Saint Maybe

9. The Flooded Sewing Box

The spring of 1988 was the wettest anyone could remember. It rained nearly every day in May, and all the storm drains overflowed and the gutters ran like rivers and the Bedloes’ roof developed a leak directly above the linen closet. One morning when Daphne went to get a fresh towel she found the whole stack soaked through. Ian called Davidson Roofers, but the man who came said there wasn’t a thing he could do till the weather cleared. Even then they’d have a wait, he said, because half the city had sprung leaks in this downpour. So they kept a saucepan on the top closet shelf with a folded cloth in the bottom to muffle the constant drip, drip. Of course they’d moved the linens elsewhere, but still the upstairs hall smelled of something dank and swampy. Ian said it was him. He said he had mildew of the armpits.

Then along came June, dry as a bone. Only one brief shower fell that entire scorching month, and the yard turned brown and the cat lay stretched on the cool kitchen floor as flat as she could make herself. By that time, though, the Bedloes hardly cared; for Bee had awakened one June morning unable to speak, and two days later she was dead.

Agatha and her husband flew in from California. Thomas came down from New York. Claudia and Macy arrived from Pittsburgh with their two youngest, George and Henry; and their oldest, Abbie, drove up from Charleston. The house was not just full but splitting at the seams. Still, Daphne felt oddly lonesome. Late at night she cruised the dark rooms, stepping over sleeping bags, brushing past a snoring shape on the couch, and she thought, Somebody’s missing. She poured a shot of her grandfather’s whiskey and stood drinking it at the kitchen window, and she thought, It’s Grandma. In all the flurry of arrivals and arrangements, it seemed they had lost track of that.

But after everyone left again, Bee’s absence seemed almost a presence. Doug spent hours shut away in his room. Ian grew broody and distant. Daphne was working for a florist at the moment, and after she closed shop she would often just stay on downtown — grab a bite to eat and then maybe hit a few bars with some friends, go home with someone she hardly knew just to keep occupied. Who could have guessed that Bee would leave such a vacancy? Over the past few years she had seemed to be diminishing, fading into the background. It was Ian who’d appeared to be running things. Now Daphne saw that that wasn’t the case at all. Or maybe it was like those times you experience a physical ailment — stomach trouble, say, and you think, Why, I never realized before that the stomach is the center of the body, and then a headache and you think, No, wait, it’s the head that’s the center …

July was as dry as June, and the city started rationing water. You could sprinkle your lawn only between nine at night and nine in the morning. Ian said fine; he just wouldn’t sprinkle at all. It just wasn’t worth the effort, he said. The grass turned brittle, like paper held close to a candle flame. The hydrangeas wilted and drooped. When Davidson Roofers arrived one morning to hammer overhead, Daphne wondered why they bothered.

Late in August a gentle, pattering rain began one afternoon, and people ran out of their houses and flung open their arms and raised their faces to the sky. Daphne, walking home from the bus stop, thought she knew how plants must feel; her skin received each cool, sweet drop so gratefully. But the rain stopped short ten minutes later as if someone had turned a faucet off, and that was the end of that.

Then summer was over — the hardest summer in history, her grandfather said. (He meant because of Bee’s death, of course. He had probably not even noticed the drought.) But fall was not much wetter, or much more cheerful either.

October marked the longest Daphne had ever held a job — one entire year — and the florist gave her a raise. Her friends said now that she was making more money she ought to rent a place of her own. “You’re right,” she told them. “I’m going to start looking. I know I should. Any day I will.” No one could believe she still lived at home with her family.

That Thanksgiving was their first without Bee. It wasn’t a holiday Agatha usually returned for — she was an oncologist out in L.A., with a very busy practice-but this time she did, accompanied of course by Stuart. When Daphne came home from work Wednesday evening, she found Agatha washing carrots at the kitchen sink. They kissed, and Agatha said, “We’ve just got back from the grocery. There wasn’t a thing to eat in the fridge.”

“Well, no,” Daphne said, leaning against a counter. “We thought we’d have Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant.”

“That’s what Grandpa said.”

As usual, Agatha wore a tailored white blouse and a navy skirt. She must have a closetful; she dressed like a missionary. Her black hair curled at her jawline in the docile, unremarkable style of those generic women in grade-school textbooks, and her face was uniformly white, as if her skin were thicker than other people’s. Heavy, black-rimmed glasses framed her eyes. You could tell she thought prettiness was a waste of time. She could have been pretty — another woman with those looks would have been pretty — but she preferred not to be. Probably she disapproved of Daphne’s tinkling earrings and Indian gauze tunic; probably even her jeans, which Daphne did have to lie down to get into.

“You know what Grandma always told us,” Agatha said. “Only riffraff eat their holiday meals in restaurants.”

“Yes, but everything’s been so—”

Just then, Stuart came through the back door with a case of mineral water. “Hello, Daphne,” he said, setting the case on the counter. He shook her hand formally. Daphne said, “Well, hey there, Stuart,” and wondered all over again how her sister had happened to marry such an extremely handsome man. He was tall and muscular and tanned, with close-cut golden curls and eyes like chips of sky, and away from the hospital he wore the sort of casual, elegant clothes you see in ads for ski resorts. Maybe he was Agatha’s one self-indulgence, her single nod to the importance of appearance. Or maybe (more likely) she just hadn’t noticed. It was possible she was the only woman in all his life who hadn’t backed off in confusion at the sight of him, which would also explain why he had married her. Look at her now, for instance, grumpily stashing his bottles in the refrigerator. “Really, Stu,” she said, “you’d think we were staying till Christmas.”

“Well, someone will drink it,” he told her affably, and he went to hold open the door for Doug, who was hauling in a giant sack of cat food.

Ian arrived from work earlier than usual, and he hugged Agatha hard and pumped Stuart’s hand up and down. He was always so pleased to have everyone home. And after supper — mostly sprouts and cruciferous vegetables, Agatha’s doing — he announced he’d be skipping Prayer Meeting to meet Thomas’s train with them. Ian almost never skipped Prayer Meeting.

He was the one who drove, with his father up front next to him and Daphne in back between Agatha and Stuart, her right arm held stiffly apart from Stuart’s suede sleeve. (She could not take his looks for granted.) The dark streets slid past, dotted with events: two black men laughingly wrestling at an intersection, an old woman wheeling a shopping cart full of battered dolls. Daphne leaned forward to see everything more clearly, but the others were discussing Agatha’s new Saab. So far it was running fine, Agatha said, although the smell of the leather interior kept reminding her of adhesive tape. Agatha probably thought of Baltimore as just another city by now.

At Penn Station all the parking slots were filled, so Ian circled the block while the others went inside. “What’s happened to Ian?” Agatha murmured to Daphne as they walked across the lobby.

“Happened?” Daphne asked.

But then their grandfather caught up with them and said, “My, oh, my, I just never can get over what they’ve done to this place.” He always said that. He made them tip their heads back to study the skylight, so airily delicate and aqua blue above them, and that was what they were doing when Thomas discovered them. “Gawking at the skylight again,” he said in Daphne’s ear. She wheeled and said, “Thomas!” and kissed his cheek and passed him on to Agatha. Lately he had become so New Yorkish. He wore a short black overcoat that picked up the black of his hair and the olive in his skin, and he carried a natty little black leather overnight bag. But when he bypassed Stuart’s outstretched hand to give him a one-armed bear hug, Daphne could see he was still their old Thomas. He had this way of assuming that people would just naturally love him, and so of course they always did.

Now they had to crowd together in the car, and since Daphne was smallest she sat in front between Doug and Ian. As they drove up Charles Street, Thomas told them all about his new project. (He worked for a software company, inventing educational computer games.) None of them could get more than the gist of it, but Ian kept saying, “Mm. Mmhmm,” looking very tickled and impressed, and Stuart and Agatha asked intelligent-sounding questions. Doug, however, was silent, and when Daphne glanced up at him she found him staring straight ahead with an extra, glassy surface in front of his eyes. He was thinking about Bee, she knew right off. All of the children home again but Bee not there to enjoy them. She reached over and patted his hand. He averted his face and gazed out the side window, but his hand turned upward on his knee and grasped hers. His fingers felt satiny and crumpled, and extremely fragile.

It wasn’t till late that night, after Doug and Ian had gone to bed and the others were watching TV, that Agatha had a chance to ask her question again. “What’s happened to Ian?”

“Nothing’s happened,” Daphne said.

“And Grandpa! And this whole house!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Thomas, you know, don’t you?”

Thomas gave a light shrug — his favorite response to any serious question. He was seated on Agatha’s other side, flipping channels with the remote control. Stuart lounged on the floor with his back against Agatha’s knees. It was after midnight and Daphne was getting sleepy, but she hated to miss out on anything. She said, “How about we all go to bed.”

