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

5

It rained during their first evening at the beach, and their cottage roof turned out to have a leak. This was not a very fancy cottage, not an oceanfront, resort-style cottage, but a dumpy little house on the inland side of Highway 1. Delia could imagine an ordinary Delaware feed-store clerk living there until about a week ago. The kitchen sink was skirted in chintz, the living-room floor was blue linoleum squiggled to suggest a hooked rug, and all the beds sagged toward the middle and creaked at the slightest movement. Still, Sam said, they shouldn’t have to endure a puddle in the upstairs hall. He phoned the rental agent at once, using the after-hours emergency number, and insisted that the problem be seen to the first thing the following morning.

“What,” Linda asked him, “do you have to have your crew of workmen even on vacation?”

And Eliza said, “Let’s just mop it up and forget it. It surely won’t rain again while we’re here, because if it does I’m going to sue God.”

Delia herself said nothing. She really couldn’t gather the strength.

In their own house back in Baltimore, workmen would be using the week to sand down the floors and refinish them. This meant that Delia had had to bring the cat along. (He wouldn’t tolerate boarding-had nearly pined away the one time they had tried it.) Sam claimed they were sure to be evicted, since pets were expressly forbidden, but Delia told him that was impossible. How would anyone ever guess Vernon was there? For he’d been so incensed by the car trip that the instant he was set down in the cottage, he streaked to the back of a kitchen cabinet. Delia knew enough to leave him tactfully alone, but the twins wouldn’t rest, and after supper they hovered at the cabinet door with a plate of leftovers, trying to coax him out. “Here, Vernon! Nice Vernon.” His only response was that disheartening, numb silence cats seem to radiate when they’re determined to keep to themselves. “Oh,” Marie-Claire wailed, “what’ll we do? He’s going to starve to death!”

“Good riddance,” Sam told her. “It’s only live pets that we’re not allowed.”

Sam had been out of sorts all day, it seemed to Delia.

So that first evening, when they should have been taking a stroll on the beach or walking into town for ice cream, the grown-ups sat in the kerosene-smelling, poorly lighted living room, reading tattered magazines left behind by earlier tenants and listening to the pecking of the rain against the windows. The twins were still in the kitchen, badgering Vernon. Susie and the boys had borrowed the Plymouth and driven to Ocean City, which made Delia anxious because she always pictured Ocean City as a gigantic arena of bumper cars manned by drunken college students. But she tried to keep her mind on American Deck and Patio.

“If tomorrow isn’t sunny,” Linda said, “maybe we could take a little day trip out past Salisbury. I want the twins to get some sense of their heritage.”

“Oh, Linda, not that damn cemetery again,” Eliza said.

“Well, fine, then. Just lend me a car and I’ll take them myself. That’s what happened last year, as I recall.”

“Yes, and last year both twins came back bored to tears and cranky. What do they care for a bunch of dead Carrolls and Webers?”

“They had a wonderful time! And I’d like to find Great-Uncle Roscoe’s place too, if I can.”

“Well, good hunting, is all I can say. I’m sure it’s a parking lot by now, and anyhow, Mother never got along with Uncle Roscoe.”

“Eliza, why do you have to run me down at every turn?” Linda demanded. “Why is it that every little thing I propose you have to mock and denigrate?”

“Now, ladies,” Sam said absently, leafing through Offshore Angler.

Linda turned on him. She said, “Don’t you ’Now, ladies’ me, Sam Grinstead.”

“Sorry,” Sam murmured.

“Mr. Voice of Reason, here!”

“My mistake.”

She rose in a huff and went off to check the twins. Eliza closed her Yachting World and stared bleakly at the cover.

Linda and Eliza were in their Day Two Mode, was how Delia always thought of it-that edgy, prickly stage after the first flush of Linda’s arrival had faded. Once, Delia had asked Eliza why she and Linda weren’t closer, and Eliza had said, “Oh, people who’ve shared an unhappy childhood rarely are close, I’ve found.” Delia was surprised. Their childhood had been unhappy? Hers had been idyllic. But she refrained from saying so.

Linda returned with the twins, who were still fretting over Vernon, and Sam set aside his magazine and suggested a game of rummy. “Did you bring the cards?” he asked Delia.

She had not. She realized it the instant he asked, but made a show of rooting through the shopping bag on the coffee table. Jigsaw puzzles, Monopoly, and a Parcheesi board emerged, but no cards. “Um…,” she said.

“Oh, well,” Sam said, “we’ll play Parcheesi, then.” His tone was weightily patient, which seemed worse than shouting.

At the bottom of the bag, Delia came across her current library book. Captive of Clarion Castle, it was called. She had started it last week and found it slow, but anything was preferable to deck plans. When Sam asked, “Are you playing too, Delia?” she said, “I think I’ll go read in bed.”

“Now? It’s not even nine o’clock.”

