She rose and went to open her door. “Noah?” she whispered.

Instantaneously, almost, Joel was standing in front of her. She couldn’t see him so much as feel him, as the blind are said to feel-a tall, dense, solid shape giving off warmth, his moon-pale pajamas only gradually emerging from the dark of the windowless hall.

“Yes, Delia?” he whispered.

He had misunderstood, she realized. “Noah” and “Joel” sounded so much alike. The same thing often happened when she called one of them to the phone. She said, “I thought I heard Noah.”

“I was just going to see to him,” he said.

“Oh.”

“I’ll bring him some of those cough drops.”

“All right.”

But neither one of them moved.

Then he stepped forward and took her head between his hands, and she raised her face and closed her eyes and felt herself drawn toward him and enfolded, surrounded, with his lips pressing her lips and his palms covering her ears so all she could hear was the rush of her own blood.

That, and Noah’s sudden cough.

They broke apart. Delia stepped back into her room and reached for her door with trembling hands and shut herself inside.

19

Mr. Lamb’s car was a dull-green Maverick with one orange fender and a coat-hanger antenna. Inside, several scale-model windows filled the back seat-wood-framed, double-sashed, none more than twelve inches tall. Little girls from the neighborhood were always begging to play with them. The bottom of his trunk was paved with panes of clear plastic, so that when Delia leaned in with her suitcase, she had an impression of bending over a gleaming body of water. Mr. Lamb told her the plastic was pretty near indestructible. “Slide your suitcase right on top,” he told her. “It won’t do the least bit of harm. That’s where our product beats anything else on the market. When I go to a house that has pets? I like to lay a square of Rue-Ray on the floor and let a dog or cat march straight across, gritching with its toenails.”

Rue-Ray, Delia knew, took its name from the married couple who owned the company, Ruth Ann and Raymond Swann. They lived above their workshop on Union Street, and Mr. Lamb was their one and only salesman. She had learned all this from Belle, but still she felt like laughing at the sound of those two slurred, slippery R’s.

It also struck her as comical that Mr. Lamb turned out to be so talkative. Before they reached Highway 50, even, he had gone from storm windows (their noise-reduction powers) to the wedding gift he planned for Belle (a complete set of Rue-Rays, fully installed) to his philosophy of salesmanship. “The important thing to remember,” he said, veering around a tractor, “is that people like to proceed through a process. A regular set of steps for every activity. For instance, the waitress wants to give you your bill before you hand her your credit card. The mechanic wants to tell all about your fuel pump before you say to go ahead and fix it. So I ask my customers, I ask, ‘You notice any drafts? Northern rooms any colder than southern?’ I know they’ve noticed drafts. I can hear their durn windows rattle as I’m speaking. But if I let folks kind of like describe the symptoms first-say how the baby’s room is so cold at night she has to wear one of those blanket sleepers with the fold-over flaps for the hands-why, they get this sense a certain order has been followed, understand? Then I’m more apt to make the sale.”

Unfortunately, he was one of those drivers who feel the need to look at the person they’re talking to. He kept his muddy, deep-socketed eyes fixed on Delia, his scrawny neck twisted in his collar, while Delia glued her own eyes to the road as if to make up for it. She watched a column of cypress trees approach, then a long-dead motel as low to the ground and sprawling as a deserted chicken shed, then a strip of fog-filled woods where entire clouds seemed trapped in a web of branches. Only a few leaves here and there had developed a faint tinge of orange, and she could imagine that it was still summer-that it was last summer, even, and she had not lost the year in between.

“Many people don’t realize that salesmen consider such things,” Mr. Lamb was saying. “But salesmen are a very considering bunch, you’ll find. I say it comes from traveling by car so much. Belle had an idea we should travel by car for our honeymoon, but I told her I just didn’t know if I’d focus on her right, driving along with my own thoughts like I do.”

Delia said, “Hmm.” Then, because she felt she wasn’t holding up her end of the conversation, she added, “I honeymooned by car.”

“You did?”

She had startled herself; she very nearly turned to see who had volunteered this information. “I don’t recall that it interfered with our focus, though,” she said.

He glanced at her, and she gave an artificial cough. Probably he thought she’d meant something risqué. “Of course, my husband was not so attuned to driving as you must be,” she said.

“Ah,” Mr. Lamb murmured. “No, not many people are, I suppose.”

Sam’s car at the time had had a bench seat, and Delia had sat pressed against his side. He had driven left-handed, with his right hand resting in her lap, his fingers loosely clasping her nylon-clad knee, their steady warmth sending a flush straight through her. She coughed again and gazed out her window.

The passing houses looked arbitrarily plunked down, like Monopolyboard houses. The smaller the house, it seemed, the more birdbaths and plaster deer in the yard, the tidier the flower beds, the larger the dish antenna out back. A brown pond slid by, choked with grappling tree trunks. Then more woods. In Delia’s girlhood, the very word “woods” had had an improper ring to it. “So-and-so went to the woods with So-and-so” was the most scandalous thing you could say, and even now the sight of winding, leafy paths conjured up an image of… Well.

Goodness, what was wrong with her?

She forced her thoughts back to Mr. Lamb. He seemed to be talking about dogs. He said that after he and Belle were married they might just get themselves one, and then he went into a discourse on the various breeds. Golden retrievers were sweet-natured but sort of dumb, he said, and Labs had that tendency to whap a person’s knickknacks with their tails all the time, and as for German shepherds, why…

Gradually the scenery began to have a different feel to it. Around Easton she started noticing bookstores and European-car dealers, neither of which existed in Bay Borough, and by the time they hit Grasonville, the road had widened to six lanes that whizzed past gigantic condominiums, flashy gift shops, marinas bristling with masts.

Mr. Lamb settled finally on a collie. He said he might name it Pinocchio if it had one of those long, thin noses. They crossed the Kent Narrows bridge, high above the grassy marshland. Delia could remember when crossing the Kent Narrows could use up the better part of an hour-long enough to get out of your car and stretch your legs and buy a watermelon, if you wanted-but that was in the days of that cranky old drawbridge. Now they were beyond the narrows in no time flat and speeding through a jungle of factory outlet stores, strip malls, raw new housing developments with MODELS NOW OPEN! DESIGNER TOUCHES! And then here came the lovely, fragile twin spans of the Bay Bridge, shimmering in the distance like something out of a dream, while Mr. Lamb decided that he might let Pinocchio have one little batch of puppies before they got her fixed.

The countryside seemed so green, so lush, after the scoured pallor of the Eastern Shore. Delia was surprised when they turned onto Highway 97-a road she’d never heard of-but then she relaxed in the glide of brand-new pavement not yet bordered with commercial claptrap.

She might have been away for decades.