“Bed? In California it’s barely nine o’clock,” Agatha said.

“Well, I’m ready to call it a day,” Stuart announced from the floor. “Don’t forget, we flew the red-eye.”

“I come home and find this place a shambles,” Agatha told Daphne. “The grass is stone dead, even the bushes look dead. The front-porch swing is hanging by one chain. The house is such a mess there’s no place to set down our bags, and the dishes haven’t been done for days and there’s nothing to eat in the fridge, nothing in the pantry, not even any cat food for the cat, and when I go up to our room both mattresses are stripped naked and all the sheets are in the hamper and when I take the sheets to the basement the washing machine doesn’t work. Grandpa told me it’s been broken all fall. I asked him, ‘Well, what have you done about it?’ and he said, ‘Oh, any time one of us goes out we try to remember to gather a little something for the laundromat,’ and then he said we’re eating our Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant. A restaurant! On St. Paul Street!”

“Well, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Daphne told her. “There’s been a drought, for one thing. I mean, the grass isn’t really our fault. And the swing is probably fine; it’s just that Ian needs to check the porch ceiling-boards that buckled in the floods.”

But she could hear how lame this was sounding — drought and floods both. And to tell the truth, she hadn’t realized about the mess. She looked around the living room (newspapers so outdated they’d turned yellow, dead flowers in a dusty vase, cat fur from the carpet clinging to Stuart’s corduroys) and she felt ashamed. A memory swam back to her of her most recent drop-in visit to the laundromat, during which she had spotted, on one of the folding tables, a hardened mass of Bedloe plaids that some stranger had removed from a washing machine and left to dry in a clump, possibly several days back.

“Also, Ian needs a haircut,” Agatha told her.

“He does? But I gave him a haircut,” Daphne said. (Ian hated barbershops.) “I gave him one just last—”

Oh, Lord, way last summer. All at once she saw him: the long, limp tendrils drooping over his collar, dull brown mixed with strands of gray, and the worn lines fanning out from his eyes.

“He looks like some eccentric, middle-aged … uncle,” Agatha said.

“He does not!” Daphne protested, so loudly that Stuart, slumped against Agatha’s knees, jolted upright and said, “Huh?” and Thomas raised the volume on the remote control.

“And Grandpa has food stains down his front,” Agatha said, “and you’ve got dirty fingernails.”

“Well, I do work in a florist shop,” Daphne told her. She darted a glance at her left hand, which rested on the arm of the couch.

“Is it Grandma?” Agatha asked. “But it can’t be, can it? I know we all miss her, but Ian’s been in charge of the house for ages, hasn’t he?”

“It’s true we miss her,” Daphne said, and just then she heard Bee calling her for supper on a long-ago summer evening. “Daaph-ne!”—the two notes floating across the twilight. Surreptitiously, she started cleaning her nails. “But we get along,” she said. “We’re fine! And no way is Ian middle-aged. He’s forty; that’s not so old! He’s even got this sort of girlfriend. Clara. Have you met Clara? No, I guess not. Woman at our church. She’s okay.”

“Is she coming for Thanksgiving dinner?”

“Who, Clara?” Daphne asked stupidly. As a matter of fact, she had never given the woman much thought. “Well, no, I don’t believe he invited her,” she said.

“How about you?”

“How about me?”

“Are you seeing anyone special?”

“Oh. No,” Daphne said, “I’m between boyfriends at the moment.”

“What happened to … was it Ron?”

“Rich,” Daphne said. “He was getting too serious. I think I’m more the one-night-stand type, if you want the honest truth.”

She didn’t know why she had this urge to shock, sometimes, when she was talking to Agatha. It wasn’t even that effective, for Agatha merely raised her eyebrows and made no comment.

The TV said, “Drop us a postcard stating — female deposits her eggs in — not thirty-nine ninety-five, not twenty-nine ninety-five, but—”

“Stuart does that too,” Agatha told Thomas. “Just hand him a remote control and he turns sort of frantic. It must be hormonal.”

“Say what?” Stuart asked, snapping his head up.

“Tomorrow afternoon we clean house,” Agatha told Daphne.

“All right,” Daphne said meekly.

“We’ll have a regular, normal, home-cooked Thanksgiving dinner; I bought an eighteen-pound turkey at the grocery store, and I’ve invited Mrs. Jordan and the foreigners. Then afterward we’ll start cleaning and sorting. Discarding. Do you know Grandma’s cosmetics are still on her bureau?”

“Maybe Grandpa likes them there,” Daphne suggested.

“Her arthritis pills are still in the medicine cabinet.”

“Maybe—”

“Past their expiration date!” Agatha said, as if that settled it.

Stuart said, “Aggie, can’t we go to bed now?”

“Now?” Agatha said. She checked her watch. “It’s not even nine-thirty.”

Daphne was so sleepy that the room was misting over, and Thomas had been yawning, but they all settled back obediently and fixed their eyes on the screen.

Thursday afternoon Agatha and Daphne washed all the dishes, even those in the cupboards, and Thomas vacuumed downstairs while Ian tried to reduce the general disorder. Stuart, who turned out to be fairly useless around the house, watched a football game with Doug.

Thursday night at ten they had turkey sandwiches (in California it was seven) and then Agatha dusted the downstairs furniture, Daphne scrubbed the woodwork, and Thomas polished the silver.

Friday Daphne went back to Floral Fantasy, and by the time she got home the upstairs had been vacuumed and dusted as well and the washing machine repaired and all the laundry done. Bee’s little walnut desk in the living room stood bare, its cubbyholes dark as missing teeth; and when Daphne opened the drawers below she found only the essentials: a box of envelopes, a photo album whose six filled pages covered the past twenty-two years, and the document transforming those two strangers, Thomas and Agatha “Dulsimore,” into Bedloes and tucking them into Ian’s safekeeping along with Daphne herself. This last was so familiar she could have quoted it verbatim, but she scanned it yet again and so did Agatha, breathing audibly over Daphne’s left shoulder. “What’s disturbing,” Agatha told her (not for the first time), “is we don’t know a thing about our genetic heritage. What if we’re prone to diabetes? Or epilepsy?”

Diplomatically, Daphne refrained from pointing out that she herself did know her heritage, at least on her father’s side. She shook her head and put the document back in the drawer.

Saturday Ian went to Good Works, but Daphne stayed home to continue with the cleaning. “Grandpa,” Agatha said, “today we’re sorting through Grandma’s belongings. Anything you want to keep, you’d better let us know now.”

“Oh,” he said, and then he said, “Well, her lipstick, maybe. Her perfume bottles.”

“Lipstick? Perfume?”

“I like her bureau to have things on top of it. I don’t want to see it all blank.”

“Couldn’t we just put a vase on top?”

“No, we couldn’t,” her grandfather said firmly.

“Well, all right.”

“And I’d like her robe left hanging in her closet.”

“All right, Grandpa.”

“But you might ship her jewelry to Claudia. Or at least what jewelry is real.”

“Well, you’re going to have to tell us which is which,” Agatha said, for of course they wouldn’t know real from Woolworth’s.

But later, when they had packed all Bee’s limp, sad, powdery-smelling lingerie into the cartons Thomas brought up from the basement, they called for Doug to advise them on the jewelry and he didn’t answer. They’d assumed he was watching TV, but when they checked they found only Stuart, channel-hopping rapidly from golf to cartoons to cooking shows. Daphne said, “I bet he’s at the foreigners’.”

“Honestly,” Agatha said.

“The foreigners have a VCR now, did you know? They own every Rita Hayworth movie ever made.”

“Run get him, will you?” Agatha asked Thomas.

But Thomas said, “Maybe we should just let him stay there.”

“Well, what’ll we do about the jewelry?”

“Send Claudia the whole box, for heaven’s sake,” Daphne said. She told Thomas, “Wrap the whole box for mailing. You’ll find paper and string in the pantry.”

“But it isn’t just the jewelry,” Agatha said. “We need him here to answer other questions, too.”

“Agatha, will you drop it? He doesn’t want to be around for this.”

“Well. Sorry,” Agatha said stiffly.

They went back upstairs to their grandparents’ bedroom, and while Thomas bore the jewelry box off to the pantry Daphne and Agatha started on the cedar chest at the foot of the bed. They had assumed this part would be easy — just sweaters, surely — but underneath lay stacks of moldering photo albums Daphne had never seen before. “Oh, those,” Agatha said. “They used to be downstairs in the desk.” She picked up a manila envelope and peered inside. Daphne, meanwhile, flipped through the topmost album and found rows of streaky, pale rectangles showing ghostlike human faces with no features but pinhead eyes. “Polaroid, in its earliest days,” Agatha explained.