“Well, I’m tired,” she told him. She said good night to the others and walked out with the front of her book concealed, although no one made any attempt to see the title.

Upstairs, a new ribbon of water meandered from the sodden bath mat alongside the chimney. She ignored it and proceeded to the room she was sharing with Sam. It was small and musty-smelling, with one, uncurtained window. For privacy’s sake she changed into her nightgown in the dark, and then she washed up in the bathroom across the hall. Back in the bedroom, she switched on the lamp and aimed its weak yellow beam in the direction of her pillow. Then she slid under the covers, wriggled her toes luxuriously, and opened her book.

The heroine of this book was a woman named Eleanora, which unfortunately brought Eleanor to Delia’s mind. Eleanora’s long raven tresses and “piquant” face kept giving way to Eleanor’s no-nonsense haircut and Iron Mama jawline; and when Kendall, the hero, crushed her to him, Delia saw Eleanor’s judging gaze directed past his broad shoulder. Kendall was Eleanora’s future brother-in-law, the younger brother of her aristocratic, suave fiancé. Impetuously, Kendall kidnapped Eleanora the first time he laid eyes on her, which happened to be about fifteen minutes before her wedding. “I will never love you! Never!” Eleanora cried, pummeling his chest with her tiny fists, but Kendall seized her wrists and waited, masterful and confident, until she subsided.

Delia closed the book, leaving one finger inside as a marker. She stared down at the couple embracing on the cover.

Not once, from the moment they met, had Adrian truly pursued her. It had all been a matter of happenstance. Happenstance had led him to ask her to pose as his girlfriend (Who else was remotely eligible? The woman with the baby? The old lady at the checkout counter?), and happenstance had brought them together again a few nights later. In addition, his every act had betrayed that he was still in love with his wife. He loved her so much that he couldn’t face her on his own in the supermarket; he couldn’t sleep in their bedroom after she left. But Delia, like some self-deluded teenage ninny, had chosen not to see.

And she had overlooked other clues as well-clues that revealed the very nature of his character. For instance, his behavior at that first encounter: his rearrangement of her shopping plans, his condescending reference to Roland Park names, his trendy groceries. He was not a bad person, surely, but his mind was on his own concerns. And he was just the least bit shallow.

In romance novels, this realization would have made her turn thankfully to the man who had been waiting in the wings all along. But in real life, when she heard Sam’s step on the stairs she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. She felt him standing over her, and then he slipped her book from her hands and switched off the lamp and left the room.

By morning the rain had stopped and the sun was out, shining all the brighter in the washed-clean air. The whole family set off for the ocean shortly before noon-the grown-ups in Sam’s Buick, the younger ones in the Plymouth with Ramsay at the wheel. Scattered puddles hissed beneath their tires as they drove across Highway 1 and threaded past the higher-priced cottages, closer to the water. When the road dead-ended, they parked and fed two meters with quarters and unloaded the day’s supplies-the thermos jugs and blankets, towels, Styrofoam coolers, rafts, and beach bags. Delia carried a stack of towels, along with her straw tote stuffed so full of emergency provisions that the handles dug a furrow in her bare shoulder. She was wearing her pink gingham swimsuit with the eyelet-edged skirt, and navy canvas espadrilles, but no robe or cover-up, because she didn’t care what Sam said, she wanted to get at least a hint of a tan.

“Watch it, girls,” Linda told the twins as they lugged a cooler between them up the wooden walkway. “You’re letting the bottom drag.”

“It’s Thérèse’s fault-she’s making me do all the work!”

“Am not.”

“Are so.”

“Didn’t I tell you to take something lighter?” Linda asked them. “Didn’t I offer you the blankets, or the-”

But then they crested the low, sandy rise, and there was the ocean, reminding them what they had come all this way for. Oh, every year it seemed Delia forgot. That vast, slaty, limitless sweep, that fertile, rotting, dog’s-breath smell, that continual to-and-fro shushing that had been going on forever while she’d been elsewhere, stewing over trivia! She paused, letting her eyes take rest in the dapples of yellow sunlight that skated the water, and then Carroll’s armload of rafts crashed into her from behind, and he said, “Geez, Mom.”

“Oh, excuse me,” she said. She started down the wooden steps to the beach.

There were advantages to coming so early in the season. True, the water had not had time to warm up yet, but also the beach was less crowded. Blankets were spread at civilized intervals, with space between. Only a few children splashed at the edge of the breakers, and Delia could easily count the heads that bobbed farther out.

She and Eliza unfolded a blanket and arranged themselves on it, while Sam worked an umbrella pole into the sand. Susie and the boys, however, walked a good twenty feet beyond before stopping to set up their own station. They had been keeping apart for several years now; it no longer hurt Delia’s feelings. But she did always notice.

“Now, you two are not stirring from here,” Linda told the twins, “until I get every inch of you covered with sunblock.” She held them close, one after the other, and slathered lotion on their skinny arms and legs. As soon as she let go of them, off they raced to the young people’s blanket.

