"Oh?" asked Step. "And is that the way Ray will remember it? Will he remember all the times you advised him against such a dangerous course of action?"

Dicky looked at him in livid silence.

"Dicky, now's a good time for you to lift your fat cheeks out of that chair and carry them through that door.

If Ray's going to fire me, then have him send me a memo to that effect and I'll be out of here collecting unemployment in a hot second. And if he's not going to fire me, then I've got work to do and you are in my way."

Step turned back to the page proofs he was checking.

After a while he heard Dicky get up out of his chair and leave the room. Softly, softly, on little cat feet.

When Dicky was gone, Step got up on shaking legs and gently closed the door. Then he leaned against the wall, breathing heavily. He felt so light- headed. Is this how a soldier feels when he has leapt from the trench and run toward the enemy lines and reached them and discovered that not one bullet touched him? Step had missed Vietnam with a draft lottery number of 225-a number that sounded as magical to him now as 7 or 3 or

12 or 40 sounded to other people. He had no experience of war, of real courage, of struggle between man and man. But this might just have been a taste, he thought. Dicky came in here prepared to bestow some pittance on me as if it were a great gift from Eight Bits Inc., and I laughed in his face and dared him to do his worst. I don't know how I did it without wetting my pants.

He went about his business as best he could, considering that he expected at any moment to have Dicky come in with his pink slip. At the end of the day he hadn't seen Dicky again at all, and he hadn't been fired. It was almost a disappointment.

The Cowpers moved on the tenth of June. "I wish you could have waited till Saturday," DeAnne told Jenny.

"Step wanted to help load up the truck. You've been so good to us, and we've never been able to give anything back."

"Nonsense," said Jenny. "I've had a wonderful time since you got here. In fact, if you had been living here when Spike accepted the transfer, I don't know if we would have taken it. But that's the way it goes, don't you know? We were each other's best friends--except for our husbands-I had to say that real quick to get it in before you said it, I know-anyway we were best friends, as long as it lasted, and I'll never forget you. But don't bother promising to write, you know we won't. Except Christmas cards every year., I'll never be bored reading your year-end family newsletter, you hear?"

"Can't I write if I want to?"

"Phone me. I'm not a writer. If you're broke, phone me collect."

"And vice versa," said DeAnne. "You're the one who knows my phone number, so you have to call first."

"Of course," said Jenny. "How else will you know where to send the five hundred dollars for the Datsun?"

"Eight hundred dollars," said DeAnne.

"Make it ten thousand if you want," said Jenny. "But we think the price was five hundred dollars and we don't really care if you never pay that. Think of it as a law-of-consecration car, a churchservice car. Take it out visiting teaching and take teenagers to youth activities in it. And whenever you do, think of us."

"I'll think of you more than you know," said DeAnne. "And I'll miss you more than you know."

"You'll make a new best friend within a month," said Jenny.

"Someone else can be my best friend," said DeAnne, "without ever being half as good a friend as you."

"Are you just trying to make me cry so I can't drive straight and I run us into a bridge abutment or something?" asked Jenny. "Now make sure none of your kids is standing behind the U-Haul or the car when we drive out." Jenny looked at the U-Haul in disgust. "They're a big enough company to transfer our family across the country and buy our stupid house, but they're not big enough that they can afford to pay for a real moving company. Tell Step to quit his lousy job, they're all thieves." Then Jenny kissed DeAnne on the cheek and they hugged each other and then Spike finally locked the house and got into the cab of the U-Haul with two of the kids as Jenny go t into their nice car with the rest of the kids. DeAnne made sure that Stevie and Robbie and Elizabeth were in plain sight and nowhere near the cars, and then she waved and the Cowpers pulled out into the road.

She watched them out of sight and then felt the baby inside her do his stretching thing, pushing against her ribs until it hurt, until she thought she couldn't stand it anymore. She wanted to swat the baby, to yell at it, to demand that it stop hurting her, that it just leave her alone for a minute.

The baby pushed all the harder. He was probably responding to the grief hormones flowing through her body, the chemical anguish.

At last the pressure subsided and she could think of walking again. "Come on, kids. This isn't the Cowpers'

house anymore, so we better go on home."

When she got home, there was the Cowpers' old beat-up Datsun B-210. The car that made her and Step a two-car family for the first time in their marriage. She walked up and touched it, examined it, the paint pitted and faded, the doors rusted through at running-board height. She caressed the car as if it were a horse that no one had been able to tame but her. Thank you for Jenny, she said. But why did you have to take her away from me so soon?

She stopped herself from thinking that way, and said, very clearly and definitely inside her mind, Thank you for Jenny. And then she forced herself to leave it at that, to go inside and concentrate on fixing lunch, which was long overdue.

There was a substitute mailman, so the mail didn't arrive till almost four o'clock. There was an envelope from Agamemnon, and inside was the check. The money that would catch them up on their payments on the house in Indiana. If the regular mailman hadn't been on vacation, she could have paid the Cowpers for the car before they left.

Oh, well. She'd make out the checks tomorrow and everything would be fine. Most of the money would be gone immediately, they were so far behind-and none of it could go to the IRS for their back taxes, so that still hung over their heads. Still, freedom was in sight.

But the next day when she sat down to write out the checks, she just couldn't bring herself to do it. It made her feel so stupid, to find it emotionally impossible to write the checks. Hadn't she and Step decided last night that they would definitely go ahead and pay the mortgage up to date?

Finally she wrote out a check for the amount of the oldest overdue mortgage payment, along with all the late fees that had accrued on that one payment. She put it in an envelope, piled the kids into the car, drove to the post office, and slipped the envelope into the box.

A month. That's all I'm doing, just paying for one month's delay before they foreclose. Why? It's stupid and dangerous they'll probably still call the note; this one payment won't do anything at all. But I can't wipe out that five thousand dollars sitting in the bank. I can't bring it down to nothing because who knows when the next check will come?