THIRTEEN

Nick didn’t want to choose. He had his life mapped out by the women in it, each one somehow placing him in time, bridging his way from one to the other. With Dore, he was in his past again, when everything was possible. With Leslie, he didn’t have to worry about any possibilities, because things already were—he had his family, he had stability, he had a daughter who connected him to life. How could he give anything up? How could anyone?

He thought about marrying Dore, thought about her face, so soft and sleepy when she woke up in the morning, nuzzling against him; he thought how she ate her lunch, how she combed her hair with her fingers, and he yearned to be with her again, he did. But then he’d get home, and there would be Leslie with her hair fanned out around her, in one of his old shirts and her jeans, opening up to him for a moment before she slowly closed shut again, making him miss her as surely as he missed Dore. And there would be Robin, his own features subtly altered in her face. Her hair snapped and curled the way his did, but hers was fireworked with golds and reds. He saw her mirroring his walk, frowning and biting down on her bottom lip when she read, the same way he did, and it moved him so much it was all he could do to watch her in a kind of dumb wonder, a gratitude, as if she herself had chosen his characteristics as an act of love.

This time at home Robin trailed him. She wanted to go with him to the market for juice, she wanted to help bring up the lawn sprinkler from the basement, and he kept feeling her eyes on him, although she wouldn’t look at him directly. He found her in his bedroom one evening, going through his things—his suitcase, his top drawer, the pockets of his suits, her face dark. “Hey—” he said.

“I needed some change,” she said, flustered. “Do you have quarters?” She looked at the floor. “I needed change,” she said again.

“Tens or twenties,” he said, but she didn’t make a funny face at him, didn’t roll her eyes; she simply took the two dollars in quarters he managed to find, and then half an hour later, as he was walking by the den, he saw her foraging in his desk. As soon as she spotted him, she left, mumbling some excuse about needing a pen with black ink, not waiting for him to try to find one. He opened the drawers and tried to figure out what it was she had been looking for, or what it was she had found.

It wasn’t just him, though. At dinner she stared at Leslie. “Is something wrong?” Leslie asked. “Are my jeans on backward?”

Robin had come to the table with pink lids and red lipstick, with lashes so mascaraed they looked black-and-blue. “This color would look good on you,” she told Leslie, touching her eyelids. She had a tiny gold lipstick case in her hand; she showed it to Leslie.

“Not at the table, please,” Leslie said, but she still twirled the color up and then twirled it back down again. “Oh, I’m not the makeup type,” Leslie said.

“Sure you are,” Robin said. “I could show you. She’d look just beautiful, wouldn’t she?” She looked right at Nick.

“She looks beautiful now,” Nick said, and Leslie turned to him, pleased and suddenly shy.

But Robin didn’t let up. She went shopping and came home with a silky blue shirt for Leslie that she claimed was a belated birthday present. She brought back perfume samples in little glass vials she jammed in her pockets and rolled across Leslie’s bureau for her to find. At night she went out to the library so Leslie and Nick could have the whole house alone; and when she came home, if they weren’t in the same room—if Nick was reading in the kitchen while Leslie sewed upstairs—it made her crazy. She’d orchestrate things so they were all in the same room. She said there was a wonderful movie on TV; she made too much popcorn and needed help eating it. And then she stopped, watching the two of them until Leslie’s hands would flutter automatically to her hair, her face, to wherever she assumed Robin was judging her, and Robin would avert her eyes.

She didn’t really talk to Nick until the next week, when he was leaving for New York, and then she simply stood in front of him and asked him not to go.

“It’s just three days,” he said. He turned to get some clean socks. He was going to ask her what was the matter, but when he turned back around, she was gone.

She wasn’t watching at the window for the car the morning he left. He used to think he’d be so relieved when she stopped doing that, but now it unsettled him, made him feel things weren’t quite right.