Susie’s radio was playing “Under the Boardwalk,” which had always seemed to Delia a very lonesome song. In fact, “Under the Boardwalk” was rising from other radios as well, on other blankets, so that the Atlantic Ocean seemed to have acquired its own melancholy background music.

“Believe I’ll go for a jog,” Sam told Delia.

“Oh, Sam. You’re on vacation!”

“So?”

He shucked off his beach robe and adjusted the leather band of his watch. (The watch was evidently part of his new exercise routine; in just what way, Delia wasn’t sure.) Then he walked down to the surf, turned, and started loping northward, a lanky figure in beige trunks and gigantic white sneakers.

“At least here they have all these lifeguards who’ve been trained in CPR,” Delia told her sisters. She folded Sam’s robe and packed it away in her tote.

“Oh, he’ll be fine,” Eliza said. “The doctors told him to jog.”

“Not to overdo, though!”

“To me he looks just the same as always,” Linda said. “If you consider that a good thing.” She was shading her forehead to gaze after him. “I never would have known he’d had a heart attack.”

“It wasn’t a heart attack! It was chest pains.”

“Whatever,” Linda said carelessly.

She was wearing a one-piece swimsuit held up by a center cord that encircled her neck. It made her breasts appear to droop at either side like a pair of weary eyes. Eliza, who scorned the notion of a whole separate outfit for one week of swimming per year, wore denim shorts and a black knit tank top rolled up beneath her bra.

Delia took off her shoes and dropped them into her tote. Then she lay down flat on her back, with the sun’s mild warmth soaking into her skin. Gradually sounds grew fainter, like remembered sounds-the voices of other sunbathers nearby, the high, sad cries of the seagulls, the music from the radios (Paul McCartney now, singing “Uncle Albert”), and under everything, so she almost stopped hearing it, the ocean’s rush, as constant and unvaried as the ocean inside a seashell.

She and Sam had come to this beach on their honeymoon. They had stayed at an inn downtown that no longer existed, and every morning, lying out here side by side with their bare, fuzzed arms just touching, they had reached such a state that, eventually, they had to rise and rush back to their room. Once even that had seemed too far, and they’d plunged into the ocean instead, out past the breakers, and she could still remember the layers of contrast-his warm, bony legs brushing hers beneath the cool, silky water-and the fishy scent of his wet face when they kissed. But the summer after that they had the baby with them (little Susie, two months old and fussy, fussy, fussy) and in later years the boys, and they had seldom managed even to stretch out on their blanket together, let alone steal back to their cottage. Eliza started coming too, and Linda before she married, and their father because he never could have kept house on his own; and Delia spent her days ankle-deep in the surf tending children, making sure they didn’t drown, admiring each new skill they mastered. “Watch this, Mom.” “No, watch this!” They used to think she was so important in their lives.

Someone’s feet passed in the sand with a sound like rubbing velvet, and she opened her eyes and sat up. For a moment she felt light-headed. “Your face is burning,” Eliza told her. “Better put some lotion on.” She herself was sitting sensibly in the shade of the umbrella. Linda was down in the surf, braced for an incoming wave with both plump arms outflung and her hands posed as liltingly as bird wings, and the twins had returned from the other blanket and were filling buckets near Delia. Damp sand caked Marie-Claire’s knees and made two circles on the empty-looking seat of Thérèse’s swimsuit.

“Did Sam get back from jogging?” Delia asked Eliza.

“Not yet. Want to go for a dip?”

Delia didn’t dignify that with an answer. (As everyone in her family well knew, the temperature had to be blistering, the ocean flat as glass, and not a sea nettle sighted all day before she would venture in.) Instead, she reached for her tote bag. Delving past espadrilles, Sam’s robe, and her billfold, she came up with Captive of Clarion Castle. Eliza humphed when she saw the cover. “Guess I’ll leave you to your literature,” she told Delia. She got to her feet and set off, dusting the back of her shorts in a businesslike manner.

“Aunt Eliza, can we come too?” Marie-Claire shrilled.

“Wait for us, Aunt Liza!”

When they ran after her, they looked as skittery and high-bottomed as two little hermit crabs.

Eleanora was beginning to notice that Kendall was not the monster she had imagined. He brought trays of food to her locked tower room and let it be known he had cooked all the dishes himself. Eleanora pretended to be unimpressed, but later, after he left, she reflected on the incongruity of someone so brawny and virile stirring pots at a stove.

“Whew!” Sam said. He was back. Sweat trickled down the ridged bones of his chest, and he had the drawn, strained, gasping look that always distressed Delia after his runs. “Sam,” she said, setting aside her book, “you’re going to kill yourself! Sit here and rest.”

“No, I have to wind down gradually,” he told her. He started walking in circles around the blanket, stopping every now and then to bend over and grip his kneecaps. Drops of sweat fell from his forehead to the sand. “What have we got to drink?” he asked her.

