sign propped in the living room window. A girl was sitting out on the steps, maybe waiting her turn; she had a small, heart-shaped face and she was dressed all in black except for her purple suede shoes, which showed up clearly in the light from the porch. A man trudged down the sidewalk with a little girl riding his shoulders and clutching two handfuls of his hair. It seemed the scenery had grown more intimate, more specific. Maggie turned toward Leroy and said, "I don't suppose any of this is familiar."

"Oh, I've seen it," Leroy said.

"You have?"

"Only in passing," Fiona corrected her quickly.

"When was that?"

Leroy looked at Fiona, who said, "We might have driven by here once or twice."

Maggie said, "Is that so."

In front of their own house, Ira parked. It was one of those houses that appear to be mostly front porch, at least from the street-squat and low-browed, not at all impressive, as Maggie was the first to admit. She wished at least the lights were on. That would have made it seem more welcoming. But every window was dark. "Well!" she said, too heartily. She opened her door and got out of the car, clutching the groceries. "Come on in, everyone!"

There was something befuddled about the way they milled around on the sidewalk. They had been traveling for too long. When Ira started up the steps, he accidentally banged Fiona's suitcase against the railing, and he fumbled awhile with the key before he got the door unlocked.

They entered the musty, close darkness of the front hallway. Ira flipped on the light. Maggie called, "Daisy?" without a hope that Daisy would answer. Clearly the house was deserted. She shifted the grocery bag to her left hip and picked up the notepad that lay on top of the bookcase.

Gone to say goodbye to Lavinia, .Daisy's precise italics read. "She's at Mrs. Perfect's," Maggie told Ira. "Well, she'll be back! How long can it take to say goodbye? She'll be back in no time!"

This was all for Leroy's benefit, to show that Daisy really existed-that there was more to this house than old people.

Leroy was circling the hallway, with her baseball glove tucked under one arm. She was squinting up at the photographs that covered the walls.

"Who's that?" she asked, pointing to one.

Ira as a young father stood in dappled sunlight, awkwardly holding a baby. "That's your grandpa, holding your daddy," Maggie told her.

Leroy said, "Oh," and moved on at once. Probably she had hoped it was Jesse holding Leroy. Maggie cast her eyes around the room to see if she could locate such a picture. You could hardly make out the wallpaper pattern for all the photos that hung here, each framed professionally by Ira and each mat and molding different, like a sample of something. There was Jesse as a toddler, as a little boy on a scooter, as a thumbtack-sized face among rows of other faces in fifth grade. But no picture of Jesse as a grownup, Maggie realized; not even as a teenager. And certainly not as a father. They had run out of wall space by then. Besides, Maggie's mother was always saying how trashy it was to display one's family photographs anywhere but a bedroom.

Fiona was pushing her suitcase toward the stairs, leaving two long thin scratches on the floorboards behind her. "Oh, don't bother with that,"

Maggie told her. "Ira will carry it up for you later."

How must Fiona feel, returning after so long-walking across the porch where she'd decided to keep her baby, passing through the front door that she had so often slammed out of in a huff? She looked drawn and dispirited. The sudden light had crumpled the skin around her eyes. She abandoned her suitcase and pointed to a photo high on the wall. "There

/happen to be," she told Leroy. "In case you're interested."

She meant her bridal photo. Maggie had forgotten that. A wedding present from Crystal, who had brought a camera to the ceremony, it showed a coltish young girl in a wrinkled dress. The frame was a black plastic diploma frame that must have come from Woolworth's. Leroy studied the photo without expression. Then she moved into the living room, where Ira was switching on lamps.

Maggie took the groceries out to the kitchen, with Fiona close behind.

"So where is he?" Fiona asked in a low voice.

"Well, he's probably ..." Maggie said. She flicked on the overhead light and glanced at the clock. "I told him we'd eat at six-thirty and it's barely that now and you know how he loses track of time, so don't worry-"

Fiona said, "I'm not worried! Who says I'm worried? I don't care if he comes or he doesn't."

"No, of course not," Maggie said soothingly.

"I just brought Leroy to visit you two. I don't care if he comes."

"Well, of course you don't."

Fiona sat down heavily in a kitchen chair and threw her purse on the table. Like the most formal of guests, she was carrying that purse with her from room to room; some things never changed. Maggie sighed and began unpacking the groceries. She put the ice cream in the freezer, and then she slit open both packs of chicken and dumped them into a bowl. "What kind of vegetables does Leroy like?" she asked.

Fiona said, "Hmm? Vegetables?" She didn't seem to have her mind on the question. She was gazing at the wall calendar, which still showed the month of August. Oh, this wasn't a very organized house, not that Fiona had any right to complain. The counters seemed to collect stray objects on their own. The cupboards were filled with dusty spice bottles and cereal boxes and mismatched dishes. Drawers sagged open, exposing a jumble of belongings. One drawer caught Maggie's eye, and she went over to riffle through the layers of papers stuffed inside. "Now, somewhere here," she said, "I could almost swear . . ."

She came across a PTA announcement. A torn-out recipe for something called Amazin' Raisin Pie. A packet of get-well cards that she'd been hunting since the day she bought them. And then, "Aha," she said, holding up a flier.

"What is it?"

"Picture of Jesse as a grownup. For Leroy."

