Marya was slightly dazed at first, greeted with Everard’s conspicuous white smile (which must mean he had false teeth now: and they suited him), and Wilma’s breezy new social manner, nervous and coquettish (which must mean she had women friends in town, women who knew how things were done). She was taken proudly about the house, told of Wilma’s new car (a secondhand Honda), told of the expanded service station (Everard had taken out a loan at one of the banks in town). She was shown color snapshots of her nieces and nephews—Lee’s, Alice’s, Dave’s grinning children mingled together.

Wilma was chatting excitably about the upcoming wedding and about being a grandmother. A grandmother—her! “You just don’t think it can happen,” she said, fixing Marya with a quizzical little smile, “then it does, and it seems so easy, like it was there all along. I mean—it was there all along, waiting.”

Marya’s cheeks felt flushed. She heard herself exchanging news, talking, chatting, as if she belonged here. She told herself that nothing had greatly changed. And she did belong here, as much as she belonged anywhere.

MARYA STAYED ON after the wedding, to Wilma’s pleased surprise.

It was the first time she hadn’t hurried away, Wilma said.

Yes, said Marya. I haven’t anywhere to hurry to.

But that was the wrong tone to take with Wilma: she admired strength, not weakness. She had admired Marya’s stubborness, even her selfishness, in the old days.

At breakfast one morning when they were alone Marya asked, over coffee, why they had fought so much, the two of them. She remembered running out of the house and crying, hiding back in the car lot. She remembered wishing she was dead. And Wilma herself in tears; shouting at her; slapping her hard. (“And I know I deserved it,” Marya said.) Why so much quarreling, so many tears . . . ?

Well, said Wilma, startled, blushing—being unaccustomed, as they all were, to such direct personal questions—she supposed people mainly fought with whoever was close at hand. That was all they had, after all, wasn’t it?