“Lemonade, Pepsi, iced tea-”

“Iced tea sounds good.”

She stood to fill a paper cup and hand it to him. He was no longer breathing so hard, at least. He drained the cup in a single draft and set it on the lid of the cooler. “Your nose is burning,” he told her.

“I want to get a little tan.”

“Melanoma is what you’re going to get.”

“Well, maybe after lunch I’ll put on some-”

But he had already picked up Linda’s bottle of sunblock. “Hold still,” he said, unscrewing the cap. He started smoothing lotion across her face. It smelled like bruised peaches, an artificial, trashy smell that made her wrinkle her nose. “Turn around and I’ll do your back,” he told her.

Obediently, she turned. She faced inland now, where the roofs of cottages hulked beyond the sand fence. A flock of tiny dark birds crossed the blue sky in the distance, keeping a perfectly triangular formation so that they seemed connected by invisible wires. They swung around and caught the sun, and suddenly they were white, in fact almost silver, like a veil of sequins; and then they swung again, and once more they were plain black specks. Sam smoothed lotion over Delia’s shoulders. It went on warm but cooled in the breeze, tingling slightly.

“Delia,” he said.

“Hmm?”

“I was wondering about the old woman who came by the house Saturday night.”

She grew still beneath his palm, but she felt that every one of her nerves was thrumming like a twanged string.

“I know she was, maybe, peculiar,” he said. “But she had an actual photograph, and she seemed to think it really did show you and that who’s-it, that what’s-his-name…”

She had already turned toward him to deny it when he said, “That Adrian Fried Rice.”

“Bly-Brice,” she said.

For he had twisted the name on purpose. He always did that. The maid of honor at their wedding, Missy Pringle, he had kept referring to as Prissy Mingle. It was just like him to be so belittling! So contemptuous of her friends, with that ironic glint to his voice! Her entire marriage unrolled itself before her: ancient hurts and humiliations and resentments, theoretically forgotten but just waiting to revive at moments such as this.

“His name is Adrian, Bly, Brice,” she told him.

“I see,” Sam said. His face had a sheeted look.

“But that woman got it all wrong. He’s nothing but an acquaintance.”

“I see.”

In silence, he replaced the bottle of sunblock.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I never said that.”

“No, but you implied it.”

“I surely can’t be blamed for what you imagine I might have implied,” Sam said. “Of course he’s just an acquaintance. You’re not exactly the type to have an affair. But I’m wondering how it seems to outsiders, Dee. You know?”

“No, I don’t know,” she said, between set teeth. “And my name is not Dee.”

“All right,” he said. “Delia. Now, why don’t you just calm down.”

And he leveled the air between them with both palms, in that patronizing gesture she always found so infuriating, and turned away from her and walked toward the water.

Every quarrel they had ever had, he had walked off before it was resolved. He would get her all riled up and then loftily remove himself, giving the impression that he, at least, could behave like an adult. Adult? Old man was more the case. Who else would wade into the surf in his sneakers? Who else would pat water so fastidiously on his chest and upper arms before ducking under? And check his watch, for Lord’s sake, when he rose? To Delia it seemed he was timing the waves, engaging in some precise and picky ritual that filled her with irritation.

She snatched her tote bag from the blanket, spun on one bare heel, and stamped off down the beach.

More people had arrived without her noticing. Only a slender path wound among the umbrellas and canvas chairs and mesh playpens, and so after a few yards she changed course till she was marching alongside the ocean, on wet, packed sand that cooled the soles of her feet.

This part of the beach belonged to the walkers. They walked in twos, mostly: young couples, old couples, almost always holding hands or at least matching their strides. From time to time small children cut in front of them. Delia pictured a map of the entire East Coast from Nova Scotia to Florida -an irregular strip of beige sand dotted with tiny humans, a wash of blue Atlantic next to it even more sparsely dotted. She herself was a dot in motion, heading south. She would keep going till she fell off the bottom of the continent, she decided. By and by Sam would think to ask, “Have you seen Delia?” “Why, no, where could she have got to?” the others would say, but she would keep on the move, like someone running between raindrops, and they would never, ever find her.

Already, though, something was slowing her down. The first of the Sea Colony condominiums towered ahead-ugly Sea Colony with its impassive monochrome high-rises, like a settlement from an alien galaxy. She could have made her way past, but that mysterious, Star Wars hum that the buildings always emitted chilled her so that she stopped short. In her childhood, this had been grassy marshland, with a few plain-faced cottages scattered about. In her childhood, she was almost certain, she and her father had flown homemade kites right where that complex of orange plastic pyramids now shaded a modernistic sundeck. For an instant she could feel her father’s blunt fingers closing over hers on the kite string. She brushed a hand across her eyes. Then she turned and started walking back.

