"Ladder of Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tyler Anne)

12

Mr. Pomfret said, “Moving on, eh,” without so much as a change of expression. (You would think she was a piece of office equipment.) All he asked, he said, was that she finish out the week-tie up any dangling odds and ends. Which of course she agreed to do, even though there were no odds and ends; just the usual busywork of rat-a-tat letters and robot phone calls and Mr. Pomfret’s daily sheaf of marked catalogs.

It seemed he urgently required a pair of perforated leather driving gloves. A radio antenna the size and shape of a breakfast plate. A solid-walnut display rack for souvenir golf balls.

When she turned in her office key on Friday afternoon, he told her he might wait till after New Year’s to replace her. “This time,” he said, “I believe I’ll hire a word processor, assuming I can find one.”

Delia was confused, for an instant. She pictured hiring a machine. Just try asking a machine to debate his glove size with an 800 operator! she thought. Then she realized her mistake. But still, somehow, she felt hurt, and she shouldered her bag abruptly and left without saying goodbye.

All she owned fit easily in a cardboard carton begged from Rick-Rack’s. The goosenecked lamp poked its head out, though. She could have left it that way (Belle was giving her a ride), but she liked the notion of a life no larger than a single, compact box; and so she shifted things until the flaps closed securely. Then she took her coat and handbag from the bed, and she picked the carton up and walked out.

No point sending one last look backward. She knew every detail of that room by heart-every nail hole, every seam in the wallpaper, and the way the paw-footed radiator, in the furry half-light of this overcast Saturday morning, resembled some skeletal animal sitting on its haunches.

At the bottom of the stairs, she set down her load and put her coat on. She could hear Belle talking to George in the kitchen. He was staying here another week or two, just till Delia was settled. It was Delia’s belief that she had to let her own smell permeate the new place first; otherwise he’d keep running back to the old place.

Mr. Miller had told her George was more than welcome. He’d been meaning to buy a cat anyhow, he said. (But notice how he’d used the word “buy,” apparently unaware that true animal lovers would not be caught dead in a pet shop.)

Still buttoning her coat, she walked through the dining room to knock on the kitchen door. “Coming,” Belle called. Delia returned to the hall. Upstairs, Mr. Lamb was creaking the floorboards, and his TV had started its level, fluent murmur. She wondered when he would get around to noticing she was gone. Maybe never, she thought.

It was still not too late to change her mind.

“I gave George a can of tuna,” Belle said when she emerged. “That ought to keep him occupied.”

“Oh, Belle, you’ll spoil him.”

“Nothing’s too good for my whiskums! I’m hoping he’ll refuse to leave me when it’s time. ‘No, no, Mommy!’” she squeaked. “‘I want to stay here with Aunt Belle!’”

Meanwhile she was flouncing into her winged coat, fluffing her curls, jingling her car keys. “All set?” she asked.

“All set.”

They walked out to her enormous old Ford. Delia fitted her carton among a tangle of real estate signs in the trunk, and then the two of them got in the car and Belle started the engine. With the seat-belt alarm insistently dinging, they pulled away from the curb.

It was months since Delia had ridden in a car. The scenery glided past so quickly, and so smoothly! She gripped her door handle as they swung around the corner, and then zip! zip! zip! went the dentist, the dime store, the Potpourri Palace. In no time, they were turning onto Pendle Street and parking in the Millers’ gravel driveway-a trip that had taken her at least ten minutes, walking.

“My parents live in a house like this,” Belle said. She was peering through the windshield at the cut-out designs of covered wagons on the shutters. “In a suburb of York, P.A. Dee, are you sure you want to do this?”

“Oh, yes,” Delia said weakly.

“You’ll be nothing but a servant!”

“It’s better than being a typewriter,” Delia told her.

“Well, if you’re going to put it that way.”

Delia climbed out of the car, and Belle came around to help her maneuver her box from the trunk. “Thanks,” Delia said. “You have my phone number.”

“I have it.”

“I’ll let you know when’s a good time to bring the cat.”

“Or before then,” Belle said. “Or supposing you want to move back! I’ll wait a few days before I try renting your room.”

They might have gone on this way forever, but at that moment Noah burst out the front door. “Delia! Hi!” he called.

“Ms. Grinstead to you,” Belle muttered under her breath. She told Delia, “Don’t you let them treat you like a peon.”