She brought it over to Fiona: a darkly photocopied photo of the band.

Lorimer was sitting in front with his drums and Jesse stood behind, his arms draped loosely around the necks of the other two, Dave and what's-his-name. All wore black. Jesse had his eyebrows knitted in a deliberate scowl. SPIN THE CAT was printed in furry, tiger-striped letters beneath their picture, and a blank space at the bottom allowed for a specific time and place to be written in by hand.

"Of course it doesn't do him justice," Maggie said. "These rock groups always try to look so, I don't know, so surly; have you noticed? Maybe I should just show her the snapshot I carry in my wallet. He isn't smiling there, either, but at least he's not frowning."

Fiona took the flier to study it more closely. "How funny," she said.

"Everyone's just the same."

"Same?"

"I mean they were always going to be going somewhere; didn't you always think so? They had such high-and-mighty plans. And they used to keep changing so, changing their views of music. Why, one time Leroy asked me just what kind of songs her daddy played, new wave or punk or heavy metal or what, exactly-I think she wanted to impress her friends-and I said, 'Lordy, by now it could be anything; I wouldn't have the foggiest notion.' But just look at them."

"Well? So?" Maggie said. "What's to look at?"

"Lorimer's still got his hair fixed in that silly shag haircut with the tail down the back of his neck that I was always dying to chop off,"

Fiona said. "They're still wearing the same style of clothes, even. Same old-fashioned Hell's Angels style of clothing."

"Old-fashioned?" Maggie asked.

"You could picture how they'll get to be forty and still playing together on weekends when their wives will let them, playing for Rotary Club get-togethers and such."

It bothered Maggie to hear this, but she didn't let on. She turned back to her bowl of chicken.

Fiona said, "Who was it he brought to dinner?"

"Pardon?"

"You said he brought this woman to dinner one time."

Maggie glanced over at her. Fiona was still holding the photo, gazing at it with a bemused expression. "Nobody important," Maggie said.

"Well, who?"

"Just some woman he'd met someplace; we've been through a lot of those.

Nobody long-term."

Fiona set the photo down on the table, but she went on looking at it.

Out in the living room, ragged music started thrumming forth from the hi-fi. Evidently Leroy had found one of Jesse's castoffs. Maggie heard Hey hey and Every day and a familiar twanging of strings, although she couldn't say who was playing. She took a carton of buttermilk from the refrigerator and poured it over the chicken. A headache was tightening the skin of her forehead. Now that she thought of it, she realized it had been nagging at her for some time.

"I'm going to call Jesse," she told Fiona suddenly.

She went over to the wall telephone and lifted the receiver. There wasn't any dial tone. Instead she heard a ringing at the other end. "Ira must be using the extension," she said, and she hung up again. "Well, so anyhow.

Vegetables. Which vegetables will Leroy eat?"

"She likes tossed salad," Fiona said.

"Oh, dear, I should've bought lettuce."

"Maggie," Ira said, entering the kitchen, "what did you do to my answering machine?"

"Me? I didn't do anything."

"You most certainly did."

"I did not! I already told you about that little mishap last evening, but then I put a new message on."

He crooked his finger, beckoning her to the telephone. "Try it," he told her.

"What for?"

"Try dialing the shop."

She shrugged and came over to the phone. After she dialed, the phone at the other end rang three times. Something clicked.

"Well, here goes," Maggie's own voice said, faraway and tinny. "Let's see: Press Button A, wait for the red . . . oh, shoot."

Maggie blinked.

"I must be doing something wrong," her voice continued. Then, in the falsetto she often used when she was clowning around with her children:

"Who, me? Do something wrong? Little old perfect me? I'm shocked at the very suggestion!"

There was a ribbony shriek, like a tape on fast forward, followed by a beep. Maggie hung up. She said, "Well ... um ..."

"God knows what my customers thought," Ira told her.

"Maybe no one called," she said hopefully.

' 'I don't even know how you managed it! That machine is supposed to be foolproof."

"Well, it only goes to show: You can't trust the .simplest product nowadays," she told him. She lifted the receiver again and started dialing Jesse's number. While his telephone rang and tang, she twined the cord nervously between her fingers. She was conscious of Fiona watching them, seated at the table with her chin resting on her cupped hand.

"Who're you calling?" Ira asked.

She pretended not to hear.

"Who's she calling, Fiona?"

"Well, Jesse, I flunk," Fiona told him, "Did you forget his phone won't ring?"

Maggie looked up at him, "Oh" she said.

She replaced the receiver and then gazed at it regretfully.

"Oh, well," Fiona said, "maybe he's on his way. It's Saturday night, after all; how late does he work?"

"Not late at all," Ira told her.

"Where does he work, come to think of it?"

"Chick's Cycle Shop. He sells motorcycles."

"Wouldn't they be closed by now?"

"Of course they're closed. They close at five."

"Then why bother calling?"

"No, no, she was calling his apartment," Ira said.

Fiona said, "His-"

Maggie went back to the bowl of chicken. She stirred it around in the buttermilk. She took a flattened brown paper bag from one of the drawers and poured some flour into it., "Jesse has an apartment?" Fiona asked Ira.

"Why, yes."

Maggie measured in baking powder, salt, and pepper.