A lifeguard slouched on his chair, surveying the bathers inscrutably from behind his dark glasses. A lardy young boy on a raft landed in the foam at Delia’s feet. She stepped around him and, looking ahead, spotted her family’s green-and-white umbrella and her children on their blanket just beyond. They were sitting up now, and Sam stood some distance away, still shiny after his swim. From here it didn’t seem that anyone was speaking, for the children faced the horizon and Sam was studying his watch.

Just that abruptly, Delia veered inland. She left the ocean behind and picked her way around sand tunnels and forts and collections of toys. When she had traversed the wooden walkway to the road, she stopped to dust her feet off and dig her espadrilles from her tote. Sam’s beach robe lay beneath them-a wad of navy broadcloth-and after a moment’s consideration, she shook it out and put it on. Her shoulders were so burned by now that they seemed to give off heat.

If she had thought to get the car keys from Ramsay, she could have driven. She wasn’t looking forward to that trek to the cottage. In fact, she could return for the keys right now. But then some of the others might want to come with her, and so she decided against it.

Already the ocean seemed far away and long ago, a mere whisper on this sunny paved road with its silent cottages and empty, baking automobiles and motionless rows of swimsuits on clotheslines. She cut through someone’s backyard-mostly sand-and circled an enclosure of garbage cans that smelled of crab and buzzed with glittery blue flies. Then she was facing Highway 1. Traffic whizzed by so fast that she had to wait several minutes before she could cross.

On the other side of the highway, her footsteps were the loudest sound around-her stiff straw soles clopping out a rhythm. Perhaps because she’d been thinking of her father, the rhythm seemed to keep time with the song he used to sing when she was small. She stalked past screened porches, with her shoes beating out “Delia’s Gone”-asking where she’d been so long, saying her lover couldn’t sleep, saying all around his bed at night he kept hearing little Delia’s bare feet. She especially liked that last line; she always had. Except, wasn’t the other Delia dead? Yes, obviously: there was mention in the very first verse of little Delia dead and gone. But she preferred to believe the woman had simply walked out. It was more satisfying that way.

Her face felt sticky, and her shoulder hurt where the handles of her tote bag chafed her sunburn. She switched the tote to her other side. She was almost there now, anyhow. She was planning on a tall iced tea as soon as she stepped through the door, and after that a cool bath and a little private visit with her cat. It was time to lure Vernon from under her bed, where he had taken up residence at some point during the night. In fact, maybe she ought to do that first.

She smiled at a woman carrying a suitcase out of the cottage next to theirs. “Lovely beach weather!” the woman called. “Hate to leave it!”

“It’s perfect,” Delia said, and she rounded a van parked in the driveway and climbed her own steps.

Inside, the dimness turned her momentarily blind. She peered up the stairwell and called, “ Vernon?”

“What.”

She gasped.

“Somebody page me?” a man’s voice asked.

He lumbered down the stairs-a chubby young man with a clipboard, dressed in jeans and a red plaid shirt. His moon-shaped face, with its round pink cheeks and nubbin nose and buttonhole mouth, reassured her somewhat, but even so she could barely draw breath to ask, “Who…?”

“I’m Vernon, didn’t you holler my name? I’m here about the roof.”

“Oh,” she said. She gave a shaky laugh and clutched her tote bag to her chest. “I was just calling my cat,” she told him.

“Well, I haven’t seen no cat about. Sorry if I scared you.”

“You didn’t scare me!”

He squinted at her doubtfully. The satiny skin beneath his eyes glistened with sweat, which made him look earnest and boyish. “Anyhow,” he said. “Seems I’ll need to replace that flashing up top round the chimney. I won’t be doing it today, though; I got to get on back. So if those folks at the realtor’s phone, tell them I’ll be in touch, okay?”

“Okay,” Delia said.

He waved his clipboard amiably and headed past her out the door. On the steps, he turned and asked, “How you like my vehicle?”

“Vehicle?”

“Ain’t it something?”

It was, in fact. She wondered how she could have missed it. Big as a house trailer, painted a metallic bronze with a desert landscape lighting up one side, it occupied the whole driveway. “Got a microwave,” Vernon was saying, “got a dinky little ’frigerator-”

“You mean it’s for living in?”

“Sure, what else?”

“I thought vans would just have rows and rows of seats.”

“Ain’t you ever been inside a RV before? Shoot, come on and I’ll show you.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I-”

“Come on! This’ll knock your socks off.”

“Well, maybe I will take a peek,” Delia said, and she followed him, still hugging her tote bag. One section of the desert scene proved to be a sliding panel. Vernon slid it open and stood back to let her see inside. When she poked her head in she found gold shag carpeting halfway up the walls, and built-in cabinets, and a platform bed at the rear with storage drawers underneath. Two high-backed seats faced the windshield-the only sign that this was, after all, a means of transportation.

“Gosh,” Delia said.

