Noah looked downright queasy by now, so Delia stood up to collect the baby-an excuse to feel, for an instant, the limp, crumpled weight of that little body-and return him to Binky. “We have to get Noah to his tryouts,” she told Binky. “Is there anything I can do for you? Grocery shopping? Errands?”

“Oh, no. Nat’s taking wonderful care of me,” Binky said.

Nat, Delia happened to know, felt the ache of his flashbacks most keenly when he was driving, but she couldn’t point that out when he was looking so proud of himself.

Joel seemed very nervous about the Grade Mothers’ Tea. He must be wishing for Ellie, Delia thought-for Ellie’s clever, theme-party style of entertaining. But when she proposed phoning Ellie and asking for suggestions, he said, “Why should we do that? We’re surely capable of a simple tea, for God’s sake.”

“Yes, but maybe-”

“All we need from Ellie is her recipe for lemon squares,” he said.

“Lemon squares. I’ll ask.”

“The ones with the crispy glaze on top. Also her cucumber sandwiches.”

“Well, I can make a cucumber sandwich,” Delia snapped.

“Oh. Of course.”

After that he let the subject drop-forced himself to drop it, no doubt. On Friday afternoon, though, he paced circles around her as she set up the party-sized percolator on the dining room buffet. “This group will be nothing but women,” he told her.

“Well, so I gathered: grade mothers.”

“There is a grade father, but he’s away on business. It’s one hundred percent women.”

She went to draw the water for tea. He followed. “You do plan to help with the conversation, don’t you?” he asked.

She hadn’t expected to. She had envisioned herself biding her time in the kitchen, like those discreet lady housekeepers in nineteenth-century novels. She had been looking forward to it, in fact. She said, “Oh, um…”

“I can’t do it alone, Delia.”

“Well, I’ll try.”

But no help was needed, she found. Fourteen women showed up-two for each homeroom, minus the traveling father and a mother who couldn’t get off work. All of them were acquainted, most since childhood, and they slid easily into topics so well established that they seemed to be speaking in code. “What did Jessie finally decide?”

“Oh, just what we figured all along.”

“Darn!”

“Yes, but who can say-maybe this will turn out like the Sanderson girl.”

“Well, that’s a thought.”

Delia wore her navy knit, on the assumption that teas were dressy, but the guests wore slacks or even jeans, and one had on a sweatshirt reading COMPOST HAPPENS. They all seemed unduly curious about her. They kept coming up to ask, “So how do you like it here? How is Noah handling all this? Has he adjusted?” When she answered, the voices nearby would trail off and others would edge closer. “Golly,” one said, “Mr. Miller must be awfully glad to have you. And you help with the tutoring too! You tutor the Brewsters’ youngest! Mr. Miller’s always complaining he can’t find enough math tutors.”

Now she knew how new girls must feel on their first day at school. But she responded politely, keeping a smile on her face, holding the teapot before her like a ticket of admission. She liked Bay Borough very much, thank you, and Noah was getting on well, and she had probably learned more from her pupils than they had learned from her. The usual remarks. She could have made them in her sleep. Meanwhile Joel stood talking with two women at the other end of the room, nodding pensively and from time to time wrinkling his brow. He no longer seemed nervous. And when she approached with a plate of cookies, he said, “You’re doing a fine job, Delia.”

“Thank you,” she said, smiling.

“It may be the best tea we’ve given.”

“Oh! Well, the lemon squares were Ellie’s, remember; Ellie was kind enough to-”

Then one of the women asked Joel what had been planned for the Fall Bazaar, and Delia escaped to the kitchen.

She straightened things up, wiped counters, put a few items in the dishwasher. The cat had taken refuge under the table, and she hauled him forth to cuddle him and scratch behind his ears. For a while she watched the minute hand of the wall clock visibly jerk forward: five-eighteen to five-nineteen to five-twenty. Time for the guests to recall that they should get home and fix supper. In fact, she could detect a certain shift in the blur of voices-the rising notes of leave-taking.

“Didn’t I have a purse?”

“Has anyone seen my keys?”

And then, “Where’s Delia? I should say goodbye to Delia.”

She had to drop George and make another appearance, see them all to the door. (“It was good meeting you, too. I’d be happy to give out the recipe.”) Then she returned to the dining room, and Joel unplugged the percolator while that woman who always has to stay longest (there was one at every party) fussily separated the clean spoons from the dirty ones. “Please,” Delia told her, “just let them be. I’ve got a system.” How quickly the old formulas came back to her: I’ve got a system. Don’t give these a thought. It won’t be a bit of trouble.

The woman was reluctant to leave and stood awhile gazing into her purse, as if searching for instructions on where to go next. She had triplets, Delia had overheard-all boys, all just starting to drive. Easy to understand why she wasn’t rushing home. Finally she said, “Well, thanks, you two. This was a real treat.” And darting a smile in Joel’s direction, she told Delia, “Isn’t he helpful! Why, if I asked my husband to clear, he’d think I was joking. He would just act… bemused and go off with his pals.”

Joel waited till she was gone before he snorted. “‘Bemused’!” he echoed. “Discouraging, isn’t it?”

Delia wasn’t sure what he was objecting to. (At least, she thought, he hadn’t seemed to notice the woman’s apparent belief that they were a couple.) She carried a stack of cups to the kitchen and began fitting them into the dishwasher.

“You realize what’s going to happen,” Joel said. He set the percolator on the counter. “Bit by bit, more and more people will say ‘bemused’ in place of ‘amused,’ thinking it’s just the twenty-dollar version, the same way they think ‘simplistic’ is a twenty-dollar ‘simple.’ And soon enough that usage will start showing up in dictionaries, without so much as a ‘non-standard’ next to it.”

“Maybe she really did mean ‘bemused,’” Delia said. “Maybe she meant her husband was puzzled; he was perplexed that she’d asked him to help.”

“No, no. Nice try, Delia, but no, she meant ‘amused,’ all right. Everything’s changing,” Joel said. “It’s getting so we’re hardly speaking English anymore.”

She looked over at him. He was winding the cord around the percolator, although it hadn’t been emptied yet or washed. “Yes, I’ve noticed that’s what bothers you, most times,” she told him.

“Hmm?”

“Most times it’s not grammatical errors-other than the obvious, like ‘me and him.’ It’s the new things, the changes. ‘Input’ and ‘I’m like’ and ‘warm fuzzies.’”

Joel shuddered. Too late, Delia recalled that he had never to her knowledge mentioned “warm fuzzies”-that it came from Ellie’s interview. She hurried on. “But think,” she said. “Probably half your own vocabulary was new not so long ago. Well, ‘twenty-dollar,’ for instance! These terms pop up for good reason. ‘Glitch.’ ‘Groupie.’ ‘Nickel-and-diming.’ ‘Time-shifting.’”

“What’s time-shifting?” Joel asked.

“When you record a TV program to view later. Mr. Pomfret used to say that, and I thought, Oh, how… economical! Don’t you sometimes wish for new words? Like a word for, a word for…”

“Freckles,” Joel said.

“Freckles?”

“Those freckles that are smaller than ordinary freckles,” he said. “And paler. Like gold dust.”

“And also, um, tomatoes,” Delia said, too quickly. “Yes, tomatoes. You have the true kind and then you have the other kind, the supermarket kind, the same color as the gums of false teeth, and those should be given a whole separate name.”