Helen was smiling hopefully and a little nervously.

Natalie’s face suddenly lit up and she began to bounce up and down in the Papoose carrier Helen was wearing, waving her arms excitedly in Ralph’s direction.

She remembers me, Ralph thought. How about that. And as he reached out and let one of the waving hands grasp his right index finger, his eyes flooded with tears.

“Ralph?” Helen asked. “Are you okay?”

He smiled, nodded, stepped forward, and hugged her. He felt Helen lock her own arms around his neck. For a moment he was dizzy with the smell of her perfume, mingled with the milky smell of healthy baby, and then she gave his ear a dazzling smack and let him go.

“You are okay, aren’t you?” she asked. There were tears in her eyes, too, but Ralph barely noticed them; he was too busy taking inventory, wanting to make sure that no signs of the beating remained.

So far as he could see, none did. She looked flawless.

“Better right now than in weeks,” he said. “You are such a sight for sore eyes. You too, Nat.” He kissed the small, chubby hand that was still wrapped around his finger, and was not entirely surprised to see the ghostly gray-blue lip-print his mouth left behind. It faded almost as soon as he had noted it and he hugged Helen again, mostly to make sure that she was really there.

“Dear Ralph,” she murmured in his ear. “Dear, sweet Ralph.”

He felt a stirring in his groin, apparently brought on by the combination of her light perfume and the gentle puffs her words made against the cup of his ear… and then he remembered another voice in his ear. Ed’s voice. I called about your mouth, Ralph. It’s trying to get you in trouble.

Ralph let her go and held her at arm’s length, still smiling.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes, Helen. I’ll be damned if you’re not.”

“You are, too. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. Ralph Roberts, Gretchen Tillbury. Gretchen, Ralph.”

Ralph turned toward the other woman and took his first good look at her as he carefully folded his large, gnarled hand over her slim white one. She was the kind of woman that made a man (even one who had left his sixties behind) want to stand up straight and suck in his gut.

She was very tall, perhaps six feet, and she was blonde, but that wasn’t it. There was something else-something that was like a smell, or a vibration, or (an aura) yes, all right, like an aura. She was, quite simply, a woman you couldn’t not look at, couldn’t not think about, couldn’t not speculate about.

Ralph remembered Helen’s telling him that Gretchen’s husband had cut her leg open with a kitchen knife and left her to bleed to death.

He wondered how any man could do such a thing; how any man could touch a creature such as this with anything but awe.

Also a little lust, maybe, once he got beyond the “She walks in beauty like the night” stage. And just by the way, Ralph, this might be a really good time to reel your eyes back into their sockets.

“Very pleased to meet you,” he said, letting go of her hand.

“Helen told me about how you came to see her in the hospital.

Thank you for helping her.”

“Helen was a pleasure to help,” Gretchen said, and gave him a dazzling smile. “She’s the kind of woman that makes it all worthwhile, actually… but I have an idea you already know that.”

“I guess I might at that,” Ralph said. “Have you got time for a cup of coffee? Please say yes.”

Gretchen glanced at Helen, who nodded.

“That would be fine,” Helen said. “Because… well.

“This isn’t entirely a social call, is it?” Ralph asked, looking from Helen to Gretchen Tillbury and then back to Helen again.

“No,” Helen said. “There’s something we need to talk to you about, Ralph.”

As soon as they had reached the top of the gloomy front stairs, Natalie began to wriggle impatiently around in the Papoose carrier and to talk in that imperious baby pig Latin that would all too soon be replaced by actual words.

“Can I hold her?” Ralph asked.

“All right,” Helen said. “If she cries, I’ll take her right back.

Promise.”

“Deal.”

But the Exalted amp; Revered Baby didn’t cry. As soon as Ralph had hoisted her out of the Papoose, she slung an arm companionably around his neck and cozied her bottom into the crook of his right arm as if it were her own private easy-chair.

“Wow,” Gretchen said. “I’m impressed.”

“Bug!” Natalie said, seizing Ralph’s lower lip and pulling it out like a windowshade. “Ganna-wig! Andoo-sis!”

“I think she just said something about the Andrews Sisters,” Ralph said. Helen threw her head back and laughed her hearty laugh, the one that seemed to come all the way up from her heels. Ralph didn’t realize how much he had missed it until he heard it.

Natalie let Ralph’s lower lip snap back as he led them into the kitchen, the sunniest room of the house at this time of day. He saw Helen looking around curiously as he turned on the Bunn, and realized she hadn’t been here for a long time. Too long. She picked up the picture of Carolyn that stood on the kitchen table and looked at it closely, a little smile playing about the corners of her lips. The sun lit the tips of her hair, which had been cropped short, making a kind of corona around her head, and Ralph had a sudden revelation: he loved Helen in large part because Carolyn had loved herthey had both been allowed into the deeper ranges of Carolyn’s heart and mind.

“She was so pretty,” Helen murmured. “Wasn’t she, Ralph?”

“Yes,” he said, putting out cups (and being careful to set them beyond the reach of Natalie’s restless, interested hands). “That was taken just a month or two before the headaches started. I suppose it’s eccentric to keep a framed studio portrait on the kitchen table in front of the sugar-bowl, but this is the room where I seem to spend most of my time lately, so…”

“I think it’s a lovely place for it,” Gretchen said. Her voice was low, sweetly husky. Ralph thought, If she’d been the one to whisper in my ear, I bet the old trouser-mouse would have done a little more than Just turn over in its sleep.

“I do, too,” Helen said. She gave him a fragile, not-quite-eyecontact smile, then slipped the pink tote-bag off her shoulder and set it on the counter. Natalie began to gabble impatiently and hold her hands out again as soon as she saw the plastic shell of the Playtex Nurser. Ralph had a vivid but mercifully brief flash of memory: Helen staggering toward the Red Apple, one eye puffed shut, her cheek lashed with beads of blood, carrying Nat on one hip, the way a teenager might carry a textbook.

“Want to give it a try, old fella?” Helen asked. Her smile had strengthened a little and she was meeting his eye again.

“Sure, why not? But the coffee-”

“I’ll take care of the coffee, Daddy-O,” Gretchen said. “Made a million cups in my time. Is there half-and-half?”

“In the fridge.” Ralph sat down at the table, letting Natalie rest the back of her head in the hollow of his shoulder and grasp the bottle with her tiny, fascinating hands. This she did with complete assurance, guiding the nipple into her mouth and beginning to suck at once. Ralph grinned up at Helen and pretended not to see that she had begun to cry a little again. “They learn fast, don’t they?”

“Yes,” she said, and pulled a paper towel off the roll mounted on the wall by the sink. She wiped her eyes with it. “I can’t get over how easy she is with you, Ralph-she wasn’t that way before, was she?”

“I don’t really remember,” he lied. She hadn’t been. Not standoffish, no, but a long way from this comfortable.

“Keep pushing up on the plastic liner inside the bottle, okay?

Otherwise she’ll swallow a lot of air and get all gassy.”

“Roger.” He glanced over at Gretchen. “Doing okay?”

“Fine. How do you take it, Ralph?”

“Just in a cup’s fine.”