“Climb in. Get a load of my entertainment center.”

“You have an entertainment center?”

“State of the art,” he told her. He climbed in himself, causing the van to tilt beneath his weight, and then turned to offer a hand as big as a baseball glove. She accepted it and clambered inside. The oily, exciting smell of new carpet reminded her of airports and travel.

“Ta-daah!” Vernon said. He flung open a cabinet. “What it is,” he said, “in the bottom of this here TV is a slot for a videotape, see? Integrated VCR. Evenings, I just swivel it out and watch the latest hit movies from the bed.”

“You stay here all the time?”

“Just about,” he said. “Well, more or less. Well, for now I do.” Then he sent her a look, with his head ducked. “I’ll tell you the honest truth,” he said. “This van belongs to my brother.”

He seemed to think the news would disappoint her deeply. He fixed her with a worried blue gaze and waited, scarcely breathing, until she said, “Oh, really?”

“I guess I kind of gave the impression it was mine,” he said. “But see, my brother’s off on this fishing trip, him and his wife. Left his van at our mom’s house in Nanticoke Landing. Told her to watch over it and not let nobody drive it. Me is who he meant. But he’s due back this afternoon and so yesterday I got to thinking. ‘Well, durn,’ I got to thinking. ‘Here’s this fully equipped RV, been setting in Mom’s yard all week and I have not so much as tried that little microwave.’ So last night I stayed in it, and this morning I took it out to make my estimates. Mom said she don’t even want to know about it. Said not to drag her into it. But what can he do to me, right? What’s he going to do to me-haul me off to jail?”

“Maybe he won’t find out,” Delia said.

“Oh, he’ll find out, all right. Be just like him to have wrote down the mileage before he left,” Vernon told her gloomily.

“You could always say you thought the battery needed charging.”

“ Battery. Sure.”

“Does he live here? In the van, I mean?”

“Naw.”

“Well, I would,” Delia said. She bent to raise the seat of an upholstered bench. Just as she had expected, there was storage space underneath. She glimpsed woolens of some kind-blankets or jackets. “I would make it my year-round home,” she said. “Really! Who needs a big old house and all those extra rooms?”

“Yeah, but my brother’s got three kids,” Vernon said.

“Have you ever seen those under-cabinet coffeemakers?” Delia asked him.

“Huh?”

She was inspecting the kitchen area now. It was a model of miniaturization, with a sink the size of a salad bowl and a two-burner stovetop. A dented metal percolator stood on one of the burners. “They have these coffeepots,” she told Vernon, “that you permanently install beneath the overhang of a cabinet. So you don’t waste any space.”

“Is that a fact.”

“Actually, there’s a whole line of under-cabinet equipment. Toaster ovens, can openers… electric can opener you install beneath the-”

“I believe my brother just uses the hand-cranked kind,” Vernon said.

“Well, if this were mine, I’d have everything under-cabinet.”

“Hand-cranked don’t take no space at all, to speak of.”

“I’d have nothing rattling around,” Delia said, “nothing interfering, so at a moment’s notice I could hop behind the wheel and go. Travel with my house on my back, like a snail. Stop when I got tired. Park in whatever campground caught my fancy.”

“Well, but campgrounds,” Vernon said. “Mostly you’d need to reserve ahead, for a campground.”

“And next morning I’d say, ‘Okay! That’s it for this place!’ And move on.”

“The rates are kind of steep too, if the campground’s halfway decent,” Vernon said. “Durn. Is that the time?”

He was looking at the clock above the sink. Delia was glad to see that the clock, at least, was attached to the wall. In her opinion, there was far too much loose and adrift here-not just the percolator but sloppily refolded newspapers and videotapes out of their boxes and cast-off pieces of clothing. “What I can’t fathom,” she said, “is how you manage to drive with these things sliding all over. Wouldn’t you have flying objects every time you hit a speed bump?”

“Not as I’ve noticed,” Vernon said. “But remember this ain’t my property. And speaking of which, my brother’s due back in like a couple of hours so I reckon I better be going.”

“I wish I could come too,” Delia said.

“Yeah. Right. Well, look, it’s been great talking with you-”

“Maybe I could just ride along for a little tiny part of the way,” Delia said.

“When-now?”

“Just to see how it handles on the road.”

“Well, it… handles fine on the road,” Vernon said. “But I’m going inland, you know? I’m nowhere near any beaches. Going down Three eighty past Ashford, way past Ashford, over to-”

“I’ll just ride to, um, Ashford,” Delia said.

She knew she was making him nervous. He stood staring at her, his eyebrows crinkled and his mouth slightly open, his clipboard dangling forgotten from one hand. Never mind: any moment now she would let him off the hook. She would give a little coming-to-her-senses laugh and tell him that on second thought, she couldn’t possibly ride to Ashford. She did have a family after all, and already they must be wondering where she was.

