Ramsay had been right here in town. He had driven all these miles and then not bothered to visit her. Susie too, perhaps, although Delia had glimpsed only two heads in the Plymouth.

She deserved this, of course. There was no denying that.

She turned and retraced her steps to Rick-Rack’s, all but feeling her way.

An enormous amount had happened to her, but when she reached the café Belle and Teensy were still talking out front, Kim and Marietta were blowing sultry ribbons of cigarette smoke inside, and Rick was tucking her lunch bill under the ketchup container. She counted out her money in slow motion and paid, not forgetting to leave a tip on the table. She gathered her purse and her Young Mister bag and walked out the door, through the scorched, chemical smell of Teensy’s hairdo, through the clack and tumble of Belle’s chatter. “Have you ever noticed,” Belle was saying, “that Horace Lamb looks the eentsiest little bit like Abraham Lincoln?”

At the corner, Delia turned south. The clock in the optician’s window read eleven-fifteen-nowhere near time for lunch, and yet she regretted leaving that barbecue sandwich. And the coleslaw had been superb. It was the creamy kind, with lots of celery seeds. A seed or two still lodged in her mouth, woodsy and fragrant when she bit down. She savored the taste on her tongue. She felt the most amazing hunger, all at once. She felt absolutely hollow. You would think she hadn’t eaten in months.

15

For a short while after Carroll’s visit, half a dozen spots around town seemed haunted by his presence. Here was the ivy-filled window where he had first appeared, here the booth at Rick-Rack’s where he’d sat, here Belle’s front porch where he must have spent several minutes waiting for someone to answer the door. (Had he noticed the scaly paint? The hammocking of the floorboards under his tread?) In Delia’s memory he seemed not surly now but sad, his porcupine behavior merely a sign of hurt feelings. She should have taken him with her when she left, she thought. Except that then she would have had to take Susie and Ramsay too. Otherwise it would have looked like favoritism. She saw herself striding down the coastline with her retinue-the two boys’ ropy wrists in her grasp, Susie scurrying to keep up. Where we going, Mom? Hush, don’t ask; we’re running away from home.

Although her children had been partly what she was running from, as it happened.

Then she reflected that after all, Carroll had not appeared ruined by her leaving. He had survived just fine, and so had his brother and sister. And she remembered Nat’s philosophy: we ought to forget our grown offspring as easily as cats forget theirs. She smiled to herself. Well, maybe not quite as easily.

Still, wasn’t it true that over the past several years, her children had turned into semistrangers-at last even her youngest? That not only had she lost her central importance to them but they, in fact, had become just a bit less overwhelmingly all-important to her?

She sat stone still, staring into space, wondering how long ago she had first begun to know that.

Then, having watched her children slip free, she turned to what remained: her husband.

If he really did remain.

In her mind’s eye he sat at the breakfast table while Eliza poured his coffee. Eliza wore her tan safari dress and even a bit of rouge. She was not unattractive, from certain angles. She had that smooth, yellowish skin that didn’t go all fragile with age, and the rouge turned her dark eyes bright and snappy. She would insinuate herself into Sam’s routine, take over his charts and bills, provide him with hot meals and a seamlessly organized household. “Why, thanks, Eliza,” Sam would say feelingly. Men were so gullible sometimes! And he had more in common with Eliza than you might suspect. Granted, Eliza claimed she was living life over and over again until she got it right, while Sam said that for his part, he meant to get it right the first time. But both of them did assume that “getting it right” was possible. Delia herself had more or less given up trying.

Besides which, there was the fact that Eliza was Delia’s sister. She had Delia’s small, neat bone structure and her phenomenally sound teeth, her tendency to get out of hand after eating any sugar, her habit of letting her sentences trail away unfinished. Loving Eliza would come as naturally to Sam as appreciating a song he had already heard once before.

Delia felt an impulse to jump in the car and tear off to Baltimore, but she knew how trite that was-to want a man back the instant she learned he was wanted by someone else. She made herself sit still. This is what you asked for, she told herself.

This other woman’s maimed husband and child, this too new ranch house with its walls that thunked like cardboard when you rapped them, this thin town propped on a countryside as flat and pale as paper.

Before dawn one morning, she came sharply awake, perhaps disturbed by a dream, although no fragments of it lingered. She lay in bed recalling, for some reason, the first dinner party she’d given after she and Sam were married. He had wanted to invite two of his old classmates, along with their wives. For days she had pored over possible menus. She had refused her sisters’ offers of help; she had extracted her family’s promise not to show their faces during the evening. It was essential that she prove she was a grown-up. And yet from the moment the first couple arrived, she had felt herself sinking back into childhood. “Hey, Grin,” the husband had said to Sam. Grin! Would she ever feel so comradely as to call Sam that herself? she had wondered, twisting her skirt. “Hi, Joe,” Sam had said. “Delia, I’d like you to meet Joe and Amy Guggles.” Delia had not been informed of their last name ahead of time, and in fact had never heard the name Guggles in all her life. It had struck her as funny, and she’d started laughing. She slid into helpless cascades of laughter, her breath dissolving in squeaks, her eyes streaming tears, her cheeks beginning to ache. It was like being in sixth grade again. She laughed herself boneless, while the couple watched her with kindly concern and Sam kept saying, “Delia? Honey?”

“I’m sorry,” she had told them, when finally sheer embarrassment had sobered her. “I’m so sorry, really I can’t think what-”

At which point, the second couple arrived. “Why, here you are!” Sam had cried in relief. “Hon, these are my oldest friends, Frank and Mia Mewmew.”

Oh, Lord.

But Sam had been very understanding. After the party, he had drawn her into his arms and told her, speaking warmly into the curls on top of her head, that these things could happen to anyone.

How young he’d been, back then! But Delia hadn’t realized. To her he had seemed fully formed, immune to doubt, this unassailably self-possessed man who had all but arrived on a white horse to save her from eternal daughterhood. Around his eyes faint puckers were already evident, and she had found them both appealing and alarming. If he dies first I don’t want to go on living, she had thought. I’ll find something in Daddy’s office cabinet that’s deadly poison. In those days, she could say such things, not having had the children yet. She used to picture all sorts of catastrophes, in those days. Well, later too, to be honest. Oh, she’d always been a fearful kind of person, full of hunches and forebodings. But look what happened: the night of his chest pains, she hadn’t felt the slightest premonition. She had sat there reading Luanda ’s Lover, dumb as a post. Then the phone rang.

Although the news had not come as a shock, certainly. Listening to the nurse’s diplomatic wording, she had thought, Ah, yes, of course, while a dank, heavy sense of confirmation had solidified inside her. First Daddy, and now Sam. He would die and they would bury him in Cow Hill Cemetery and he would lie there alone till Delia crept up to join him, as on those nights when she stayed awake watching some silly movie and then climbed the stairs afterward and slipped between the covers and laid one arm lightly across his chest while he went on sleeping.