"An apartment away from here?"

"Up on Calvert Street."

Fiona thought that over.

Maggie said, "Here's something I always wanted to ask you, Fiona!" Her voice had somehow taken on that chirpy tone again. "Remember just a few months after you left?" she asked. "When Jesse phoned you and said you'd phoned him first and you said you hadn't? Well, had you, or hadn't you?

Was it you who phoned our house and I said, 'Fiona?' and you hung up?"

"Oh, goodness . . .'' Fiona said vaguely.

"I mean it had to be, or why else would the person hang up when I said your name?''

"I really don't recollect," Fiona said, and then she reached for her purse and rose. Walking in an airy, aimless way, as if she hardly noticed she was leaving, she wandered out of the kitchen, calling, "Leroy? Where'd you get to?"

"See there?" Maggie told Ira.

"Hmm?"

"It was her. I knew it all along."

"She didn't say it was."

"Oh, Ira, you are so obtuse sometimes," she said.

She closed the brown paper bag and shook it, mixing the seasonings. You can't have things both ways, she should have told Fiona. You can't laugh at him for staying the same and also object when he changes. Why, of course he had moved! Did Fiona imagine he had sat here waiting for her all these years?

And yet Maggie knew how she felt, somehow. You have this picture of a person; you have him tucked away in your mind in this certain fixed position.

She looked again at the band photo on the table. They had all been so enthusiastic once, she thought. So much energy had been invested. She remembered those early rehearsals in Lorimer's parents' garage, and the months and months when they'd been thrilled to perform for free, even, and the night that Jesse had come home triumphantly waving a ten-dollar bill-his share of their first paycheck.

"Is that Daisy?" Ira asked.

"What?"

"I thought I heard the front door."

"Oh!" Maggie said. "Maybe it's Jesse."

"Don't count on it," he told her.

But only Jesse would sling the door back against the bookcase that way.

Maggie dusted off her hands. "Jesse?" she called.

"Here I am."

She hurried out to the hall, and Ira followed more slowly. Jesse stood just inside the door. He was looking toward the living room, where Leroy was poised like some startled small animal with her hands pressed together in front of her and one foot drawn up behind her. Jesse said, "Well, hi."

"Hi," Leroy said, "How're you doing?"

"I'm okay."

He looked over at Maggie. Maggie said, "Hasn't she grown?"

His long black eyes returned to Leroy.

Now Maggie moved toward him, willing him further into the house. (He always seemed on the verge of leaving.) She took his arm and said, "I'm frying up some chicken; it'll be a few more minutes. You two can sit hi here and get acquainted."

But he had never been easily led. He was wearing a knitted jersey, and beneath the thin cloth she felt his resistance-the steely muscle above his elbow. His boots remained rooted to the floor. He was going to take his own sweet time at this.

"So what're you listening to?" he asked Leroy.

"Oh, just some record."

"You a Dead fan?"

"Dead? Urn, sure."

"You want some better album, then," he said. "This one here is too popular with the masses."

"Oh, yeah, well," she said. "I was just thinking that myself."

He glanced at Maggie again. He was holding his face in a way that caused his chin to lengthen, just as Ira always did when he was trying to keep back a smile.

"She's athletic too," Maggie told him. "Brought along her baseball glove."

"That so?" he asked Leroy.

She nodded. The toe of her raised foot pointed daintily dawnward-ballet style.

Then something clattered upstairs and Fiona called, "Maggie, where-?"

She arrived on the landing. They all looked at her.

"Oh," she said.

And she began to descend the stairs very smoothly and quietly, with one hand trailing along: the banister. The only sound was the slapping of her sandals against her bare heels.

Jesse said, "Good to see you, Fiona."

She reached the hall and looked up at him. "It's good to see you too," she said.

"Done something new to your hair, haven't you?"

She lifted a hand, with her eyes still on his face, and touched the ends of her hair. "Oh! Maybe so," she told him.

Maggie said, "Well, I guess I'd better get back to-"

And Ira said, "Need help in the kitchen, Maggie?"

"Yes, please!" she sang out happily.

Fiona told Jesse, "I was just upstairs hunting my soapbox."

Maggie -hesitated.

"Soapbox?" Jesse asked.

"I tried your bureau drawer, but it's empty. All I found was mothballs.

Did you take my soapbox with you when you moved to your apartment?"

"What soapbox are you talking about?"

"My tortoiseshell soapbox! The one you kept."

Jesse looked over at Maggie. Maggie said, "You remember -her soapbox.'

"Well, no, I can't say as I do," Jesse said, and lie grabbed hold of his forelock die way he always did when he was puzzled.

"?ba kept it after she left," Maggie told him. "I saw you with it. There was a bar of soap inside, remember? That dear kind of soap you can see through."

"Oh, yes," Jesse said, letting go of Iris forelock.

"You remember it?"

"Sure."

Maggie relaxed. She flashed a bracing smile at Leroy, who had lowered her foot to the floor now and was looking uncertain.

"So where is it?" Fiona asked. "Where's my soapbox, Jesse?"

"Well, uh, didn't your sister take it?"

"No."

"I thought she packed it up along with your other things."

"No," Fiona said. "You had it in your bureau."