“Well, darn,” Daphne said, because the captions were so alluring. Danny at Bethany Beach, 1963. Lucy with the Crains, 8/65. Her father, whom she knew only from a boringly boyish sports photo hanging in the living room. Her mother, who was nothing but the curve of a cheek above Daphne’s own newborn self on page one of her otherwise empty baby book.

She turned to the albums below. The pictures there were more distinct, but they documented less interesting times. Claudia, thinner and darker, married a plucked-looking Macy in a ridiculous white tuxedo. Doug stood at a lectern holding up a plaque. Claudia and Macy had a baby. Then they had another. People seemed to graduate a lot. Some wore long white robes and mortarboards, some wore black and carried their mortarboards under their arms, and one, labeled Cousin Louise, wore just a dress but you could see this was a graduation because of her ribboned diploma and her relatives pressing around. All those relatives attending all those ceremonies, sitting patiently through all those tedious speeches just so they could raise a cheer at the single mention of a loved one’s name. It wasn’t fair: by the time of Daphne’s own graduation, most of those people had vanished and Claudia and Macy had moved out of state. The family had congealed into smaller knots, wider apart, like soured milk. Their gatherings were puny, their cheers self-conscious and faint.

“Thomas and me with Mama,” Agatha said, thrusting a color snapshot at Daphne. “I wonder how that got here.”

She had pulled it from the manila envelope: a slick, bright square that Daphne took hold of reverently. So. Her mother. A very young woman with two small children, standing in front of a trailer. Probably she and Daphne looked alike — same shade of hair, same shape of face — but this woman seemed so long ago, Daphne couldn’t feel related to her. Her dress was too short, her makeup too harsh, her surroundings too tinny and garish. Had she ever cried herself to sleep at night? Laughed till her legs could no longer support her? Fallen into such a rage that she’d pounded the wall with her fists?

Daphne used to ask about her mother all the time, in the old days. She had plagued her sister and brother with questions. They never gave very satisfactory answers, though. Agatha said, “Her hair was black. Her eyes were, I don’t know, blue or gray or something.” Thomas said, “She was nice. You’d have liked her!” in his brightest tone of voice. But when Daphne asked, “What would I have liked about her?” he just said, “Oh, everything!” and looked away from her. He could be so exasperating, at times. At times she imagined him encased in something plastic, something slick and smooth as a raincoat.

Agatha held out her hand for the snapshot, and Daphne said, “I think I’ll keep it.”

“Keep it?”

“I’ll get it framed.”

“What for?” Agatha asked, surprised.

“I’m going to hang it in the living room with the other family pictures.”

“In the living room! Well, that’s just inappropriate,” Agatha told her.

Daphne had a special allergy to the word “inappropriate.” A number of teachers had used it during her schooldays. She said, “Don’t tell me what’s appropriate!”

“What are you so prickly about? I only meant—”

“She has just as much right to be on that wall as Great-Aunt Bess with her Hula Hoop.”

“Yes, of course she does,” Agatha said. “Fine! Go ahead.” And she passed Daphne the manila envelope. “Here’s all the rest of her things.”

Daphne shook the envelope into her lap. Certificates. Receipts. A date on one read 2/7/66. She didn’t see any more photos. “Put them away; don’t leave them lying around,” Agatha said, delving into the chest again. Her voice came back muffled. “We’re trying to get organized, remember.”

So Daphne took them across the hall to her room. It used to be Thomas’s room, and although Thomas had to sleep on the couch now he kept his belongings here during his visits. His toilet articles littered Daphne’s bureau and his leather bag spilled clothing onto her floor. Daphne suddenly felt overcome by objects. What did she need with these papers, anyhow? Except for the snapshot, they were worthless. And yet she couldn’t bear to throw them away.

When she returned to her grandparents’ bedroom, she found Agatha looking equally defeated. She was standing in front of Bee’s closet, facing a row of heart-breakingly familiar dresses and blouses. Crammed on the shelf overhead were suitcases and hatboxes and a sliding heap of linens — the linens moved last spring from beneath the leaky roof. It showed what this household had descended to that they’d never been moved back, except for those few items in regular use. “What are these?” Agatha asked, taking a pinch of a monogrammed guest towel.

“I guess we ought to carry them to the linen closet,” Daphne said.

But the linen closet, they discovered, had magically replenished itself. The emptied top shelf now held Doug’s shoe-polishing gear and someone’s greasy coveralls and the everyday towels not folded but hastily wadded. And the lower shelves, which hadn’t been sorted in years, made Agatha say, “Good grief.” She gave a listless tug to a crib sheet patterned with ducklings. (How long since they’d needed a crib sheet?) When they heard Thomas on the stairs, she called, “Tom, could you bring up more boxes from the basement?”

She pulled out half a pack of disposable diapers — the old-fashioned kind as stiff and crackly as those paper quilts that line chocolate boxes. From the depths of the closet she drew a baby-sized pillow and said, “Ick,” for a rank, moldy smell unfurled from it almost visibly. The leak must have traveled farther than they had suspected. “Throw it out,” she told Daphne. Daphne took it between thumb and forefinger and dropped it on top of the diapers. Next Agatha brought forth a bedpan with an inch of rusty water in the bottom—“That too,” she said — and a damp, cloth-covered box patterned with faded pink roses. “Is this Grandma’s?” she asked. “I don’t remember this.”

Both of them hovered over it hopefully as she set the box on the floor and lifted the lid, but it was only a sewing box, abandoned so long ago that a waterlogged packet of clothing labels inside bore Claudia’s maiden name. There were sodden cards of bias tape and ripply, stretched-out elastic; and underneath those, various rusty implements — scissors, a seam ripper, a leather punch — and tiny cardboard boxes falling apart with moisture. Clearly nothing here was of interest, so why did they insist on opening each box? Even Agatha, common-sense Agatha, pried off a disintegrating cardboard lid to stare down at a collection of shirt buttons. Everything swam in brown water. Everything had the dead brown stink of overcooked broccoli. It was amazing how thorough the rust was. It threaded the hooks and eyes, it stippled the needles and straight pins. It choked the revolving wheel of the leather punch and clogged each and every one of its hollow, cylindrical teeth.

Daphne thought of the dress form in the attic storeroom — Bee’s figure but with a waist, with a higher bosom. Once their grandma had been a happy woman, she supposed. Back before everything changed.

“Will these be enough?” Thomas asked, arriving with two cartons. But Agatha flapped a hand without looking. “Shall I pack these things on the floor?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t bother,” Agatha told him, and then she turned and wandered toward the stairs.

“Just leave them here?” he asked Daphne.

“Whatever,” Daphne said.

In fact they remained there the rest of the day, obstructing the hall till Daphne finally stuffed them back in the closet. She piled everything onto the bottom shelf, and she set the cardboard cartons inside and closed the door.

“I dreamed this high-school boy was proposing to me,” Agatha said at breakfast. “He told me to name a date. He said, ‘How about Wednesday? Monday is always busy and Tuesday is always rainy.’ I said, ‘Wait, I’m … wait,’ I said. ‘I think you ought to know that I’m quite a bit older than you.’ Then I woke up, and I laughed out loud. Did you hear me laughing, Stu? I mean, older was the least of it. I should have said, ‘Wait, there’s another thing, too! It so happens I’m already married.’ ”

“I dreamed I was going blind,” Thomas said. “Everyone said, ‘Oh, how awful, we’re so sorry for you.’ I said, ‘Sorry? Why? I’ve had twenty-six years of perfect vision!’ I really meant it, too. I sounded like one of those inspirational stories we used to read in Bible camp.”

“I dreamed I was seeing patients,” Stuart said. “They all had some kind of rash and I was trying to remember my dermatology. It didn’t seem to occur to me to tell them that wasn’t my field.”

Agatha said, “I’d never go into dermatology.”

They were having English muffins and juice — just the four of them, because it was ten-thirty and Doug and Ian had eaten breakfast hours ago. Doug was in the dining room laying out a game of solitaire, the soft flip-flip of his cards providing a kind of background rhythm. Ian was moving around the kitchen wiping off counters. When he passed near Daphne he smiled down at her and said, “What did you dream, Daphne?” Something about his crinkled eyes and the kindly attentiveness of his expression made her sad, but she smiled back and said, “Oh, nothing.”

“Dermatology’s not bad,” Stuart was saying. “At least dermatologists don’t have night call.”

“But it’s so superficial,” Agatha said.

“You should see Agatha with her patients,” Stuart told the others. “She’s amazing. She’ll say straight out to them, ‘What you have can’t be cured.’ I think they feel relieved to finally hear the truth.”

