“No, I told her that; I told her you kids were tied up. But you and I, Sam, just for-”

“We can’t make it,” Sam said flatly.

“But I’ve already accepted.”

He had been on the point of turning away again, but now he stopped and looked at her.

“I know I should have checked with you first, but by accident somehow I just went ahead and accepted.”

“Well, then,” he said, “you’ll have to call her back and unaccept.”

“But, Sam!”

He left.

She looked over at Carroll. “How can he be so mean?” she asked, but Carroll just raised one eyebrow in that urbane new way she suspected him of practicing in the mirror.

Sometimes she felt like a tiny gnat, whirring around her family’s edges.

The linoleum was slick and chilly beneath her feet, and she would have gone back upstairs for her slippers except that Sam and the plumber were upstairs. Instead, she turned to her grocery bags and unpacked several more boxes of pasta. Maybe she could tell Mrs. Allingham that Sam had been taken ill. That was always risky, though, when you lived in the same block and could so easily be observed, hale and hearty, stepping out to collect your morning paper or whatever. She sighed and shut a cabinet door. “When did this start happening to me?” she asked Carroll.

“Huh?”

“When did sweet and cute turn into silly and inefficient?”

He didn’t seem to have an opinion.

Her sister appeared in the doorway, rolling up her shirt sleeves. “Morning, all!” she announced.

“Eliza?”

There were days when Eliza seemed almost gnomish, and this was one of them. She wore her gardening clothes-a pith helmet that all but obscured her straight black Dutch-boy bob, a khaki shirt and stubby brown trousers, and boys’ brown oxfords with thick, thick soles intended to make her seem taller. (She was the shortest of the three Felson sisters.) Her horn-rimmed glasses overwhelmed her small, blunt, sallow face. “I figured I’d transplant some of those herbs before the ground dried out,” she told Delia.

“But I thought you were at work.”

“Work? It’s Saturday.”

“You called from work, I thought.”

Eliza looked over at Carroll. He raised that eyebrow again.

“You called and left a message on the machine,” Delia said, “asking me to find an address.”

“That was ten days ago, at least. I needed Jenny Coop’s address, remember?”

“Then why did I just get it off the answering machine?”

“Mom,” Carroll said. “You must have been playing back old calls.”

“Well, how is that possible?”

“You didn’t have the machine turned on in the first place, see, and then when you pressed the Message button-”

“Oh, Lord,” Delia said. “Mrs. Allingham.”

“Is there coffee?” Eliza asked her.

“Not that I know of. Oh, Lord…”

She went over to the wall phone and dialed Mrs. Allingham’s number. “I’m snug in bed,” Eliza was telling Carroll, “thinking, Goody, Saturday morning, I can sleep till noon-when who should come crawling through that door in the back of my closet but another one of your father’s blasted repairmen.”

“Mrs. Allingham?” Delia said into the phone. “This is Delia again. Mrs. Allingham, I feel like such a dummy but it seems I got my calls mixed up and it was last week you invited us for. And of course last week we went, and a lovely time we had too; did I write you a thank-you note? I meant to write you a thank-you note. But this week we’re not coming; I mean I realize now that you didn’t invite us for-”

“But, Delia, darlin’, we’d be happy to have you this week! We’d be happy to have you any old time, and I’ve already sent Marshall off to the Gourmet To Go with a shopping list.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Delia said, but then the coffee grinder started up-a deafening racket-and she shouted, “Anyhow! We’ll have to invite you to our place, very soon! Goodbye!”

She replaced the receiver and glared at Eliza.

“If only coffee tasted as good as it smells,” Eliza said serenely when the grinder stopped.

Sam and the plumber were descending the stairs. Delia could hear the plumber’s elasticized East Baltimore vowels; he was waxing lyrical about water. “It’s the most amazing substance,” he was saying. “It’ll burst out one place and run twenty-five feet along the underside of a pipe and commence to dripping another place, where you least expect to see it. It’ll lie in wait, it’ll bide its time, it’ll search out some little cranny you would never think to look.”

Delia placed her hands on her hips and stood waiting. The instant the two men stepped through the door, she said, “I certainly hope you’re satisfied, Sam Grinstead.”

“Hmm?”

“I called back poor Mrs. Allingham and canceled supper.”

“Oh, good,” Sam said absently.

“I broke our promise. I ducked out of our commitment. I probably hurt her feelings for all time,” Delia told him.

But Sam wasn’t listening. He was following the plumber’s forefinger as it pointed upward to a line of blistered plaster. And Eliza was measuring coffee, so the only one who paid any heed was Carroll. He sent Delia a look of utter contempt.

Delia turned sheepishly to her grocery bags. From the depths of one she drew the celery, pale green and pearly and precisely ribbed. She gazed at it for a long, thoughtful moment. “Aren’t you clever to say so!” she heard Adrian exclaim once again, and she held the words close; she hugged them to her breast as she turned back to give her son a beatific smile.

3

“Aren’t you clever to say so,” he had said, and, “Why, you’re very pretty!” and, “You have such a little face, like a flower.” Had he meant that she had such a flowerlike face, which incidentally was little? Or had its littleness been his sole point? She preferred the first interpretation, although the second, she supposed, was more likely.

Also, he had praised her marvelous blancmange. Of course the blancmange did not really exist, but still she felt a lilt of pride, remembering that he had found it marvelous.

She studied her face in the mirror when nobody else was around. Yes, maybe it did resemble a flower. If he had been referring to those flowers that seem freckled. She had always wanted to look more dramatic, more mysterious-more adult, in fact. It had struck her as unfair that she should be wrinkling around the eyes without ever losing the prim-featured, artless, triangular face of her childhood. But evidently Adrian had considered that attractive.

Unless he had been speaking out of kindness.

She checked for his name in the phone book, but he must have had an unlisted number. She kept watch for him on the streets and in the local shops. Twice in the next three days she drove back to the supermarket, on both occasions wearing the dress with the smocked, gathered front that made her seem less flat-chested. But Adrian never appeared.

And if he had, what would she have done? It wasn’t that she’d fallen in love with him or anything like that. Why, she didn’t even know what kind of person he was! And she certainly didn’t want (as she put it to herself) “something to start up.” Ever since she was seventeen, she had centered her life on Sam Grinstead. She had not so much as glanced at any other man from the moment she first met him. Even in her day-dreams, she wasn’t the type to be unfaithful.

Still, whenever she imagined running into Adrian, she was conscious all at once of the light, quick way she naturally moved, and the outline of her body within the folds of her dress. She couldn’t remember when she had last been so aware of herself from outside, from a distance.

At home, four workmen were installing air-conditioning-another of Sam’s sudden renovations. They were slicing through floors and walls; they were running huge, roaring machines; they were lugging in metal ducts and bales of what looked like gray cotton candy. Delia could lie in bed at night and gaze straight upward through a new rectangle in the ceiling to the stark bones of the attic. She pictured bats and barn swallows swooping down on her while she slept. She fancied she could hear the house groaning in distress-such a modest, mild house, so unprepared for change.