Delia just hugged her and turned toward the house. How the Millers treated her was the least of her concerns, she thought. The question was how to treat them-what distance to maintain from this mop-headed, blue-jeaned boy. It was so easy to fall back into being someone’s mother! She smiled at him as he lifted the carton from her arms. “I can manage that,” she said.

“I’m supposed to carry your luggage. Dad told me. Don’t you have anything more?” he asked. Belle was already backing the car out of the driveway.

“This is it,” Delia said.

“Dad’s over at the school, so I’m supposed to show you where everything is. We’ve got your room all made up for you. We changed the bedsheets even though they were clean.”

“Oh, then why did you change them?”

“Dad said if they didn’t still have their laundry smell you might think someone else had slept in them.”

“I wouldn’t think that,” she assured him.

They walked through the living room, where the cushions lined the couch in last week’s exact formation and the magazines had not varied their positions by an inch. The carpet in the hall was freshly vacuumed, though. She could see the roller marks in the nap. And when they entered the guest room, Noah placed her box on a folding luggage stand that had definitely not been there earlier. “It’s new,” he said, noticing her glance. “We bought it at Home ‘n’ Hearth.”

“It’s very nice.”

“And lookit here,” he said. On the bureau sat a tiny television set. “Color TV! From Lawson Appliance. Dad says a live-in woman always has her own TV.”

“Oh, I don’t need a-”

“Clock radio,” Noah said, “decorator box of Kleenex…”

What touched her most, though, was how they’d turned the bedcovers down-that effortful white triangle. She said, “You shouldn’t have.” And she meant it, for the sight made her feel indebted, somehow.

She followed Noah to the closet, where he was displaying the hangers. “Three dozen matching hangers, solid plastic, pink. Not a wire one in the bunch. We had our choice between pink or white or brown.”

“Pink is perfect,” she told him.

Three dozen! It would disappoint them to find out how few clothes she owned.

“Now I’m supposed to leave you in private,” Noah said. “But I’ll be in my room if there’s anything you need.”

“Thank you, Noah.”

“You know where my room is?”

“I can find it.”

“And you’re supposed to unpack and put your stuff in drawers and all.”

“I’ll do that,” she promised.

As he left he glanced back at her doubtfully, as if he worried she wouldn’t follow instructions.

Her carton looked so shabby, resting on the needlepoint webbing of the luggage stand. She walked over to it and lifted the flaps, and out floated the lonesome, stale, hornet’s-nest smell of the room on George Street. Well. She took off her coat, hung it on one of the hangers. Draped her purse strap over a hook. Drew the goosenecked lamp from the box but then had nowhere to put it, for the room already contained two lamps, shaded in rigid white satin. Still holding the goosenecked lamp (with its helmet of army-green metal and the dent at its base from when the cat had knocked it over one night), she sat down limply on the edge of the bed. She had to brace her feet so as not to slide off the slick coverlet. It was one of those hotel-type beds that seem at once too springy and too hard, and she couldn’t imagine getting used to it.

Elsewhere in the house she heard a door open, a set of heavy footsteps, a man’s voice calling and Noah answering. She would have to rearrange her face and go join them. Any minute now, she would. But for a while she went on sitting there, clutching her homely little lamp and gathering courage.

At the rear of the house, divided from the kitchen by only a counter, lay what the Millers called the family room. Here the stuffy decorating style relaxed into something more casual. A long, low couch faced a TV, an office desk stood against one wall, and three armchairs were grouped in a corner. It was this room that became, within the next few days, Delia’s territory. (She had always wanted a more modern house, without cubbies or nooks or crannies.) In the mornings, when she was through cleaning, she sat at the desk to write her grocery list. She went out for several hours then-usually on foot, even though she had a car at her disposal-but afternoons would find her puttering between family room and kitchen while Noah did his homework on the couch. Evenings, she read in one of the armchairs while Noah watched TV. Sometimes Mr. Miller watched too-or Joel, as she had to remind herself to call him-in which case she retired early with her book. She was a little shy with Mr. Miller: Joel. This was such an awkward situation, businesslike and yet at the same time necessarily intimate. But usually he had meetings to go to, or he spent the evening at his workbench in the garage. She suspected he felt the awkwardness too. He couldn’t possibly have stayed away so much before she came here.