“I say, ‘What you have can’t be cured at this particular time,” Agatha corrected him. “There’s a difference.”

Daphne couldn’t imagine that either version would be as much of a relief as Stuart supposed.

“Speaking of time,” Ian said, draping his dishcloth over the faucet, “when exactly does your plane take off, Ag?”

“Somewhere around noon, I think. Why?”

“Well, I’m wondering about church. If I wanted to go to church I’d have to leave right now.”

“Go, then,” she told him.

“But if your flight’s at noon—”

“Go! Grandpa can drive us.”

Ian hesitated. Daphne knew what he was thinking. He was weighing Sunday services, which he never missed if he could help it, against the possibility of hurting Agatha’s feelings. And Agatha, with her chin raised defiantly and her glasses flashing an opaque white light, would most definitely have hurt feelings. Daphne knew that if Ian did not. Finally Ian said, “Well, if you’re sure …” and Agatha snapped, “Absolutely! Go.”

He didn’t seem to catch her tone. (Or he didn’t want to catch it.) He rounded the table to kiss her goodbye. “It’s been wonderful having you,” he said. She looked away from him. He shook Stuart’s hand. “Stuart, I hope you two will come again at Christmas.”

“We’ll try,” Stuart told him, rising. “Thanks for the hospitality.”

“You planning on church today, Daphne?”

“I thought I’d ride along to the airport,” Daphne said.

“Well, I’ll be off, then,”

In the dining room, they heard him speaking to Doug. “Guess I’ll let you do the airport run, Dad.”

“Oh, well,” Doug said. “Seems I’m losing here anyway.”

“And another thing,” Agatha told Daphne. (But what was the first thing? Daphne wondered.) “This business about you not driving is really dumb, Daph.”

“Driving?” Daphne asked.

“Here you are, twenty-two years old, and Grandpa has to drive us to the airport. As far as I know you’ve never even sat behind a steering wheel.”

“How did my driving get into this?”

“It’s a symptom of a whole lot of other problems, any fool can see that. Why are you still depending on people to chauffeur you around? Why have you never gone away to college? Why are you still living at home when everyone else has long since left?”

“Maybe I like living at home, so what’s the big deal?” Daphne asked. “This happens to be a perfectly nice place.”

“Nobody says it isn’t,” Agatha said, “but that’s not the issue. You’ve simply reached the stage where you should be on your own. Right, Stuart? Right, Thomas?”

Stuart developed an interest in brushing crumbs off his sweater. Thomas gave one of his shrugs and drank the last of his orange juice. Agatha sighed. “You know,” she told Daphne, “in many ways, living in a family is like taking a long, long trip with people you’re not very well acquainted with. At first they seem just fine, but after you’ve traveled awhile at close quarters they start grating on your nerves. Their most harmless habits make you want to scream — the way they overuse certain phrases or yawn out loud — and you just have to get away from them. You have to leave home.”

“Well, I guess I must not have traveled with them long enough, then,” Daphne told her.

“How can you say that? With Ian doddering about the house calling you his ‘Daffy-dill’ and spending every Saturday at Good Works — Good Works! Good God. I bet half those people don’t even want a bunch of holy-molies showing up to rake their leaves in front of all their neighbors. And marching off to services come rain or shine; never mind if his niece is here visiting and will have to go to the airport on her own—”

“He gets a lot out of those services,” Daphne said. “And Good Works too; it kind of … links you. He doesn’t have much else, Agatha.”

“Exactly,” Agatha told her. “Isn’t that my point? If not for Second Chance he’d have much more, believe me. That’s what religion does to you. It narrows you and confines you. When I think of how religion ruined our childhood! All those things we couldn’t do, the Sugar Rule and the Caffeine Rule. And that pathetic Bible camp, with poor pitiful Sister Audrey who finally ran off with a soldier if I’m not mistaken. And Brother Simon always telling us how God had saved him for something special when his apartment building burned down, never explaining what God had against those seven others He didn’t save. And the way we had to say grace in every crummy fast-food joint with everybody gawking—”

“It was a silent grace,” Daphne said. “It was the least little possible grace! He always tried to be private about it. And religion never ruined my childhood; it made me feel cared for. Or Thomas’s either. Thomas still attends church himself. Isn’t that so, Thomas? He belongs to a church in New York.”

Thomas said, “It’s getting on toward eleven, you two. Maybe we should be setting out for the airport.”

“Not to change the subject or anything,” Daphne told him.

He pretended he hadn’t heard. They all stood up, and he said, “Then driving back, you and Grandpa can drop me at the train station. I’ll just get my things together. You want me to put my sheets in the hamper, Daph?”

“Are you serious?” Daphne asked. “Those sheets are good for another month yet.”

Agatha rolled her eyes and said, “Charming.”

“You have no right to talk if you’re not here to do the laundry,” Daphne told her.

“Which reminds me,” Agatha said. She stopped short in the dining room, where their grandfather was collecting his cards. “About the linen closet and such—”

“Don’t give it a thought,” Daphne said. “Just go off scot-free to the other side of the continent.”

“No, but I was wondering. Isn’t there some kind of cleaning service that could sort this place out for us? Not just clean it but organize it, and I could pay.”

“There’s the Clutter Counselor,” Daphne said.

Stuart laughed. Agatha said, “The what?”

“Rita the Clutter Counselor. She lives with this guy I know, Nick Bascomb. Did you ever meet Nick? And she makes her living sorting other people’s households and putting them in order.”

“Hire her,” Agatha said.

“I don’t know how much she charges, though.”

“Hire her anyway. I’ll pay whatever it costs.”

“What?” their grandfather spoke up suddenly. “You’d let an outsider go through our closets?”

“It’s either that or marry Ian off quick to that Clara person,” Agatha told him.

“I’ll call Rita this evening,” Daphne said.

Rita diCarlo was close to six feet tall — a rangy, sauntering woman in her late twenties with long black hair so frizzy that the braid hanging down her back seemed not so much plaited as clotted. She’d been living with Nick Bascomb for a couple of years now, but Daphne hadn’t really got to know her till just last summer when a bunch of them went together to a rock concert at RFK Stadium. They’d had bleacher tickets that didn’t allow them on the field, where all the action was; but Rita, bold as brass, strode down to the field anyway. When an usher tried to stop her she held up her ticket stub and strode on. The usher considered a while and then spun around and called, “Hey! That wasn’t a field ticket!” By then, though, she was lost in the crowd. Daphne hadn’t seen much of her since, but she always remembered that incident — the dash and swagger of it. She thought Rita was entirely capable of yanking their house into shape.

On the phone Rita said she could fit the Bedloes into that coming week, so she dropped by Monday after work to “case the joint,” as she put it. Wearing a red-and-black lumber jacket, black jeans, and heavy leather riding boots, she ambled about throwing open cupboards and peering into drawers. She surveyed the basement impassively. She seemed unfazed by the smell in the linen closet. She did not once ask, as Daphne had feared, “What in hell has hit here?” She poked her head into Doug’s bedroom and, finding him seated empty-handed in his rocker, merely said, “Hmm,” and withdrew. This was tactful of her, of course, but Doug’s room had urgent need of her services; so Daphne said, “Maybe after Grandpa’s gone downstairs …”

“I got the general idea,” Rita told her.

“That’s where Grandma’s closet is and so—”

“Sure. Clothes and stuff. Hatboxes.”

“Right.”

“I got it.”

She climbed the wooden steps to the attic, which had a stuffy, cloistered feeling now that it was no longer in regular use. She bent to look into the storeroom under the eaves. When she plucked one of Bee’s letters from a cardboard carton, Daphne felt a pang. “I guess these … personal things you’ll leave to us,” she said, but Rita said, “Not if you want this done right.” Then she added, “Don’t worry, I don’t read your mail. Or only enough to classify it. Stuff like this, for instance: too recent to have historical interest, no postage stamps of value, and the return address is a woman’s so we know it’s not your grandparents’ love letters. I’d say ditch them.”

“Ditch them?”

Rita turned to look at her. Her face was tanned and square-jawed; her heavy black eyebrows were slightly raised.

“But suppose they told us what young women used to think about,” Daphne said. “Politics, or feminism, or things like that.”

Rita shook a piece of ivory stationery out of the envelope. Without bothering to unfold it, she read off the phrases that showed themselves: “… tea at Mrs.… wore my new flowered … self belt with covered buckle …”

“Well,” Daphne murmured.

“Ditch them,” Rita told her.

