“Yes.”

“I understand you came here of your own free will.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Nobody kidnapped you, coerced you…”

“Nobody else had anything to do with it.”

“Well, I surely wish you had thought to make that clear before you left.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Next time I will.”

Next time!

She wondered when on earth she supposed that would be.

Saturday, Sunday. The elaborate filling of empty white hours, the glad pounce upon the most inconsequential task. Saturday evening she ate at home, little cartons of Chinese takeout, and she read Daisy Miller late into the night. Sunday breakfast was tea and a grocery-store muffin in bed, but she made an event of lunch. She ate at the Bay Arms Restaurant, a stodgy, heavily draped and carpeted establishment, where all the other tables were occupied by families in church clothes. Her inclination was to get the meal over with as fast as possible, but she forced herself to order a soup course, a main course, and a dessert, and she worked her way through all this in a measured and leisurely fashion, fixing her gaze upon a point in the middle distance.

Once Susie had announced, during a particularly feminist stage in her life, that every woman ought to learn how to dine alone in a formal restaurant without a book. Delia wished Susie could see her now.

In fact, maybe Sam would bring the children with him when he came. Maybe they would walk right into the Bay Arms; it was not impossible that they would track her down. She was wearing her new navy dress from the Pinchpenny. It looked very becoming, she thought. She requested a second cup of coffee and sat on awhile.

Out of nowhere, she longed for a cigarette, although she had not smoked since tenth grade.

When she left the restaurant she headed north to the library, planning to choose that night’s reading. But the library door was locked tight and the venetian blinds were slanted shut. She should have realized the place would be closed on Sundays. Now she would have to buy a book-invest actual money.

In the pharmacy on George Street, she found one rack of paperbacks-mostly mysteries, a few romances. She chose a romance called Moon Above Wyndham Moor. A woman in a long cloak was swooning on the cover, precariously supported by a bearded man who encircled her waist with his left arm while he brandished a sword with his right. Delia hid the book in her purse after she had paid for it. Then she continued toward Belle’s, taking quick, firm steps so that anybody watching would think, That woman looks completely self-reliant.

But there was no one watching.

She remembered how, as a child, she used to arrange herself in the front yard whenever visitors were due. She remembered one time when her great-uncle Roscoe was expected, and she had placed her doll cradle on the grass and assumed a pretty pose next to it till Uncle Roscoe stepped out of his car. “Why, looky there!” he cried. “It’s little Lady Delia.” He smelled of cough drops, the bitter kind. She had thought she retained no mental picture of Uncle Roscoe, and she was startled to find him bobbing up like this, shifting his veiny leather gladstone bag to his other hand so he could clamp her shoulder as they proceeded toward the house. But what had the occasion been? Why had he come to visit, wearing his rusty black suit? She suspected she would rather not know the answer.

“I was singing my doll a lullaby,” she had told him in a confiding tone.

She had always been such a false child, so eager to conform to the grown-ups’ views of her.

Moon Above Wyndham Moor was a disappointment. It just didn’t seem very believable, somehow. Delia kept lowering it to stare blankly at the dim, far corners of the room. She checked to see how many pages remained. She cocked her head toward the sound of Mr. Lamb’s radio. He had been playing it all weekend, though never so loudly that she could decipher the announcer’s words. On the porch overhang outside, raindrops were falling one by one. She missed the noises of the family across the street. They must have closed their windows against the weather.

Is he not going to come at all, then?

On Monday morning Mr. Pomfret let her know, in a roundabout way, that he had learned the truth. “I see you have a new dress, Mrs. Grinstead,” he said, eyeing her significantly. But she pretended not to understand, and by noon he had drifted back to “Miss.” Not that she much cared. She felt oddly lackluster today. The rain didn’t help. She had been forced to buy an umbrella at the pharmacy, and during lunch hour she went to the dime store and purchased an inexpensive gray cardigan made of something synthetic. Miss Grinstead’s standards were slipping, it appeared. She poked her hands dispiritedly through the clingy, tubelike sleeves.

Because of the rain, she couldn’t picnic on her usual park bench, and she wasn’t up to the social demands of Rick-Rack’s or the Bay Arms; so she took her cup of yogurt back to her room. She opened the front door, stepping over the mail, and started up the stairs. Then she halted and turned to look back at one of the envelopes on the floor.

A cream-colored envelope-or more like custard-colored, really. She knew that shade well. And she knew the name embossed in brown on the upper-left-hand corner: SAMUEL A. GRINSTEAD, M.D.

He would settle for just writing her a letter?

She stooped to pick it up. Mrs. Delia Grinstead, the address read (Miss Manners would be appalled). George Street, house w/ low front porch next door to Gobble-Up Grocery. Bay Borough, Maryland.

She took it to her room before she opened it. Delia, he wrote. No Dear. Delia, it is my understanding from Eliza that…

He had used the office typewriter, the one with the tipsy e, and he hadn’t bothered to change the margins from when she’d done the bills. The body of the letter was scarcely four inches wide.

Delia, it is my understanding from Eliza that you have requested some time on your own due to various stresses including your father’s recent death, etc.

Naturally, I would much rather you had forewarned us. You cannot have been unaware of the anxiety you would cause, simply strolling off down the beach like that and disappearing. Do you have any idea how it feels to

Nor am I entirely clear on what “stresses” you are referring to. Of course I realize you and your father were close. But his death after all occurred four and a half months ago. and frankly I feel Perhaps you view me as one of the stresses. If so this is regrettable but I have always tried to be a satisfactory husb vowed while I was growing up that I would be a rock for my wife and children and to the best of my belief I have fulfilled that vow and I don’t understand what but if you have any complaints against me I am certainly willing to hear what they are.

In the meantime you may rest assured that I will not invade your privacy. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxx

Sam

He had made his first four corrections with the hyphen key-easy for Delia to read through-but the fifth was so thoroughly x-ed over that she couldn’t figure it out even when she held the letter up to the light. Well, no doubt that was for the best. It was probably something even more obtuse than his other remarks, and Lord knows those were obtuse enough.

Not invade her privacy! Just sit back and give up on her, as if she were a missing pet or mitten or dropped penny!

She might have known, she reflected. All this proved was how right she had been to leave.

Her teeth were chattering, and her new sweater was no help. Instead of eating her lunch, she slipped off her shoes and climbed into bed. She lay shivering beneath the one blanket, with her jaw set against the cold and her arms wrapped around her ribs, hugging her own self tightly.