As soon as Nick left, Robin began her steady retreat back into herself. It frightened Leslie. Sometimes when Leslie was working with a client, she’d excuse herself, leaving a hem half pinned, a sleeve hanging awkwardly on a bare arm, and go into the kitchen to call her daughter to see if she was all right. The line was always busy. She’d try again in ten minutes, in half an hour, until her client got exasperated. “Forget why you’re here?” one woman sniped.

Leslie, standing there with the phone clenched in her hand, thought it a funny remark, because really, how nice it would be to forget, to stop worrying, to just get back to pulling forth a dress from a bolt of cloth, the only kind of magic she was ever able to do.

She came home and asked Robin why the line had been tied up like that, and Robin dipped her head so that her hair covered her face and said she was talking to some friend Leslie had never heard of, doing math homework over the phone. “Homework,” Leslie said. She was certain it must be a boy again, but Robin was still so young, and if she was going to have any dates, Leslie wanted them to be with the proper sort of boy, a boy who would come to dinner and tease her into liking him, a boy who wouldn’t meddle around with cars or emotions.

When the phone bill came, Leslie glanced casually at the amount, and then stopped short. It was so high. Nick kept a separate line for his business calls and was pretty strict about it, and she herself didn’t call long-distance except for an occasional call to her folks. It had to be Robin. She trailed a finger down the list of phone numbers: 617-555-6788, over and over again. A half-hour. Twenty minutes. Once, two hours. She wondered how many other calls to that number had been made from the home of a friend, whose parents might be angered at the size of their bill. She knew the area code was Boston from all the calls she had made to Nick, and for a moment she felt a stubborn flash of sympathy for Robin, a bond built out of telephone wires and the endless neediness of loving. She looked at the dates of the calls, days when Nick was out of town, in other cities. It made her feel so strange. Her husband and her daughter’s boyfriend might have been in the same city—a boyfriend, that must be it—and she couldn’t imagine how Robin had met such a boy.

She didn’t know what to do. She’d have to confront Robin with the bill, but she knew Robin would just pay it off with allowance money and wouldn’t give Leslie any information at all about anything. Leslie thought maybe she’d call the number, just to see who answered. Maybe she could pick something up from the boy’s voice. She had a sudden nervous feeling that it might be Rick again, transplanted, dangerous in new ways. And if it was someone perfectly proper, perfectly nice? Well, she didn’t want to interfere with Robin, she just wanted to know what was going on. She yearned to somehow be a part of it.

She called on a night when Nick was in Philadelphia and Robin was swimming at the “Y.”

The line rang only once, and then a woman’s voice said, “Yes?” Leslie felt foolish. She rubbed at her eyes, and then the woman said, “Amy, is that you, honey?” and the voice was so kind, it made Leslie want to speak.

She didn’t give her full name, not at first. She politely explained about the phone bill, all those calls to that number. “I think it’s probably my daughter, Robin, who’s calling, and I think it might have something to do with a boy.” She felt more and more awkward, more and more guilty, too. “Uh, do you have a son?” Leslie asked.

There was silence on the other end, and Leslie thought, Why, this woman didn’t know what her son was up to. Or maybe she did know—maybe she got calls like this all the time.

“Listen,” the woman finally said, “I don’t have a son, and no one named Robin has been calling me.”

“No son?” Leslie said. “But I don’t get it then. The numbers are right here, for an hour at a time. She must be calling you—she has to be.”

There was silence again, thickening through the wires, and then the woman cleared her throat. She said she didn’t know if she should even be talking about this, but there was this one girl who called her, but her name was Amy. “I can’t tell you what we talk about, it’s all in confidence.” The woman laughed a little. “I guess I’m kind of like a psychiatrist sometimes.”

“I’m kind of like a mother,” Leslie said, her voice tight.

“All right, all right,” Dore sighed. She told her what she could. She sketched in Robin’s features, the hair, the stubborn strong voice, the way she had just shown up on her doorstep.

“It’s got to be Robin,” Leslie said, “but why would she come to you? How would she know?” She bit down on her lip. “What did she say to you?”