They went back downstairs. Daphne felt like a little fairy person following Rita’s clopping boots. “What I do,” Rita said, “is sort everything into three piles: Keep, Discard, and Query. I make it a practice to query as little as possible. Everything we keep I organize, and what’s discarded I haul away; I’ve got my own truck and two guys to help tote. I charge by the hour, but I generally know ahead of time how long a job will run me. This place, for instance — well, I’ll need to sit down and figure it out, but offhand I’d say if I start tomorrow morning, I could be done late Thursday.”

“Thursday! That’s just three days!”

“Or four at the most. It’s a fairly straightforward house, compared to some I’ve seen.”

They were back in the kitchen now. She opened one of the cabinets and gazed meditatively at a collection of empty peanut butter jars.

“It doesn’t look so straightforward to me,” Daphne told her.

“Well, naturally. That’s because you live here. You feel guilty getting rid of things. This one old lady I had, she could never throw out a gift. A drawing her son made in nursery school — and that son was sixty years old! A seashell her girlfriend brought from Miami in nineteen twenty—‘I just feel I’d be throwing the person out,’ she told me. So what I did was, I didn’t let her know. Well, of course she knew in a way. What did she suppose was in all those garbage bags? But she never asked, and I never said, and everyone was happy.”

She slammed the cabinet door shut. “I’ve seen houses so full you couldn’t walk through them. I’ve seen closets totally lost — I mean crammed to the gills and closed off, with new stuff piled in front of them so you didn’t know they existed.”

“Your own apartment must be neat as a pin,” Daphne said.

“Not really,” Rita told her. “That Nick saves everything. I would end up with a pack rat!” She laughed. She hooked a kitchen chair with the toe of her boot, pulled it out from the table, and sat down. “Now,” she said, drawing a pencil and a note pad from her breast pocket. The pencil was roughly the size of a cartridge. She licked its tip and started writing. “Six rooms plus basement plus finished attic. Your attic’s in pretty good shape, but that basement …”

Ian appeared at the back door, lugging a large cardboard box. “Open up!” he called through the glass, and when Daphne obeyed he practically fell inside. Whatever he was carrying must weigh a ton. “Genuine ceramic tiles,” he told Daphne, setting the box on the floor. “We’re replacing an antique mantel at a house in Fells Point and these were just being thrown out, so—”

“Will you be putting them to use within the next ten days?” Rita asked.

He straightened and said, “Pardon?”

“Ian, this is Rita diCarlo,” Daphne said. “My uncle Ian. Rita’s here to organize us.”

“Oh, yes,” Ian said.

“Do you have a specific bathroom in mind that’s in need of those tiles within the next ten days?” Rita asked him.

“Well, not exactly, but—”

“Then I suggest you walk them straight back out to the trash can,” she said, “or else I’ll have to tack them onto my estimate here.”

“But these are from Spain,” Ian told her. He bent to lift one from the box — a geometric design of turquoise and royal blue. “How could I put something like this in the trash?”

Rita considered him. She didn’t give the tile so much as a glance, but Ian continued holding it hopefully in front of his chest like someone displaying his number for a mug shot.

“You see what I have to deal with,” Daphne told Rita.

“Yes, I see,” Rita said.

Oddly enough, though, Daphne just then noticed how beautiful that tile really was. The design looked kaleidoscopic — almost capable of movement. She couldn’t remember now why stripping the house had seemed like such a good idea.

Rita did do an excellent job, as it turned out, but Daphne hardly had time to notice before something new came along for her to think about: Friday afternoon, she was fired.

It wasn’t entirely unexpected. Ever since she’d got her raise, she seemed to have lost interest in her work. She had shown up late, left early, and mislaid several orders. The messages people sent with their flowers had begun to depress her. “Well, I think I’ll say … well, let me see,” they would tell her, frowning into space. “Why don’t we put … Okay! I’ve got it! ‘Congratulations and best wishes.’ ” Then Daphne would slash CBW across the order form. “To the girl of my dreams” was G/dms. “Thanks for last night,” Tx/nite. She felt injured on their behalf — that their most heartfelt sentiments could be considered so routine. And when they were not routine, it was worse: I am more sorry than I can tell you and you’re right not to want to see me again but I’ll never forget you as long as I live and I hope you have a wonderful marriage. “With delivery that comes to twenty-seven eighty,” she would say in her blandest tone.

The way Mr. Potoski put it was, she could either leave now or stay on for her two weeks’ notice, but she could see he was eager to get rid of her. He already had a new girl lined up. “I’ll leave now,” Daphne told him, and so at closing time she gathered her few possessions and stuffed them into a paper sack. Then she slipped her jacket on and ducked quietly out the door, avoiding an awkward farewell scene. On the way to the bus stop she found herself composing messages to Mr. Potoski. Tx/fun: Thanks, it’s been fun. TK: Take care. Not that she had anything against Mr. Potoski personally. She knew this was all her own fault.

Her bus was undergoing some heater problems, and by the time she reached home she was chilled through. Still in her jacket, she went directly to the kitchen and lit the gas beneath the kettle. Ian must be working late this evening. She could hear her grandfather down in the basement, rattling tools and thinking aloud, but she didn’t call out to him. Maybe there was some advantage to living alone after all — not dealing with other people, not feeling responsible for other people’s happiness. Although that was out of the question, now that she had no salary.

She took a mug from the cupboard, where everything sat in straight rows — eight mugs, eight short glasses, eight tall glasses. The mugs that didn’t match and the odd-sized glasses had been sent to Good Works. The cereals that people had tried once and never again had disappeared from the shelves. In just three days Rita had turned this house into a sort of sample kit: one perfect set of everything. But Daphne hadn’t quite adjusted yet and she felt a little rustle of panic. She wanted some extras. She wanted that crowd of cracked, crazed, chipped, handleless mugs waiting behind the other mugs on the off chance they might be needed.

She ladled coffee into the drip pot and then poured in the boiling water. Coffee was her weakness. Reverend Emmett said coffee clouded the senses, coffee stepped between God and the self; but Daphne had discovered long ago that coffee sharpened the senses, and she loved to sit through church all elated and jangly-nerved and keyed to the sound of that inner voice saying enigmatic things she might someday figure out when she was wiser: if not for you, if not for you, if not for you and down in the meadow where the green grass grows … She waited daily for caffeine to be declared illegal, but it seemed the government had not caught on yet.

She poured the coffee and sat down at the table with it, warming her hands around the mug. Now her grandfather’s footsteps climbed the basement stairs and crossed the pantry. Daphne looked up, but the figure in the doorway was not her grandfather after all. It was Rita. Daphne said, “Rita! Aren’t you done with us?”

Well, she was done. She had finished yesterday afternoon and even presented her staggeringly high bill, which Daphne was going to mail on to Agatha as soon as she figured out where the stamps had been moved to. But here Rita stood, flushed from her climb, looking a bit better put together than usual in a flowing white shirt that bloused above her jeans and a tan suede jacket as soft as washed silk. “Daphne,” she said flatly. “I thought you were Ian.”

Ah.

Daphne had been through this any number of times. Back in high school, girlfriends of hers showed up unannounced, wearing brand new outfits and carrying their bosoms ostentatiously far in front of them like fruit on a tray. “Oh,” they’d say in just such a tone, dull and disappointed. “I thought you were Ian.”

But Rita already had somebody, didn’t she? She was living with Nick Bascomb. Wasn’t she?

“It just occurred to me,” Rita said, “that I ought to try once more to sort out your grandpa’s workbench. Not that I’d charge any extra, of course. But I didn’t feel right allowing it to stay so …”

Her voice dwindled away. Daphne, sitting back in her chair and cupping her mug in both hands, watched her with some enjoyment. Rita diCarlo, of all people! Such a tough cookie. Although Daphne could have warned her that she was about as far from Ian’s type as a woman could get.

“But it seems your grandpa’s sticking to his guns,” Rita said finally.

“Yes,” Daphne said. She took a sip from her mug.

“So I’ll be going, I guess.”

“Okay.”

In another mood, she might at least have offered coffee. But she had troubles of her own right now, and so she let Rita see herself out.

Daphne started reading the want ads over breakfast every morning. A waste of time. “What is this?” she asked her grandfather. “A city where nobody needs anything?”

“Maybe you should try an agency,” he said.

When it came to unemployment, he was her best listener. Ian always said, “Oh, something will show up,” but her grandfather had been through the Depression and he sympathized from the bottom of his heart every time she was fired. “You might want to think about the Postal Service,” he told her now. “Your dad found the Postal Service very satisfactory. Security, stability, fringe benefits …”

“I do like outdoor exercise,” Daphne mused.

“No, no, not a mailman,” her grandfather said. “I meant something behind a desk.”

She hated desk work. She sighed so hard she rattled her newspaper.

