“Is that so?” Sam would ask. (Somehow, the listener had changed from Eleanor to Sam.) “Handles everything, you say. Not mislaying important files? Not lounging around the waiting room, reading trashy novels?”

Well, she’d spent more than half her life trying to win Sam’s approval. She supposed she couldn’t expect to break a habit like that overnight.

October came, and the weather grew cooler. The square filled up with yellow leaves. Some nights, Delia had to shut her windows. She bought a flannel nightgown and two long-sleeved dresses-one gray pinstripe, one forest green-and she started keeping an eye out for a good secondhand coat. It was not yet cold enough for a coat, but she wanted to be prepared.

On rainy days, now, she ate lunch at the Cue Stick ‘n’ Cola on Bay Street. She ordered coffee and a sandwich and watched the action at the one pool table. Vanessa often wheeled her stroller in to join her. While Greggie lurched among the chair legs like a brightly colored top, Vanessa would offer Delia thumbnail sketches of the players. “See the guy breaking? Buck Baxter. Moved here eight or ten years ago. Baxter as in Baxter Janitorial Supplies, but they say his father’s disowned him. No, Greggie, the man doesn’t want your cookie. Now, her I don’t know,” she said. She meant the diminutive, dark-haired young woman who was leaning across the pool table to shoot on tiptoe, her purple canvas pocketbook still slung over her shoulder. “Must be from outside. Leave him alone, Greggie. And the fellow in the cowboy boots, that’s Belle’s ex-boyfriend, Norton Grove. Belle was out of her mind to fall for him. Fickle? That man put fickle in the dictionary.”

Delia was gathering an impression of Bay Borough as a town of misfits. Almost everybody here had run away from someplace else, or been run away from. And no longer did it seem so idyllic. Rick and Teensy Rackley were treated very coolly by some of the older citizens; the only two gay men she knew of seemed to walk about with no one but each other; there was talk of serious drug use in the consolidated high school; and Mr. Pomfret’s appointment book was crammed with people feuding over property lines and challenging drunk-driving arrests.

Still, she felt contented here. She had her comfortable routine, her niche in the general scheme of things. Making her way from office to library, from library to café, she thought that her exterior self was instructing her interior self, much like someone closing his eyes and mimicking sleep in order to persuade sleep to come. It was not that her sadness had left her, but she seemed to operate on a smooth surface several inches above the sadness. She deposited her check each Saturday; she dined each Sunday at the Bay Arms Restaurant. People nodded now when they saw her, which she took not just for greeting but for confirmation: Ah, yes, there’s Miss Grinstead, exactly where she belongs.

Although every so often something would stab her. A song from Ramsay’s Deadhead period about knock-knock-knocking on heaven’s door, for instance. Or a mother and a little girl hugging each other in front of the house across the street. “She’s leaving me!” the mother called mock-plaintively to Delia. “Going off to her very first slumber party!”

Maybe Delia could pretend to herself that she was back in the days before her marriage. That she didn’t miss her children at all because they hadn’t been born yet.

But in retrospect it seemed she had missed them even then. Was it possible there had been a time when she hadn’t known her children?

Dear Delia, Eleanor wrote. (She addressed her letter to 14 George Street this time.)

I was so pleased to get your postcard. It’s good to know that my little gift came in handy, and I’m glad you’re doing some reading.

I myself find it impossible to sleep if I don’t read at least a few pages first, preferably from something instructive like biography or current events. For a while after Sam’s father died I used to read the dictionary. It was the only thing with small enough divisions to fit my attention span. Also the information was so definite.

Probably Sam has been marked by losing his father at such an early age. I meant to say that in my last note but I don’t believe I did. And his father never had a strong personality. He was the kind of man who let all the bathwater drain away before he got out of the tub. Maybe it would worry a boy to think he might grow up to do the same.

I hope I haven’t overstepped.

Love, Eleanor

Delia didn’t know what to make of that. She understood it better when the next note came, some two weeks later. Please forgive me if you felt I sounded “mother-in-lawish” and that’s why you didn’t answer my letter. I had no intention of offering excuses for my son. I’ve always said he was forty years old when he was born, and I realize that’s not easy to live with.

Delia bought another postcard-this one the kind with a picture on it, a rectangle of unblemished white captioned Bay Day in Bay Borough, so there was even less space to write on. Dear Eleanor, she wrote. I’m not here because of Sam, so much. I’m here because

Then she sat back, not knowing how to end the sentence. She considered starting over, but these postcards cost money, and so she settled, finally, for I’m here because I just like the thought of beginning again from scratch. She signed it, Love, Delia, and mailed it the following morning on her way to work.

And after all, wasn’t that the true reason? Truer than she had realized when she wrote it, in fact. Her leaving had very little to do with any specific person.

Unlocking the office door, she noticed the pleasure she took in the emptiness of the room. She raised the white window shades; she turned the calendar to a fresh page; she sat down and rolled a clean sheet of paper into the typewriter. It was possible to review her entire morning thus far and find not a single misstep.

Mr. Pomfret sometimes employed a detective named Pete Murphy. This was not the swaggery character Delia would have envisioned, but a baby-faced fat boy from Easton. It seemed he was hired less often to locate people than to fail to locate them. Whenever a will or a title search required his services, Pete would plod in, whistling tunelessly, and trill his pudgy fingers at Delia and proceed to the inner office. He never spoke to her, and he probably didn’t know her name.

One rainy afternoon, though, he arrived with something bulging and struggling inside the front of his windbreaker. “Got a present for you,” he told Delia.

“For me?”

“Found it out in the street.”

He lowered his zipper, and a small, damp gray-and-black cat bounded to the floor and made a dash for the radiator. “Oh!” Delia said.

Pete said, “Shoot. Come out of there, you little dickens.”

Beneath the radiator, silence.

“It’ll never come if you order it to,” Delia said. “You have to back away a bit. Turn your face away. Pretend you’re not looking.”

“Well, I’ll let you see to that,” Pete decided. He brushed cat hairs off his sleeves and started for the office.

“Me! But… wait! I can’t do this!” Delia said. She was speaking now to Mr. Pomfret; he had come to his door to see what all the fuss was about. “He’s brought a stray cat! I can’t take care of a cat!”

“Now, now, I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Mr. Pomfret said genially. “Miss Grinstead was a cat in her last incarnation, you know,” he told Pete.

“Is that a fact,” Pete said. They walked into the office, and Mr. Pomfret closed the door.

For the next half hour, Delia worked with one eye on the radiator. She watched a gray-and-black tiger tail unfurl from behind a pipe, gradually fluffing as it dried. She had a sense of being under surveillance.

When Pete reemerged, she said, “Maybe the cat belongs to someone. Have you thought of that?”

“I doubt it,” he told her. “I didn’t see no collar.” He trilled his fingers and left. When the door slammed behind him, the tail gave a twitch.