Derek said they had weed growing in the bushes. But he wouldn’t buy from them, not trusting their security.

Rosemary refused to smoke with Derek.

“I’m too turbulent around you,” she said. “I don’t think it would be good.”

“Suit yourself,” said Derek. “It might help.”

Neither would Ann smoke. She said she would feel silly. She had never smoked anything; she didn’t even know how to inhale.

They didn’t know that Derek had let Karin try once. She didn’t know how to inhale either, and he had to teach her. She tried too hard; she inhaled too deeply and had to fight to keep from throwing up. They were out in the barn, where Derek kept all the rock samples he had collected up on the ridges. Derek tried to steady her by telling her to look at the rocks.

“Just look at them,” he said. “Look into them. See the colors. Don’t try too hard. Just look and wait.”

But what calmed her down eventually was the lettering on a cardboard box. There was a pile of cardboard boxes which Ann had packed things in when she and Derek had moved back here from Toronto, a couple of years ago. One of them had a silhouette of a toy battleship on the side, and the word dreadnought. The first part of the word-dread-was in red lettering. The letters shimmered as if written in neon tubing, and issued a command to Karin that had to do with more than the word’s meaning. She had to dismember it and find the words inside.

“What are you laughing at?” Derek said, and she told him what she was doing. The words came tumbling out miraculously.

Read. Red. Dead. Dare. Era. Ear. Are. Add. Adder. “Adder” was the best. It used up all the letters.

“Amazing,” said Derek. “Amazing Karin. Dread the Red Adder.”

He never had to tell her not to mention any of this to her mother or to Ann. When Rosemary kissed her that night she sniffed her hair and laughed and said, “God, the smell of it’s everywhere, Derek’s such a dedicated old pothead.”

This was one of the times when Rosemary was happy. They had been to Derek and Ann’s house to eat supper on the closed-in sun porch. Ann had said, “Come with me, Karin, see if you can help me get the mousse out of the mold.” Karin had followed her, but came back-pretending it was to get the mint sauce.

Rosemary and Derek were leaning across the table teasing each other, making kissing faces. They never saw her.

Maybe it was that same night, leaving, that Rosemary laughed at the two chairs set outside the back door. Two old dark-red metal-tube chairs, with cushions. They faced west, towards the last remnants of the sunset.

“Those old chairs,” said Ann. “I know they’re a sight. They belonged to my parents.”

“They’re not even all that comfortable,” said Derek.

“No, no,” said Rosemary. “They’re beautiful, they’re you. I love them. They just say Derek and Ann. Derek and Ann. Derek and Ann watching the sunset at the end of the day’s labors.”

“If they can see it through the pea vines,” Derek said.

The next time Karin went out to pick vegetables for Ann, she noticed the chairs were gone. She didn’t ask Ann what had become of them.

Ann’s kitchen was in the basement of the house, just partly underground. You had to go down four steps. Karin did that, and pressed her face against the screen door. The kitchen was a dark room, with bushes growing against its high windows-Karin had never been there when the light was not on. But it wasn’t on now, and at first she thought the room was empty. Then she saw somebody sitting at the table, and it was Ann, but her head was a different shape. She had her back to the door.

She had cut her hair. It was cut short and fluffed out like any gray-haired matron’s. And she was doing something-her elbows moved. She was working in the dim light, but Karin couldn’t see what the work was.

She tried the trick of making Ann turn around by staring at the back of her head. But it didn’t work. She tried running her fingers lightly down the screen. Finally she made a noise.

“Woo-oo-ooo-woo.”

Ann got up and turned around so reluctantly that Karin had the swift unreasonable suspicion that she might have known who was there all the time-might have seen Karin coming, in fact, and arranged herself in this guarded position.

“It’s me, it’s me. It’s your lost child,” said Karin.

“Why so it is,” said Ann, unhooking the door. She didn’t greet Karin by hugging her-but then she and Derek never did that.

She had got fatter-or the short hair made her look that way- and her face had red blotches on it, as if bugs had been biting her. Her eyes looked sore.

“Do your eyes hurt?” Karin said. “Is that why you’re working in the dark?”

Ann said, “Oh, I hadn’t noticed. I hadn’t noticed the light wasn’t on, I was just cleaning some silver and I thought I could see fine.” Then she seemed to make an effort to brighten up, speaking as if Karin was some much younger child. “Cleaning silver is such a boring job, it must have put me in a trance. What a good thing you came along to help me.”

As a temporary tactic, Karin became this much younger child. She sprawled in a chair beside the table and said boisterously, “So-where’s old Derek?” She was thinking that this strange behavior of Ann’s might mean that Derek had gone off on one of his expeditions over the ridges and not come back, leaving both Ann and Rosemary. Or that he was sick. Or depressed. Ann had once said, “Derek wasn’t depressed half so often once we left the city.” Karin had wondered if “depressed” was the right word. Derek seemed to her critical, and sometimes fed up. Was that depression?

“I’m sure he’s around somewhere,” Ann said.

“He and Rosemary had a big split-up, did you know that?”

“Oh yes, Karin. I knew that.”

“Do you feel sorry about it?”

Ann said, “This is a new way I’ve got of cleaning silver. I’ll show you. You just take a fork or spoon or whatever and you dip it in this solution here in the basin and leave it just a moment and then you take it out and dip it in the rinse water and wipe it dry. See? It shines just as well as ever it did when I used to do all that rubbing and polishing. I think so. I think it’s just as good a shine. I’ll get us some fresh rinse water.”

Karin dipped a fork. She said, “Yesterday Rosemary and I did what we wanted all day. We never even got dressed. We made waffles and we read stuff in these old magazines. Old Ladies’ Home Journals.”

“Those were my mother’s,” said Ann with a slight stiffness.

“She’s lovely,” said Karin. “She’s engaged. She uses Pond’s.”

Ann smiled-that was a relief-and said, “I remember.”

“Can this marriage be saved?” said Karin, taking on a deep ominous tone. Then she changed to wheedling and whining.

“The problem is that my husband is really mean and I just don’t know what to do about him. For one thing he has gone and eaten up all our children. It’s not because I don’t give him good meals to eat either because I do. I slave all day over a hot stove and make him a delicious dinner and then he comes home and the first thing he does is pull a leg off the baby-”

“Now stop,” said Ann, not smiling anymore. “Just stop, Karin.”

“But I really want to know,” said Karin, in a subdued but stubborn voice. “Can this marriage be saved? “

All last year, when she thought of the place where she most wanted to be, Karin had thought of this kitchen. A big room whose corners stayed dim even when the light was on. The patterns of green leaves brushing the windows. All the things here and there that strictly speaking didn’t belong in a kitchen. The treadle sewing machine and the big overstuffed armchair, its maroon covering oddly worn to gray-green on the armrests. The large painting of a waterfall done long ago by Ann’s mother when she was just a bride and had the time, which she never had again.