“Nothing so terrible, she just wanted to talk,” Dore said. “I’m sorry—it was personal. I can’t betray a confidence. I feel funny telling you what I’m telling you now, except if you’re her mother—”

“I am her mother.”

“Maybe,” Dore said.

“She’s never even been to Boston,” Leslie said. “Her father gets there on business sometimes, he’s due there in a few days, but Nick’s never taken her with him, although I remember she did want to go.”

“Nick?” Something snaked up along Dore’s spine.

“My husband sells books,” Leslie said. “He’s out of town a lot. I don’t know, I think it upsets her. No, I know it does.” She curled the phone cord about her hand.

“Excuse me, what did you say your whole name was?” Dore asked, keeping her breath quiet, and as soon as she heard Leslie say Austen, something ruptured inside of her and she had to sit down.

“And your name?” Leslie asked, but then something happened to the phone—it gave an odd click and there was a dial tone. Leslie called back, but the line was busy, and when she called the operator to check on it, she was told the phone was off the hook. It made her a little angry. But she had a number now, she could call back. These calls weren’t about a boy, she thought. They were about something else, something she would have to get from the one person who could storytell it to her, from Robin.

Dore didn’t know what she was doing. The whole world seemed to be moving in slow motion except for her, and she was moving in small, brilliant panics, she was all bone. She watched the phone, and when it rang, the sound crawled up along her spine. She was half-certain that if she dared to touch the receiver, her own pain might electrocute her.

She walked. She tried to go into neighborhoods that were unfamiliar, that seemed as lost to her as her own self. She kept her head down, ignoring people if they smiled at her, if they excused themselves past her. She scowled at the dogs lazily loping past her. I’m a stranger in a strange land, she thought. She wished she were getting on a plane and just leaving. For the first time, she felt exactly the way her students probably did, looking for safe haven; for a hand to hold back the fever that raged away inside of you; for a rational, calm voice that knew just what you should do next.

Amy, she thought. Betrayer. She thought the girl had loved her a little. She thought they had a real connection. But all those questions, all those calls—they took on a different meaning now. Who knew how she had found out? Who knew how careless Nick was? But there it was. Amy, a lying little heart, small and hurting as a cramp, pulling her life and her past from her for nothing at all.

Oh, Lord, she used to think how Nick might like Amy, how maybe Amy could be their bridge to another child of their own. What a fool she was. And Nick, sad and silent, gutless at giving. “He’s not worth you,” her mother used to say about boys she disapproved of. “He’s hardly your kind.” She’d said it about the butcher when Dore was seventeen. She’d said it about Nick when she found out they were living in a trailer court, a time when Dore’s heart had kept expanding because she was so happy. Why had she kept thinking he’d change, be different?

She thought suddenly, What if she never had anyone else to love in her life, anyone else to love her back? It was difficult, being a teacher. She heard the talk in the teacher’s room, the stories, the fix-ups that didn’t quite take, the lives going nowhere, the kids in your classes always the same age, year after year, while you just got older and older. Whom did you meet teaching kids all day long? Divorced, unhappy parents trailing into the PTA twice a year. Other teachers, most of them women.

It was a fluke, her meeting Nick. She remembered the other teachers talking about it, joking about how they were all planning to pretend they’d misplaced their glasses, even when their vision was so perfect they could spot a kid chewing gum a mile away. They all wanted a catch like Nick. Oh, yes, what a catch! Tumbling right out of her hands, taking pieces of her right along with him.

It was fate, all fate and all timing. One minute more and she never would have met Nick at all, her life would have wound its way into something different. One minute less and Susan might still be alive. In another few minutes, she wouldn’t have been home to get that call from Leslie, she would have been at the market, buying wine, squeezing fruit. She wondered what would have happened then—whether Nick would have divorced Leslie and married her; whether he ever would have admitted that she wasn’t his first-and-always. Maybe things would have just stretched out along the same path until she got fed up.

