But Marya refused to discuss Emmett with Wilma; she shrank from discussing certain volatile subjects with her in any case. “You can’t possibly have an opinion about him,” she told Wilma. “Not an informed opinion.”

To Emmett she said nervously, “But I’m starting college in September.”

He was bemused, skeptical. “But are you really?” he said, smiling, as if he knew a secret Marya didn’t know: she would never leave Innisfail any more than he would.

Faltering, vague, Marya protested that she had to go, didn’t she? she’d been awarded that scholarship, in fact two scholarships, she couldn’t disappoint people. There had even been such a flattering piece in the newspaper. . . .

Emmett told her she’d been saying that all summer. She really wanted to get married, she really wanted to stay in Innisfail, but she was afraid of making people angry with her—“disappointing” them was how she phrased it. And he went on to name, contemptuously, the names of various Innisfail teachers—a familiar litany he had long outgrown.

“You could turn those scholarships down and nobody would give a damn,” he said. “They can’t make you go anywhere if you don’t want to.”

“Emmett, I have to go, I can’t back out,” Marya whispered.

He closed his thumb and forefinger about her wrist, as he often did, in play. And then gave a little twist. Also in play: though it did hurt.

He said, “You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to, Marya.”

STILL, HE WANTED to drive her to Port Oriskany in early July, just after the holiday weekend, so that she could find a room for the fall, and a job of some kind. Marya didn’t want to live in university housing if she could avoid it; she couldn’t bear the thought of having a roommate—a stranger; some nights this past year her nerves were so raw, her pulses leaped with a startled urgency she couldn’t define, she had to leave the bedroom she shared with Alice to sleep on the couch in the front room, or even on the porch. Her thoughts unusually sharp, her blood pulsing hot and sullen, she had a fantasy of wandering off into the scrub forest behind the car lot . . . losing herself in the foothills of the Chautauquas, or in the mountains themselves. She’d be alone then. Unobserved, unmonitored. With nobody picking at her or judging her or wanting to marry her.

“As soon as I leave home,” Marya had been telling everyone during her senior year, “I intend to begin a private life. I’ve had enough of crowds!”