It made me feel nervous, and stupid, and a little crazy. He couldn’t know; he was only nine. But I felt nervous anyway.

I did wait, living from day to day, promising myself that if nothing happened that next day, I’d go in and see my brother, a lawyer, and tell him to start divorce proceedings. But each night I’d convince myself to wait still another day.

So I waited the years by, until this last March, and then I decided I couldn’t go on any longer, not like that, until I decided I owed myself a little more than I was getting, that twenty years of this kind of marriage was enough for anyone.

And so one Monday night I told Tucker I wanted him to drive me to New Marsails and to please have the car ready at ten the next morning. I got up and dressed in something dark—that was the way I felt, like I was attending a funeral—and had a cup of coffee, and got my purse and went out and climbed in the car. I started to cry then, and kept on crying all the way down the hill into Sutton and up and over the Ridge through Harmon’s Draw. I could see from the top of the Ridge New Marsails in the distance, shifting and blurry. We went all the way into the city and Tucker pulled up in front of my brother’s office. I told him if anything happened to contact me in the law offices of R. W. DeVillet.

That’s when he said it. That’s when he got out of the car and opened the back door for me, when I slid across the seat and he looked straight at me through those thick-rimmed glasses and said it, so softly, so quietly that I couldn’t hear it at first over the roaring of the passing cars and the dull chatter of people, and I asked him to repeat it. Or perhaps I heard him, but hadn’t wanted to believe my ears, because it was impossible that he could remember, or that he had known that long ago, known then when I told him the fairy tale. I looked up, startled, and said, “Excuse me, Tucker?”

And he said it, again: “I think the princess should wait, Missus Willson. Leastways, now when her waiting is almost over.”

I told him to take me to the nearest movie. That’s where I spent the day.