“So where is she now?”

“Oh, she’s a TV weather lady over in Kellerton,” Vanessa said. “The lump was nothing at all; they removed it under local anesthetic. Now Mr. Miller and Noah can turn on their TV and watch her every evening. Or you might have seen her in Boardwalk Bulletin. They ran a profile of her last August. Real pretty blond? Hair like that shredded straw we pack our bottles in. Course, no one here was impressed in the slightest-person who’d leave her own child.”

Delia looked down at her lap.

“All the women in town have been trying to help Mr. Miller out,” Vanessa said. “Bringing pans of lasagna, taking his kid for the afternoon. But I guess by summer he realized it wasn’t enough, because that’s when he put the ad in the Bugle.”

“The ad’s been in since summer?”

“Right, but his neighbor tells me the onliest answers were teenaged girls from the high school. Every girl at Dorothy Underwood’s got a crush on Mr. Miller. I did too; it’s part of being a student there. I was a senior the first year he was principal, and I thought he was the sexiest man I’d ever laid eyes on. But of course he can’t hire some airhead, so he’s just kept running the ad. It never crossed my mind you’d want the job yourself.”

“Well, I don’t, really,” Delia said. She watched Greggie start a cork train across the linoleum. His little hands reminded her of biscuits, that kind with a row of fork holes pricked on top. She had forgotten what a joy it was to rest your eyes on young children. “It’s just that I’m so fed up with Mr. Pomfret,” she said. “Do you suppose they have any openings at the furniture factory?”

“Oh, the furniture factory,” Vanessa said, dipping her pen. “All’s they ever need there is oilers. Stand all day rubbing oil into chair legs with these big mittens on your hands.”

“But they must have office positions. Typist, filing clerk…”

“How come you’re not taking the job at Mr. Miller’s?”

“I don’t want to just… step into a little boy’s life like that, in case I decide to leave,” Delia told her.

“Do you always up and leave a place?”

Delia wasn’t sure how that question was intended. She looked at Vanessa suspiciously. “No, not always,” she said.

“I mean I never heard you speak a word against Zeke Pomfret. Now you want to quit.”

“He’s so bossy, though. So condescending. Also, the pay is ridiculous,” Delia said. “I didn’t realize how ridiculous when I took the job. And he doesn’t even provide health insurance! What if I got sick?”

Vanessa sat back to watch her.

“Well,” Delia told her, “yes, I do seem to up and leave a lot.”

As she spoke, she saw a lone, straight figure marching down the coastline. It was strange, the feeling of affection the image summoned up in her.

For her family’s Christmas, she decided to buy nothing at all. Maybe Greggie’s trip to Santa had depressed her. He had appeared to grasp the concept before they went, but once they got there he started screaming and had to be carried out. Vanessa was crushed; even the Santa looked crushed. And their shopping expedition afterward was spiritless, with Greggie hiccuping tearfully and slouching in his stroller in a brooding, insulted manner. Delia told Vanessa she thought she would call it a day. “I need to go to the laundromat anyhow,” she said-a flimsy excuse.

When she got home, Belle hailed her from the living-room doorway. “You had a phone call,” she said.

“I did?”

Her knees seemed to melt. She thought first of the children, then of Sam’s heart.

But Belle said, “Mr. Miller from the high school. He wants you to call him back.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t know you knew Joel Miller.”

Delia hadn’t mentioned him to Belle because working for him would mean moving out of this house, and how could she ever do that? This house was perfect. Even Mr. Pomfret had his good points. Somehow the visit to Santa had shown her that. So she nonchalantly accepted the number Belle had scrawled on the corner of a takeout menu. Might as well get this over with. She perched on one arm of the couch and reached for the phone and dialed. Meanwhile Belle hovered in the background, supposedly absorbed with the cat. “Is you a nice little kitty. Is you a sweet little kitty,” she crooned. Delia listened to the ringing at the other end of the line, letting her eyes travel gratefully over the blank white walls and bare floorboards.

“Hello?” Noah said.

She said, “This is Delia Grinstead.”

“Oh, hi! I’m supposed to tell you I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? For what?”

“Dad says a guy shouldn’t talk about seagull do in front of ladies.”

“Oh. Well-”

A man said something in the background.

“Women,” Noah said.

“Excuse me?”

“‘Women,’ I meant to say, not ‘ladies.’”

All pretext, of course. Mr. Miller surely didn’t think she would be offended by seagull do. Or the word “ladies.” This was mere strategy. But Noah himself probably had no inkling of that, and so Delia told him, “It’s quite all right.”

“Kenny Moss’s uncle drives a snack truck; that’s how Kenny knows about the you-know-what. But Dad claims his uncle was teasing him. Dad goes, ‘Right, the corn-chip factory really does take the time to send their workers out to the beach with shovels.’”

Another mutter in the background.

“Okay, ‘said.’ He said,” Noah told Delia. “And on top of that he said”-heavy stress, meaningful pause-“he said how come it’s not in the list of ingredients, if they use seagull do? Oops.”

“Oh, you know those lists,” Delia told him. “All those scientific terms. They can cover up just about anything with some chemical-sounding name.”

“They can?”

“Why, sure! They probably call it ‘dihydroxyexymexylene’ or some such.”

Noah giggled. “Hey, Dad,” he said, his voice retreating slightly. “Delia says it probably is on the list; it’s probably dihydroxy…”

Belle had carried the cat over to the window now. She was holding him up to the glass, which was nearly opaque with dust. And cobwebs clouded the tops of the curtains, and the philodendron plant on the sill was leggy and bedraggled. The whole room seemed drained of color, as if, already, it had slipped into the dimmest reaches of Delia’s memory.

12

Mr. Pomfret said, “Moving on, eh,” without so much as a change of expression. (You would think she was a piece of office equipment.) All he asked, he said, was that she finish out the week-tie up any dangling odds and ends. Which of course she agreed to do, even though there were no odds and ends; just the usual busywork of rat-a-tat letters and robot phone calls and Mr. Pomfret’s daily sheaf of marked catalogs.

It seemed he urgently required a pair of perforated leather driving gloves. A radio antenna the size and shape of a breakfast plate. A solid-walnut display rack for souvenir golf balls.

When she turned in her office key on Friday afternoon, he told her he might wait till after New Year’s to replace her. “This time,” he said, “I believe I’ll hire a word processor, assuming I can find one.”

Delia was confused, for an instant. She pictured hiring a machine. Just try asking a machine to debate his glove size with an 800 operator! she thought. Then she realized her mistake. But still, somehow, she felt hurt, and she shouldered her bag abruptly and left without saying goodbye.

All she owned fit easily in a cardboard carton begged from Rick-Rack’s. The goosenecked lamp poked its head out, though. She could have left it that way (Belle was giving her a ride), but she liked the notion of a life no larger than a single, compact box; and so she shifted things until the flaps closed securely. Then she took her coat and handbag from the bed, and she picked the carton up and walked out.