They liked plain food, plainly prepared-roast beef and broiled chicken and burgers. Noah hated vegetables but was required to eat one spoonful each night. Mr. Miller was probably no fonder of them, but he worked his way conscientiously through everything, and he always told her, “Dinner is delicious, Delia.” She suspected he would have said that no matter what she served. He asked her several courteous questions at every meal (had her day gone well? was she finding what she needed?), but she sensed he didn’t listen to her answers. This was a sad, sad man underneath, and sometimes even when his own son spoke there was a moment of silence before he pulled himself together to reply.

“Guess what!” Noah might say. “Kenny Moss just got a humongous golden retriever. Dad, can we get a golden retriever?”.

Long pause. Clinking of china. Then finally: “There is no such word as ‘humongous.’”

“Sure there is, or how come I just used it?”

And the two of them would be off on one of their arguments. Delia had never known anyone as particular about words as Joel Miller. He despised all terms that were trendy (including “trendy” itself). He refused to agree that something was “neat” unless it was, literally, tidy. He interrupted one of Noah’s most animated stories with the observation that no one could be “into” mountain climbing. But he always spoke with good humor, which probably explained why Noah still ventured to open his mouth.

Fastened to Delia’s bathroom door was a full-length mirror, the first she had faced in six months, outside of a changing booth; and she was startled to see how thin she had grown. Her hipbones were sharp little chips, and the tops of her dresses looked hollow. So she served herself large helpings at these suppers, and she breakfasted with Noah every morning, and she walked to Rick-Rack’s each noon to dine on something hefty-even crab cakes, for she was making good money now and had nothing else to spend it on.

Rick also served pork barbecue, the vinegary kind she was partial to, as it turned out. “You know,” she told him, “I never had much of a chance to try a real meal here. I knew you were a good cook, but I didn’t know how good.”

“And here you been taking your Sunday dinners at that la-di-da Bay Arms!” he said.

Was there anything about her this whole town didn’t know?

After lunch, she crossed the street to pay a visit to George. He was in a snit with her for leaving. He showed up as soon as she let herself in but then turned his back pointedly and stalked off. “George?” she wheedled. No response. He marched into Belle’s living room and vanished. Delia waited in the hall, and a moment later a telltale sprig of whiskers poked around the edge of the door. A nose, an ear, an accusing green eye. “Georgie-boy!” she said. He sidled out, dusting the door with his fur and seeming to hang back even as he drew close enough to let her pat him.

Why couldn’t Delia’s children miss her this much?

All around town the streets were festooned with bristly silver ropes and honeycombed red tissue bells. There was a wreath above Mrs. Lincoln’s desk in the library. Vanessa had tied a red bow to Greggie’s stroller.

The thought of spending Christmas with the Millers-poor Noah bearing the full weight of it-filled Delia with dread. But maybe they didn’t celebrate Christmas. Maybe they were Jewish, or some kind of fundamentalists who frowned on pagan ritual. It was true that so far, with just a week remaining, they hadn’t given a sign they knew what season this was.

Delia went out to the garage to talk to Mr. Miller. “Um, Joel?” she said.

He was measuring a board at his workbench, wearing a raveled black sweater and frayed corduroys. Delia waited for him to look up-it took a minute-and then she said, “I wanted to ask about Christmas.”

“Christmas,” he said. He reeled in his measuring tape.

“Do you observe it?”

“Well, yes. Normally,” he said.

By “normally,” he must mean when he still had his wife. This would be their first Christmas without her, after all. Delia watched the thought travel across his face, deepening the lines at either side of his mouth. But he said, “Let’s see. Ah, you would get the day off, of course. Noah will be at his mother’s, and some friends in Wilmington have been asking me to visit. School is closed through New Year’s, so if you need more time in Baltimore -”

“I won’t be going to Baltimore.”

He stopped speaking.

“I just wondered how you celebrate,” she told him. “Do you put up a tree? Should I take Noah shopping for gifts?”

“Gifts.”

“Something for his mother, maybe?”

“Oh, God,” he said, and he sank onto the high stool behind him. He clamped the top of his head with one large hand-his usual sign of distress. “Yes, certainly for his mother, and also for Nat, Ellie’s father. He and Noah are pretty close. And for me, I guess; aren’t we supposed to encourage that? And I should get something for him. Oh, God Almighty.”

