I awakened early that Saturday morning and got up and showered for a long time. Then I opened Duff’s door quietly. He was still sleeping. I went downstairs and began to mix the ingredients for his birthday cake. Around nine he came down, and after I had put the cake in the oven, I made breakfast.

“When we go into town we’ll buy your present,” I said. “What would you like?”

“Let’s get something for all of us, but especially for Franny,” he said. “A television set.”

I agreed and he laughed and clapped his hands. We went to the hospital and afterward to a nearby furniture store where I bought the largest portable color television set the two of us could carry. We took it home and Duff watched part of a football game while I frosted the cake. He was pretending he didn’t know anything about it, and I went along with that, putting the cake in a cupboard before I called him to dinner.

After dinner I went out to the kitchen, lit the seventeen candles on the cake, and brought it into the dining room. He reacted with convincing surprise. Then he blew out the candles and made a wish.

“Do you want to know what I wished for?” he asked.

“The wish won’t come true if you tell it,” I said.

“I’ll take a chance. I wish we could be together like this for always, just the two of us.”

“You know that’s impossible, Duff.”

“Well, for a long time anyway.”

“It can’t even be for very long. You’ll be going away to college next year.”

“Maybe I won’t go.”

“Now you’re being silly. In any case even if you didn’t go to college, you’d go somewhere else. You’d get a job and eventually find a girl and go away.”

He just shook his head and grinned. We didn’t say any more on that subject, but instead moved on to more pleasant things—again the old days in Scarsdale mostly, but I also talked about my girlhood, telling him things I had never told Jack. Lately I’ve been wondering why I didn’t tell him about some of the recent things that had happened to me—the times I had seen the General, for example, and the things that had happened at Mrs. Reddy’s house. Maybe that would have made a difference. Maybe it would have persuaded him to run, to make him make me run.

Anyway, we cleared away the dishes and moved into the front room, where we watched some inane television programs until ten o’clock or so.

Just after he turned off the set Duff said out of the blue, “I’ve done some bad things, I know, Mother, but I didn’t kill Stephanie.”

“All right, Duff, I believe you,” I said.

“Good night, Mother. Thank you for the nice birthday.”