“Yes, of course,” she said, and she slid her chair back and handed him his cane. “Excuse us, please,” she told the others.

Everyone nodded, abashed. As she and Nat crossed the hall, she could almost feel the furtive exchange of glances behind their backs.

“There’s a flight of stairs,” she warned Nat. “Can you manage?”

“Oh, yes, if you’ll hang on to my other arm. I’m sorry, Delia. I don’t know what got into me.”

“You’re just tired,” she told him. “I hope you’re not thinking of driving back tonight.”

“No, I suppose I shouldn’t,” he said. On each stair step, his cane gave a tinny rattle, like a handful of jacks being shaken. His elbow within his tweed sleeve was nothing but knob and rope.

“I’m going to make up a bed for you,” Delia told him when they reached the second floor, “and then you should call Binky and tell her you’re staying over.”

“All right,” he said meekly. He hobbled through the door she held open and sank into a slipcovered chair.

“This used to be my father’s room,” Delia said. She went out to the hall closet and came back with an armload of sheets. “There’s still a telephone by the bed, see? From the days when he was in practice. Even after he stopped seeing patients, he could pick up his receiver whenever Sam got a call; chime in with a second opinion. He just hated to feel left out of things, you know?”

She was babbling aimlessly as she bustled around the bed, smoothing sheets and tucking in blankets. Nat watched without comment. He might not even have been listening, for when she went to Sam’s room to borrow a pair of pajamas, she returned to find him staring at the blue-black windowpanes. “In fact,” she said, placing the pajamas on the bureau, “I can’t tell you how often I made up his bed just the way I did tonight, while Daddy sat where you’re sitting now. He liked for his sheets to be fresh off the line, oh, long after we switched to an automatic dryer. And he would sit in that chair and-”

“It’s a time trip,” Nat said suddenly.

“Why, yes, I suppose it is, in a way.”

But he’d been talking to himself, evidently. “Just a crazy, half-baked scheme to travel backwards,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken, “and live everything all over again. Unfortunately, Binky’s the one who’s left with the consequences. Poor Binky!”

“Binky will be fine,” Delia said firmly. “Now. That door right there is the bathroom. New toothbrushes on the shelf above the tub. Can I get you anything more?”

“No, thank you.”

“A tray of food, maybe? You didn’t touch your supper.”

“No.”

“Well, you be sure to call me if you need me,” she said.

Then she bent to press her lips to his forehead, the way she used to do with her father all those nights in the past.

Delia was the next to go to bed. She went at nine-thirty, having struggled to keep her eyes open ever since dinner. “I am beat,” she told the others. They were all sitting around, still-even Courtney, although Paul had been picked up by his mother at some point. “It seems this morning took place way back in prehistory,” Delia told them, and then she climbed the stairs to Eliza’s room, so weary that she had to haul her feet behind her like buckets of cement.

Once she was in bed, though, she couldn’t get to sleep. She lay staring at the ceiling, idly stroking the curl of warm cat nestled close to her hip. Downstairs, Linda and Sam were squabbling as usual. A Mozart horn concerto was playing. Eliza said, “Why wouldn’t he, I ask you.” Wouldn’t who? Delia wondered. Wouldn’t do what?

She must have slept then, but it was such a fitful, shallow sleep that she seemed to remain partly conscious throughout, and when she woke again she wasn’t surprised to find the house dark and all the voices stilled. She sat up and angled her wristwatch to catch the light from the window. As near as she could make out, it was either eleven o’clock or five till twelve. More likely five till twelve, she decided, judging from the quiet.

She propped her pillow and leaned back against it, yawning. Tears of boredom were already edging the corners of her eyes. It was going to be one of those nights that go on for weeks.

Let’s see: if the wedding began at ten tomorrow, she supposed it would be finished by eleven. Well, say noon, to play it safe. She’d reach the bus station by half past, if she could catch a ride with Ramsay. Or with Sam. Sam had offered, after all.

She saw herself riding in the passenger seat, Sam behind the wheel. Like two of those little peg people in a toy car. Husband peg, wife peg, side by side. Facing the road and not looking at each other; for why would they need to, really, having gone beyond the visible surface long ago. No hope of admiring gazes anymore, no chance of unremitting adoration. Nothing left to show but their plain, true, homely, interior selves, which were actually much richer anyhow.

Where was she? Bus station. Catch a bus by one o’clock or so, reach Salisbury by…

The tears seemed not exactly tears of boredom after all. She blotted them on her nightgown sleeve, but more came.

She folded back the covers, mindful of the cat, and slid out of bed and walked barefoot toward the door. The hall was lit only by the one round window, high up. She had to more or less feel her way toward Sam’s room.

Luckily, his door was ajar. No sound gave her away as she entered. But she knew, somehow, that he was awake. After all these years, of course she knew, just from that bated quality to the air. She stepped delicately across cool floorboards, then scratchy rug, then cool floorboards once again-terrain she had traveled since the day she first learned to walk. She sat with no perceptible weight upon the side of the bed that used to be hers. He was lying on his back, she saw. She could begin to sift his white face from the flocked half-dark. She whispered, “Sam?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You know that letter you wrote me in Bay Borough.”

“Yes.”

“Well, what was the line you crossed out?”

He stirred beneath the bedclothes. “Oh,” he said, “I crossed out so many lines. That letter was a mess.”

“I mean the very last line. The one you put so many x’s through I couldn’t possibly read it.”

He didn’t answer at first. Then he said, “I forget.”

Her impulse was to stand up and leave, but she forced herself to stay. She sat motionless, waiting and waiting.

“I think,” he said finally, “that maybe it was… well, something like what Driscoll was wondering earlier. Was there anything that would, you know. Would persuade you to come back.”

She said, “Oh, Sam. All you had to do was ask.”

Then he turned toward her, and Delia slipped under the blankets and he drew her close against him. Although, in fact, he still had not asked. Not in so many words.

Long after they went to sleep, the telephone rang, and Delia resurfaced gradually. This late, it had to be a patient calling. But Sam didn’t even change the rhythm of his breathing; so she inched out from under his arm to reach for the phone.

“Hello?” she said.

“Mrs. Grinstead?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Joe Bright.”

A voice as bright as his name, wide awake and chipper at the ungodly hour of-she peered at the alarm clock. One twenty-three.

“Um…,” she said.

“The realtor?” he prompted.

“Oh!”

“You called me? You and your daughter? Left a whole bunch of messages?”

“Oh! Yes!” she said, but she was still floundering. “Um…”

“I would never phone so late except you did say it was life and death, Mrs. Grinstead, and I only now got in from out of town. Wife’s mother died, spur of the moment.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. She sat up straighter. “Um, Mr. Bright, why I called was…” She shifted the phone to her other ear. “My daughter has been wanting to know,” she said. “Yes… will she be allowed to pound nails in the walls?”