“I’ll take him tomorrow,” she said. She hadn’t intended to plunge the man into despair.

“That’s a Saturday. Your weekend.”

“I don’t mind.”

Seated on the stool, Mr. Miller was closer to Delia’s eye level. He looked across at her for a moment. He said, “Don’t you have any family around? For weekend visits and such?”

“No.”

It was a mark of his isolation, she thought, that he had apparently not heard so much as a whisper about her past. For all he knew, Delia had dropped from the sky. Clearly he would have liked to ask more, but in the end he just said, “Well, thanks, Delia. As far as a tree goes, I figure since Noah won’t be here for the day itself, we don’t need to bother.”

Delia would have bothered anyhow, if it had been up to her. But she didn’t argue. When she left, Mr. Miller was still slumped on his stool, staring down at the measuring tape in his hands.

She and Noah did all his Christmas shopping at the hardware store-dark, old-fashioned, wooden-floored Brent Hardware, across the street from Belle’s. Noah had very definite ideas, Delia discovered. For his mother he chose a screwdriver with interchangeable shafts, because she lived alone now and would need to make her own repairs. For his grandfather, who had trouble bending, a tonglike instrument called a “grabber” that would help him retrieve dropped objects. And for his father, a device to hold a nail in position while he was hammering it in. “Dad is all the time banging his thumb,” Noah told Delia. “He’s not a real great carpenter.”

“What is it that he builds, exactly?” Delia asked.

“Shadow boxes.”

“Shadow boxes?”

For an instant she pictured Charlie Chaplin shadowboxing in baggy trunks.

“Those, like, partitioned-up wooden shelves. You know? To hang on a wall?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Because my mom collects miniatures. Teeny little kitchen utensils and furniture and like that, and he used to make these shadow boxes for her to keep them in.”

And now? Delia wanted to ask.

As if he had read her mind, Noah said, “Now he just piles them behind the tires in the garage.”

“I see.”

She couldn’t tell from Noah’s tone how he felt about his parents’ separation. He had mentioned his mother only in passing, and this coming visit would be his first since Delia’s arrival.

“I want to pick out one more thing,” he told her. “You go wait outside a minute.”

So he was buying her a present too. She wished he wouldn’t. She would have to act appreciative; she would have to make a big show of putting whatever it was to use, not to mention the necessity of buying something for him that was neither more nor less serious than what he’d bought her. Oh, how had she worked her way back to this? She should have stayed at Belle’s; she’d known it all along.

But Noah was so gleeful as he hustled her out the door, she couldn’t help smiling.

“Will you need money?” she asked him.

“I’ve been saving up my allowance.”

He closed the door after her and made a comic shooing motion through the glass.

She waited on the sidewalk, watching the passersby. It was hard to resist getting caught up in the spirit of things. Everyone carried shopping bags and brightly wrapped parcels. From Rick-Rack’s Café, next door, the cheering smells of bacon and hot pancakes drifted into the frosty air. When Noah rejoined her, hugging his own bag, she said, “How about I buy you a soda at Rick-Rack’s?”

He hesitated. “You going to put it in the book?” he asked.

He meant the little notebook Mr. Miller had given her. She was supposed to keep a record of reimbursable expenses, and Noah always worried she might shortchange herself. (He viewed her as someone less fortunate, which she found both amusing and slightly humiliating.) “Today it’s my treat,” she told him firmly, and even as he opened his mouth to protest, she was nudging him toward the café.

Rick waved a spatula in their direction; he was busy at the grill. Teensy, though, made a big fuss. “It’s Delia! And Mr. Miller’s boy. Look, Pop!” she chirped, turning to an old man seated at the counter. “This is Delia Grinstead! She used to live across the street! My father, Mr. Bragg,” she told Delia. “He’s come to stay with us awhile.”

Teensy’s father, Delia seemed to recall, was a snarky man who had not behaved very graciously toward his son-in-law; so she was unprepared for his timid, meek expression and wilted posture. He sat up close to his breakfast like a child. When she said, “Hello,” he had to work his mouth a minute before the words formed.

“I’m having cocoa,” was what he finally said.

“How nice!”

Her voice came out sounding as false as Teensy’s had.

“That your boy?” he asked.

“This is… Noah,” she told him, not bothering with a full explanation.

“Come sit here, boy.”