Jesse said, "Gosh, Fiona. In that case maybe it's thrown out by now. But look, if it means so much to you, then I'd be glad to-"

"But you kept it, because it reminded you of me," Fiona told him. ' 'It smelled like me! You closed your eyes and held my soapbox to your nose."

Jesse's gaze swiveled to Maggie again. He said, "Ma? Is that what you told her?"

"You mean it's not true?" Fiona asked him.

"You said I went around sniffing soapboxes, Ma?"

"You did!" Maggie said. Although she hated having to repeat it to his face. She had never meant to shame him. She turned to Ira (who was wearing exactly the shocked, reproachful expression she had expected) and said, "He kept it in his top drawer."

"Your treasure drawer," Fiona told Jesse. "Do you suppose I'd come all the way down here like any ordinary . . . groupie if your mother hadn't told me that? I didn't have to come! I was getting along just fine! But your mother says you hung on to my soapbox and wouldn't let Crystal pack it, you closed your eyes and took this big whiff, you've kept it to this day, she said, you've never let it go, you sleep with it under your pillow at night."

Maggie cried, "I never said-!"

"What do you think I am? Some kind of loser?" Jesse asked Fiona.

"Now, listen," Ira said.

Everyone seemed glad to turn to him.

"Let me get this straight," he said. "You're talking about a plastic soapbox."

"A plastic soapbox," Fiona told him, "that Jesse sleeps every night with."

"Well, there seems to be some mistake," Ira said. "How would Maggie even know such a thing? Jesse has his own apartment now. All he sleeps with that I've ever heard of is an auto greeter."

"A what?"

"Oh, never mind."

"What's an auto greeter?"

There was a pause. Then Ira said, "You know: the person who stands at the door when you go in to buy a car. She makes you give your name and address before she'll call a salesman."

"She? You mean a woman?"

"Right."

"Jesse sleeps with a woman?"

"Right."

Maggie said, "You just had to spoil things, Ira, didn't you."

"No," Ira told her, "it's the simple truth that's spoiled things, Maggie, and the truth is, Jesse's involved with somebody else now."

"But that woman's no one important! I mean they're not engaged or married or anything! She's no one he really cares about!"

She looked to Jesse to back her up, but he was studiously examining the toe of his left boot.

"Oh, Maggie, admit it," Ira said. "This is the way things are. This is how he's going to be. He never was fit husband material! He passes from girlfriend to girlfriend and he can't seem to hold the same job for longer than a few months; and every job he loses, it's somebody else's fault. The boss is a jerk, or the customers are jerks, or the other workers are-"

"Now, hold on," Jesse began, while Maggie said, "Oh, why do you always, always exaggerate, Ira! He worked in the record shop a full year, have you forgotten that?"

"Everyone in Jesse's acquaintance," Ira finished calmly, "by some magical coincidence ends up being a jerk."

Jesse turned and walked out of the house.

It made things more disturbing, somehow, that he didn't slam the door but let it click shut very gently behind him.

Maggie said, "He'll be back." She was speaking to Fiona, but when Fiona didn't respond (her face was almost wooden; she was staring after Jesse), she told Leroy instead. "You saw how glad he was to see you, didn't you?"

Leroy just gaped.

' 'He's upset at what Ira said about him, is all," Maggie told her. And then she said, "Ira, I will never forgive you for this."

"Me!" Ira said.

Fiona said, "Stop it."

They turned.

"Just stop, both of you," she said- "I'm tired to death of it. I'm tired of Jesse Moran and I'm tired of the two of you, repeating your same dumb arguments and niggling and bickering, Ira forever so righteous and Maggie so willing to be wrong,"

"Why . , . Fiona?" Maggie said. Her feelings were hurt. Maybe it was silly of her, out she had always secretly believed that outsiders regarded her marriage with envy. We're not bickering; we're just discussing," she said. "We're compiling oar two views of tilings."

Fiona said, "Oh, forget it. I don't know why I thought anything would be any different here," And she stepped into die living room and hugged Leroy, whose eyes were wide and startled. She said, "There, fliere, Ironey," and she buried her face in the crook of Leroy's neck. Plainly, Fiona herself was the one who needed consoling.

Maggie glanced at Ira. She looked elsewhere.

"Soapbox?" Ira asked. "How could you invent such a story?"

She didn't answer. (Anything she said might look like bickering.) Instead she walked away from him. She headed toward the kitchen in what she hoped was a dignified silence, but Ira followed, saying, "Look here, Maggie, you can't keep engineering other people's lives this way. Face facts!

Wake up and smell the coffee!"

Ann Landers's favorite expression: Wake up and smell the coffee. She hated it when he quoted Ann Landers. She went over to the counter and started dropping chicken parts into the paper bag.

"Soapbox!" Ira marveled to himself.

"You want peas with your chicken?" she asked. "Or green beans."

But Ira said, "I'm going to go wash up." And he left.

So here she was alone. Well! She brushed a tear from her lashes. She was in trouble with everybody in this house, and she deserved to be; as usual she had acted pushy and meddlesome. And yet it hadn't seemed like meddling while she was doing it. She had simply felt as if the world were the tiniest bit out of focus, the colors not quite within the lines-something like a poorly printed newspaper ad-and if she made the smallest adjustment then everything would settle perfectly into place.

"Stupid!" she told herself, rattling the chicken parts far the bag.

