Mr. Lamb said Belle was scared of dogs but he thought it was all in her head. Where else could it be? Delia wondered. Not that he gave her a chance to ask. He said women just got these notions sometimes. Delia smiled to herself. It amused her to see how quickly he had come to take his happiness for granted.

On the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, the lanes were so crowded that she gathered herself inward, as if that would help their car slip through more easily. She looked ahead and saw the Baltimore skyline-smokestacks, a spaghetti of ramps and overpasses, monster storage tanks. They began to pass gray-windowed factories and corrugated-metal warehouses. Everything seemed so industrial-even the new ballpark, with its geometric strutwork and its skeletons of lights.

“Mr. Lamb, ah, Horace,” she said, “I don’t know where you’re headed, but if you’ll drop me at the train station, I can grab a taxi.”

“Oh, Belle told me to drive you direct to the door.”

“But it’s only…” She checked her watch. “Not quite ten,” she said, “and I don’t have to be there till eleven.”

“No, no, you just sit tight. Belle would never forgive me,” he said.

She would have put up more of an argument, but she was afraid her voice would shake. All at once she felt so nervous. She wished she’d worn a different dress. In spite of the gloomy weather, it was warmer than she had expected, and her forest-green was too heavy. It was also too… Miss Grinsteadish, she realized. Luckily, though, she had brought other clothes. (She had debated which was worse: wearing the wrong thing or lugging a suitcase to a wedding, and like the most insecure schoolgirl, she had opted for the suitcase.) Maybe once she reached the house she could duck into a vacant room and change.

Mr. Lamb was asking her a question. Which street to take. She said, “Up Charles,” using as few words as possible. She didn’t seem to have enough air in her lungs.

How intimate this city seemed! How quaint and huddled to itself! After all those superhighways, Charles Street threaded between tall buildings like the narrowest little river in a ravine.

She opened her bag and searched for Susie’s invitation. Yes, there it was, safe and sound.

Mr. Lamb was admiring the Johns Hopkins campus now. He said he had a cousin who had gone there for one semester. “Oh, really?” Delia murmured. He said he himself had not had the opportunity of a college education, although he felt he would have put it to good use. Delia wished he would stop talking. He was so irrelevant, so extraneous. She kept swallowing, but there was something in her throat that wouldn’t go away.

When she told him to turn left he had to ask her to repeat herself. “Hah?” he asked, like a deaf old man. Like an irritating, deaf old man.

At a red light on Roland Avenue, a jogger ran toward them, a young woman with her long dark hair in a topknot and the fingers of her right hand delicately clasping two fingers of her left hand. A man in a tweed hacking jacket crossed with a tiny chihuahua. (“Now, there is a dog you couldn’t pay me to put up with,” Mr. Lamb said. “Might as well own a mosquito.”) The air had a greenish, fluorescent quality, as if a storm were brewing.

She showed him where to turn next, which house to park in front of. (Was this how their house looked to strangers: so brown, so hunched, so forbidding?) She said, “I can get my things myself, if you’ll just pop the trunk.” But no, he had to unfold from the car, walk around to the rear, take forever hauling forth her suitcase. “Thanks! Bye!” she said, but even then she wasn’t free to go. He kept on standing there, swaying slightly on his long, scuffed shoes and gazing at the house.

“We could easily manage the round one,” he told her.

“Pardon?”

“The round little window up top there, what is it, over a stairs? Rue-Ray makes round windows all the time.”

“Oh, good,” she said, and she shook his hand, just to get him to leave. But an odd thing happened. Holding on to his bunched-twig fingers, meeting his bucktoothed, wistful smile, she unaccountably began to miss him. She felt like climbing back into the car with him and riding along for the rest of his trip.

Four vehicles stood in the driveway: Sam’s Buick, a beat-up purple van, Eliza’s Volvo, and a little red sports car. The mulberry tree had already started to scatter its chewed-looking leaves, and she had to step around acorns on the front walk. Evidently no one had thought to sweep.

The shutters had been repaired. The replacement louvers were a different color, though-a paler, flatter brown, as if they’d been given just a primer coat and then forgotten. There was a new sisal mat at the top of the porch steps, and a foil-wrapped pot of yellow chrysanthemums next to the door.

Knock, or walk in?

She knocked. (The doorbell would have been too much, somehow.) No answer. She knocked harder. Finally she turned the knob and stuck her head in. “Hello?”

For a house that was hosting a wedding in less than forty minutes, it didn’t seem very welcoming. The front hall was empty, and so was the dining room, although (as Delia found when she advanced) the dining-room table was spread with a white tablecloth. She set down her suitcase, intending to continue into the kitchen, but just then Eliza walked through the kitchen door with a mug of something hot. She was concentrating so hard on the mug that it took her a second to see Delia. Then she said, “Oh!” and stopped short.

“I know I’m early,” Delia told her.

“Oh, Delia! Thank heaven you’re here!”

“What’s wrong?” Delia asked. She was alarmed, of course, but also grateful to find herself in demand.

“Susie’s changed her mind,” Eliza called over her shoulder. She was proceeding toward the stairs.

Delia grabbed her suitcase and followed. “Changed her mind about marrying?” she asked.

“That’s what she claims.”

“When did this happen?”

“This morning,” Eliza tossed back, starting upward. She wore a new dress, a magenta A-line Delia couldn’t imagine her buying, and patent-leather shoes whose heels rang against the stair treads. “Last night she slept in her old room,” she was saying, “and this morning when we got here I asked Sam, ‘Where’s Susie? Isn’t she up yet?’ and he said-”

Delia felt disoriented. Susie’s old room? Where was her new room? And who were “we” and what place had they got there from?

There wasn’t a sign of Sam. Not a sign.

They had reached the second floor now, and Eliza, holding the mug in both hands, was sidling through the partly open door of Susie’s bedroom. “Look who I brought with me!” she said. Delia set her suitcase down and walked in after her.

The room itself was what she noticed first. Frilly and flowered and stuffed with chintz since the days when it had been Linda’s, it was a hollow cube now, unsoftened by curtains or rugs, furnished only with a foldaway cot and an ugly, round-cornered bureau from the attic. Susie sat cross-legged in a welter of blankets, wearing striped pajamas. Surrounding her-seated on the cot as well but all dressed up, even overdressed-were Linda, Linda’s twins, and a pudgy young woman Delia could almost name but not quite. They raised a flank of alerted faces when Delia entered, but Delia looked only at Susie. Susie said, “Morn?”

“Hello, dear heart.”

She bent over Susie and hugged her, absorbing that unique Susie smell that was something like dill weed. Still holding on to her, she settled on the cot beside her.

“Mom, I don’t want to get married,” Susie said.

“Then don’t,” Delia told her.

“Delia Grinstead!” Linda shrilled. “We’re trying to talk some sense into her, do you mind?”

Linda was wearing bifocals-a new development. The twins had grown several inches, and from their dresses-stiff, mint-colored lace that hardly touched their skinny frames-Delia suspected they might be bridesmaids. Everyone looked so detailed, so eerily distinct: she couldn’t explain it. Her eyes kept returning to Susie, craving the sight of her uncombed hair and her sweetly round chin and her cushiony lower lip.