Married. How could he be married to someone who wasn’t her? She tried to frame a picture of Leslie in her mind, but the only face she could conjure up alongside Nick’s was her own. Maybe Leslie would be the lucky one, maybe she’d never even realize whom she had been talking to, or maybe it wouldn’t even matter. An old girlfriend always mattered less than a wife, didn’t she?

She crouched in bed, miserable. She remembered Leslie mentioning Pittsburgh, and she called Information and got the number, planning to confront Nick. But the first time she called, Amy—Robin—answered, and, stunned, Dore hung up.

She tried calling him at work, and in the end he just showed up. “I thought I’d surprise you,” he said.

She bolted back. “Don’t you try talking to me!” she cried.

“What did I do?”

“It’s what you didn’t do.” She decided she couldn’t speak, and she was too angry to stay still, so she went outside and started walking. Nick walked along with her, a little in front of her, so she’d have to see him just by looking where she was going.

“Talk to me,” he said. “Speak.”

“Leslie called me,” she blurted, and as soon as she had that name in her mouth, it was as if she had bitten down on rusty tin. “Your daughter, Amy—Robin—was here,” she cried.

He froze in the middle of the sunny sidewalk, his face changing. “Here?” he said. He washed one hand over his face, looking at the sky, the walk, anywhere but her. “Dore—”

“Shut up,” she said. “You have a wife. You have a daughter. You have what I’m supposed to have, what I’m supposed to be, and you think you have any right to come here and talk to me?”

“I have a right,” he said, grabbing her arm. “What did they tell you?”

“I hate you,” said Dore. “I’m right here and you’re talking about someone else. You’re so anxious to know, you ask them.”

“I love you,” he said, his voice fierce. “I loved you the day I saw you struggling in that hall. I loved you when you shut me out with nine million students, when it was all I could do to get you to look at me, let alone talk, and I love you now.” He pulled her roughly in front of him. “You listen,” he said. “I was fucked up, I was wrong. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you—I was afraid of what you’d think, I was afraid you’d disappear. I’ll marry you now. I don’t care about anything, just don’t leave, just don’t.”

“You didn’t want to give any of it up, did you?” said Dore. “You didn’t want to marry me at all. It was just a daydream, like winning the lottery.”

“Jesus, I love you,” said Nick. “How many more times do I have to say it?”

“What about your wife? You love her? What about your daughter?” She yanked herself free. “I’m second-best to you, and you’re crazy.” She swiped at him.

“Listen to me,” Nick said; but she broke free, she shouted at him that she never wanted to see him or his family again, that he had better not come around, because she would call the cops, she would create a scandal that would bruise more lives than her own. He called her name, he came toward her, his face miserable, and she started running, staring straight ahead so she wouldn’t have to notice whether or not he was following her, wouldn’t have to face the possibility that he wasn’t.

She wasn’t sure where she was going. She heard his steps, his voice, scraped from his throat, but she kept taking shortcuts on him, sprinting across lawns, through bushes, into alleys he knew nothing about, and then she entered a neighborhood that was unfamiliar, and when she glanced back, he was gone. Sometimes a car would beep at her, but mostly she felt as if she were running hidden, and she stopped only when her side stitched up on her, and she leaned against a pole.

When someone touched her, she jerked up, her hand raised to strike, but it wasn’t Nick, it was a man in black sweats, asking her if she was okay. “You’re nuts to run in boots,” he said. He made her breathe in and out deeply. He said he got cramps all the time when he didn’t pay attention to how he ran, and then he introduced himself. His name was Ray and he taught anthropology at B.U. and he said she ought to rest. He knew this coffee shop. She didn’t know why, but she let him take her, and when she was sitting in the booth, exhausted, when she managed to look up into a strange, bright face, she thought only that it wasn’t Nick’s. And she knew suddenly that Nick’s face would be one she would miss every morning and every evening of her life from now on, and there would never, ever, be anything she could do about it.

Nick sat on Dore’s front stoop, sure she would come back if he stayed there long enough. She’d be exhausted, her pain would be dulled, and he’d be able to talk to her. Her love might refuel—everything might be all right.