"Stupid aid nosy-bones!" She slammed a skillet onto the stove and poured in too much oil. She twisted a knob savagely and then stood back and waited for the burner to heat. Now look: Droplets of oil were dotted across the front of her best dress, over the mound of her stomach. She was clumsy and fat-stomached and she didn't even have the sense to wear an apron while she was cooking. Also she had paid way too much for this dress, sixty-four dollars at Hecht's, which would scandalize Ira if he knew. How could she have been so greedy? She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand.

Took a deep breath. Well. Anyhow.

The oil wasn't hot enough yet, but she started adding the chicken.

Unfortunately, there was quite a lot of it. Too much, it appeared now.

(Unless they could coax Jesse back before suppertime.) She had to push the pieces too close together in order to fit in the last few drumsticks.

Peas, or green beans? That still hadn't been settled. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and went out to the living room to check. "Leroy," she said, "what would-?"

But the living room was empty. Leroy's record had a worn sound now, as if it were playing for the second or third time. "Truckin', got my chips cashed in ..." an assortment of men sang doggedly. No one sat on the sofa or in either of the armchairs.

Maggie crossed the hallway to the front porch and called, "Leroy? Fiona?"

No answer. Four vacant rockers faced out toward the streetlight.

"Ira?"

"Upstairs," he called, his voice muffled-sounding.

She turned away from the door. Fiona's suitcase, thank goodness, still stood at the foot of the Stairs; so she couldn't have gone far. "Ira, is Leroy with you?" Maggie called.

He appeared on the landing with a towel draped around his neck. Still drying his face, he looked down at her.

"I can't find her," she told him. "I can't find either one of them."

"Did you look on die porch?" "

He came downstairs, carrying the towel. "Well, maybe they went out back," he said.

She followed him through the front door and around the side of the house.

The night air was warm and humid. A gnat or mosquito whined in her ear and she waved it away. Who would want to be out here at this hour? Not Leroy or Fiona, evidently. The backyard, when they reached it, was a small, empty square of darkness.

"They've gone," Ira told her.

"Gone? You mean for good?"

"They must have."

"But their suitcase is still in the hall."

"Well, it was pretty heavy," he said, and he took her arm and steered her up the back porch steps. "If they were traveling on foot, they most likely didn't want to carry it."

"On foot," she said.

In the kitchen, the chicken was crackling away. Maggie paid no attention, but Ira turned the burner down.

"If they're on foot, we can catch them," Maggie said.

"Wait, Maggie-"

Too late; she was off. She sped through the hall again, out the door, down the steps to the street. Fiona's sister lived somewhere west of here, near Broadway. They would have turned left, therefore. Shading her eyes beneath the glare of the streetlight, Maggie peered up the stretch of deserted sidewalk. She saw a white cat walking alone in that high-bottomed, hesitant manner that cats take on in unfamiliar surroundings. A moment later a girl with long dark hair flew out of an alley and scooped it up, crying "Turkey! There you are!" She vanished with a flounce of her skirt. A car passed, leaving behind a scrap of a ball game: ". . . no outs and the bases loaded and it's hot times on Thirty-third Street tonight, folks ..." The sky glowed a grayish pink over the industrial park.

Ira came up and set a hand on her shoulder. "Maggie, honey," he said.

But she shook him off and started back toward the house.

When she was upset she lost all sense of direction, and she concentrated now on her path like a blind man, reaching out falteringly to touch the little boxwood hedge by the walk, stumbling twice as she climbed the steps to the porch. "Sweetheart," Ira said behind her. She crossed the hallway to the foot of the stairs. She laid Fiona's suitcase flat and knelt to unfasten the latches.

Inside she found a pink cotton nightgown and a pair of child's pajamas and some lacy bikini underpants-none of these folded but scrunched instead like wrung-out dishcloths. And beneath those, a zippered cosmetics case, two stacks of tattered comic books, half a dozen beauty magazines, a box of dominoes, and a giant, faded volume of horse stories.

All objects Fiona and Leroy could easily do without. What they couldn't do without-Fiona's purse and Leroy's baseball glove-had gone with them.

Sifting through these layers of belongings while Ira stood mute behind her, Maggie had a sudden view of her life as circular. It forever repeated itself, and it was entirely lacking in hope.

There was an old man in Maggie's nursing home who believed that once he reached heaven, all he had lost in his lifetime would be given back to him. "Oh, yes, what a good idea!" Maggie had said when he told her about it. She had assumed he meant intangibles-youthful energy, for instance, or that ability young people have to get swept away and impassioned. But then as he went on talking she saw that he had something more concrete in mind. At the Pearly Gates, he said, Saint Peter would hand everything to him in a gunnysack: The little red sweater his mother had knit him just before she died, that he had left on a bus in fourth grade and missed with all his heart ever since. The special pocketknife his older brother had flung into a cornfield out of spite. The diamond ring his first sweetheart had failed to return to him when she broke off their engagement and ran away with the minister's son.

Then Maggie thought of what she might find in her own gunnysack-the misplaced compacts, single earrings, and umbrellas, some of which she hadn't noticed losing at the time but recollected weeks or months afterward. ("Didn't I used to have a . . . ?" "Whatever became of my

...?") Objects freely given up, even, which later she wished back again-for example, those s skirts she had donated to Goodwill, now that lower hemlines were once more in fashion. And she had said, "Oh, yes," again, but a shade less certainly, for it didn't seem that she had suffered losses quite as bitter as the old man's.

