"I know," Sister Bertha said, "that this person must be feeling very overworked, very beset with problems, and he's casting about for a solution. But it doesn't seem to occur to him that he could bring it up at Prayer Meeting."

She sat down.

Ian's cheeks felt hot.

Surely private detectives were sworn to secrecy, weren't they? Just like lawyers, or doctors. Weren't they?

Reverend Emmett looked uncertain. He said, "Well..." and glanced around at the other worshipers. His eyes did not linger noticeably on Ian, although of course he must suspect. "Does this person wish to ask for our prayers?" he said.

No response. Just a few rustles and whispers.

"In that case," Reverend Emmett said, "we won't intrude. Let us pray, instead, for all all of us. For all of us to know that we can bring our problems to God whenever we feel ready to let go of them." of us. For all of us to know that we can bring our problems to God whenever we feel ready to let go of them."

He raised his arms and the silence fell, as if he had somehow cast it forth in front of him.

Sister Bertha is a nosy-bones, Ian thought distinctly. And I hate that tomato-soup color she dyes her hair And I hate that tomato-soup color she dyes her hair.

After the Benediction, he was the first one out the door. He left behind even Mrs. Jordan, who most likely would want to walk home with him, and he set off at a brisk, angry pace. So the last thing he expected to hear was Reverend Emmett calling his name. "Brother Ian!"

Ian stopped and turned.

The man must have run the whole way. He must have left his flock unattended, his Bible open on the counter, his church lit up and unlocked. But he wasn't even breathing hard. He approached at a saunter, seemingly absorbed in slipping on a cardigan the same color as the dusk.

"May I tag along?" he asked.

Ian shrugged.

They set off together more slowly.

"Of course, it does come down to whether a person feels ready to let go," Reverend Emmett said in the most conversational tone.

Ian kicked a Dixie cup out of his path.

"Some people prefer to hug their problems to themselves," Reverend Emmett said.

Ian wheeled on him, clenching his fists in his pockets. He said, "This is my life? This is all I get? It's so settled! It's so cut and dried! After this there's no changing! I just lean into the burden of those children forever, is that what you're saying?" is my life? This is all I get? It's so settled! It's so cut and dried! After this there's no changing! I just lean into the burden of those children forever, is that what you're saying?"

"No," Reverend Emmett told him.

"You said that! You said to lean into my burden!"

"But those children will be grown in no time," Reverend Emmett said. "They are not the burden I meant. The burden is forgiveness." are not the burden I meant. The burden is forgiveness."

"Okay," Ian said. "Fine. How much longer till I'm forgiven?"

"No, no. The burden is that you you must forgive." must forgive."

"Me?" Ian said. He stared at Reverend Emmett. "Forgive who?"

"Why, your brother and his wife, of course."

Ian said nothing.

Finally Reverend Emmett asked, "Shall we walk on?"

So they did. They passed a lone man waiting at a bus stop, a shopkeeper locking up his store. Each footstep, Ian felt, led him closer to something important. He was acutely conscious all at once of motion, of flux and possibility. He felt he was an arrow-not an arrow shot by God but an arrow heading toward God, and if it took every bit of this only life he had, he believed that he would get there in the end.

7.

Organized Marriage.

It was Agatha who came up with the notion of finding Ian a wife. Agatha was graduating that June; she'd had word she'd been accepted at her first-choice college; she would soon be leaving the family forever. And one night in April she walked into the living room and told the other two, "I'm worried about Ian."

Thomas and Daphne glanced over at her. (There was a commercial on just then, anyhow.) She stood in the doorway with her arms folded, her tortoiseshell glasses propped on top of her head in a purposeful, no-nonsense manner. "Who will keep him company after we're gone?" she asked.

"You're the only one going," Daphne told her. "He's still got me and Thomas."

"Not for long," Agatha said.

Their eyes slid back to the Late Late Movie.

But they knew she had a point. In a sense, Thomas was already gone. He was a freshman in high school now and he had a whole outside existence-a raft of friends and a girlfriend and an extracurricular schedule so full that he was seldom home for supper. As for Daphne, well, their grandma liked to say that Daphne was eleven going on eighty. She dressed like a tiny old Gypsy-muddled layers of clothing, all tatters and gold thread, purchased on her own at thrift shops-and was generally off in the streets somewhere managing very capably.

"Pretty soon all he'll have will be Grandma and Grandpa," Agatha said. "He'll be taking care of them like always and shopping and driving the car and helping with the housework. What kind of life is that? I think he ought to get married."

Now she had their attention.

"And since he doesn't seem to know any women, I think we'll have to find him one."

"Miss Pennington," Daphne said instantly.

"Who?"

"Miss Ariana Pennington, my teacher," Daphne said.

