Lee, noticing the change in him, asked quietly, “You haven’t found a girl, have you?”

“Girl? No. Who wants a girl?”

“Everybody,” said Lee.

And Lee asked Adam, “Do you know what’s got into Cal?”

Adam said, “He knows about her.”

“Does he?” Lee stayed out of trouble. “Well, you remember I thought you should have told them.”

“I didn’t tell him. He knew.”

“What do you think of that!” said Lee. “But that’s not information to make a boy hum when he studies and play catch with his cap when he walks. How about Aron?”

“I’m afraid of that,” said Adam. “I don’t think I want him to know.”

“It might be too late.”

“I might have a talk with Aron. Kind of feel around.”

Lee considered. “Something’s happened to you too.”

“Has it? I guess it has,” said Adam.

But humming and sailing his cap, driving quickly through his schoolwork, were only the smallest of Cal’s activities. In his new joy he appointed himself guardian of his father’s content. It was true what he had said about not feeling hatred for his mother. But that did not change the fact that she had been the instrument of Adam’s hurt and shame. Cal reasoned that what she could do before, she could do again. He set himself to learn all he could about her. A known enemy is less dangerous, less able to surprise.

At night he was drawn to the house across the tracks. Sometimes in the afternoon he lay hidden in the tall weeds across the street, watching the place. He saw the girls come out, dressed somberly, even severely. They left the house always in pairs, and Cal followed them with his eyes to the corner of Castroville Street, where they turned left toward Main Street. He discovered that if you didn’t know where they had come from you couldn’t tell what they were. But he was not waiting for the girls to come out. He wanted to see his mother in the light of day. He found that Kate emerged every Monday at one-thirty.

Cal made arrangements in school, by doing extra and excellent work, to make up for his absences on Monday afternoons. To Aron’s questions he replied that he was working on a surprise and was duty bound to tell no one. Aron was not much interested anyway. In his self-immersion Aron soon forgot the whole thing.

Cal, after he had followed Kate several times, knew her route. She always went to the same places—first to the Monterey County Bank where she was admitted behind the shining bars that defended the safe-deposit vault. She spent fifteen or twenty minutes there. Then she moved slowly along Main Street, looking in the store windows. She stepped into Porter and Irvine’s and looked at dresses and sometimes made a purchase—elastic, safety pins, a veil, a pair of gloves. About two-fifteen she entered Minnie Franken’s beauty parlor, stayed an hour, and came out with her hair pinned up in tight curls and a silk scarf around her head and tied under her chin.