“On Saturday then. At six.” She sat back in her chair and I went over to the diving board and showed off doing half gainers and back dives for a while and then swam my laps. I was half thinking about giving up swimming entirely. I had always done it to keep my body thin, but now I didn’t really need it anymore.

On Saturday afternoon I dressed up in a blue and white flowered dress and drove out to Fairfields, a small community ten miles from Dunleith with three streets of restored houses and a post office and a store. The place the Morgans had bought was an old farmhouse with brick chimneys and porches with brick floors. Patricia was waiting at the door when I drove up in the yard. Her son, Clay, was beside her. A tall, happy-looking young man with brown hair and soft brown eyes. Dr. Morgan, the mad scientist, was nowhere in sight. I walked up onto the porch.

“Your dress is very pretty,” Patricia said.

“Mother told me all about you,” Clay added. I looked him over. I liked him. There was no way anyone could help but like him. There was something childlike about him. He seemed so young compared to the young men I knew. The young men I knew drove cars fast and talked fast and moved in fast to put the make on me. This young man kept standing beside his mother. He kept waiting for me to do something.

“Clay’s been in summer school at Brown,” Mrs. Morgan said. “He’s going to be at Woods Hole when he goes back, to study marine life.”

“It’s pretty silly,” he said. “It’s just a lot of work.”

“Nonsense,” Patricia said. “Of course it’s not.”

“Is your husband here?” I asked. “I’d really like to meet him if I could.”

“Oh, Max. Of course. I think he’ll be out soon. I wanted to take you around first and show you what I’ve been doing.” We began to walk through the house. Patricia leaned on Clay’s arm. talking gaily as she showed us things she had been restoring, bricks that had been stripped, boards that had been uncovered and revealed, old artifacts she had found in the yard and was polishing. We went out to the root cellar and looked at that awhile. Every now and then I would meet Clay’s eye and he would smile at me. He seemed perfectly content. He seemed to think nothing else was supposed to happen but walking around looking at old junk his mother thought was worth polishing and hanging on the walls. “Clouds are gathering,” she said, pointing past the root cellar to the west. “It might rain later.”

“I doubt it,” Clay said. “They’re stratocumulus. They’re too high for rain.”