“Do sit down at least,” Janice says, to reduce the interloper’s radiant, unsettling bulk. The girl sits on the sofa, where like everybody else she sinks down lower than she expects, her bare knees brightly upthrust. A few hasty tugs on her skirt reduce the amount of thigh that shows. Janice takes the green wing chair, with the matching arm doilies, folding her hands palm-up in her lap as her mother used to do, setting herself to listen, if the thudding of her heart lets her. Her heart is caught in a net of calculation as to how this innocently disgusting intrusion will affect her life and disturb her peace. With Ronnie being so steady compared to Harry, she has known peace.

“My mother worried that I hadn’t married,” Annabelle tells her, from her relaxed voice already more at home than Janice thinks is quite seemly. “She wondered if it had been her fault, making me distrust men, or sex or something, out of her own experience. I would tell her, That’s silly. Dad, as I called him, was a wonderful man. He died when I was sixteen, but still I grew up with this good masculine image. He would toss me all around, even when I was eleven or so, and taught me to ride the tractor and whatever all else a child can do to help run a farm—pick apples and strawberries and feed the chickens and whack back the bushes and poison ivy. We even did carpentry together and he taught me to shoot his gun. I had two brothers, Scott and Morris, I always got along good with—being country children, we did a lot together. And then I had boyfriends, normal enough, though I guess compared to city boys they were shy, but after high school I got a job as a nurse’s aide in a nursing home called Sunnyside, out toward the old fairgrounds—?”

She is checking to see if Janice is listening. Janice nods and says, “I’ve heard of it. Sunnyside.”

“And then I went for a year’s degree and passed the boards and after I entered service at St. Joe’s the boys weren’t so shy, some of them were even married doctors, but some weren’t, and it all seemed normal to me except, you know, lightning never struck, the question never got popped. Maybe I didn’t want to hear it. I’d tell my mother, It’s no big deal, if it happens it happens, you’re still a person, but it worried her sick, somehow, that I stayed independent, as if she were preventing something, especially after she sold the farm and I asked her to move in with me, we could manage a larger place together, over on Eisenhower Avenue—”