“Oh, we’d better take a booth, with all we’re carrying.” Delia gestured toward Noah’s shopping bag. The handles of his grandfather’s grabber extended from it a good two feet.

In the rear corner booth, Mr. Lamb sat hanging his head over a bowl of cereal. Two teenage girls had a window table-Underwood students, Delia assumed, judging by how they perked up at the sight of Noah. (Already she had turned several away from the house, briskly thanking them for their plates of homemade fudge and pretending not to notice how they gazed beyond her for Joel.) One of them sang out, “Hey there, Noah!” Noah rolled his eyes at Delia.

“What can I get you?” Teensy asked, standing over their table.

“Coffee, please,” Noah said.

“Coffee!”

“Can’t I?” He was addressing Delia. “Dad lets me have it, sometimes on special occasions.”

“Well, all right. Make that two,” Delia told Teensy.

“Sure thing,” Teensy said. Then she bent so close that Delia could smell her starched-fabric scent, and she whispered, “When you leave here, could you say goodbye real loud to Rick, so Pop can hear you?”

“Of course,” Delia said.

“Pop can act so hurtful to him sometimes.”

“I’d have said goodbye anyhow, you know that.”

“I know, but…” Teensy flapped a hand toward her father. He still appeared harmless, the X of his suspenders curving with the hunch of his back.

Noah was one of those people who like gloating over their purchases even before they get them home. He was rustling through his bag, first pulling out the screwdriver, then burrowing to the bottom for a furtive look at something there and shooting a tucked, sly glance at Delia. When she craned across the table, pretending to be angling for a peek, he laughed delightedly and crumpled the bag shut again. His two front teeth were still new enough to seem too big for his mouth.

And see how his hair fell over his eyes-the bouncy thickness of it, the soft sheen that made her want to press it with her palm. And the tilt at the tip of his nose, the knobby cluster of little-boy warts that showed on the bend of his index finger when he gripped the mug Teensy brought him. One point of his jacket collar stuck up crookedly. The knit shirt beneath it bore scratches of ballpoint-pen ink. His jeans, she knew, were ripped at the knees, and his sneakers were those elaborate, puffy high-tops that could have been designed for walking on the moon.

He was telling her a dream he’d had-something boring and impossible to follow. His teacher changed into a dog, the dog came to visit at Noah’s house, which was somehow the school auditorium too, if Delia knew what he meant…

Delia nodded, smiling, smiling, and folded her hands tightly so as not to reach across to him. When they left, she told Rick goodbye with such feeling that her voice broke.

Belle claimed the cat had developed an eating disorder. She brought him over in a Grape-Nuts carton late Monday morning, so he could adjust to the house while Delia was the only one home. Still in the carton, he was borne directly to Delia’s room and set on the floor. “It’s like he’s bulimic,” Belle was saying. She sank onto the edge of the bed to watch him nose his way out of the carton. “The minute his bowl is half empty he starts nagging me for more; I swear I never knew a cat could plan ahead that way. And if, God forbid, he should finish every bit of it, we have this heartrending melodrama the second I walk in from work. Great yowling and wringing of paws, and as soon as I fill the bowl he staggers over all weak-kneed to eat and makes these disgusting gobbling sounds and then darned if he doesn’t throw up in a corner not ten minutes after he’s done.”

“Oh, George, did I do this to you?” Delia asked him. He was investigating the room now, sniffing daintily at the luggage stand.

“About six times a day he goes to the cupboard and looks up at his sack of kibble, checking to make sure I’m keeping enough in stock.”

“All my life,” Delia said, “I’ve been the ideal cat-owner. I lived in one place; I had a routine. I was motionless, in fact. Now I’m flitting about like a… He must feel so insecure!”

She bent to stroke the black M on his forehead, while Belle gazed around her. “This room is awfully small, isn’t it?” she asked. “Your old one was a whole lot bigger.”

“It’s okay.” Delia was trying to lure George into the bathroom now. “See? Your litter box,” she told him. “Store-bought; not just cardboard.”

“What’re you doing for Christmas, Dee?” Belle called after her.

“Oh, staying here.”

“Christmas with strangers?”

“They’ll be gone, at least for the day.”

“That’s even worse,” Belle told her.

“I’m sort of looking forward to it.”

George stepped into the litter box and then out again, as if demonstrating that he knew what it was.

