Delia digested this. She said, “Aren’t you all taking your beach trip this year?”

“No, Delia,” Sam told her, and the iciness was back in his voice. Delia understood his point as clearly as if he’d stated it: Do you really imagine we’d go back to the beach, now that you’ve ruined it for all of us forever?

Hastily she said, “So no one’s sat Susie down and discussed her options with her.”

“I fail to see how I can hold a discussion with someone who walks out of a room the instant I walk in,” Sam said.

You follow her, is how, Delia wanted to tell him. You walk out after her. What’s so hard about that? But for Sam it would be unthinkable, she knew. He wasn’t a man who laid himself open to rebuff. He didn’t like to plead, or bargain, or reverse himself; he had never made a mistake in all his life. (And was that why the people around him seemed to make so many?)

A delivery truck wheezed past, and she covered her free ear. “All right,” she said, “here’s what I propose. I’m going to write and tell her that if she wants you to pay for her wedding, she’ll have to accept your conditions. And if she doesn’t like those conditions, then she can pay for her own wedding. Either way, you will go along with it.”

“I will?”

“You will.”

“But then she might decide to marry him tomorrow.”

“If she does, she does,” Delia said. “That’s up to her.”

Sam was quiet. Delia’s ankle had started to pound, but she didn’t push him. Finally he said, “How about the not-speaking part?”

“How about it?”

“Could you tell her to talk all this over with me?”

“I could suggest it,” she said.

“Thank you.”

She felt uncomfortable in this new role. She said, “So! Everything else all right?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Boys okay?”

“They’re fine.”

“Who’s taking care of the office while Eliza’s gone?”

“I am.”

“Maybe that’s a job for Susie.”

“Never,” he said flatly.

Another stab to the heart. Never, he meant, would I let my daughter follow her mother’s wretched example. And she couldn’t even argue with that. She said, “I guess I’ll be going, then.”

“Oh. Well. Goodbye,” he said.

After she hung up, it occurred to her that on the other hand, maybe he was just saying Susie would be a disaster in the office. It was true that she was hopeless when it came to organizational matters. Unlike Delia, who had a gift for them.

Could that have been what he’d meant?

In her letter to Susie she included one request that she hadn’t mentioned to Sam beforehand. When you do get married, she wrote, whatever kind of wedding it may be, will you let me come? I couldn’t blame you if you didn’t, but…

She wrote that afternoon, using the desk in the family room, choosing a time when she had the house to herself. Before she was finished, though, Joel came home. He said, “Oh, here you are.” Then he stood about for a while, jingling coins deep in his pocket. At last she stopped writing and looked up at him.

“Was there something you wanted?” she asked.

“No, no,” he said, and he moved away, went off to another part of the house. But as soon as she had finished the letter, he was back again. He must have heard her starting supper preparations. He stood in the kitchen doorway, once again jingling his coins. “Saw you on Weber Street today,” he said.

“ Weber Street?”

“Making a phone call.”

“Ah.”

“You know you’re welcome to use the phone here,” he said.

Delia had one of those flashes where she saw herself through someone else’s eyes: huddling over the receiver and shielding her ear with one hand. She almost laughed. The Mystery Woman Strikes Again. She said, “Oh, well, it’s just that I… had to call on the spur of the moment, that was all.”

He waited, as if hoping for more, but she said nothing else.

Sometimes Delia noticed some detail in Joel-the play of muscles under the skin of his forearms, or the casual drape of his suit coat across his back-and she felt a pull so deep that she had to remind herself she hardly knew this man. In fact, they barely talked to each other. Ever since he’d bandaged her ankle they seemed to have grown tongue-tied and shy. And anyhow, they had Noah to think of.

Watchful, mistrustful Noah! Always lurking about, lately, scanning their faces for signs of guilt. One night when Joel and Delia came home from a Volunteer Tutors’ Supper (potluck, each woman meditatively eating just her own dish, for the most part), they found him waiting at the front door with his arms clamped across his chest. “What took you so long?” he demanded. “That supper was supposed to get over at nine. It’s nine forty-three, for gosh sake, and the Brookses’ house is not but five minutes away!”

Well, think about it: in October he would turn thirteen. Not an easy age, as Delia knew far too well. Already there were signs. For instance, he had spurned those clothes she’d bought him this spring. And he wanted her to leave his laundry in the hall outside his room from now on, not bring it in. And one morning after his friends had slept over, he asked her, “Do you have to wear that beachy-looking cover-up at breakfast? Don’t you own a bathrobe like normal people?”

Yes, it was clear where he was headed.

“He’s getting so tall all at once; I went to kiss him the other day and his face was just about even with mine,” Ellie said. (Often, now, the two of them talked on the phone awhile before Delia summoned Noah.) “Every time I see him, he’s changed some way! He’s started listening to this horrible music in the car, these singers who might as well be gossiping amongst themselves except every now and then you manage to overhear a stray word or two.”

“And he says he’s going to start a rock band,” Delia told her. “He and Kenny Moss.”

“But he doesn’t play an instrument!”

“Well, I don’t know. They’ve already got a name picked out: Does Your Mother Have Any Children?”

“That’s a band name?”

“So he tells me.”

“I don’t get it,” Ellie said.

“You’re not supposed to, I guess. And you heard he doesn’t want to go to camp this summer.”

“But he loves camp!”

“He says it’s babyish.”

“What will he do instead, then?”

“Oh, he’s going, willy-nilly,” Delia told her. “Joel says he has to.” She felt odd, mentioning Joel so familiarly to Ellie. She hurried on. “He’s already paid the deposit, he says, and anyhow, I won’t be here to tend him. I’ll be on vacation.”

“You will? Where?”

“ Ocean City, the middle two weeks in July. Belle Flint set it up with this friend of hers who runs a motel.”

“You and I should get together while you’re there,” Ellie told her. “Have dinner one night in my favorite restaurant. I hang out in Ocean City all the time!”

Evidently she no longer thought Delia was Joel’s girlfriend. Delia wondered why. Was it seeing Delia up close that had changed her mind?

Delia felt a little bit disappointed, to be honest.

She dreamed she ran into Sam in front of Senior City. He was standing outside the double doors in his starched white coat, with his hands in his pockets, and she walked directly up to him and said, in her most positive tone, “At the Millers’ I have a full-sized bike I built all by myself out of paper clips.”

He gazed down at her thoughtfully.

“A working bike?” he asked.

“Well, no.”

She woke up still squinting against the sunlight that had flashed off his glasses. He had been wearing a stethoscope, she recalled, looped across the back of his neck like a shaving towel. He hadn’t worn a stethoscope since the first week he came to work for her father. It was a new-young-doctor thing to do, really, and new was what Sam had been then, in spite of his age, because he’d had to spend so long working his way through school. But he never would have given her such a stern and judging look when they were first acquainted.