Oh, yes, the emergency. Delia had almost forgotten. While Ellie explained the circumstances (“sharp metal corner on the… nothing I could do… tried to warn her but…”), Delia unstuck the sweatshirt from her forehead and discovered she was no longer bleeding. The bloodstains on the shirt had dried to a dull, blackish color. She glanced toward the other patients. Two women and a small girl sat watching her with interest, and she hastily clapped the sweatshirt back on her temple.

Dr. Norman was just hanging up the phone when the secretary led them in. He was a dumpy man with a flounce of white curls above his ears. “What have we here?” he asked, and he rose and came around the desk to peel away the sweatshirt with practiced fingers. His breath smelled of pipe tobacco. Delia would have liked to take hold of his hand and cradle it against her cheek. “Hmm,” he said, peering. “Well, nothing you’ll die of.”

“Will it leave a scar?” Delia asked him.

“It shouldn’t. Hard to tell for sure till I get it cleaned up.”

“Of course I did everything humanly possible,” Ellie said. “Warned her over and over again. ‘Watch yourself getting in, Dee,’ I told her; if I told her once, I told her half a dozen times-”

Dr. Norman said, with a touch of impatience, “Yes, fine, Ellie, I understand,” and Ellie shut up. “Come next door,” he told Delia. He ushered her into an adjoining room. Ellie and Noah followed, which may not have been what he had intended.

This second room held an examining table upholstered in cracked black leather. Delia boosted herself nimbly onto the end of it and settled her handbag in her lap. While Dr. Norman rummaged in a metal drawer the color of condensed milk, he asked Ellie about the weather; he asked Noah about his softball team; he told Delia he had heard she was a ba-a-ad tutor.

“Bad!” Delia said.

“Good, that means.” He looked up from the rubber gloves he was slipping on. “In T. J. Renfro’s language, ‘bad’ is good, and so is ‘wicked.’ You teach a wicked equation, he says.”

“Oh,” Delia said, relieved.

Ellie, who had been studying a poster on the Heimlich maneuver, looked over at her. “You tutor at Underwood?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She sniffed. “Joel must be in heaven,” she said. “He was always after me to volunteer.”

Dr. Norman sent Ellie a quick glance that she probably didn’t notice. Then he told Noah, “Excuse me, son,” and stepped around him to peer again at Delia’s forehead. She stilled her swinging feet as he came close. “This’ll smart some,” he said, tearing open an antiseptic wipe. The keen, authoritative smell filled her with longing. I’m really not just a mere patient, she could have told him. I know this office top to bottom! I know you’ll sit down to supper tonight and tell your family that that Ellie Miller sure acts mighty possessive of Joel, considering they’re separated. I know you’ll say you finally got to meet that live-in woman of his, and depending on how discreet you are, you might even voice some suspicion as to exactly how I was injured. Don’t think I’m one of those outsiders who can’t see beyond the white coat!

But of course she said nothing, and Dr. Norman swabbed her wound and then laid dots of rubbery warmth on either side of it as he tested it with his fingertips. “What you’ve got,” he said, “is a superficial scratch across the forehead, but a fairly deep gash at the temple. No need for stitches, though, and I doubt there’ll be a scar if we keep the edges together while it heals.” He turned back to the cabinet. “We’ll just apply a butterfly closure. This nifty type of bandage that…”

Yes, Delia knew what a butterfly was-had plastered more than a few onto her own children’s injuries. She shut her eyes as he set it in place. Next to her she heard Noah breathing; he was leaning in close to watch. “Cool!” he said.

“Now, if you want I could prescribe a pain medication,” Dr. Norman said, “but I don’t believe-”

“It hardly hurts at all,” Delia told him, opening her eyes. “I won’t need anything.”

He scrawled a note for his secretary before he showed her out, and clapped Noah on the shoulder, and said, “Ellie, always good to see your clothes hanging so well on you.”

“Oh, stop,” Ellie said. She told Delia, “Everybody pokes fun at this remark I made in Boardwalk Bulletin.”

Delia’s only response was, “Oh?” because she didn’t want to let on she’d read it.

“But I was misquoted!” Ellie said. “Or at least, I didn’t mean it that way. What I meant was, I dress economically.”

She was still going on about that-telling Noah that this skirt, for instance, had cost thirteen ninety-five at Teenage World-when they reached the reception desk, which left Delia to pay the bill. She did think Ellie might have offered. But she had planned to decline anyhow, and so she held her tongue.

Out on the porch, she folded the sweatshirt and stuffed it in her bag. Then she followed Ellie and Noah down the steps. Ellie was discussing the clothing budget of someone named Doris. Doris? Oh, yes, the anchorwoman at WKMD. “What she spends on headbands alone,” Ellie said, “to say nothing of those scarves she wears to hide her scraggy neck…”

Delia was reflecting that she should have accepted that prescription after all, not for her forehead but for her ankle. She had completely neglected to mention twisting her ankle. She limped painfully to the car and fell with a thud into the passenger seat.

“So I guess you want to go home now,” Ellie said.

“Yes, please,” Delia told her.

But Ellie had been speaking to Noah. “Honey?” she said, watching his face in the rearview mirror.

“I guess,” he said.

“Don’t want to change your mind and visit me?”

“I’ve got this history test to study for.”

Ellie’s shoulders slumped. She didn’t point out that he could do that anytime over the weekend.

They cruised down Weber Street, passing Copp Catering where Belle had bought Thanksgiving dinner, and the Sub Tub, where all the Underwood students headed for snacks after school. In Ellie’s company, Delia felt that Bay Borough took on a different shading. It didn’t look as happy as it usually did. The women walking home with their grocery bags seemed unknowingly ironic, like those plastic-faced, smiling housewives in kitchen-appliance ads from the fifties. Delia shook off the thought and turned to Ellie. “Well!” she said. “Maybe I’ll run into you at your father’s sometime.”

“If I ever go back there,” Ellie said gloomily.

“Oh, you have to go back! Why wouldn’t you? He’s such a pleasure to talk to.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Ellie said. “You’re not his daughter.”

She turned onto Pendle Street, braked for a jaywalking collie, and pulled into the Millers’ driveway. (The glance she shot toward the front windows could have meant nothing at all.) “Bye, No-No,” she said, blowing her son a kiss. “Delia, sorry again about the whatever.”

“That’s all right,” Delia said.

Limping after Noah up the sidewalk, she remembered where she’d heard that phrase of Ellie’s before. “Easy for you,” Delia’s sisters used to tell her. They said, “Naturally you get along with Dad. You arrived so late, is why. You don’t have so much to hold against him.”

But they never specified just what they held against him themselves. They hadn’t been able to name it even when she asked, and she would be willing to bet that Ellie couldn’t either.

When Delia changed into the shoes she wore around the house, she found that the strap of her pump had left a groove across her right instep. Her foot was so swollen, in fact, that she seemed to be wearing a ghost pump, pressing into her flesh. And her anklebone had become a mere dent. She doubted anything was broken, though. She could still wriggle her toes.

She drew a dishpan of cold water, added a few ice cubes, and sat down on a kitchen chair to let the ankle soak. And what else should she do for it? All those times she’d heard Sam advising his patients; you’d think she would remember. There was a mnemonic: R.I.C.E., he always told them. She tried it aloud. “Rest, ice…” But what was the C for? Caution? Coddling? She tried again. “Rest, ice…”