“Come along with me to my folks’,” Belle told her. “They’d be thrilled to have you.”

“No, really, thanks.”

“Or get Vanessa to invite you to her grandma’s.”

“She already did, but I said no.”

“Well, granted it’s kind of hectic there,” Belle said. “I’m a little peeved at Vanessa these days.”

“Oh? How come?”

“You know what she had the nerve to ask me?” Belle stood up to follow Delia into the hall; they were heading for the bowl of cat food in the kitchen. George wafted after them in a shadowy, indecisive way. “I was complaining about my love life,” Belle said. “Can’t find a man to save my soul, I told her, and she asked why I’d never thought of Mr. Lamb.”

“Mr. Lamb!”

“Can you imagine? That dreary, gloomy man, that… Eeyore! I said, ‘Vanessa, just what sort of idea do you have of me? Do you honestly believe I would date a man who’s spent his entire adulthood in rented bedrooms?’ I mean, think about it: no one even calls him by his first name, have you noticed? Quick: what’s Mr. Lamb’s first name?”

“Um…”

“Horace,” Belle said grimly. She plunked herself at the kitchen table. “I may be single, but I’m not suicidal. What’s that I see on the fridge?”

She meant Mr. Miller’s map of the household. “It’s to keep things in the living room the way Mrs. Miller left them,” Delia said. “He’s charted all the doodads, exactly where she used to set them out.”

Belle leaned forward for a closer look. On the rectangle representing the mantel, tiny block letters spelled blue vase, pine-cone candle, sandbox photo, clock.

“Well, that’s just pathetic,” Belle said. “And why would he need it? What makes him think these things would go and lose themselves, for Lord’s sake?”

“You wouldn’t ask if you could see him around the house,” Delia said. “For someone so set on order, he’s awfully… discombobulated. He’s just plain incompetent! Oh, everything’s fine on the surface, but when you look in the back of a cupboard you find pans with scorched bottoms that will never come clean, dish towels with big charred holes in them…”

Belle was peering at the diagram of the coffee table. “Large paperweight, small paperweight, magazines,” she read.

“He keeps these magazines that still come to the house in her name, all about clothing styles and cellulite and such.”

“Ellie Miller never had a speck of cellulite in her life,” Belle said.

“A new magazine comes, he fits it in the spot where the old one was and throws the old one away.”

“That’s what you get for worshiping a person,” Belle said. “Poor man, he thought she walked on water! In fact, she was kind of silly, but you know how the smartest men will sometimes go so gaga over silly women. I asked him to a picnic after she left, and he said, ‘Oh, I’m afraid I wouldn’t know anyone; thank you just the same.’ This is a high-school principal we’re talking about! He ought to know the whole town! But he always depended on Ellie for that. Ellie was real outgoing and social, threw these parties with themes to them like Hawaiian Luau, Wild West Barbecue… and a Grade Mothers’ Tea in the fall, but Joel hasn’t kept that up. He just let the grade mothers flounder this year, when needless to say, every gal in town was dying to help him.”

“I wish…,” Delia began.

She wished Sam Grinstead had felt like that about her, she’d been going to say. But she stopped herself.

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll let you help,” Belle said, misunderstanding. “You just have to do it inch by inch, you know? Pretty soon, you’ll be indispensable.”

“Well, yes, of course,” Delia agreed.

That much she simply assumed. Already, only ten days into her stay, Mr. Miller had requested another of “her” meat loaves; he had wordlessly laid out a shirt in need of a button; he no longer left his compulsive lists of instructions on the breakfast table.

But wasn’t it odd that she had assumed it? She seemed to have changed into someone else-a woman people looked to automatically for sustenance.

The cat wove around her ankles, purring. “See?” Delia told Belle. “He doesn’t have an eating disorder. All he ate was a couple of kibbles, just to be polite.”

“You’re amazing, Dee,” Belle said.

Belle had also brought Delia’s mail-a package from Eleanor and a letter from Eliza. Eleanor’s package contained a knitted jacket for reading in bed. Eliza’s letter said she’d invited the Allinghams for Christmas dinner. I won’t press you but you know you’re welcome too, she wrote, and then she hurried on to news of Linda. She says the twins are getting to the age where they want to spend the holidays at home, so I guess it will be just the Allinghams and us and then Eleanor too of course… The stationery gave off that faint scent of cloves (for positive thoughts) that always hung in the air of Eliza’s bedroom.