He was losing everything. He didn’t have his family the way he used to, he didn’t have his work the way he used to, and now he didn’t seem to have Dore. He thought about Robin being with Dore, and it chilled him. He couldn’t imagine how she had known, why she had kept calling, and what he was going to do about any of it.

The afternoon light was dying. Men and women were coming home with briefcases, stepping over him. He got up. He thought about leaving Dore a note, but he couldn’t find a pencil, and, too, he kept having visions of Robin finding his words on Dore’s mailbox. He traced his hand on her mailbox, on her name that she had handwritten, and then on impulse he dug the name out and put it in his pocket like a lucky charm. He had thought that once—he had thought nothing could go wrong as long as she was in his life, as long as someone was. He remembered his dizzy relief whenever he came back to Pittsburgh and there was Leslie, among her pins and her patterns, getting up to fling her arms about him. And he thought about Robin, how he wanted her frozen in time.

He suddenly thought of this one boy from the home. Mike, who had actually lived with foster parents for so long that everyone was certain he’d be adopted. After he’d been gone two years, they all stopped talking about him; they let him fade into memory, into a kind of dull hope that what had befallen him might befall anyone. And then, one day, he was returned to the home, driven up by a cheerful, tanned couple who said nothing was wrong, he was a wonderful boy, but they had simply changed their minds about having a boy around.

Mike kept running away, running back to the people he insisted were his family, and each time they brought him back, until finally they called the school and told them to pick him up because they didn’t want to waste the gasoline. Mike had stopped running after that. The kids had befriended him, but Nick remembered how he had never been able to look at Mike without feeling a deepening chill, without craving warmth.

He walked down the block to his car. He felt a terrible, dangerous tide moving in toward him, tugging, pulling him back toward what he was, what he had always been, an orphan, belonging to no one.

Robin, terrified, stayed up in her room, the door shut. She had come home to find Leslie with the phone bill fanned in one hand, her face terrible. “I spoke to your Dore,” Leslie spat out, saying the name as if she knew everything connected to it. Robin hadn’t even thought to lie. She had just sat there on the couch opposite Leslie, spilling out the story, crying, half in fear, half in relief, and when she finally looked at Leslie, Leslie’s face was bleached of color and her hands were shaking.

Leslie got up slowly. She acted as if she didn’t even see Robin anymore. As she walked, her fingers seemed to read the tables, the walls, and when she got to the door, she quietly stepped out.

Robin didn’t move. She sat on the couch for over three hours, trying to figure out how she should be positioned when Leslie came back in. Should she be slumped over and miserable? Should she be erect and stoic? Should she even be still sitting right where Leslie had left her?

When Leslie finally did walk through the front door, Robin bolted upright. “What’s the matter with me?” Leslie said quietly. “I’m your mother. Didn’t you care how I might feel? I don’t understand. Just who were you trying to protect?” She was so still, it frightened Robin.

“You know what?” Leslie said. “I went and called her from a pay phone outside. I didn’t want to call her where you could hear, where you might get hurt. Isn’t that funny? She didn’t want to talk to me, but she didn’t hang up, either. I kept thinking she was lying—maybe she was some crazy client who just had a crush, who made up a life with your father.” Leslie straightened. “She slipped out a few details—things no one else could know unless they were close. She said—” Leslie’s voice cracked. “She said, ‘How’s Robin taking this?’ And that’s when I did to her what she did to me before. That’s when I hung up.” Leslie looked at Robin. “She has my husband,” she said. “But I swear to God, she isn’t getting my daughter.”

Leslie had to call three locksmiths before she found one who would come over right away. He was just a young kid in jeans, and he told her he was really a writer, that he just did enough lock jobs to keep himself going. He tried flirting with Robin, who got flustered, and then Leslie marched him to the back to start him on the dead bolts. She changed front and back door locks; she put in window locks, too, and would have installed a whole alarm system except it would have taken much too long and cost too much. When he was finally finished, she made Robin come with her to try out the keys.