In the afternoons she would take a bus downtown to look in person—“pounding the pavement,” she called it, thinking again of her grandfather’s Depression days. She gazed in the windows of photographic studios, stationery printers, record shops. A record shop might be fun. She knew everything there was to know about the current groups. However, if customers asked her assistance with something classical like Led Zeppelin or the Doors, she’d be in trouble.

Thomas told her she ought to come to New York. She phoned him just to talk, one evening when she felt low, and he said, “Catch the next train up. Sleep on the couch till you land a job. Angie says so too.” (Angie was his girlfriend, who had recently moved in with him although Ian and their grandfather were not supposed to know.) But Daphne couldn’t imagine living in a city where everyone came from someplace else, and so she said, “Oh, I guess I’ll keep looking here.”

One Sunday she even phoned Agatha — not something she did often, since Agatha was hard to reach and also (face it) inclined to criticize. But on this occasion she was a dear. She said, “Daph, what would you think about going to college now? I’d be happy to pay for it. We’re making all this money that we’re too busy to spend. You wouldn’t have to ask Ian for a cent.”

“Well, thank you,” Daphne said. “That’s really nice of you.”

She wasn’t the school type, to be honest. But it felt good to know both her brother and sister were behind her. Her friends were more callous; they were hunting jobs themselves, many of them, or waitressing or tending bar till they decided what interested them, or heading off to law school just to appear busy. Nobody in her circle seemed to have an actual career.

At the start of her third week without work, her grandfather talked her into going to a place called Same Day Résumé. He’d heard it advertised on the radio; he thought it might help her “present” herself, he said. So Daphne took a bus downtown and spoke to a bored-looking man at an enormous metal desk. The calendar on the wall behind him read TUES 13, which made her nervous because an old boyfriend had once told her that in Cuba, Tuesday the thirteenth was considered unlucky. Shouldn’t she just offer some excuse and come back another time? It did seem the man wore a faint sneer as he listened to her qualifications. In fact the whole experience was so demoralizing that as soon as she’d finished answering his questions she walked over to Lexington Market and treated herself to a combination beef-and-bean burrito. Then she went to a matinee starring Cher, her favorite movie star, and after that she cruised a few thrift shops. She bought two sets of thermal underwear with hardly any stains and a purple cotton tank top for a total of three dollars. By then it was time to collect her résumé, which had miraculously become four pages long. She had only to glance through it, though, to see how it had been padded and embroidered. Also, it cost a fortune. Her grandfather had said he would pay, but even so she resented the cost.

All the good cheer she had built up so carefully over the afternoon began to evaporate, and instead of heading home for supper she stopped at a bar where she and her friends hung out on weekends. It gave off the damp, bitter smell that such places always have before they fill up for the evening, and the low lighting seemed not romantic but bleak. Still, she perched on a cracked vinyl stool and ordered a Miller’s, which she drank very fast. Then she ordered another and started reading her résumé. Any four-year-old could see that she hadn’t gone past high school, even if she did list an introductory drawing course at the Maryland Institute and a weekend seminar called New Directions for Women.

“Hello, Daphne,” someone said.

She turned and found Rita diCarlo settling on the stool next to her, unbuttoning her lumber jacket as she hailed the bartender. “Pabst,” she told him. She unwound a wool scarf from her neck and flung her hair back. “You waiting for someone?”

Daphne shook her head.

“Me neither,” Rita said.

Daphne could have guessed as much from Rita’s shapeless black T-shirt and paint-spattered jeans. Her hair was even scruffier than usual; actual dust balls trailed from the end of her braid.

“I had my least favorite kind of job today,” Rita told her. “A divorce. Splitting up a household. Naturally the wife and husband had to be there, so they could offer their opinions.” She accepted her beer and blew into the foam. “And they did have opinions, believe me.”

“Too many jobs get too personal,” Daphne said gloomily.

“Right,” Rita said. She was digging through her pockets for something — a Kleenex. She blew her nose with a honking sound.

“Like this florist’s I was just fired from,” Daphne said. “Everybody’s private messages: you have to write them down pretending not to know English. Or when I worked at Camera Carousel — those photos of girls in bikinis and people’s awful prom nights. You hand over the envelope with this smile like you never even noticed.”

“Look,” Rita said. “Did Ian tell you he and I have been seeing each other?”

“You have?” Daphne asked.

“Well, a couple of times. Well, really just once. I guess you wouldn’t count when I accidentally on purpose ran into him at the wood shop.”

No, Daphne wouldn’t count that.

“I went to Brant’s Custom Woodworks and ordered myself a bureau,” Rita told her.

“I don’t believe he mentioned it.”

“Do you have any idea how much those things cost?”

“Expensive, huh?” Daphne said.

She glanced again at her résumé. Page two: Previous Employment. Here the facts were not padded but streamlined, for the man had suggested that too long a list made a person look flighty. “What say we strike the framer’s,” he had said, his sneer growing more pronounced.

“Another example is picture framing,” Daphne told Rita. “People bring in these poor little paintings they’ve done themselves, or their drawings with the mouths erased and redrawn a dozen times and the hands posed out of sight because they can’t do hands, and all you say is, ‘Let me see now, perhaps a double mat …’ ”

“Then after we talked about my bureau awhile I asked if he’d come look at my apartment,” Rita said, “just so he’d have an idea of the scale.”

Daphne pulled her eyes away from the résumé. She focused on Rita’s face for a moment, and then she said, “Don’t you live with Nick Bascomb?”

“Well, I did, but I made him move out,” Rita said.

“Oh? When was this?”

“Wednesday,” Rita said.

“Wednesday? You mean this Wednesday just past?”

“See,” Rita said, “Monday I went to visit Ian at the wood shop, and that night I asked Nick to move out. But I let him stay till Wednesday because he needed time to get his things together.”

“Decent of you,” Daphne said dryly.

“So then Friday Ian came by and we settled on what size bureau I wanted. I invited him to supper, but he said you-all were expecting him at home.”

Daphne tried to remember back to Friday. Had she been there, even? She might have gone out with her usual gang and forgotten supper altogether.

“So when was it you saw him the second time?” she asked Rita.

“Well, that was it. Friday.”

“You mean the second time was when he came to measure for your bureau?”

“Well, yes.”

Daphne sat back on her stool.

This Rita was so big, though. She had that angular, big-boned frame. You’d expect her to be immune.

“Um, Rita,” she said. “Ian’s kind of … hard to pin down, sometimes. Also, I believe he has this sort of girlfriend at his church.”

“So what? I had a boyfriend, till last Wednesday,” Rita said.

“Yes, but then besides he’s very, let’s say Christian. Did you know that?”

“What do you think I am, Buddhist?”

“He’s unusually Christian, though. I mean, look at you! You’re sitting here in a bar! Drinking beer! Wearing a Hell Bent for Leather T-shirt!”

Rita glanced down at her shirt. She said, “That’s not exactly a sin.”

“It is to Ian,” Daphne told her. “Or it almost is.”

“Daphne,” Rita said, “you get to know folks when you rearrange their belongings. Ian’s belongings are so simple. They’re so plain. He owns six books on how to be a better person. The clothes in his closet smell of nutmeg. And have you ever honestly looked at him? He has this really fine face; it’s all straight lines. I thought at first his eyes were brown but then I saw they had a clear yellow light to them like some kind of drink; like cider. And when he talks he’s very serious but when he listens to what I say back he starts smiling. He acts so happy to hear me, even when all I’m talking about is drawer knobs. Okay: so he does that to everyone. I don’t kid myself! Probably it’s part of his religion or something.”

“Well, no,” Daphne said. She felt touched. She was seeing Ian, all at once, from an outsider’s angle. She said, “I didn’t mean to drag you down. I was just thinking of back in school when some of my friends had crushes on him. They used to end up so frustrated. They ended up mad at him, almost.”

“Well, I can understand that,” Rita said. She took a hearty swallow of beer and wiped the foam off her upper lip.

“And he is a good bit older than you,” Daphne pointed out.

“So? We’re both grownups, aren’t we? Anyhow, in some ways it’s me who’s older. Do you realize he’s only slept with two women in all his life?”

“What?” Daphne asked.

“First his high-school sweetheart before he joined the church and then this woman he dated a few years ago, but he felt terrible about that and vowed he wouldn’t do it again.”

Daphne didn’t know which shocked her more: the fact that he’d slept with someone or the fact that he and Rita had discussed it. “Well, how did … how did that come up?” she asked.

“It came up when I invited him to spend the night,” Rita said calmly.

“You didn’t!”

“I did,” Rita said. “Bartender? Same again.” She met Daphne’s eyes. “I invited him when he came about the bureau,” she said, “but he declined. He was extremely polite.”

“I can imagine,” Daphne said.