Noah was very excited about the cat. He came straight home from school that day, and he flung his books any old where and raced through the house, calling, “George? George?” George, of course, hid. Delia had to explain to Noah how cats operated-that you shouldn’t pursue them, shouldn’t face them head-on; should do everything at a diagonal, so to speak, with a cat. “Sit at his level,” she said when George finally showed himself. “Look a little sideways to him. Talk in a crooning tone of voice.”

“Talk? What should I say?”

“Tell him he’s beautiful. Cats love the word ‘beautiful.’ I guess it must be something in your tone, because they’re not the least bit good at language, but if you draw out that u sound long and thin and twangy…”

“Bee-yoo-tee-ful,” Noah said, and sure enough, George slitted his eyes in a sleek, self-satisfied smile.

On Christmas Eve, Delia picked Noah up at school and drove him to his mother’s. The Millers’ car was a Volkswagen Beetle. She didn’t yet feel completely at home with the stick shift, so it was a rocky ride. Noah was nice enough not to comment. He sat forward and watched for the turnoff to Kellerton. “Most times Mom comes to get me,” he said, “but her car’s in the shop right now. She’s had five wrecks in the last nine months.”

“Five!” Delia said.

“None of them were her fault, though.”

“I see.”

“She’s just, like, unlucky. This last time, a guy backed into her while she was looking for a parking spot. Here’s where you turn.”

Delia signaled and took a right onto a patchy highway that ran between fields of frozen stubble. This countryside was so flat, at least she didn’t need to shift gears all that often. They were heading east, in the direction of the beaches. Mr. Miller had told her it was a half-hour drive.

“Tonight at six you want to watch WKMD,” Noah said. “It’s not like I’ll be on it or anything, but at least you’ll know I’m sitting there in the station.”

It must feel eerie to see your absent mother deliver the weather report every night. Although Noah never did, to the best of Delia’s knowledge. Six o’clock was The MacNeil / Lehrer NewsHour, which Mr. Miller watched instead.

The fields gave way to hamburger joints and used-car lots and liquor stores, implying the approach of a town, but soon Delia realized this was the town-this scattering of buildings flung across the farmland. Noah pointed out the television station beneath its Erector-set tower. He showed her where his mother did her grocery shopping and where she got her hair done, and then he directed her two blocks south to a low, beige-brick apartment building. “Should I come in with you?” Delia asked, parking at the curb.

“Naw. I’ve got a key if she’s not there.”

Delia was disappointed, but she didn’t argue.

“When you wake up tomorrow,” Noah told her as she unlocked the trunk, “look on my closet shelf and you’ll find your present.”

“And when you wake up, look in the inside end pocket of your duffel bag.”

He grinned and took the bag from her. “So, okay,” he said. “See you, I guess.”

“Have a good Christmas.”

Instead of hugging him, she tousled his hair. She’d been longing to do that anyhow.

By the time she got back to the house, Mr. Miller was waiting at the front window. They barely crossed paths in the doorway-Mr. Miller holding out a palm for the car keys, wishing her a Merry Christmas, saying he’d be back with Noah tomorrow evening-and then he was gone. The cat mewed anxiously and trailed Delia to her room.

On her bureau, she found a Christmas card with a check for a hundred dollars. Season’s Greetings, the card read, followed by Mr. Miller’s block print: Just a token thank you for setting our lives back in order. Gratefully, Joel and Noah.

That was nice of him, she thought. Also, he had shown tact in clearing out of the house when he did. It would have been a strain without Noah to serve as buffer.

She spent the afternoon on the couch, reading an extra-thick library book: Doctor Zhivago. The wind dashed bits of leaves against the picture windows. George slept curled at her feet. Twilight fell, and her lamp formed a nest of honey-colored light.

A few minutes before six, she took the remote control from the end table and clicked the TV on. WKMD had a one-eyed pirate advertising choice waterfront lots. Then a housewife spraying a room with aerosol. Then a deskful of newscasters-a bearded black man, a pink-faced white man, and a glamorous blonde in a business suit. Delia thought at first the blonde was Ellie Miller, till the black man called her Doris. Doris told about a bank heist in Ocean City. The robber had been dressed as Santa Claus, she said. She spoke in such a way that her lipstick never came in contact with her teeth.