Now, though (sorting leftover fried chicken into plastic containers for Ira's lunches), she reconsidered that gunny-sack, and this time it bulged much fuller. She remembered a green dress that her brother Josh's wife, Natalie, had admired one day. Maggie had said, "Take it, it matches your eyes," for it truly did, and she had been glad for Natalie to have it; she had loved her like a sister. But then Josh and Natalie had divorced and Natalie moved away and didn't keep in touch anymore, as if she'd divorced Maggie as well, and now Maggie wanted that dress returned. It used to move so fluidly when she walked! It was one of those dresses that go anywhere, that feel right for every occasion.

And she would like that funny little kitten, Thistledown, who'd been Ira's very first present to her in their courting days. She was a jokey, mischievous creature, forever battling imaginary enemies with her needle teeth and soft gray paws, and Maggie and Ira used to spend hours playing with her. But then Maggie had unintentionally murdered the poor thing by running her mother's dryer without-checking inside first, and when she'd gone to pull the domes out there was Thistle, as limp and frowsy and boneless as her namesake, and Maggie had cried and cried. After that there had been a whole string of other cats-Lucy and Chester and Pumpkin-but now all at once Maggie wanted Thistle back again. Surely Saint Peter allowed animals in that gunnysack, didn't he? Would he allow all the lean, unassuming dogs of Mulraney Street, .those part-this-part-thats whose distant voices had barked her to sleep every night of her childhood? Would he allow the children's little gerbil, tirelessly plodding the years away on his wire treadmill till Maggie set him free out of pity and Pumpkin caught him and ate him?

And that corny key chain she used to have, a metal disk that rotated on an axle, with LOVES ME on one side and LOVES ME NOT on the other. Boris Drumm had given her that, and when Jesse got his license she had sentimentally passed it on to him. She had dropped it into his palm after chauffeuring him home from his driver's test, but unfortunately the car was still in gear and it had started rolling as she climbed out. "Oh, great going, Ma," Jesse had said, reaching for the brake; and something about his lofty amusement had made her see him for the first time as a man. But now he carried his keys in a little leather case-snakeskin, she believed. She would like that key chain back again. She could actually feel it between her fingers-the lightweight, cheap metal and the raised lettering, the absentminded spin she used to give it as she stood talking with Boris: Loves me, loves me not. And once again she saw Boris rising up before her car as she practiced braking. Why, all he'd been trying to say was: Here I am! Pay me some notice!

Also, her clear brown bead necklace that looked something like dark amber. Antique plastic, the girl at the thrift shop had called it. A contradiction in terms, you would think; but Maggie had loved that necklace. So had Daisy, who in her childhood often borrowed it, along with a pair of Maggie's high-heeled shoes, and finally lost it in the alley out back of the house. She had worn it jumping rope on a summer evening and come home in tears because it had vanished. Definitely that would be in the gunnysack. And the summer evening as well, why not-the children smelling of sweat and fireflies, the warm porch floorboards sticking slightly to your chair rockers, the voices ringing from the alley: "Call that a strike?" and "Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, dressed all in black, black, black . . ."

She stowed the containers of chicken at the front of the refrigerator, where Ira couldn't overlook them, and she pictured Saint Peter's astonishment as he watched what spilled forth: a bottle of wind, a box of fresh snow, and one of those looming moonlit clouds that used to float overhead like dirigibles as Ira walked her home from choir practice.

The dishes in the draining rack were dry by now and she stacked them and put them in the cupboard. Then she fixed herself a big bowl of ice cream.

She wished they had bought mint chocolate chip. Fudge ripple was too white-tasting. She climbed the stairs, digging her spoon in. At the door to Daisy's room, she paused. Daisy was kneeling on the floor, fitting books into a carton. "Want some ice cream?" Maggie asked her.

Daisy glanced up and said, "No, thanks."

"All you had for supper was a drumstick."

"I'm not hungry," Daisy said, and she pushed a lock of hair off her forehead. She was wearing clothes that she wouldn't be taking with her-baggy jeans and a blouse with a torn buttonhole. Her room already seemed uninhabited; the knickknacks that usually sat on her shelves had been packed for weeks.

"Where are your stuffed animals?" Maggie said.

"In my suitcase."

"I thought you were leaving them home."

"I was, but I changed my mind," Daisy said.

She had been quiet all through supper. Maggie could tell she was anxious about tomorrow. It was like her not to talk about it, though. You had to read the signs-her lack of appetite and her decision to bring her stuffed animals after all. Maggie said, "Well, honey," you let me know if you want any help."

"Thanks, Mom."

Maggie went on down the hall to the bedroom she shared with Ira. Ira was sitting tailor-fashion on the bed, laying out a game of solitaire. He had taken off his shoes and rolled his shirt sleeves up. "Care for some ice cream?" Maggie asked him.

"No, thanks."

"I shouldn't have any, either," she said. "But travel is such a strain, somehow. I feel I've burned a million calories just sitting in that car."

