"Your mother?"

"A wrung-out dishrag. I guess she loved us, but he took all the spirit out of her before I was born. She died about five years ago, some trouble she'd had for years that should have been taken care of when she was having babies. We were all born at home, of course. I didn't go back for the funeral."

Erika looked away. "But you weren't the only child."

"No. My one brother was killed in Korea. My older sister lives on the home place, her husband runs it. We were never much to each other. Then there's—" she stopped. "There's Paul."

Erika was silent.

"Why don't you ask me?"

"Tell me if you want to. Or not."

"Paul and I were buddies. The kids always made fun of us in the district school—you don't know how mean kids can be. It's not their fault, they pick it up at home. Paul was two years older than me. I thought he was perfect."

The room was full of waiting. Kate walked to the door and looked into the kitchen. "Imagine having a real kitchen," she said in a tight voice. "I'm going to make us a Sunday dinner. Wait and see."

"I think you'll feel better if you tell the rest." She turned stiffly.

"About four years ago, Paul killed a man in a fight over a line fence. A neighbor, just moved into the township. They could have sent him to the chair, it would have been better. He got life.”

“It seems odd—"

"He quit farming when Pa died, went off and lived by himself. I suppose he got to brooding."

"That was when you started drinking."

"Of course."

But how could you describe, even to Erika, the gathering tension, the hours of lying awake, the inability to breathe? How could you tell about the nightmare that never came to an end but left her filled with a nameless dread? "It happened to me too," she said thickly. "That was when I—"

"What?"

"Nothing. I don't know what I was going to say."

But she knew. She rushed into the bathroom and stood looking at the basin until it seemed that the white china oval was permanently stamped on her mind. That was when I started sleeping around with men, she thought, feeling sick.

She'd left home at sixteen in the middle of the night, with her clothes in a cheap suitcase. It wasn't until she was nineteen that she even would look at a man. Then, because she was reasonably goodlooking, she was asked for dates and, timidly, began to go out once in a while. There had been movies and dances and—she remembered a skinny boy named Bob—endless boring baseball games where you sat sweaty and bored while people yelled. She supposed she would fall in love and get married some time, but she wasn't in any hurry.

Naturally there was a lot of backseat fumbling. Approach and retreat, attempt and rebuff, hot hands in the uplift bra or under the skirt. Nobody got farther with her, partly because she was afraid of being caught and partly because she never wanted to go past the tongue-kissing, bosom-stroking stage. Most of the time that was too far. Sometimes she felt as though part of herself stood off to one side watching, repelled.