He drove the rest of the way to Innisfail without speaking. Marya began to cry. “I love you, you know I love you,” she whispered guiltily, but Emmett didn’t trouble to reply, perhaps didn’t even hear. He had worked the Buick up to seventy-five, seventy-eight, eighty miles an hour along a curving highway, slowing only when walls of fog drifted across the road. “Emmett please, I’m sorry, I can’t help it,” Marya said almost inaudibly, “I get so nervous, you know how I am . . . but you know I love you,” while a part of her thought calmly: There, that’s done.

BY MIDSUMMER MARYA’S insomnia kept her awake through much of the night, night following night; she swayed and staggered through the days, her eyes bruised, her head aching. Everyone thought it was because she and Emmett had broken up (“ ‘Broken up’?” Wilma asked, pretending to take it casually, “was it your doing finally, or his?”) but in fact it seemed to be because of Port Oriskany and what was coming in the fall: the steep narrow streets, the unfamiliar buildings; whether, with no one from home to observe, she would finally stop attending Mass; whether she would do as well there as everyone expected. If I fail I’m not coming home, she told herself; then again, a moment later, If I fail I could telephone Emmett and he’d come and get me, I know he’d come and get me.

But she wouldn’t call him. And, in any case, he wouldn’t have come.

He had loved her; but now, it seemed, he hated her. He really did hate her.

Bonnie Michalak dropped by at Fowler’s office to ask Marya, with a cruel little half smile of bewilderment, “What on earth happened to you and Emmett?” And Erma Dietz, now Erma Jelinski, married six weeks and at least three months pregnant, caught at Marya’s sleeve in Woolworth’s and said in a soft pitying voice that made Marya want to jerk angrily away, “I think it’s such a shame about you and Emmett. Ron was telling me he’s going out now with someone from Mt. Horne. It’s such a shame, Marya, God damn it, why did you let it happen?”

Marya muttered an inaudible reply.

Erma stared at her, blinking. Since the pregnancy, since the marriage, she was prettier than ever: shorter than Marya by three or four inches, with a doll’s porcelain-perfect face and a small snubbed nose and eyes so beautifully lashed they looked almost unreal. They had never exactly been friends but now they were certainly not friends and Marya couldn’t even bring herself to smile, to behave nicely.

“What? I didn’t hear,” Erma said.

“I said it isn’t your problem,” Marya told her, swallowing. “You don’t have to concern yourself with it.”