Water, filter, French roast. This coffeemaker was top-of-the-line: it ground its own beans. She supposed it came from one of those catalogs that weighed down the office mail. Whenever Mr. Pomfret spotted an item he liked, he had Delia place an order. (“Yes, Mr. Pomfret…”) She called 1-800 numbers clear across the country, requesting a bedside clock that talked, a pocket-sized electronic dictionary, a black leather map case for the glove compartment. Her employer’s greed, like his huge belly, made Delia feel trim and virtuous. She didn’t at all mind placing the orders. She enjoyed everything about this job, especially its dryness. No one received word of inoperable cancer in a lawyer’s office. No one told Delia how it felt to be going blind. No one claimed to remember Delia’s babyhood.

She pressed a button on the coffeemaker, and it started grinding. “Help!” Mr. Pomfret shouted over the din. He was goggling at his computer screen, where the lines of text shivered and shimmied. For some reason, it never occurred to him that this always happened when the grinder was running. Delia left the office, closing the door discreetly behind her.

She typed another letter, this one enumerating the corporate bylaws of an accounting firm. (“Buy-laws,” Katie O’Connell had spelled it.) Pursuant to our discussion, she typed, and fiscal liability, and consent of those not in attendance. She sacrificed speed for accuracy, as befitted Miss Grinstead, and corrected her rare mistakes with Wite-Out fluid on original and carbon both.

Mr. Miller arrived-a big, handsome, olive-skinned man with a narrow band of black hair. Delia followed him into Mr. Pomfret’s office to serve their coffee and then perched on a chair, pen and pad ready. She had worried she couldn’t write fast enough, but there wasn’t much to write. The question was how often Mr. Miller’s ex-wife could see their son, and the answer, according to Mr. Miller, was “Never,” which Mr. Pomfret amended to once a week and alternate holidays, hours to be arranged at client’s convenience. Then the conversation drifted to computers, and when it didn’t drift back again, Delia cleared her throat and asked, “Will that be all?”

Mr. Pomfret said, “Hmm? Oh. Yes, thank you, Miss Grinstead.” As she left, she heard him tell Mr. Miller, “We’ll see to that right away. I’ll have my girl mail it out this afternoon.”

Delia settled in her swivel chair, rolled paper into the carriage, and started typing. You could have balanced a glass of water on the back of each of her hands.

The only other appointment was at four-a woman with some stock certificates belonging to her late mother-but Delia’s services were not required for that. She addressed a number of envelopes and folded and inserted the letters Mr. Pomfret had signed. She sealed the flaps, licked stamps. She answered a call from a Mrs. Darnell, who made an appointment for Monday. Mr. Pomfret walked past her, cramming his arms into his suit coat. “Good night, Miss Grinstead,” he said.

“Good night, Mr. Pomfret.”

She sorted her carbons and filed them. She returned what was left of the Ongoing file to its drawer. She answered a call from a man who was disappointed to find Mr. Pomfret gone but would try him at home. She cleaned the coffeemaker. At five o’clock exactly she lowered all the shades, gathered the letters and her handbag, and left the office.

Mr. Pomfret had given her her own key, and she already knew the crotchets of the pebble-paned door-the way you had to push it inward a bit before it would lock.

Outside, the sun was still shining and the air felt warm and heavy after the air-conditioning. Delia walked at a leisurely pace, letting others pass her-men in business suits hurrying home from work, women rushing by with plastic bags from the Food King. She dropped her letters into the mailbox on the corner, but instead of turning left there, she continued north to the library-the next stop in her routine.

By now she had a sense of the town’s layout. It was a perfect grid, with the square mathematically centered between three streets north and south of it, two streets east and west. Look west as you crossed an intersection, and you’d see pasture, sometimes even a cow. (In the mornings, when Delia woke, she heard distant roosters crowing.) The sidewalks were crumpled and given over in spots to grass, breaking off entirely when a tree stood in the way. The streets farther from the square had a tendency to slant into scabby asphalt mixed with weeds at the edges, like country highways.

On Border Street, the town’s northern boundary, the Bay Borough Public Library crouched between a church and an Exxon station. It was hardly more than a cottage, but the instant Delia stepped inside she always felt its seriousness, its officialness. A smell of aged paper and glue hung above the four tables with their wooden chairs, the librarian’s high varnished counter, the bookcases chockablock with elderly books. No CDs or videotapes here, no spin racks of paperback novels; just plain, sturdy volumes in buckram bindings with their Dewey decimal numbers handwritten on the spines in white ink. It was a matter of finances, Delia supposed. Nothing seemed to have been added in the last decade. Bestsellers were nowhere to be seen, but there was plenty of Jane Austen, and Edith Wharton, and various solemn works of history and biography. The children’s corner gave off a glassy shine from all the layers of Scotch tape holding the tattered picture books together.

Closing time was five-thirty, which meant that the librarian was busy with her last-minute shelving. Delia could place yesterday’s book on the counter without any chitchat; she could hunt down a book for today unobserved, since at this hour all the tables were empty. But what to choose? She wished this place carried romances. Dickens or Dostoyevsky she would never finish in one evening (she had an arrangement with herself where she read a book an evening). George Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald…

She settled on The Great Gatsby, which she dimly remembered from sophomore English. She took it to the counter, and the librarian (a cocoa-colored woman in her fifties) stopped her shelving to come wait on her. “Oh, Gatsby!” she said. Delia merely said, “Mmhmm,” and handed over her card.

The card had her new address on it: 14 George Street. A dash in the space for her telephone number. She had never been unreachable by phone before.

Tucking the book in her handbag, she left the library and headed south. The Pinchpenny Thrift Shop had changed its window display, she noticed. Now a navy knit dress hung alongside a shell-pink tuxedo. Would it be tacky to buy her second dress from a thrift shop? In a town this size, no doubt everyone could name the previous owner.

But after all, what did she care? She made a mental note to come try on the dress tomorrow during lunch hour.

Taking a right onto George Street, she met up with the mother and toddler who fed the pigeons in the square. The mother smiled at her, and before Delia thought, she smiled back. Immediately afterward, though, she averted her eyes.

Next stop was Rick-Rack’s Café. She glanced over at the boardinghouse as she passed. No cars were parked in front, she was glad to see. With luck, Belle would be out all evening. She seemed to lead a very busy life.

Rick-Rack’s smelled of crab cakes, but whoever had ordered them had already eaten and gone. The little redheaded waitress was filling salt shakers. The cook was scraping down his griddle. “Well, hey!” he said, turning as Delia walked in.

“Hello,” she said, smiling. (She had nothing against simple courtesy, as long as it went no further.) She settled in her usual booth. By the time the waitress came over, she was already deep in her library book, and all she said was, “Milk and the chicken pot pie, please.” Then she went on reading.

Last night she’d had soup and whole-wheat toast; the night before that, tuna salad. Her plan was to alternate soup nights with protein nights. Just inexpensive proteins, though. She couldn’t afford the crab cakes, at least not till she got her first salary check.