And yet here stood this van, this beautiful, completely stocked, entirely self-sufficient van that you could travel in forever, unentangled with anyone else. Oh, couldn’t she offer to buy it? How much did such things cost? Or steal it, even-shove Vernon out the door and zoom off, careening west on little back roads where no one could ever track her.

But: “Well,” she said regretfully, “I do have a family.”

“Family in Ashford? Oh, in that case,” Vernon said.

It took her a minute to understand. His eyebrows smoothed themselves out, and he leaned past her to slide the door shut. Then he flung his clipboard on the bench and said, “Long as you’ve got transportation back, then…”

Speechless, Delia made her way to the front. She sat in the passenger seat and perched her tote bag on her knees. Next to her, Vernon was settling behind the wheel. When he switched on the ignition, the van roared to life so suddenly that she fancied it had been jittering with impatience all this time.

“Hear that?” Vernon asked her.

She nodded. She supposed it must be the engine’s vibration that caused her teeth to start chattering.

Traveling down Highway 1 toward the Maryland border, past giant beach-furniture stores and brand-new “Victorian” developments and the jumbled cafés and apartments of Fenwick Island, Delia kept telling herself that she could still get back on her own. It would mean a long walk, was all (which stretched longer moment by moment). And when they entered Ocean City, with its honky-tonk razzle-dazzle-well, Ocean City had buses, she happened to know. She could take a bus to its northernmost edge and then walk back. So she rode quietly, beginning to feel almost relaxed, while Vernon hunched over the wheel and steered with his forearms. He was one of those drivers who talked to traffic. “Not to pressure you or anything, fella,” he said when a car ahead of him stalled, and he clucked at four teenage boys crossing the street with their surfboards. “Aren’t you-all hotshots,” he told them. Delia gazed after them. The tallest boy wore ticking-striped shorts exactly like a pair Carroll owned-that voluminous new fashion that billowed to mid-knee.

When her family discovered she was gone, they would be baffled. Flummoxed. If she stayed away long enough, they would wonder if she’d met with an accident. “Or could she have left on purpose?” Sam would at last ask the children. “Did one of you say something? Did I say something? Was I mistaken to believe she wasn’t the type for an affair?”

An airy sense of exhilaration filled her chest. She felt so lightweight, all at once.

Then after they had had time to get really concerned, she would phone. Find a booth before night fell and, “It’s me,” she would announce. “Just took a little jaunt to the country; could one of you come pick me up?” No harm done.

So when Vernon turned onto Highway 50 and started inland (talking now about the “differential,” whatever that was), she still said nothing to stop him. The percolator clanked on the stovetop; they rattled across a bridge she’d never seen before and entered a bleached, pale country entirely unfamiliar to her. She merely stared out the window. They passed yellowing, papery houses set in the middle of careful lawns that appeared to have been hand clipped, blade by blade. They flickered through leafy woodlands. “One place he flubbed up is not opting for a CB,” Vernon said, referring evidently to his brother, but Delia was just then picturing how Sam’s lips always formed a straight line when he was angry. And it occurred to her that what he might tell the children was, “Well, at least we can get things done right, now she’s gone.”

“Besides which you will notice there’s no stereo,” Vernon said. “That’s my brother for you: he don’t care much for music. I say there’s something lacking in a man who don’t like music.”

Maybe Eleanor would step in (speaking of doing things right). Oh, Eleanor would take over gladly-plan all the menus a year in advance and set up one of her Iron Mama budgets.

“I guess you think that’s awful,” Vernon said. “To pick fault with my own brother.”

Delia said, “No, no…”

Here and there, now, gaunt old dignified farmhouses stood at the end of long driveways, with crops growing all around them and lightning rods bristling on their rooftops. Imagine living in such a place! It would be so wholesome. Delia saw herself feeding chickens, flinging corn or wheat or whatever from her capacious country apron. First she’d have to marry a farmer, though. You always had to begin by finding some man to set things in motion, it seemed.

“But I’ll be honest,” Vernon was saying. “Me and him never have been what you’d call close. He is three years older than me and never lets me forget it. Keeps yammering about head of the family, when fact is he hardly lays eyes on our family from one month to the next. I’m the one takes Mom grocery shopping. I’m the one runs her hither and yon for her bingo nights and her covered-dish suppers and what all.”

Why did everyone maintain that men were uncommunicative? In Delia’s experience, they talked a blue streak, especially repairmen. And Sam was no exception. Sam communicated all too well, if you asked Delia.

She let her eyes follow a trailer park as they passed it. Each trailer was anchored by awnings and cinder-block steps and sometimes a screened extension. Whole menageries of plaster animals filled the little yards.

“Now, you take this fishing trip: know who’s tending his kids? Me and Mom. Course mostly it’s Mom, but time I come home from work nights, she is so wore out the rest is up to me. But don’t expect Vincent to thank me. No, sir. And if he gets wind I drove his van, he’ll have my head.”