She called the phone company and told them she was getting obscene phone calls and had to have a new, unlisted number immediately. She said she wanted the new number under her name and wanted no one, under any circumstances, to have access to it, no matter what they said, no matter how much they might beg and say it was an emergency.

Nick was expected home past midnight that evening, and Leslie grew increasingly nervous. She wasn’t sure he couldn’t get in if he really wanted to. The locksmith had told her stories about thieves swinging like chimps from window to window, about iron bars being sawed. Rick might do anything. Oh, the house was hers, but he could still call the police and make her open the door. He could take Robin. Then again, he might not show up at all. He could have found out that she knew from Dore, and he could just count that as a finish, leaving her standing in the darkness by the window, night after night. That way he’d never know how hard she had tried to keep him away.

But at three, she heard his car. She couldn’t bring herself to actually look out the window at him. She didn’t want to see his face, his body; she didn’t want his scent loosening her anger. She heard his steps coming up the walk, his key jamming in the lock, not fitting. The bell, when it rang, hurt her ears. She listened to it, over and over, not sure what to do, and then she heard him calling her name. It seemed to scorch from his throat—he cried it like a cat—and when she turned away from the door, her arms cradling her ribs, she saw Robin poised in the light on the stairs, in a thin cotton nightgown.

He shouted her name. She could almost feel the lights switching on about the neighborhood, the faces staring out. Then he shouted Robin’s name, and without turning, Leslie shouted back, “I know everything.” There was silence, then his steps fading back down, the car turning on, and Leslie locked eyes with Robin, who slowly turned from her, who went back into her room and shut the door, leaving Leslie alone in her locked house, in her darkness.

All the next day, they both stayed in the house. When Leslie spoke to Robin, her voice was so soft, Robin wasn’t sure it was her mother’s voice at all. For a while, Nick kept driving by the house, sometimes parking, sometimes getting out to try the door Leslie refused to answer. Robin watched him from her window. He ate hamburgers out of white paper bags that he basketball-tossed into the back seat; he smoked whole packs of cigarettes; and once, he said something to a neighbor passing by, and they both stopped talking to look over at the house. He even sent a few telegrams that Leslie was at first fooled into opening. “Forgive me,” they said. “Let me talk to you, let me explain. You’re my wife.” Leslie began refusing them, but they still came.

He left finally, the car disappearing for one day and then another, and it was Robin who got furious. She was angry with Leslie for not somehow being able to fix things, for not softening enough to give Nick his chance to explain, to lie even, to do whatever he could to bring things back to where they’d been. And, too, she was angry with Nick for the seeming ease with which he gave up, for the way the car just glided out of her sight, and for the way he sent every single one of those telegrams to Leslie, and none of them, not one, to her.

Leslie might not have spoken to Nick, but she did have conversations with him in her mind. She asked him why he had done this, why he hadn’t told her about his past. And when he answered, she could see him so clearly, feel his breath right on her neck, but the answers he gave her were blurry, the language garbled. It was a while before she realized it was she who was blurring things, she who was stubbornly refusing to hear what she most wanted.

Leslie refused to talk about anything that had to do with Nick, but she did things that showed how she felt. She came home one day and started gathering up all of Nick’s things—his clothing, his papers, the endless little gifts she had given him just for loving her—and she gave them to Goodwill, keeping only one old blue flannel shirt that she sometimes slept in when she was feeling most lost. She knew how he was about his possessions—his things—but she didn’t care. She wanted him to know what she had done, to know that he wasn’t the only one who could give away what he wasn’t supposed to, what he had no right to let go. And she watched Robin’s reaction, almost daring her to object, to say one word, but all Robin did was turn her white, baffled face away and go back upstairs to her room.