“Then all last weekend I waited to hear from him. I haven’t done that since junior high! But he didn’t call, and so here I sit, drinking away my sorrows.”

He wasn’t ever going to call, but Daphne didn’t want to be the one to tell her. “Gosh! Look at the time,” she said. She asked the bartender, “What do I owe?” and then she made a great to-do over paying, so that when she turned back to say goodbye, it would seem the subject of Ian had entirely slipped her mind.

Agatha and Stuart didn’t come home for Christmas. Stuart was on call that weekend. Thomas came, though, and they spent a quiet holiday together, rising late on Christmas morning to exchange their gifts. Ian gave Daphne a key chain that turned into a siren when you pressed a secret button. (He was always after her about the neighborhoods she hung out in.) Her grandfather gave her a ten-dollar bill, the same thing he gave the others. Thomas, the world’s most inspired shopper, gave her a special crystal guaranteed to grant steadiness of purpose, and Agatha and Stuart sent a dozen pairs of her favorite brand of black tights. Daphne herself gave everybody houseplants — an arrangement she’d made weeks ago when she still worked at Floral Fantasy.

For Christmas dinner they went to a restaurant. Daphne viewed this as getting away with something. If Agatha had been home, she never would have allowed it. But Agatha might have a point, Daphne thought as they entered the dining room. The owner kept his place open on holidays so that people without families had somewhere to go, and at nearly every table just a single, forlorn person sipped a solitary cocktail. Across the room they saw Mrs. Jordan, which made Daphne feel guilty because if Bee were still alive she would have remembered to invite her. But then Ian and the owner conferred and they added an extra place setting and brought her over to sit with them. Mrs. Jordan was as adventurous and game as ever, although she must be in her eighties by now, and once they’d said grace she livened things up considerably by describing a recent outing she’d taken with the foreigners. It seemed that during that peculiar warm spell back in November, she and three of the foreigners had driven to a marina someplace and rented a sailboat; only none of them had ever sailed before and when they found themselves on open water with a stiff breeze blowing up, the one named Manny had to jump over the side and swim for help. After they were rescued, Mrs. Jordan said, the marina owner had told them they could never take a boat out again. They couldn’t even stand on the dock. They couldn’t even park on the grounds to admire the view. By now she had them laughing, and she raised a speckled hand and ordered a bottle of champagne—“And you must join us, Ezra,” she told the owner — along with a fizzy apple juice for Ian. It turned out to be a very festive meal.

In the evening Claudia and her family telephoned from Pittsburgh, and Agatha from California. Agatha didn’t seem as distressed about the restaurant as she might have been. All she said to Daphne was, “Did Ian bring Clara?”

“Clara? No.”

Agatha sighed. She said, “Maybe we’ll just have to marry Grandpa off, instead.”

“Actually, that might be easier,” Daphne told her.

In January Daphne started working at the wood shop, performing various unskilled tasks like oiling and paste-waxing. She had done this several times before while she was between jobs, and although she would never choose it for a permanent career she found it agreeable enough. She liked the smell of sap and the golden light that the wood gave off, and she enjoyed the easy, stop-and-go conversation among the workmen. It reminded her of kindergarten — everyone absorbed in his own project but throwing forth a remark now and then. Ian didn’t join in, though, and whenever he said anything to Daphne she was conscious of the furtive alertness in the rest of the room. Clearly, he was considered an oddity here. It made her feel sorry for him, although he might not even notice.

The Friday before Martin Luther King Day, Agatha and Stuart flew in for the long weekend and Thomas came down from New York. Agatha toured the house from basement to attic, checking the results of the Clutter Counseling. She approved in general but pointed out to Daphne that a sort of overlayer was beginning to sprout on various counters and dressers. “Yes, Rita warned us that might happen,” Daphne said. “She offers a quarterly touch-up service but I swore I would do it myself.”

Agatha said, “Hmm,” and glanced at the cat’s flea collar, which for some reason sat on the breadboard. “I wonder how much one of these touch-ups would cost.”

“I could probably get a bargain rate,” Daphne told her. Shoot, she could probably get it for free, if Rita still had her crush on Ian. But maybe she had recovered by now. Daphne hadn’t seen her since that evening in the bar.

Saturday Agatha and Stuart attended an all-day conference on bone marrow transplants, and that night they had dinner with some of their colleagues. This may have been why, on Sunday, they agreed to go to church with the rest of the family. They had barely shown their faces, after all, and tomorrow they would be flying out again. Ian was thrilled, you could tell. He talked his father into coming along too, which ordinarily was next to impossible. Churches ought to look like churches, Doug always said. He was sorry, but that was just the way he felt.

It was coat weather, but sunny, and so they went on foot — Doug and Ian, then Thomas and Stuart, with Agatha and Daphne bringing up the rear. As they passed each house on Waverly Street, Agatha inquired about the occupants. “What do you see of the Crains these days? Does Miss Bitz still teach piano?” It wasn’t till that moment that Daphne realized how much had changed here. The Crains, no longer newlyweds, had moved to a bigger house after the birth of their third daughter. Miss Bitz had died. Others had gone on to condominiums or retirement communities once their children were grown, and the people who took their places — working couples, often, whose children attended day care — seemed harder to get to know. “All that’s left,” Daphne said, “are the foreigners and Mrs. Jordan.”

“Where is Mrs. Jordan? Shouldn’t we stop by and pick her up?”

“She has to drive now, on account of her rheumatism.”

“This is depressing,” Agatha said.

It did seem depressing. Or maybe that was just the season, the thin white light of January; for in spite of the sunshine the neighborhood had a pallid, lifeless look.

The church was barely half full this morning, but there weren’t six empty chairs in a row and so they had to separate. The men sat near the front, and Daphne and Agatha sat at the rear next to Sister Nell. Sister Nell leaned across Daphne to say, “Why, Sister Agatha! Isn’t this a treat!” Daphne felt a bit jealous; she was never called “Sister” herself. Evidently you had to leave town before you were considered grown.

Two years ago Sister Lula had willed the church her electric organ — the very small kind that salesmen sometimes demonstrate in shopping malls — and Sister Myra was playing “Amazing Grace” while latecomers straggled in. Under cover of the music, Agatha murmured, “Show me which one is Clara.”

Daphne looked around. “There,” she said, sliding her eyes to the left. Clara sat between her father and her brother — a slim woman in her mid-thirties with buff-colored hair feathered perfectly, dry skin powdered, tailored suit a careful orchestration of salmon pink and aqua.

“Why isn’t she sitting with Ian?” Agatha asked.

“Because she’s sitting with her father and brother.”

“You know what I mean,” Agatha told her. But just then the music stopped and Reverend Emmett rose from behind the counter to offer the opening prayer.

He was getting old. It took Agatha’s presence to make Daphne see that. He was one of those people who hollow as they age, and when he turned to reach for his Bible his back had a curve like a beetle’s back. But his voice was as strong as ever. “Proverbs twenty-one: four,” he said in his rich, pure tenor. “ ‘An high look, and a proud heart, and the plowing of the wicked, is sin.’ ” Then he announced the hymn: “In the Sweet Bye and Bye.”

Daphne loved singing hymns. She had forgotten, though, what a trial it was to sing with Agatha, who talked the words in a monotone and broke off halfway through to ask, “Where are the young people? Where are the children?”

Daphne wouldn’t answer. She went on singing.

The sermon had to do with arrogance. Nothing was more arrogant, Reverend Emmett said, than the pride of the virtuous man, and then he told them a story. “Last week, I called on a brother whose wife had recently died. Some of you may know whom I mean. He was not a member of our church, and had visited only a very few times. Still, I was surprised to see him bring forth a bottle of wine once I was seated. ‘Reverend Emmett,’ he said, ‘you happen to have arrived on my fiftieth anniversary. My wife and I always promised ourselves that when we reached this day, we would open a bottle of wine that we’d saved from our wedding reception. Well, she is no longer here to share it, and I’m hoping very much that you will have a glass to keep me company.’ ”

Daphne held her breath. Even Agatha looked interested.

“So I did,” Reverend Emmett said.

Daphne started breathing again.

“I reflected that the Alcohol Rule is a rule for the self, designed to remove an obstruction between the self and the Lord, but drinking that glass of wine was a gift to another human being and refusing it would have been arrogant. And when I took my leave — well, I’m not proud of this — I had a momentary desire for some sort of mouthwash, in case I met one of our brethren on the way home. But I thought, ‘No, this is between me and my God,’ and so I walked through the streets joyfully breathing fumes of alcohol.”