In her tote bag Delia had five hundred dollars of vacation money, split between her billfold and a deceptive little vinyl cosmetic kit. She could stay away overnight, if she really wanted to alarm them-take a room in some motel or even a picturesque inn. However, all she had on was her swimsuit. Oh, Lord. Her scrunchy-skirted swimsuit and her espadrilles and Sam’s beach robe. But supposing she kept the robe tightly closed… Viewed in a certain way, it was not all that different from a dress. The sleeves were three-quarter length; the hem covered her knees. And hotels around here must be used to tourists, in their skimpy tourist outfits.

They were approaching the edge of a town now. Vernon slowed for a traffic light. He was talking about his brother’s wife, Eunice. “I feel kind of sorry for her, if you really want to know,” he said. “Picture being married to Vincent!”

“What town is this?” Delia asked him.

“This? Why, Salisbury.”

The light changed, and he resumed driving. Delia was thinking that maybe she could just get out here. Maybe at the next red light. But the lights from then on were green, and also they had reached a residential section, very middle class and staid. And then beyond were unappealing malls, and messy commercial establishments, and somehow nothing struck her as very inviting.

“It’s my belief he hits her,” Vernon was saying. “Or at least, like, sort of pushes her. Anyways I know they fight a lot, because half the time when they come over she won’t look him in the face.”

They were riding through open country again, and Delia was beginning to fear she had missed her last chance. It was such empty country, so cardboard flat and desolate. She gripped her door handle and gazed at a naked dirt field in which violently uprooted trees lay every which way, their roots and branches clawing air. Unexpectedly Vernon braked, then took a sharp left onto a narrow paved road. “Three eighty,” he informed her. He didn’t seem to notice the clattering of the percolator behind them. “But this fishing trip they’re on is supposed to be a second honeymoon.”

“Honeymoon!” Delia said. She was looking at a pasture filled with rusted-out cars. Around the next curve lay a ramshackle barn halfway returned to the earth-the ridgepole almost U-shaped, the warped gray boards slumping into waist-high weeds. Every minute, she saw, she was traveling farther from civilization.

“Well, how Eunice put it to my mom,” Vernon said, “she put it that her and Vincent were going off on the boat by themselves, just the two of them together.”

Delia thought that a trip alone on a fishing boat would strain the best of marriages, but all she said was, “Well, I wish them luck.”

“That’s what I told Mom,” Vernon said. He swerved around an antique tractor, whose driver was wearing what looked like a duster. “I told Mom, I said, ‘Lots of luck, when her husband is Vincent the Dweeb.’”

“She should give up on him,” Delia said, forgetting it was none of her business. “Especially if he hits her.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure he hits her.”

Was that a brick building in the distance? Yes, and a grove of dark trees that cooled and relieved Delia’s eyes, and beyond them a sparkling white steeple. She knew there must be guest accommodations here. She gathered up her tote bag and smoothed her robe around her knees.

“One time Eunice dropped by the house with a puffy place on her cheekbone,” Vernon said. “And when Mom asked where she got it she said, ‘I walked into a wall,’ which if it had been me I could have come up with a lot better story than that.”

“She should leave him,” Delia said, but her mind was on the town ahead. They were passing the outskirts now-small white houses, a diner, a collection of men talking in front of a service station. “There’s no point trying to mend a marriage that’s got to the point of violence,” she told Vernon.

Now they had reached the brick building, which turned out to be a school. DOROTHY G. UNDERWOOD HIGH SCHOOL. A street leading off just past that ended, evidently, in a park, for Delia glimpsed distant greenery and a statue of some kind. And now they were nearing the church that the steeple belonged to. Vernon was saying, “Well, I don’t know; maybe you’re right. Like I was telling Mom the other day, I told her-”

“I believe I’ll get out here,” Delia said.

“What?” he said. He slowed.

“Here is where I think I’ll get out.”

He brought the van to a stop and looked at the church. Two ladies in straw hats were weeding a patch of geraniums at the foot of the announcement board. “But I thought you were going to Ashford,” he said. “This is not Ashford.”

“Well, still,” she said, looping the handles of her tote bag over her shoulder. She opened the passenger door and said, “Thanks for the ride.”

“I hope I didn’t say nothing to upset you,” Vernon told her.

“No! Honest! I just think I’ll-”

“Was it Eunice?”

“Eunice?”

“Vincent hitting her and all? I won’t talk about it no more if it upsets you.”

“No, really, I enjoyed our talk,” she told him. And she hopped to the ground and sent him a brilliant smile as she closed the door. She started walking briskly in the direction they had come from, and when she reached the street where she had seen the statue she turned down it, not even slowing, as if she had some specific destination in mind.

Behind her, she heard the van shift gears and roar off again. Then a deep silence fell, like the silence after some shocking remark. It seemed this town felt as stunned as Delia by what she had gone and done.