“Rest, ice, compression, elevation,” Joel told her, setting his briefcase on the counter. “What happened to you? You look like a war orphan.”

“Oh,” Delia said, “you know that sharp corner they have on car doors…” Then she realized that this in no way explained her ankle. “It’s just been one of those days,” she finished vaguely.

He didn’t pursue it. He opened an overhead cabinet and felt for something on the top shelf. “I know we have a first-aid kit,” he said. “I had to take a course in-Here we go.” He pulled out a gray metal tackle box. “When you’re through soaking, I’ll tape it.”

“Oh, I’m through,” Delia said. She should probably allow more time, but the ice was making her shiver. She lifted her foot and patted it dry with a dish towel. Joel bent over it. He whistled.

“Maybe you ought to get that x-rayed,” he said. “Are you sure it’s not broken?”

“Pretty sure. Everything works,” Delia told him.

Moving aside the dishpan, he knelt and started unrolling a strip of flesh-colored elastic. Delia felt self-conscious about the puffiness of her ankle and the dead blue of her skin, but he showed no reaction. He began wrapping her foot, crisscrossing her instep, working his way upward in a series of perfectly symmetrical V’s. “Oh, how neat! Tidy, I mean,” Delia said. “You’re very good at this.”

“Part of a principal’s education,” Joel said. He wound the last of the bandage around her shin. Then he secured it with two metal clips the same shape as the butterfly closure on her temple. “How’s that?” he asked. He took hold of her foot, as if weighing it. “Tight enough?”

“Oh, yes, it feels…”

It felt wonderful. Not just the bandage-although the support was a great relief-but the hand clasping her foot, the large palm warming her arch through the elastic. She wished she could push even harder against his grip. She was thirsty, it seemed, for that firmness. Till now she had never realized that the instep could be an erogenous zone.

As if he guessed, he went on kneeling there, looking into her face.

“Delia?” Noah said. “Can I invite-?”

Both of them jumped. Joel dropped her foot and stood up. He said, “Noah! I thought you were off at your mother’s.”

Noah stood in the doorway, frowning.

“We were just, ah, taping Delia’s ankle,” Joel told him. “It seems she must have sprained it.”

Delia said, “Rest, ice, compression, elevation! That’s the menon… menonom…” She laughed, short of breath. “Oh, Lord, I never can pronounce it.”

Noah just watched her. Finally he said, “Can I invite Jack for supper?”

“Oh, of course!” she said. “Yes! Good idea!”

He looked at her a moment longer, looked at his father, then turned and walked out.

Joel wouldn’t let her cook that night. He settled her on the family-room couch with her feet up and the cat in her lap, and he went off to order a pizza. Meanwhile Noah and Jack sprawled on the floor in front of the TV. Some kind of thriller was playing. During the more suspenseful scenes a piano tinkled hypnotically. Delia loosened her hold on George and leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Behind her lids, she saw the gritty surface of Highway 50 rushing toward her. She saw the Plymouth darting across a stream of traffic, miraculously avoiding collision like a blip in a video game. She jerked awake, eyes wide and staring, shaken all over again by the narrowness of her escape.

17

The cut on Delia’s forehead healed quickly, leaving just the faintest white fishhook of a scar. The sprain, though, took longer. She favored her right ankle for weeks. “This is not my actual walk,” she wanted to tell passersby, for she felt, somehow, at a disadvantage-second rate, inferior. She wondered how people endured it when they knew they’d be disabled forever, like some of the residents in Senior City.

Senior City was the one place where her limp attracted no attention. She could proceed unhurriedly toward a waiting elevator, trusting the other passengers to hold it for her. When she finally stepped inside, she would find them conversing among themselves without a sign of impatience, one of them leaning absently on the Open button till Delia reminded her to release it. No longer did their own infirmities seem so apparent, either, or their wrinkles or white hair. Delia had adjusted her slant of vision over the past months.

And what a contrast Binky made! For anyone could see now that she was pregnant. By May she was in maternity clothes. By early June she was cupping her belly like an apronful of fruit as she rose from a chair. “Seems like things are more so, with this one,” she told Delia. “When I had the boys I hardly showed till the end. I used to wear unzipped jeans and one of my husband’s long-tailed shirts. But now I have to squeeze through car doors sideways and I’ve still got three months to go.”

There was no question that this baby was unplanned. Binky said she’d been twelve weeks along before she suspected a thing-had continued proclaiming her June wedding date to all and sundry. “Then I said, ‘What is this?’ and I went to see my doctor. When he told me I was pregnant I just looked at him. He said, ‘But nowadays, thirty-eight is nothing. Lots of women give birth at thirty-eight.’ I said, ‘How about sixty-seven?’ He said, ‘Sixty-seven?’ I said, ‘That’s the age of the father.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ Said, ‘I see.’ Said, ‘Hmm.’”

“I view it this way,” Nat told Delia. “What better place for childbirth than a retirement community? Here we have all these doctors and nurses, just standing by twiddling their thumbs on Floor Four.”

Delia was horrified. She said, “You would go to Floor Four for this?”

“He’s teasing,” Binky told her.

“We’ll turn the cardiac unit into a labor room,” Nat went on impishly. “Use one of those railed hospital beds for a crib. And Lord knows these folks have got enough diapers around. Right, Noah?”

Noah grinned, but only at his teacup. He had reached that age where any talk of bodily functions was a monumental embarrassment.

“The best part is,” Nat said, “whoever drew up the bylaws for Senior City never dreamed of this eventuality. All our contract says is, ‘Applicants must be sixty-five before entering,’ but this baby isn’t an applicant. However, we did lose the Floor Two dispute. You heard we asked permission to move down to Floor Two? Now that I have Binky to look after me, I said… but the board said no. Said it wasn’t the way the place worked. Progression was supposed to be up, they said; not down.”

“Well, perhaps it’s for the best,” Binky told him. “Our neighbors on Three would be heartbroken to lose us, now the baby’s coming.”

“Yes, she certainly won’t lack for sitters,” Nat said dryly.

He kept insisting that the baby was a girl, even though they had chosen not to learn the sex. Girls were the only babies he’d had experience of, he said. He tried to convince Noah that all babies were girls but metamorphosed, some of them, into boys at about the same time their eyes darkened.

“You wouldn’t believe how many old ladies are working on booties right now,” he told Delia. “Little knitted slippers, socks, embroidered Mary Janes… Kid is going to be the Imelda Marcos of the nursery set.”

Still, both Nat and Binky must have misgivings, Delia thought. How could they not? She was awed by their determined good cheer-by Binky’s habit of telling people, “We couldn’t be more pleased,” as if prompting them; and by Nat’s solicitude, even as he hobbled around as fragile and easily overturned as something constructed of Tinkertoys.

“When my first wife was dying,” he told Delia one afternoon, “I used to sit by her bed and I thought, This is her true face. It was all hollowed and sharpened. In her youth she’d been very pretty, but now I saw that her younger face had been just a kind of rough draft. Old age was the completed form, the final, finished version she’d been aiming at from the start. The real thing at last! I thought, and I can’t tell you how that notion colored things for me from then on. Attractive young people I saw on the street looked so… temporary. I asked myself why they bothered dolling up. Didn’t they understand where they were headed? But nobody ever does, it seems. All those years when I was a child, longing for it to be ‘my turn,’ it hadn’t ever occurred to me that my turn would be over, by and by. Then Binky came along. Is it any wonder I feel I’ve been born again?”