In the mirror above the bureau, though, she was positively obese. She set her ice cream on the dresser scarf and leaned forward to study her face, sucking in her cheeks to give herself a hollow look. It didn't work. She sighed and moved away. She went into the bathroom for her nightgown.

"Ira," she called, her voice echoing off the tiles, "do you suppose Serena is still mad at us?"

She had to peer around the door to catch Ms answer: a shrug.

"I was thinking I might phone to see how she's doing," she told him, "but I'd hate for her to hang up on me."

She unbuttoned her dress and pulled it over her head and tossed it onto the toilet lid. Then she stepped out of her shoes. "Remember when I helped her put her mother in the nursing home?" she asked. "That time, she didn't speak for months and whenever I tried to call she'd bang the receiver down. hated when she did that. That thunk on die other end of the line. It made me feel so small. It made me fed we were back in third grade."

"That's because she was behaving like a third-grader," Ira said.

Maggie came out in her slip to take another spoonful of ice cream. "And I don't even know why she got so upset," she told Ira's reflection in the mirror. "It was a perfectly honest mistake! I had the best intentions in die world! I said to her mother, 'Listen,' I said, 'you want to make a hit with the other residents? Want to show the "taff right off that you're not just another bland old la%T I mean this was Anita! Who used to wear the red toreador pants! I couldn't have them underestimating her, could I? That's why I told Serena we shouldn't take her in till Sunday evening, Halloween, and that's why I sewed that clown suit on my own machine and went all the way out Eastern Avenue to a what-do-you-call-it. What's it called?"

"Theatrical supply house," Ira said, dealing out another row of cards.

"Theatrical supply house, for white greasepaint. How was I to know they'd thrown the costume party on Saturday that year?"

She brought her ice cream over to the bed and settled down, propping her pillow against the headboard. Ira was frowning at his layout. "You would think I had deliberately plotted to make her a laughingstock," Maggie told him, "the way Serena carried on."

Whom she was picturing in her mind, though, was not Serena just then but Anita: her painted face, her red yarn hair, the triangles Maggie had lipsticked beneath her eyes which made them seem unnaturally bright or even teary, just like a real circus clown's. And then her chin quivering and denting inward as she sat in her wheelchair, watching Maggie leave.

"I was a coward," Maggie said suddenly, setting down her bowl. "I should have stayed and helped Serena get her changed. But I felt so foolish; I felt I'd made such a mess of things. I just said, 'Bye now!' and walked out, and the last I saw of her she was sitting there in a fright wig like somebody . . . inappropriate and senile and pathetic, with everyone around her dressed in normal clothing."

"Oh, honey, she adjusted to the place just fine, in the end," Ira said.

"Why make such a big deal of it?"

"Because you didn't see how she looked, Ira. And also she was wearing one of those Poseys, you know? One of those Posey restraining devices because she couldn't sit upright on her own anymore. A clown suit and a Posey! I was dumb, I tell you."

She was hoping Ira would continue contradicting her, but all he did was lay a jack of clubs on a queen.

"I don't know why I kid myself that I'm going to heaven," Maggie told him.

Silence.

"So shall I call her, or not?"

"Call who?"

"Serena, Ira. Who have we been talking about here?"

"Sure, if you like," he said.

"But suppose she hangs up on me?"

"Then think of all you'll save on the phone bill."

She made a face at him.

She took the telephone from the nightstand and set it in her lap.

Pondered it for a moment. Lifted the receiver. Tactfully, Ira bent lower over his cards and started whistling. (He was so polite about privacy, although as Maggie knew from experience you could overhear quite a lot while pretending to be absorbed in your song.) She punched in Serena's number very slowly and deliberately, as if that would help their conversation'.

Serena's telephone gave two short rings instead of one long. Maggie thought of that as rural and slightly backward. Breep-breep, it said.

Breep-breep.

Serena said, "Hello?"

"Serena?"

"Yes?"

"It's me."

"Oh, hi."

Maybe she hadn't realized yet who "me" was. Maggie cleared her throat.

She said, "It's Maggie."

"Hi, Maggie."

Maggie relaxed against her pillow and stretched her legs out. She said, "I called to see how you were doing."

"Just fine!" Serena said. "Or, well, I don't know. Not so hot, to tell the troth. I keep walking up and down, walking from one room to another. Can't seem to stay in one place."

"Isn't Linda there?"

"I sent her away."

"What for?"

"She got on my nerves."

"On your nerves! How?"

"Oh, this way and that, I forget. They took me out to dinner and ... I admit it was partly my fault. I was acting sort of contrary. I didn't like the restaurant and I couldn't stand the people who were eating there. I kept thinking how good it would feel to be alone, to have the house to myself. But now here I am and it's so quiet. It's like Fm wrapped in cotton or something. I was thrilled to hear the phone ring."

"I wish you lived closer," Maggie said.

Serena said, "I don't have anyone to tell about the trivia, what the plumbing's up to and how the red ants have come back in the kitchen."

"You can tell me," Maggie said.

"Well, but they're not your red ants too, don't you see? I mean you and I are not in this together."

"Oh," Maggie said.

There was a pause.

What was it Ira was whistling? Something from that record Leroy had played this evening; the lyrics were on the tip of Maggie's tongue. He scooped up a run of diamonds and shifted them to a king.

