“I,” Lois said, applying Ralph’s handkerchief vigorously look horrible.

“I’m alright.”

“No, ma’am. Just a little smeary.

Lois at last turned to face him. It clearly took a lot of effort with her rouge and eye makeup now mostly on Ralph’s handkerchief.

“How bad am I?” she breathed. “Tell the truth, Ralph Roberts, or I’ll cross your eyes He bent forward and kissed one moist cheek. “Only lovely, Lois.

You’ll have to save ethereal for another day, I guess.”

She gave him an uncertain smile, and the upward movement of her face caused two fresh tears to spill from her eyes. Ralph took the crumpled handkerchief from her and gently wiped them away.

“I’m so glad it was you who came along and not Bill,” she told len “I would have died of shame if Bill had seen me crying in. public,” Ralph looked around. He saw Rosalie, safe and sound at the bottom of the hill-she was lying between the two Portosans that stood down there, her muzzle resting on one paw-but otherwise this part of the park was empty. “I think we’ve got the place pretty much to ourselves, at least for now,” he said.

“Thank God for small favors.” Lois took the handkerchief back and went to work on her makeup again, this time in a rather more businesslike manner. “Speaking of Bill, I stopped into the Red Apple on my way down here-that was before I got feeling sorry for myself and started to bawl my silly head off-and Sue said you two had a big argument just a little while ago. Yelling and everything, right out in your front yard.”

“Nah, not that big,” Ralph said, smiling uneasily, “Can I be nosy and ask what it was about?”

“Chess,” Ralph said. It was the first thing to pop into his mind.

“The Runway 3 Tournament Faye Chapin has every year. Only ’ really wasn’t about anything. You know how it is-sometimes people get out of bed on the wrong side and just grab the first excuse.”

“I wish that was all it was with me,” Lois said. She opened her purse, managing the clasp effortlessly this time, and took out her compact. Then she sighed and stuffed it back into the bag again without opening it. “I can’t. I know I’m being a baby, but I just can’t.”

Ralph darted his hand into her purse before she could close it, removed the compact, opened it, and held the mirror up in front of her.

“See? That’s not so bad, is it?”

She averted her face like a vampire turning away from a crucifix.

“Ugh,” she said. “Put it away.”

“If You promise to tell me what happened.”

“Anything, just Put it away.”

He did. For a little while Lois said nothing but only sat and watched her hands fiddle restlessly with the clasp of her purse. He was about to prod her when she looked up at him with a pitiful expression of defiance.

“ “it just so happens you’re not the only one who can’t get a decent night’s sleep, Ralph,”

“What are you talking ab-”

“Insomnia!”

she snapped. “I go to sleep at about the same time I always did, but I don’t sleep through anymore.

And it’s worse than that. I wake up earlier every morning, it seems.”

Ralph tried to remember if he had told Lois about that aspect of his own problem. He didn’t think he had.

“Why are you looking so surprised?” Lois asked. “You didn’t really think you were the only person in the world to ever have a sleepless night, did you?”

“Of course not!” Ralph responded with some indignation but had it it often felt as if he were the only person in the world to have n that particular kind of sleepless night? Standing helplessly by as his good sleep-time was eroded minute by minute and quarter hour by quarter hour? It was like a weird variant of the Chinese water-torture.

“When did yours start?” he asked.

“A month or two before Carol died.”

How much sleep are you getting?”

“Barely an hour a night since the start of October.” Her voice was calm, but Ralph heard a tremor which might have been panic just below the surface. “The way things are going, I’ll have entirely quit sleeping by Christmas, and if that really happens, I don’t know how I’ll survive it, I’m barely surviving now.”

Ralph struggled for speech and asked the first question to come into his mind: “How come I’ve never seen your light?”

“For the same reason I hardly ever see yours, I imagine,” she said.

“I’ve been living in the same place for thirty-five years, and I don’t need to turn on the lights to find my way around. Also, I like to keep my troubles to myself. You keep turning on the lights at two in the morning and sooner or later someone sees them. It gets around, and then the nosybirds start asking questions. I don’t like nosybird questions, and I’m not one of those people who feel like they have to take an ad out in the paper every time they have a little constipation.”

Ralph burst out laughing. Lois looked at him in round-eyed perplexity for a moment, then Joined in. His arm was still around her? (or had it crept back on its own after he had taken it away Rap I didn’t know and didn’t really care), and he hugged her tightly. This time she pressed against him easily; those stiff little wires had gone out of her body. Ralph was glad.

“You’re not laughing at me, are you, Ralph?”

“Nope. Absolutely not.”

She nodded, still smiling, “That’s all right, then. You never even saw me moving ing around in my living room, did you?”

“No.”

“That’s because there’s no streetlamp in front of my house. But there’s one in front of yours. I’ve seen you in that ratty old wing chair of yours many times, sitting and looking out and drinking tea,” I always assumed I was the only one, he thought, and suddenly a question-both comic and embarrassing-popped into his head.

How many times had she seen him sitting there and picking his nose? Or picking at his crotch?

Either reading his mind or the color in his cheeks, Lois said, “I really couldn’t make out much more than your shape, you know, and you were always wearing your robe, perfectly decent. So you don’t have to worry about that. Also, I hope you know that if you’d ever started doing anything you wouldn’t want people to see you doing, I wouldn’t have looked. I wasn’t exactly raised in a barn, you know.” He smiled and patted her hand. “I do know that, Lois. it’s just…

“I was sitting there and you know, it was a surprise. To find out that while I was watching the street, somebody was watching me.”

She fixed him with an enigmatic smile that might have said, Don’t worry, Ralph-you were just another part of the scenery to me.

He considered this smile for a moment, then groped his way back to the main point. “So what happened, Lois? Why were you sitting here and crying? JUST sleeplessness? If that’s what it was, I certainly sympathize. There’s really no just about it, is there?”

Her smile slipped away. Her gloved hands folded together again in her lap and she looked somberly down at them. “There are worse things than insomnia. Betrayal, for instance. Especially when the people doing the betraying are the people you love.”

She fell quiet. Ralph didn’t prompt her. He was looking down the hill at Rosalie, who appeared to be looking up at him. At both of them, maybe.

“Did you know we share the same doctor as well as the same problem, Ralph?”

“You go to Litchfield, too?”

“Used to go to Litchfield. He was Carolyn’s recommendation.

I’ll never go to him again, though. He and I are quits.” Her upper lip drew back. “Double-crossing son of a bitch!”

“What happened?”

“I went along for the best part of a year, waiting for things to get better by themselves-for nature to take her course, as they say.

Not that I didn’t try to help nature along every now and then. We probably tried a lot of the same things.”

“Honeycomb?” Ralph asked, smiling again. He couldn’t help it.

What ’ an amazing day this has been, he thought. What a perfectly amazing day… and it’s not even one in the afternoon yet.