“Miss Grinstead,” Mr. Miller said, “let me show you where you’d stay if you took the job.”

“No, really, I-”

“Just to look at! It’s the guest room. Has its own private bath.”

She rose when he did, but only because she wanted to make her escape. What had she been thinking of, coming here? It seemed she could feel within the curl of her fingers the urge to slice those vegetables as they ought to be sliced, to set the soup in front of the boy and turn away briskly (twelve was too old to cuddle) and pretend she hadn’t noticed his tears. “I’m sure it’s a lovely room,” she said. “Somebody’s going to love it! Somebody young, maybe, who still has enough…”

She was trailing Mr. Miller down a short, carpeted hall lined with open doors. At the last door, Mr. Miller stood back to let her see in. It was the sort of room where people were expected to spend no more than a night or two. The high double bed allowed barely a yard of space on either side. The nightstand bore a thoughtful supply of guest-type reading (more magazines, two books that looked like anthologies). The framed sampler on the wall read WELCOME in six languages.

“Large walk-in closet,” Mr. Miller said. “Private bath, as I believe I’ve mentioned.”

In another part of the house, a door slammed and a child called, “Dad?”

“Ah,” Mr. Miller said. “Coming!” he called. “Now you get to meet Noah,” he told Delia.

She took a step backward.

“Just to say hello,” he assured her. “What harm could that do?”

She had no choice but to follow him down the hall again.

In the kitchen (cabinets the color of toffees, wallpaper printed with butter churns), a wiry little boy stood tugging off a red jacket. He had a tumble of rough brown hair and a thin, freckled face and his father’s long dark eyes. As soon as they entered the room, he started talking. “Hey, Dad, guess what Jack’s mother gave us for dinner! This, like, cubes of meat that you dunk into this…” He registered Delia’s presence, flicked a look at her, and went on. “… dunk into this pot and then-”

“Noah, I’d like you to meet Miss Grinstead,” his father said. “Should we call you Delia?” he asked her. She nodded; it hardly mattered. “I’m Joel,” he said, “and this is Noah. My son.”

Noah said, “Oh. Hi.” He wore the guarded, deadpan expression that children assume for introductions. “So the pot is full of hot oil, I guess it is, and each of us got-”

“Fondue,” his father said. “You’re talking about fondue.”

“Right, and each of us got our own fork to cook our meat on, with different, like, animals on the handles so we could keep straight whose was whose. Like mine was a giraffe, and guess what Jack’s little sister’s was?”

“I can’t imagine,” his father said. “Son, Delia is here to-”

“A pig!” Noah squawked. “His little sister got the pig!”

“Is that right.”

“And she cried about it too, but Carrie cries about everything. Then for dessert we each had a bag of chocolate marbles, but I turned mine down. I was polite about it, though. I go to his mom, I go-”

“Said.”

“Huh?”

“You said to his mom.”

“Right, I’m all, ‘Thanks a lot, Mrs. Newell, but I’m so full I guess I better pass.’”.

“I thought you liked chocolate marbles,” his father said.

“Are you kidding? Not after what I know now.” Noah turned to Delia. “Chocolate marbles are coated with ground-up beetle shells,” he told her.

“No!” she said.

“No,” Mr. Miller agreed. “Where’d you get that information?” he asked his son.

“Kenny Moss told me.”

“Well, then! If Kenny Moss said it, how can we doubt it?”

“I’m serious! He heard it from his uncle who’s in the business.”

“What business-tabloid newspapers?”

“Huh?”

“There are no beetle shells in chocolate marbles. Take my word for it. The FDA would never allow it.”

“And guess what’s in corn chips,” Noah told Delia. “Those yellow corn chips? Seagull do.”

“I never knew that!”

“That’s what makes them so crackly.”

“Noah-” his father said.

“Honest, Dad! Kenny Moss swears it!”

“Noah, Delia came to talk about keeping house for us.”

Delia shot Mr. Miller a frown. He wore an oblivious, bland expression, as if he had no idea what he’d done. “Actually,” she said, turning to Noah, “I was only… inquiring.”

“She’s going to think about it,” Mr. Miller amended.

Noah said, “That’d be great! I’ve been having to fix my own school lunches.”

“Horrors,” his father said. “Don’t let on to the child-labor authorities.”

“Well, how would you feel? You open your lunch box: ‘Gee, I wonder what I surprised myself with today.’”

Delia laughed. She said, “I should be going. It was nice to meet you, Noah.”

“Goodbye,” Noah said. Unexpectedly, he held out his hand. “I hope you decide to come.”

His hand was small but callused. When he looked up at her, his eyes showed an underlay of gold, like sunshine filtered through brown water.

Outside the front door, Delia told his father, “I thought you didn’t want him to feel people were checking him over.”

“Ah,” Mr. Miller said. “Yes. Well.”

“I thought you were trying to spare him! Then you went and told him what I was here for.”

“I realize I shouldn’t have done that,” Mr. Miller said. He spread one hand distractedly across his scalp, like a cap. “It’s just that I wanted so badly for you to say you’d come.”

“And you haven’t seen my references, even! You don’t know the first thing about me!”

“No, but I approve of your English.”

“English?”

“It kills me to hear him speak so sloppily. ‘Like’ this and ‘like’ that, and ‘I go’ instead of ‘I said.’ It drives me bats.”

“Well, of all things,” Delia said. She turned to leave.

“Miss Grinstead? Delia?”

“What.”

“Will you at least think it over?”

“Of course,” she said.

But she knew she wouldn’t.

Vanessa said Joel Miller was the most pitiful man she knew of. “Ever since his wife left, the guy has been barely coping,” she told Delia.

“Isn’t anyone in Bay Borough happily married?” Delia wondered.

“Yes, lots of folks,” Vanessa said. “Just not who you choose to hang out with.”

They were sitting in Vanessa’s kitchen the following morning, a cold, sunny Saturday. Really it was her grandmother’s kitchen; Vanessa and all three of her brothers lived with their father’s mother. Vanessa was filling out labels with an old-fashioned steel-nibbed pen. Highly Effective Insect Repellent, she wrote, in hair-thin brown script on ivory paper ovals. Highly Effective was an ancient family recipe. When Vanessa had finished her daily allotment of labels, her youngest brother would glue them onto the slender glass phials in which various dried sprigs and berries bobbed mysteriously underwater. Delia found it hard to believe that people could make a living this way, but evidently the Linleys did all right. The house was large and comfortable, and the grandmother could afford to travel once a year to Disney World. Vanessa said the trick was pennyroyal. “Don’t let this get around,” she’d told Delia, “but insects despise pennyroyal. The other herbs are mostly for show.”

On the floor, Greggie was building a tower with stacks of corks. After Vanessa finished her labels, she and Delia were going to take him to visit Santa. Then Delia might do a little Christmas shopping. Or maybe not; she couldn’t decide. She had always disliked Christmas, with its possibilities for disappointing her family’s secret hopes, and this year would be worse than ever. Should she just, maybe, skip the whole business? Oh, why wasn’t there an etiquette book for runaway wives?

Which brought her back to Mr. Miller. “How come his wife left him, does anyone know?” she asked Vanessa.

“Oh, sure; everyone knows. Here they were, together for years, sweet little boy, nice house, and one day last spring Ellie, that’s his wife, found a lump in her breast. Went to the doctor and he said, yup, looked like cancer. So she came home and told her husband. ‘In the time that I have left to me, I want to make the very best of my life. I want to do exactly what I’ve dreamed of.’ And by nightfall she had packed up and gone. That was her deepest, dearest wish-did you ever hear such a thing?”