Leslie took her wedding band to sell, and the thin gold chain she had never liked because it made her feel like Sammy Davis, Jr., the same chain she had never once taken off because it had been an anniversary present from Nick and he had taken such shy pleasure in it—and in her. She had a few more gold pieces, a few silver ones, and she walked into the first store downtown that bought metals. The man at the desk told her airily that gold wasn’t doing so hot right now, that in his opinion she’d be better off waiting. When she insisted, he just shook his head. “It’s your funeral, lady,” he said.

He gave her just twelve dollars for everything, for pieces that were each worth four or five times that much, and as soon as Leslie felt the press of bills in her hands, she started crying. “Look, maybe I can get you four more, five tops,” the clerk said, a little startled, but Leslie pushed her way outside, struggling free of the pull of a present she was doing her best to turn into a past.

She was going to do everything differently. She turned the bedroom into her sewing room; she spent four days cleaning out the sewing room, and she slept in there. She threw out everything Nick had ever given her, and she thanked God that the house had always been hers. She pierced her left ear and wore a tiny green stone in it. She stepped up her business and learned to keep dry-eyed with her clients because her tears made them suddenly remember that they had to be home early, or had to go into the other room and make a phone call. When she walked at night, she called out to the neighbors who had always watched her. She was suddenly invited up onto cool front porches, offered limeade and packaged cookies. She found out about their lives, their families—all the details she had never cared about before and only half-heard now. It was just the sound of all those voices, the caress of the cadence, that lulled her into a kind of comfort.

She and Robin, though, moved like ghosts past each other. Robin never said one thing, just looked at Leslie hard-eyed when she thought Leslie wasn’t noticing. The more Robin pushed out of the house, the more Leslie wanted her home. She wouldn’t drive her to the “Y” to swim nights—she said there was something wrong with the car. She wouldn’t let her study at a friend’s because she wasn’t feeling well and might need Robin to run to Walnut Street and pick up a prescription. When Robin reminded her that they delivered, Leslie told her to watch that mouth of hers, to stop being so fresh.

Leslie couldn’t help it, she couldn’t make herself stop. She’d see Robin leaning along the front window and all she could think was that Robin was waiting for Nick as if he were some white knight come to deliver her out of this castle, and she would feel herself growing afraid. Every car that passed by could be Nick daring to take his daughter, daring to take another thing from her.

She made up elaborate dinners with all of the four basic food groups represented. She bought tea for Robin, international coffees for herself. Swiss Vienna Malt. Ginger Java. Apricot Java. She thought she was going crazy. Once, feeling Robin’s stare on her, she stared back. “How was I any different?” Her own voice sounded strange to her, foreign.

“What?” said Robin.

“I see how it is,” Leslie said. “I know what time the men around here get home, what time they go out again to their clubs or their bowling, to bluegrass bars for half the night. I’m at their houses, listening to the women waiting for their husbands to call, to come home, to just drop by. They spend more time alone than I ever did. Really. And when Nick was home,” she said, “he was home. He was happy.”

Robin stood up from the table, taking her cup.

“Stay,” Leslie said. “Talk to me a little, why don’t you.”

Robin balanced her cup. “I don’t have anything to say.”

“Turn the dishwasher on, then,” Leslie said.

That evening Leslie sat in the living room by herself, braiding and unbraiding her hair, thinking about tornadoes, about Danny being saved only to be sparked into oblivion by a live wire. These days, she felt the air thinning out, felt the ground blistering, giving way. You couldn’t count on anything, she thought, and you couldn’t escape.

She went to bed with pillows at her ears to muffle the sounds, and when in the morning she thought she heard hornets, she decided the thing to do was try to take some control, try to make herself unbend-able, a strip of steel. She forced herself to get up, to start. She walked past Robin’s room, the door still shut, and went downstairs. She got out the Yellow Pages and slapped them onto the kitchen table. Still in Nick’s blue flannel shirt, she flipped the pages, and when her fingers found the columns and columns of lawyers, she started crying, her sobs ragged, torn from her, because it hadn’t taken any time at all for her to get to this place, because it was almost natural, and, mostly, because now there wasn’t any reason at all not to pick out one of those numbers and go ahead and dial it.