“I’m hanging up. To hell with it. To hell with you.” He hung up the phone. I sat with the phone in my hand and listened to the operator come back on the line. “If you are finished with your call, please replace the receiver on the hook. This is your operator. If you are finished …” I put the receiver down on its cradle. I looked around the room. A room where a man and woman slept together and loved each other and made love. I will never have that again, I thought. Now it is all over for me. Now I will be alone forever.

“Rhoda. Is anything wrong?” It was Derry. She came into the room and sat down beside me on the bed.

“Everyone’s hanging up on me.” I looked up at her and laughed. “My father hung up on me and now my husband did. I don’t know what to do, Derry. I’m so confused all the time. I never should have married him. We don’t have anything in common. We don’t even like each other, but the children belong to him. The oldest one asks for him all the time. He says, where’s my daddy? When’s my daddy coming back? I don’t know what to tell him.” I looked up at her. I had never had a grown person listen to me with such intensity. She moved into me.

“‘I spit on the grave of my twenties.’ H. L. Mencken. I think it was Mencken who said that. These are hard years, Rhoda. They are hard for everyone, no matter what they’re doing.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-eight. It’s better later. It really is. It smoothes out.”

“I wouldn’t think your life was very smooth. Not with the things you’re doing.”

“But that’s my work. Work is the main thing, Rhoda, if you can find something worth doing, something that adds to the good of the whole. It’s how you define yourself, how you create your meaning. No, I mean my emotional life is smoother now. Charles and I have gotten through the hard parts.”

“I don’t think Malcolm and I could get through the hard parts. I don’t think it would ever work. He won’t talk to me. But I miss him. I want to, well, I’m tired of sleeping by myself.”

“Do you go out with other men?”

“I can’t. My mother won’t let me. She won’t let me do it until I’m divorced.”

“Do you feel like going back with the others? I think Jim has to leave soon. Would you like to tell him goodbye?”