“It does seem that way,” Delia said. She was talking on the kitchen extension, so she didn’t have to lower her voice. “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “Susie’s fast asleep and Driscoll’s disappeared and the rest of us are just sitting here, wondering what next.”

“Mark my words,” Eliza said, “they’ll be married before sundown tomorrow. That’s what I told Linda. I said, ‘You won’t even have to switch your airline reservations.’ How about you? You’re not leaving yet, are you?”

“I haven’t decided.”

“You can’t,” Eliza said. “You’d only have to turn around and come back.”

“You may be right,” Delia said.

The real reason she couldn’t leave was Susie-her sad little face above the tartlet. But she didn’t tell Eliza that.

As soon as they said goodbye she called Joel, but the telephone rang and rang. They had probably gone out for supper, ignoring what she’d left for them. They were probably at Rick-Rack’s. She knew what they would order, even, and the tune of their conversation-Noah’s exuberant spurts of words and Joel’s neutral answers. His palms cradling her head. His mouth firm but not insistent. His body tensed as if, with every move, he had been gauging her response.

After the baby, Ellie said, we just kissed, the most wonderful kisses…

Delia hung up.

When Sam came back from the grocery store, she asked him (with her head in the fridge, tossing the question over her shoulder) whether he would mind if she stayed till tomorrow.

“Why would I mind?” he said.

It wasn’t a very satisfying answer. But before she could go into it further, Ramsay and Carroll trooped through-off to the video shop, they said, to rent that time-warp movie again-and Sam left the room. Delia fixed supper by herself. Everything came back to her: those weird little nipples on the cabinet knobs, the squeak of the exhaust fan above the stove. But here she was, in Miss Grinstead’s forest-green dress and old-maid shoes with the strap across the instep.

Susie did appear in time for supper. She sat at the table swaddled in a blanket, looking like a little girl awakened from her nap. But she didn’t refer to the wedding, and nobody else brought it up. Then afterward they all watched the movie-even Sam, his glasses glinting in the dark. Although really it was Susie they were watching. Any time Susie made a moderately humorous comment, her brothers fell all over themselves laughing, and Velma gave a hissing titter, and Rosalie sent her a deadpan, penetrating stare.

At the end of the movie Ramsay and Velma collected Rosalie and said good night, but Carroll announced that he might as well sleep over. Delia went upstairs with him to put sheets on his bed. While she was plumping his pillow she heard Susie come upstairs too, and she knew that left only Sam in the study. She didn’t go back down, therefore. Instead, she returned to the linen closet for another set of sheets, and she made up the bed in Eliza’s room.

Much later, flat on her back in the dark, she heard Sam’s shoes on the stairs. He crossed the hall to his room without so much as a pause, and she heard his door click shut behind him.

It was ridiculous of her to feel so wounded.

20

“This sugar caster,” Linda told the twins, “was a gift from your great-great-aunt, Mercy Ramsay, when her sister married Isaiah Felson in 1899.”

Delia couldn’t imagine how Linda knew that. The twins, however, seemed unimpressed. They were busy admiring Carroll, who was shaking the caster upside down over his bowl of cornflakes. It was eleven-thirty in the morning, and he was only now eating breakfast. Linda and the twins had had breakfast earlier, after Eliza dropped them off on her way to work. Sam, presumably, had fixed himself something before he went into his office, and Susie wasn’t awake yet. It was going to be one of those days when the tail end of one person’s meal ran into the start of another’s from morning to night. Delia herself was just sort of munching along with every new shift.

“Mercy Ramsay was a huge concern to her parents because she never married,” Linda was saying. “She had a job as a ‘typewriter,’ was what they called them then, at a law office down near the harbor.”

Delia glanced over at her.

Carroll was shoveling in cornflakes now, and Marie-Claire appeared to be warming her hands on the sugar caster-which was not, to tell the truth, very imposing: a chesspiece-shaped urn of dulled and dented plate. Thérèse was setting an index finger here and there on the table to mash stray crystals of sugar and transfer them to her tongue.

Linda said, “In every generation of our family, there’s been one girl who never married.”

“This generation it’ll be Thérèse,” Marie-Claire said.

“Will not,” Thérèse said.

“Will so.”

The phone rang.

“If that’s the school, I’m sick,” Carroll told Delia.

“Carroll Grinstead! I refuse to fib for you,” Delia said. She dumped the cat off her lap and rose to answer. “Hello?”

“Delia?” Noah said.

Delia turned away from the others. “What’s wrong?” she asked, as quietly as possible.

“I’ve got a cold.”

“Are you in bed?”

“I’m on the couch. Where’d you get to? Why aren’t you back yet?”

“Well, I did try to telephone last night, but you were out,” Delia said. “How’d you know where to call, anyway?”

“And that’s another thing! You didn’t leave a number! I had to phone Belle Flint and she said you’d gone to your family’s so I told Information, ‘Look for Grinstead,’ and the first Grinstead turned out to be this lady and she said, ‘Oh, that’s my daughter-in-law you want,’ and she had me write down the… But you said you’d be back yesterday!”

“Or today,” Delia reminded him. “I’ll probably catch a bus, oh, maybe this afternoon; I’ll know more as soon as-”

“Is that the realtor?” Susie called from upstairs.

Delia covered the mouthpiece of the receiver. “No, it’s not!” she called back. Then she told Noah, “You just stay on the couch. I’ll be home soon. Bye.”

When she hung up, she turned to find everyone watching her. “Well!” she said vivaciously. “So!”

From their expressions, you would have thought she’d been caught in some crime.

Then Sam walked in, wearing his white coat. He was taking his lunch break, and here they were, still at breakfast. In fact, Linda had his chair, which she made no move to give up. “If it isn’t the good doctor,” she said in an acid tone.

Delia said, “Sam, what would you-?” and then she stopped. It wasn’t her place, really, to offer him lunch. But he didn’t seem to realize that, and he sat in Susie’s usual seat and said, “Anything would be fine. Soup.”

Soup must be what he lived on, because it was just about the only thing in the cupboard-his special salt-free, fat-free, taste-free brand, with a dancing heart on the label. She opened a tin of soya-milk mushroom and poured it into a saucepan.

Now he was asking Carroll why he wasn’t in school. He was going about it all wrong, taking a drilling-in approach that would only raise Carroll’s hackles, and Carroll was hunching belligerently over his cereal bowl. Both of them, Delia noticed-in fact, everyone in the room-had become less perceivable to her since yesterday. Already they had lost that slick exterior layer of the unaccustomed.

Sam said that the distant likelihood of a sibling’s wedding was not sufficient grounds for playing hooky. “What do you know about it?” Carroll asked him. “Some of the kids in my class take off for Orioles games, for Christ’s sake.”

“Watch your language, young man,” Sam said. Delia merely stirred the soup. She pictured Sam shifting in midair like some kind of kite or streamer, like a wind sock changing shape with changes in the wind. From one angle he was gentle and reserved and well-meaning; from another he was finicky and humorless. She remembered all at once that when she had gazed across her desk at him the morning they first met, there had been a split second when his fine-boned face had struck her as too fine, too priggish, and she had faltered. But then she had brushed that impression aside and forgotten it forever-or at least, until this moment.