“Ha. Yes,” her husband said. He glanced around the table. “They’re going to think you mean our marriage. Dear.”

Everybody waited, but Melinda just speared a brussels sprout.

“Oh,” Belle assured him, “we would never think that.” She was sitting erect now, her tears already drying on her cheeks. “A gorgeous man like you? Of course we wouldn’t.” She told the others, “Donald and Melinda are customers of mine. They bought the old Meers place-lovely place. Donald’s an important executive at the furniture plant.”

Melinda was chewing her brussels sprout very noisily, or maybe it only seemed that way because the room was so quiet.

“Mrs. Meers had gone into the nursing home,” Belle said, “but Mr. Meers was still living there. Took us through the house himself; taught us how to work the trash compactor. Told us, ‘Here in the freezer are one hundred forty-four egg whites, no charge.’”

“Folks who made their own mayonnaise,” Mr. Lamb surmised.

Belle was about to go on speaking, but she stopped and looked at him.

“I don’t guess you’d be in the market for storm windows,” Mr. Lamb told Donald.

“Not really,” Donald said, with his eyes on his wife.

“Ah, well, I didn’t think so.”

“That house needs absolutely nothing,” Belle said. “The Meerses kept after it every minute. And Donald here, Don…” She smiled at him. “Don spotted that the first time he walked through.”

“Melinda and I have a fine marriage. Married seven years.” Donald said, still watching his wife. “We were one of those recognized campus couples at our college. Went steady, got pinned: the works.”

“I know the type you mean,” Belle said.

“Why, Melinda’s known me so long she still calls me Hawk! Hawk Hawser,” he added, turning at last to meet Belle’s gaze. “I was on the basketball team. Kind of a star, some people might say, though I never had the height to go professional.”

“Is that right!” Belle exclaimed.

“Hawk Hawser,” he repeated lingeringly.

“I believe I might’ve heard of you.”

“Well, maybe so if you were ever in Illinois. Jerry Bingle College?”

“Jerry Bingle. Hmm.”

“I played center.”

“Really!”

“And midway through my senior year-”

“Marshmallow,” Greggie demanded.

He didn’t have the usual small child’s trouble pronouncing I’s. He spoke very precisely and daintily. “Mama? Marshmallow!”

It was Delia, finally, who plucked a marshmallow from the sweet potatoes and reached across the table to set it on his plate. Everyone else was watching Belle. Open-mouthed and breathless, miraculously recovered, Belle stroked her topmost button with a hypnotic, circular motion and kept her damp-lashed eyes focused raptly on Donald’s lips.

11

Sometimes Mr. Pomfret ordered Delia to go out and feed the parking meter for a client. Sometimes he snapped his fingers when he needed her. Once, he tossed her his raincoat and told her to take it down the block to the one-hour cleaner’s. “Yes, Mr. Pomfret,” she murmured. When she returned, she placed the receipt on his palm as smartly as a surgical nurse dealing out a scalpel.

But now she began to feel a little itch of rebellion.

“Miss Grinstead, can’t you see I’m merging?” he demanded when she brought in some letters to sign, and she said, “Sorry, Mr. Pomfret,” but neutrally, too evenly, with her expression set in granite. And back at her desk, she seethed with imaginary retorts. You and your crummy computer! You and your “merging” and your Search-and-Destroy or whatever!

One Friday in early December, a stooped, gray-haired man in a baseball jacket arrived without an appointment. “I’m Mr. Leon Wesley,” he told Delia. “This is about my son Juval. Do you think Mr. Pomfret might have a minute for me?”

Mr. Pomfret’s office door was closed-it was early morning, his time to peruse new catalogs-but when Delia inquired, he said, “ Leon? Why, Leon resurfaced my driveway for me. Send him in. And make us a pot of coffee while you’re at it.”

It was impossible to avoid overhearing Mr. Wesley’s reason for coming. He poured it out even before he was seated, speaking through the grinding of the coffee beans so Mr. Pomfret had to ask him to repeat himself. Juval, Mr. Wesley said, was scheduled to join the navy first thing after Christmas. He had a highly promising future; special interest had been taken on account of his qualifications, which seemed to involve some technical know-how that Delia couldn’t quite follow. And last night, clear out of the blue, he had been arrested for breaking and entering. Caught climbing through the Hanffs’ dining-room window at ten o’clock in the evening.

“The Hanffs!” Mr. Pomfret said. The Hanffs owned the furniture factory, as even Delia knew-the town’s one industry. “Well, of all the doggone folks to up and burglarize,” he said.

Delia went to the supply closet for more sugar, and when she came back Mr. Pomfret was still marveling at Juval’s choice of victims. “I mean, here you’ve got Reba Hanff, who disapproves of jewelry and doesn’t own a piece of silver,” he said, “gives every cent of their profits to some religious honcho in India… What did the boy hope to steal, for God’s sake?”

“And why, is what I’d like to know,” Mr. Wesley said. “That’s the part I can’t figure. Was he in need of money? For what? He doesn’t even drink, let alone take drugs. Doesn’t even have a girlfriend.”

“Not to mention the Hanffs own the only house alarm in all of Bay Borough,” Mr. Pomfret mused.

“And with such a hotshot career ahead!” Mr. Wesley said. “You can bet that’s all down the drain now. How come he went and ruined things, so close to time he was leaving?”

“Maybe that’s how come,” Delia spoke up, setting two mugs on a tray.

“Ma’am?”

“Maybe he ruined things so he wouldn’t have to leave after all.”

Mr. Wesley gaped at her.

Mr. Pomfret said, “You may go now, Miss Grinstead.”

“Yes, Mr. Pomfret.”

“Shut the door behind you, please.”

She shut the door with such conspicuous care that every part of the latch declared itself.

In regard to the establishment of a designated fund, she typed, and then Mr. Pomfret emerged from his office, stuffing his arms into his overcoat as he walked, forging a trail for Mr. Wesley. “Cancel my ten o’clock,” he told Delia.

“Yes, Mr. Pomfret.”

He opened the outer door, ushered Mr. Wesley through it, and then closed it and came back to stand at Delia’s desk. “Miss Grinstead,” he said, “from now on, please do not volunteer comments during my consultations.”

She stared at him stubbornly, keeping her eyes wide and innocent.

“You’re paid for your secretarial skills, not for your opinions,” he said.

“Yes, Mr. Pomfret.”

He left.

She knew she had deserved that, but still she felt a flare of righteous anger once he was gone. She typed rapidly and badly, flinging the carriage so hard that the typewriter kept skidding across the desk. When she called to cancel the ten o’clock appointment, her voice shook. And when she left the office at lunchtime, she picked up a Bay Borough Bugle so she could look for another job.

Well, not that she would actually go through with it, of course. It was just that she needed to fantasize awhile.

The weather was raw and dismal, and she hadn’t brought any food with her, but she walked to the square even so because she couldn’t deal with the Cue Stick ’n’ Cola today. She found the park benches deserted. The statue looked huddled and dense, like a bird with all its feathers reared against the cold. She wrapped her coat around her and sat down on the very edge of one damp, chilly slat.

How satisfying it would be to announce her resignation! “I regret to inform you, Mr. Pompous…,” she would say. He would be helpless. He didn’t even know where she kept the carbon paper.