There was a moment of silence, and then Kay spoke again, sounding fully awake now. 'Where are you? What happened?'

'I'm at a Seven-Eleven on the comer of S trey land Avenue and some other street. I . . . Kay, I've left Tom.'

Kay, quick and emphatic and excited: 'Good! F inally! Hurray! I'll come and gel you! That son of a bitch! That piece of shit! I'll come and get you in the fucking Mercedes! I'll hire a forty-piece band! I'll — '

'I'll take a cab,' Bev said, holding the other two dimes in one sweating palm. In the round mirror at the back of the store she could see the pimply clerk staring at her ass with deep and dreamy concentration. 'But you'll have to pay the tab when I get there. I don't have any money. Not a cent.'

'I'll tip the bastard five bucks,' Kay cried. 'This is the best fucking news since Nixon resigned! You get your buns over here, girl. And — ' She paused and when she spoke again her voice was serious and so full of kindness and love that Beverly felt she might weep. 'Thank God you finally did it, Bev. I mean that. Thank God.'

Kay McCall is a former designer who married rich, divorced richer, and discovered feminist politics in 1972, about three years before Beverly first met her. At the time O f her greatest popularity/controversy she was accused of having embraced feminism after using archaic, chauvinistic laws to take her manufacturer husband for every cent the law would allow her.

'Bullshit!' Kay had once exclaimed to Beverly. 'The people who say that stuff never had to go to bed with Sam Chacowicz. Two pumps a tickle and a squirt, that was ole Sammy's motto. The only time he could keep it up for longer than seventy seconds was when he was pulling off in the tub. I didn't cheat him; I just took my combat pay retroactively.'

She wrote three books — one on feminism and the working woman, one on feminism and the family, one on feminism and spirituality. The first two were quite popular. In the three years since her last, she had fallen out of fashion to a degree, and Beverly thought it was something of a relief to her. Her investments had done well ('Feminism and capitalism are not mutually exclusive, thank God,' she had once told Bev) and now she was a wealthy woman with a townhouse, a place in the country, and two or three lovers virile enough to go the distance with her in the sack but not quite virile enough to beat her at tennis. 'When they get that good, I drop them at once,' she said, and although Kay clearly thought this was a joke, Beverly wondered if it really was.

Beverly called a cab and when it came she piled into the back with her suitcase, glad to be away from the clerk's eyes, and gave the driver Kay's address.

She was waiting at the end of her driveway, wearing her mink coat over a flannel nightgown. Pink fuzzy mules with great big pompoms were on her feet. Not orange pompoms, thank God — that might have sent Beverly screaming into the night again. The ride over to Kay's had been weird: things were coming back to her, memories pouring in so fast and so clearly that it wa s frightening. She felt as if someone had started up a big bulldozer in her head and begun excavating a mental graveyard she hadn't even known was there. Only it was names instead of bodies that were turning up, names she hadn't thought of in years: Ben Hanscom, Richie Tozier, Greta Bowie, Henry Bowers, Eddie Kaspbrak . . . Bill Denbrough.

Especially Bill — Stuttering Bill, they had called him with that openness of children that is sometimes called candor, sometimes cruelty. He had seemed so tall to her, so perfect (until he opened his mouth and started to talk, that was).

Names . . . places . . . things that had happened.

Alternately hot and cold, she had remembered the voices from the drain . . . and the blood. She had screamed and her father had popped her one. Her father — T o m —

Tears threatened . . . and then Kay was paying the cab-driver and tipping him big enough to make the startled cabbie exclaim, 'Thanks, lady! Wow!'

Kay took her into the house, got her into the shower, gave her a robe when she got out, made coffee, examined her injuries, Mercurochromed her cut foot, and put a Band-Aid on it. She poured a generous dollop of brandy into Bev's second cup of coffee and hectored her into drinking every drop. Then she cooked them each a rare strip steak and sauteed fresh mushrooms to go with them.

'All right,' she said. 'What happened? Do we call the cops or just send you to Reno to do your residency?'

'I can't tell you too much,' Beverly said. 'It would sound too crazy. But it was my fault, mostly — '

Kay slammed her hand down on the table. It made a sound on the polished mahogany like a small-caliber pistol shot. Bev jumped.

'Don't you say that,' Kay said. There was high color in her cheeks, and her brown eyes were blazing. 'How long have we been friends? Nine years? Ten? If I hear you say it was your fault one more time, I'm going to puke. You hear me? I'm just going to fucking puke. It wasn't your fault this time, or last time, or the time before, or any of the times. Don't you know most of your friends thought that sooner or later he'd put you in a body cast, or maybe even kill you?'

Beverly was looking at her wide-eyed.

'And that would have been your fault, at least to a degree, for staying there and letting it happen. But now you're gone. Thank God for small favors. But don't you sit there with half of your fingernails ripped off and your foot cut open and belt –marks on your shoulders and tell me it was your fault.'

'He didn't use his belt on me,' Bev said. The lie was automatic . . . and so was the deep shame which brought a miserable flush to her cheeks.

'If you're done with Tom, you ought to be done with the lies as well,' Kay said quietly, and she looked at Bev so long and so lovingly that Bev had to drop her eyes. She could taste salt tears in the back of her throat. 'Who did you think you were fooling?' Kay asked, still speaking quietly. She reached across the table and took Ben's hands. 'The dark glasses, the blouses with high necks and long sleeves . . . maybe you fooled a buyer or two. But you can't fool your friends, Bev. Not the people who love you.'

And then Beverly did cry, long and hard, and Kay held her, and later, just before going to bed, she told Kay what she could: That an old friend from Derry, Maine, where she had grown up, had called, and had reminded her of a promise she had made long ago. The time to fulfill the promise had arrived, he said. Would she come? She said she would. Then the trouble with Tom had started.

'What was this promise?' Kay asked.

Beverly shook her head slowly. 'I can't tell you that, Kay. Much as I'd like to.

Kay chewed on this and then nodded. 'All right. Fair enough. What are you going to do about Tom when you get back from Maine?'

And Bev, who had begun to feel more and more that she wouldn't be coming back from Derry, ever, said only: 'I'll come to you first, and we'll decide together. Okay?'

'Very much okay,' Kay said. 'Is that a promise, too?'

'As soon as I'm back,' Bev said steadily, 'you can count on it.' And she hugged Kay hard.

With Kay's check cashed and Kay's shoes on her feet, she had taken a Greyhound north to Milwaukee, afraid that Tom might have gone out to O'Hare to look for her. Kay, who had gone with her to the bank and the bus depot, tried to talk her out of it.

'O'Hare's lousy with security people, dear,' she said. 'You don't have to worry about him. If he comes near you, what you do is scream your fucking head off.'

Beverly shook her head. 'I want to avoid him altogether. This is the way to do it.'