“She began to cry again, and these tears made Ralph’s heart hurt. They were the deep, scouring sobs of someone who has been shamed to the deepest level of her being. Lois hid her face against his jacket.

He tightened his arm around her. Lois, he thought. Our Lois.

But no; he didn’t like the sound of that anymore, if he ever had.

My Lois, he thought, and at that instant, as if some greater power had approved, the day began to fill with light again. Sounds took on a new resonance. He looked down at his hands and Lois’s, entwined on her lap, and saw a lovely blue-gray nimbus around them, the color of cigarette smoke, The auras had returned.

“You should have sent them away the minute you realized the earrings were gone,” he heard himself say, and each word was separate and gorgeously unique, like a crystal thunderclap. “The very second.”

“Oh, I know that now,” Lois said. “She was just waiting for me to stick my foot in my mouth, and of course I obliged. But I was so upset-first the argument about whether or not I was going to Bangor i Ri with them to look at verview Estates, then hearing my doctor had told them things he had no right to tell them, and on top of all that, finding out I’d lost one of my most treasured possessions. And do you know what the cherry on top was? Having her be the one to discover those earrings were gone! Do you blame me for not knowing what to do?”

“No,” he said, and lifted her gloved hands to his mouth. The sound of them passing through the air was like the hoarse whisper of a palm sliding down a wool blanket, and for a moment he clearly saw the shape of his lips on the back of her right glove, printed there in a blue kiss.

Lois smiled. “Thank you, Ralph.”

“Welcome.”

“I suppose you have a pretty good idea of how things turned out, don’t you? Jan said, ’You really should take better care, Mother Lois, only Dr. Litchfield says you’ve come to a time of life when you really can’t take better care, and that’s why we’ve been thinking about Riverview Estates. I’m sorry we ruffled your feathers, but it seemed important to move quickly. Now you see why.”

“Ralph looked up.

Overhead, the sky was a cataract of green-blue fire filled with clouds that looked like chrome airboats. He looked down the hill and saw Rosalie still lying between the Portosans. The dark gray balloon-string rose from her snout, wavering in the cool October breeze.

“I got really mad, then-” She broke off and smiled. Ralph thought it was the first smile he’d seen from her today which expressed real humor instead of some less pleasant and more complicated emotion.

“No-that’s not right. I did more than just get mad.

If my great-nephew had been there, he would have said ’Nana went nuclear.”

“Ralph laughed and Lois laughed with him, but her half sounded a trifle forced.

“What galls me is that Janet knew I would,” she said. “She wanied me to go nuclear, I think, because she knew how guilty I’d feel later on. And God knows I do. I screamed at them to get the hell out.

Harold looked like he wanted to sink right through the floorboards-shouting has always made him so embarrassed-but Jan just sat there with her hands folded in her lap, smiling and actually nodding her head, as if to say ’That’s right, Mother Lois, you go on and get all that nasty old poison out of your system, and when it’s gone, maybe you’ll be ready to hear sense.” Lois took a deep breath.

“Then something happened. I’m not sure just what. This wasn’t the first time, either, but it was the worst time. I’m afraid it was some kind of… well… some kind of seizure. Anyway, I started to see Janet in a really funny way… a really scary way. And I said something that finally got to her. I can’t remember what it was, and I’m not sure I want to know, but it certainly wiped that sweetysweety-sweet smile I hate so much off her face. In fact, she just about dragged Harold out. The last thing I remember her saying is that one of them would call me when I wasn’t so hysterical that I couldn’t help making ugly accusations about the people who loved me.

“I stayed in my house for a little while after they were gone, and then I came out to sit in the park. Sometimes just sitting in the sun makes a body feel better. I stopped in the Red Apple for a snack and that’s when I heard you and Bill had a fight. Are you and he’ really on the outs, do you think?”

Ralph shook his head. “Nah-we’ll make it up. I really like Bill, but-”

ri

“-but you have to be careful what you say with him,” she rushed.

“Also, Ralph, may I add that you can’t take what he says back to YOu too seriously?”

This time it was Ralph who gave their linked hands a squeeze.

“That might be good advice for you, too, Lois-you shouldn’t take what happened this morning too seriously.”

She sighed. “Maybe, but it’s hard not to. I said some terrible things at the end, Ralph. Terrible. That awful smile of hers…”

A rainbow of understanding suddenly lit Ralph’s consciousness.

In its glow he saw a very large thing, so large it seemed both unquestionable and preordained. He fully faced Lois for the first time since the auras had returned to him… or since he had returned to them. She sat in a capsule of translucent gray light as bright as fog on a summer morning which is about to turn sunny. It transformed the woman Bill McGovern called “Our Lois” into a creature of great dignity… and almost unbearable beauty.

She looks like Eos, he thought. Goddess of the dawn.

Lois stirred uneasily on the bench. “Ralph? Why are you looking at me that way?”

Because you’re beautiful, and because I’ve fallen in love with you, Ralph thought, amazed. Right now I’m so in love with you that I feel as if I’m drowning, and the dying’s fine.

“Because you remember exactly what you said.”

She began to play nervously with the clasp of her purse again.

“No, I-”

“Yes you do. You told your daughter-in-law that she took your earrings. She did it because she realized you were going to stick to your guns about not going with them, and not getting what she wants makes your daughter-in-law crazy… it makes her go nuclear. She did it because you pissed her off. Isn’t that about the size of it?”

Lois was looking at him with round, frightened eyes. “How do you know that, Ralph? How do you know that about her?”

“I know it because you know it, and you know it because you saw it.”

“Oh, no,” she whispered. “No, I didn’t see anything. I was in the kitchen with Harold the whole time.”

“Not then, not when she did it, but when she came back. You saw it in her and all around her.”

As he himself now saw Harold Chasse’s wife in Lois, as if the woman sitting beside him on the bench had become a lens. Janet Chasse was tall, fair-skinned, and long-waisted. Her cheeks were spattered with freckles she covered with makeup, and her hair was a vivid, gingery shade of red. This morning she had come to Derry with that fabulous hair lying over one shoulder in a bulky braid like a sheaf of copper wire. What else did he know about this woman he had never met?

Everything, everything.

She covers her freckles With pancake because she thinks they make her look childish. that people don’t take women with freckles seriously.

Her legs are beautiful and she knows it. She wears short skirts to work, but today when she came to see (the old bitch) Mother Lot’s, she was wearing a cardigan and an old pair of jeans.

Derry dress-downs. Her period I’s overdue. She’s reached that time Of life when it doesn’t come as regular as clockwork anymore, and during that uneasy two-or three-day pause she suffers through every month, a pause when the whole world seems made of glass and everyone in it seems either stupid or wicked, her behave. or and her moods have become erratic. That’s probably the real reason she did what she did.