Delia was disconcerted by the speed at which everything moved. She had lost the knack of watching television, it seemed. She felt her eyes had experienced an overload, and during the next round of commercials she looked away for awhile.

“Now here’s Ellie with the weather,” the bearded man said. “So tell us, Ellie, any chance of a white Christmas?”

“Not a prayer, Dave,” Ellie told him in that sporty, bosom-buddy tone that TV people affect. Her face, though, didn’t match her voice. It was too soft, too open-a pretty face with a large red mouth, surprised blue eyes, and circlets of pink rouge. Her hair was silvery fluff. Her white sweater, a scoop-necked angora, seemed uncertain around the edges.

Delia rose and went to stand in front of the TV. Ellie slid weather maps along an aluminum groove. Somewhere behind that painted backdrop of marsh and improbable cattails, Noah would be sitting, but at the moment Delia wasn’t thinking of Noah. She was memorizing Ellie, trying to see what lay beneath her sky-blue, doll-like stare.

“Continued cold… gale-force winds…” Delia listened with her head cocked, her fingertips supporting her cheek.

The weather was followed by sports, and Delia turned and wandered out of the family room and through the kitchen, down the hall to the master bedroom. She opened the closet door and studied the clothes hanging inside. Mr. Miller’s suits straggled across the rod toward the empty space at the right. The shelf above was empty on the right as well. It appeared that Ellie, unlike Rosemary Bly-Brice, had taken everything with her when she went. Even so, Delia next pulled out each drawer in Ellie’s bureau. All she found was a button, trailing a wisp of blue thread.

Back in the family room, the TV was showing the national news. It was months since she had watched the news, but she could see she hadn’t missed anything: the planet was still hurtling toward disaster. She switched the TV off in midsentence and went to make her supper.

When she woke the next morning, the sun was out. Something about the hard, bright light told her it was very cold. Also, George lay nestled close under her arm, which he wouldn’t do in warmer weather.

Not until she was drinking her tea did she consider the fact that it was Christmas. Christmas, all by herself! She supposed that would strike most people as tragic, but to her the prospect was enjoyable. She liked carrying her cup through the silent house, still wearing her nightgown and beach robe, humming a snatch of “We Three Kings” with no one to hear her. In Noah’s room she rooted through the top drawer for a pair of woolen socks to wear as slippers. Then she remembered he’d left her a gift, and she pulled it down from his closet shelf-a squarish shape wrapped in red foil. The tag read, Because you don’t have house-type clothes, which puzzled her till she tore off the foil and saw a canvas carpenter’s apron with pockets across the front. She smiled and slipped the neck strap over her head. Till now she’d been using the cocktail apron she’d found among the dish towels, which protected no more than the laps of her dresses.

Her gift to Noah had been a survival kit from Kemp’s Kamping Store. Boys seemed to go for such things. And this kit was so ingenious-hardly bigger than a credit card, with streamlined foldout gadgets, including a magnifying lens for starting fires.

She fed George, and then she dressed and settled on the couch again with Doctor Zhivago. Periodically, she looked up from the book and let her eyes travel around the room. Wintry sunlight, almost white, fell across the carpet. The cat was giving himself a bath in a square of sunlight on the blue armchair. Everything had a pleasantly shallow look, like a painting.

At home they must be opening their presents now. It was nothing like the old days, when they used to rise before dawn. Now they ambled downstairs in midmorning, and they passed out presents decorously, one person at a time. Then for dinner they always had goose, a contribution from one of Sam’s patients who hunted. For dessert, plum pudding with hard sauce, and they would complain it was too heavy but eat it anyhow and spend the rest of the afternoon moaning and clutching their stomachs.

Every so often it took her breath away to realize how easily her family had accepted her leaving.

Although it did seem acceptable, come to think of it. It seemed almost inevitable. Almost… foreordained. In retrospect she saw all the events of the past year-her father’s death, Sam’s illness, Adrian’s arrival-as waves that had rolled her forward, one wave after another, closer and closer together. Not sideways, after all, but forward, for now she thought that her move to the Millers’ must surely represent some kind of progress.

She had imagined that her holiday would not last nearly long enough, but when Joel and Noah turned into the driveway at dusk, she was already watching at the window. She dropped the curtain as soon as she saw the headlights, and she rushed to open the door and welcome them home.