Agatha fell into a fit of silent laughter. Daphne could feel her shaking; she had a sidelong glimpse of her white face growing pink and convulsed. In disgust, Daphne drew away from her and folded her arms across her chest. She didn’t hold with the Alcohol Rule herself, but she almost wished now she did just so she could make a gesture like Reverend Emmett’s. In fact, maybe she already had. Couldn’t you say that every social drink was a gift to another human being? She played with that notion throughout the rest of the sermon, deliberately ignoring Agatha, who kept wiping her eyes with a tissue.

At Amending, Daphne confessed in a low voice that she had spoken rudely to her grandfather. “I told him to quit bugging me about a job,” she said, “and I called Ian an old maid, and I said Bert could go to hell when he showed me where I’d skipped on a bookcase.” Sister Nell was murmuring something long and involved about a dispute with a neighbor. Agatha said nothing, wouldn’t you know. This meant she got to hear everyone else’s sins and pass judgment. “Talk about an high look!” Daphne whispered sharply, and then Reverend Emmett said, “Let it vanish now from our souls, Lord. In Jesus’ name, amen.” After that they stood up to sing “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling.”

The Benediction was hardly finished before Agatha was in the aisle, making her way toward Clara as she put her coat on. Daphne followed, but then Brother Simon stopped her to talk and so she arrived at Agatha’s side too late to introduce her. “I’m Agatha Bedloe-Simms,” Agatha was saying. (Only the rawest newcomer mentioned last names within these walls, but no doubt she wanted to establish her connection to Ian.) “I believe you must be Clara.”

“Why, yes,” Clara said in her ladylike, modulated voice. “And this is my father, Brother Edwin, and my brother, Brother James.”

She was probably making a point, with all those “Brothers,” but if so it passed right over Agatha’s head. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Agatha told them. “Clara, Ian has talked so much about you.”

“Oh! Has he?” Clara asked, and a blush started spreading upward from her Peter Pan collar.

Daphne felt confused. Had he really? Before she could find out, though, Reverend Emmett reached their group. “Sister Agatha,” he said, “I’m so glad to see you here.”

He gave no sign of recollecting that Agatha had spurned his church for years and insisted on a city hall wedding. And Agatha herself seemed unabashed. “So tell me, Reverend Emmett,” she said, “what does a fifty-year-old bottle of wine taste like, anyhow?”

“Oh, it was vinegar,” he said cheerfully.

“And don’t you think mentioning it to us was another form of mouthwash, so to speak?”

“Ah,” he said, smiling. “Something to confess at our next Amending.”

He turned to Stuart, who had shown up behind her with Ian. “You must be Agatha’s husband,” he said.

“Brother Stuart,” Stuart announced, with the prideful smirk of someone speaking a foreign language.

There was a bustle of introductions and small talk, and then Reverend Emmett moved off to greet someone else and Agatha whispered to Daphne, “Do we have enough lunch for three extra?”

“Three?” Daphne asked.

“Her father and brother too?”

They didn’t, but that wasn’t the issue. Daphne said, “Agatha, I really don’t think—”

Too late. Agatha turned to Clara and said, “Won’t the three of you come home with us for lunch?”

Clara was still blushing. She looked over at Ian. “Oh, we wouldn’t want to inconvenience you,” she said.

“Right,” Ian said. “Maybe some other time.” And he took Agatha’s arm and propelled her toward the door. Daphne and Clara were left gaping at each other. Daphne said, “Um …”

“Well, it was lovely seeing you,” Clara said melodiously.

“Yes, well … so long, I guess.”

Daphne hurried to catch up with the others. Ian still had hold of Agatha, who was looking cross. Outside, when they regrouped — Agatha walking next to Daphne once again — Agatha muttered, “What a dud.”

“Who, Clara?”

“Ian.”

“Maybe they’ve had a fight or something,” Daphne said.

“More likely they’ve just withered on the vine,” Agatha told her.

Up ahead, Stuart was asking all about the Church of the Second Chance. He wanted to know how sizable a membership it had, when it had been founded, what its tax status was. You could tell he was only making conversation, but Ian answered each question gladly and at length. He said that Second Chance had saved his life. Doug, walking in front with Thomas, coughed and said, “Oh, well, ah …” but Ian insisted, “It did, Dad. You know it did.”

He told Stuart, “Sometimes I have this insomnia. I fall asleep just fine but then an hour or so later I wake up, and that’s when the troublesome thoughts move in. You know? Things I did wrong, things I said wrong, mistakes I want to take back. And I always wonder, ‘If I didn’t have Someone to turn this all over to, how would I get through this? How do other people get through it?’ Because I’m surely not the only one, am I?”

They had reached an intersection now, and they waited on the curb while a spurt of traffic passed. Agatha clutched her coat collar tight and glanced over at Daphne. There was something meaningful in the way she narrowed her eyes. And you didn’t want me to invite a girlfriend for him, she must be saying.

“You know that clock downstairs that strikes the number of hours,” Ian told Stuart. “And then it strikes once at every half hour. So when you hear it striking once, you can’t be certain how much of the night you’ve used up. Is it twelve-thirty, or is it one, or is it one-thirty? You have to just lie there and wait, and hope with all your heart that next time it will strike two. Or what’s worse, some nights it starts striking one, two, three and you say, ‘Ah!’ And then four, five and you say, ‘Can this be? Have I really slept through till dawn?’ And then six, seven and you say, ‘Oh-oh,’ because you can see it’s not that light out. And sure enough, the clock goes on to twelve, and you brace yourself for another six hours till morning.”

The street was clear now and they could have crossed, but instead they stood watching him. It was Agatha who finally spoke. “Oh, Ian,” she said. “Oh, damnit. How much longer are you going to be on your own?”

“Why, not long at all,” he told her.

They squinted at him in the sunlight.

“I wasn’t planning to bring this up yet,” he said. “But anyhow. Since you ask. I believe I might be getting married.”

Somewhere far off, a car honked.

Agatha said, “Married?”

“At least, we’re talking it over.”

Stuart said, “Hey, now!” He punched Ian in the shoulder. “Hey, guy. Congratulations!”

“Thanks,” Ian said. He was grinning.

“This is you and Clara,” Agatha said.

“Who? No, it’s Rita,” he said. He told Daphne, “You know Rita.”

Daphne’s mouth dropped open.

“Rita who?” Agatha asked. She tugged Daphne’s jacket sleeve. “Who’s Rita?”

Their grandfather was the one who answered. “Rita the Clutter Counselor,” he said. “Hot dog!”

“But who is she?” Agatha demanded. They started crossing the street, with Ian leading the way. “Have you met her, Thomas?”

Thomas said, “Nope.” But he was grinning too.

“We’ve only been going out a month or so,” Ian told them. “When I first got to know her I held back, for a while. I was afraid we were too different. But then finally I said, ‘I just have to do this,’ and I called her up. By the end of that first evening it seemed we’d known each other forever.”

“You must have at least suspected,” Agatha told Daphne.

“I swear I didn’t,” Daphne said.

She was in that stunned state of mind where every sound seems unusually distinct. Of course she liked Rita very much, and yet … “This is so sudden,” she said to Ian. “Shouldn’t you go more inch-by-inch?”

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and turned. “Look,” he said. “I’m forty-one years old. I’m not getting any younger. And you all know my beliefs. You know I can’t just … live with her or anything. I want to get married.”

“Right on!” Stuart cheered.

“Besides which, you’re going to love her. Aren’t they, Dad?”

“Absolutely,” his father said, beaming. “She let me keep my workbench just the way I wanted. She let me keep Bee’s lipstick on the bureau.”

“She’s very tall and slim and beautiful,” Ian told Agatha. “She could easily be Indian. She has beautiful long black hair and she moves in this loose, swinging way, like a dancer.”

Daphne looked at him.

As a matter of fact, every word he had said was true.

“There’s something honest about her, and just … right,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone like her.”

Agatha stepped forward, then. She put both hands on his shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Congratulations, Ian,” she said.

“Me, too,” Daphne said, and she kissed his other cheek, and Thomas clamped his neck in a rough hug. “Mr. Mysterious,” he said.

Their grandfather touched Ian’s arm shyly. Ian was trying to get the grin off his face.

They started walking again. Agatha asked all about the wedding, and Doug described how Rita admired his baby-food-jar system for sorting screws. But Daphne strolled next to Stuart in silence.

She was thinking about the dream she had dreamed at Thanksgiving. It wasn’t so much a dream as a feeling — a wash of intense, deep, perfect love. She had awakened and thought, For whom? and realized it was Ian. But it was Ian back in her childhood, when he had seemed the most magnificent person on earth. She hadn’t noticed till then how pale and flawed her love had grown since. It had made her want to weep for him, and that was why, at breakfast that day, she had said she hadn’t dreamed any dreams at all.