“Well, of course you’re not.”

“I’m really feeling sort of… blank right now. You know?”

“Of course you are!” both women said simultaneously.

In the square, the inning must have ended. The players they had been watching vanished and new players took shape, a new second baseman floating up by degrees and solidifying on the bench.

She dreamed Sam was driving a truck across the front lawn in Baltimore and the children were playing hide-and-seek directly in his path. They were little, though; not their present-day selves. She tried to call out and warn them, but her voice didn’t work, and they were all run over. Then Ramsay stood up again, holding his wrist, and Sam climbed out of the truck and he fell down and tried to get up again, fell down and tried to get up, and the sight made Delia feel as if a huge, ragged wound had ripped open in her chest.

When she woke, her cheeks were wet. She had thought she was starting to lose her habit of crying at night, but now tears flooded her eyes and she gave in to wrenching sobs. She was haunted by the picture of Ramsay in those little brown sandals she’d forgotten he’d ever owned. She saw her children lined up on the lawn, still in their younger versions before they’d turned hard-shelled and spiky, before the boys had grown whiskers and Susie bought a diary with an unpickable brass lock. Those were the children she longed for.

One evening in September, she returned from work to find several envelopes bearing her name scattered across the hall floor. She knew they must be birthday cards-she was turning forty-one tomorrow-and she could tell they were from her family because of the wordy address. (House w/ low front porch…) The first card showed a wheelbarrow full of daisies. A BIRTHDAY WISH, it said, and inside, Friendship and health / Laughter and cheer / Now and through / The coming year. The signature was just Ramsay, with the tail of the y wandering off across the page in a halfhearted manner.

She carried the rest of her mail upstairs. No sense facing this in public.

Susie, the next card was signed. (Heartiest Congratulations and Many Happy Returns.) And nothing at all from Carroll, though she riffled through the envelopes twice. Well, it was easy to see what had happened. These cards were Eliza’s idea. She had coaxed and cajoled the whole family into sending them. “All I’m asking,” was a phrase she would have used. Or, “No one should have to pass a birthday without…” But Carroll, the stubborn one, had flatly refused. And Sam? Delia opened his envelope next. A color photo of roses in a blue-and-white porcelain vase. Barrels of joy / Bushels of glee… Signed, Sam.

Then a letter from Linda, in Michigan. I want you to know that I sincerely wish you a happy birthday, she wrote. I don’t hold it against you that you absconded like that even though it did mean we had to cut short our vacation which is the twin’s only chance each year to get some sense of their heritage but anyhow, have a good day. Below her signature were Marie-Claire’s and Thérèse’s-a prim strand of copperplate and a left-hander’s gnarly crumple.

Dear Delia, Eliza wrote, on yet another rhymed card.

We are all fine but we hope you’ll soon be home. I am taking care of the office paperwork for now, and all three kids have started back to school.

Bootsy Fisher has phoned several times and also some of the neighbors but I tell everyone you’re visiting relatives at the moment.

I hope you have a good birthday. I remember the night you were born as if it were just last week. Daddy let Linda and me wait in the waiting room with the fathers, and when the nurse came out she told us, “Congratulations, kids, you can form a singing trio now and go on Arthur Godfrey,” and that’s how we knew you were a girl. I do miss you.

Love, Eliza

Delia kept that one. The others she discarded. Then she decided she might as well discard Eliza’s too. Afterward she sat on her bed a long while, pressing her fingertips to her lips.

On her actual birthday, a package arrived from Sam’s mother. It was roughly the size of a book, too thick to fit through the mail slot, so it stood inside the screen door, where Delia found it when she came home. She groaned when she recognized the writing. Eleanor was known for her extremely practical gifts-a metric-conversion tape measure, say, or a battery recharger, always wrapped in wrinkled paper saved from Christmas. This time, as Delia discovered when she took the package upstairs, it was a miniature reading light on a neck cord. Well, in fact…, she reflected. It would probably work much better than her lamp. She tucked it under her pillow, next to her stash of toilet paper.

There was a letter too, on Eleanor’s plain buff stationery:

Dear Delia,

This is just a little something I thought you might find helpful. On the few occasions when I’ve traveled myself, the reading light has generally been miserable. Perhaps you’re having the same experience. If not, just pass this along to your favorite charity. (Lately I’ve been most dissatisfied with Goodwill but continue to feel that Retarded Citizens is a worthwhile organization.)

My best wishes for your birthday.

Love, Eleanor

Delia flipped it over, but all she found on the back was RECYCLED PAPER RECYCLED PAPER RECYCLED PAPER running across the bottom. She had expected indignation, or at least a few reproaches.

She remembered how, when she and Sam were first engaged, she had entertained such high hopes for Eleanor. She had thought she was finally getting a mother of her own. But that was before they met. Eleanor came to supper at the Felsons’, arriving directly from the Home for Wayward Girls, where she volunteered as a typing teacher twice a week. Once the introductions were over, she hardly gave Delia a glance. All she talked about was the terrible, terrible poverty endured by the wayward girls and the staggering contrast of this meal-which, by the way, was merely pot roast sprinkled with onion-soup mix and an iceberg lettuce salad. “I asked this one poor child,” Eleanor said, “I asked, ‘Dear, could your people buy you a typewriter so you could work from your house after the baby arrives?’ And she said, ‘Miss, my family’s so poor they can’t even afford shampoo.’” A basket of rolls appeared before her. Eleanor gazed into it, looking puzzled, and passed it on. “I don’t know what made her choose that example, of all things,” she said. “Shampoo.”

(Why was it that so many voices came wafting back to Delia these days? Sometimes as she fell asleep she heard them nattering on without her, as if everybody she’d ever known sat around her, conversing. Like people in a sickroom, she thought. Like people at a deathbed.)

Another present Eleanor had once given her was a tiny electric steamer gadget to freshen clothes during trips. This was some years back; Delia couldn’t remember what she’d done with it. But the thing was, here in Bay Borough she could have put it to use. She could have touched up her office dresses, both of which had grown somewhat puckery at the seams after repeated hand laundering. It would certainly have been preferable to buying an iron and ironing board. Oh, why hadn’t she kept the steamer? Why hadn’t she brought it with her? How could she have been so shortsighted, and so ungrateful?

She didn’t answer any of the birthday cards, but etiquette demanded a thank-you note to Eleanor. The little light is very convenient, she wrote. Much better than the goosenecked lamp I’ve been reading by up till now. So I’ve moved the lamp to the bureau which means I don’t have to use the ceiling bulb and therefore the room looks much softer. In this manner she contrived to cover the entire writing area of a U.S. postcard without really saying anything at all.

The next morning, while she was dropping the card in the mailbox near the office, she was suddenly struck by the fact that Eleanor had once worked in an office. She had put her son through college on a high-school secretary’s salary-no small feat, as Delia could now appreciate. She wished she had thought to mention her job in her thank-you note. But maybe Eliza had said something. “Delia’s employed by a lawyer,” Eliza might have said. “She handles every detail for him. You should see her all dressed up for work; if you met her on the street, you wouldn’t know her.”