"You know," Serena said, "whenever Max went on " business trip we'd have so much to tell each other when he came home. He would talk and talk, and

/ would talk and talk, and then, you know what we'd do?"

"What?"

"We'd have a great big horrible fight."

Maggie laughed.

"And then we'd patch it up, and then we'd go to bed together," Serena said. "Crazy, wasn't it? And now I keep thinking: If Max were resurrected this minute, hale and hearty, would we still have our horrible fight just the same?"

"Well, I guess you would," Maggie said.

She wondered how it would feel to know she had seen Ira for the very last time on this earth. She supposed she would have trouble believing it. For several months, maybe, she would half expect him to come sauntering in again just as he had sauntered into choir practice that first spring evening thirty years ago.

"Um, also, Serena," she said, "I want to apologize for what happened after the funeral."

"Oh, forget it."

"No, really, both of us feel just terrible."

She hoped Serena couldn't hear Ira in the background; It made her apology seem insincere. Lately it occurs to me, he was whistling cheerily, what a long, strange trip it's been ...

"Forget it; I flew off the handle," Serena told her. "Widow's nerves, or something. Pure silliness. I'm past the stage now where I can discard old friends without a thought; I can't afford it."

"Oh, don't say that}"

"What, you want me to discard you?**

"No, no . . ."

"Just joking," Serena told her. "Maggie, thanks for calling, I mean it.

It was good to hear your voice."

"Anytime," Maggie said.

"Bye."

"Bye."

Serena hung up, A moment later, so did Maggie.

This ice cream wasn't even edible anymore. She had Jet it turn to soup.

Also she was feeling overstaffed. She looked down at herself-at the bodice of her slip stretched tight across her breasts. "I'm an elephant," she told Ira.

He said, "Not again."

"Seriously."

He tapped his upper lip with a forefinger and studied his cards.

Well. She rose and went into the bathroom, stripping as she walked, and took her nightgown from its hook. When she dropped it over her head it shook itself out around her, loose and cool and weightless. "Whew!" she said. She washed her face and brushed her teeth. A trail of underclothes led from bedroom to bathroom; she picked them up and stuffed them into the hamper.

Sometimes, after an especially trying day, she felt an urge to burn everything she had worn.

Then while she was arranging her dress on a hanger, she was struck by a thought. She looked over at Ira. She looked away. She hung the dress in her closet, next to her one silk blouse.

"Goodness," she said, turning toward him again. "Wasn't Cartwheel dinky."

"Mm."

"I'd forgotten how dinky," she said.

"Mmhmm."

"I bet their school is dinky too."

No response.

"Do you suppose the Cartwheel school offers a good education?"

"I really couldn't say," Ira said.

She closed the closet door firmly. "Well, I can say," she told him. "It must be a full year behind the schools in Baltimore. Maybe two."

"And naturally Baltimore's schools are superb," Ira said.

"Well, at least they're better than Cartwheel's."

He raised an eyebrow at her.

"I mean most likely," Maggie said.

He picked up a card, moved it onto another, then changed his mind and moved it back again.

"Here's what we could do," Maggie said. "Write and ask Fiona if she's given any thought to Leroy's education. Offer to enroll her down here in Baltimore and let Leroy live with us nine months of the year."

"No," Ira said.

"Or even twelve months, if it works out that way. You know how attached children get to their classmates and such. She might not want to leave."

"Maggie, look at me."

She faced him, hands on her hips.

"No," he said.

There were a lot of arguments she could have mentioned. All kinds of arguments!

But she didn't, somehow. She dropped her hands and wandered over to the window.

It was a warm, deep, quiet night, with just enough breeze to set the shade-pull swinging. She raised the shade higher and leaned out, pressing her forehead against the gritty screen. The air smelled of rubber tires and grass. Snatches of adventure music drifted up from the Lockes' TV next door. Across the street, the Simmonses were climbing their front steps, the husband jingling his house keys. They would not be going to bed yet; no chance of that. They were one of those happily childless young couples with eyes for only each other, and no doubt they were returning from dinner in a restaurant and now would . . . do what? Put on some romantic music, maybe something with violins, and sit conversing graciously on their spotless white love seat, each raising a wineglass made of that thin, extra-breakable crystal that doesn't even have a lip around the rim. Or maybe they would dance. She had seen them dancing on their front porch once-the wife in spike heels, with her hair swept up in an igloo shape, the husband holding her slightly apart in a formal, admiring way.

Maggie spun around and returned to the bed. "Oh, Ira," she said, dropping down beside him, "what are we two going to live for, all the rest of our lives?"

She had dislodged a stack of his cards, but he kindly refrained from straightening them and instead reached out one arm and drew her in.

"There, now, sweetheart," he said, and he settled her next to him. Still holding her close, he transferred a four of spades to a five, and Maggie rested her head against his chest and watched. He had arrived at the interesting part of the game by now, she saw. He had passed that early, superficial stage when any number of moves seemed possible, and now his choices were narrower and he had to show real skill and judgment. She felt a little stir of something that came over her like a flush, a sort of inner buoyancy, and she lifted her face to kiss the warm blade of his cheekbone. Then she slipped free and moved to her side of the bed, because tomorrow they had a long car trip to make and she knew she would need a good night's sleep before they started.