It was just that easy.

Miss Pennington had been teaching fifth grade for only the past two years, so neither Thomas nor Agatha had had her when they were fifth-graders. Thomas knew her by sight, though. Every boy in the neighborhood knew her by sight. Not even the youngest, it seemed, was immune to her hourglass figure or her mane of extravagant curly brown hair. Agatha, on the other hand, had to be shown who it was they were talking about.

So on a Friday afternoon just before the last bell, when Thomas was supposedly in a Leaders of Tomorrow meeting and Agatha had study hall, they met at the old cracked porcelain water fountain behind Poe High and walked the two blocks to the grade school. Almost no other students were out at this hour, but Thomas greeted by name the few who were-those excused early for dental appointments and such. "Thomas!" they said, and, "Yo, man, what you up to?" Agatha merely stalked on, blank-faced. She wore a bulbous down jacket over a skirt that stopped in the middle of her chunky bare knees-not an outfit any of her classmates would have been caught dead in, but then Agatha never concerned herself with appearances. She was supremely indifferent, impervious, striding on without Thomas until he ran to catch up with her.

At Reese Elementary Thomas took the lead, choosing a side door instead of the main entrance and climbing the stairs two steps at a time. Outside Room 223 he paused, turned toward Agatha, and beckoned.

Through the small window they saw rows of fifth-graders bent over their books. Miss Pennington walked among them, tall and willowy, pausing first at this desk and then at that one to answer questions. You would never take her for a woman of the seventies. In an era when teachers had started wearing pants to work, Miss Pennington wore a silky white blouse and a flaring black skirt cinched tightly at the waist, sheer nylon stockings, and high-heeled patent leather pumps-the sexy, constricting clothes of the fifties. Her hair was shoulder-length and her fingernails were sharp red spears, and her makeup-when she turned as if by instinct and glanced toward the door-was seen to be vivid and expertly applied: deep red lipstick emphasizing her full lips, and plummy rouge and luminous blue eyeshadow. Thomas and Agatha stepped back hastily, out of her line of vision. They looked at each other.

"Well?" Thomas asked.

"She's kind of...brightly colored, isn't she?"

"Oh, Agatha, you don't know anything. She's gorgeous! Women are supposed supposed to look that way. That's the type guys dream about." to look that way. That's the type guys dream about."

"Oh," Agatha said.

"She's perfect," Thomas told her.

"All right," Agatha said crisply. "Let's get this thing rolling, then."

Daphne told Ian he needed to make an appointment for a parent-teacher conference. "Conference?" Ian said. "Now what'd you do?" what'd you do?"

"I didn't do anything! How come you always think the worst of me? I just want you to talk to my teacher about my homework."

"What about it?"

"Well, like, are you supposed to help me with it, or let me do it on my own?"

"But I already let you do it on your own. What are you saying, you need help?"

"It might be a good idea."

"Why don't I just go ahead and help, then? We'll set aside a time each evening."

"No, first I think you should ask Miss Pennington," Daphne told him.

He gazed down at her. He and she were doing the supper dishes (she had offered to dry) while the other two sat at the kitchen table, ostensibly studying. Now Agatha said, "It wouldn't hurt to show the teacher you take an interest, Ian."

"Well, of course I take an interest," Ian told her. "Good grief, I'm one of the grade mothers. I baked six dozen cookies for Parents' Night and delivered them in person."

"You never went in for a private conference, though," Daphne said.

"I thought that was an improvement. Your first full year in school I haven't been issued a summons."

"Well, all right," Daphne said sorrowfully. "If you don't want to keep the lines of communication open..."

"Keep the what? Lines of what? Well, shoot," Ian said, setting a stack of bowls in the sink. "Fine, I'll go. Are you satisfied?"

Daphne nodded. So did the other two, but Ian had his back to them and he didn't see.

Daphne reported that the parent-teacher conference went very well. "He was wearing that grown-up shirt we bought him for Christmas," she told Thomas and Agatha, "the one he has to iron. He came to school straight from work and he had his wood-chip smell about him. I'm pretty sure she noticed."

"Maybe he should've worn a suit," Thomas said. "Miss Pennington's always so dressy. We don't want her to think he's just a laborer."

"He is is just a laborer," Daphne said. "What's wrong with that?" just a laborer," Daphne said. "What's wrong with that?"

"Yes, but first she should see he's intelligent and all," Thomas said. "Then afterwards she could find out what he does for a living."

"Well, too late now. Anyhow: so I used their first names in the introductions, just like Agatha told me. I said, 'Ian Bedloe, Ariana Pennington. I believe you-all have met before.'"

"It should have been the other way around," Agatha told her. "'Ariana Pennington, Ian Bedloe.'"

"Oh, big deal, Agatha. So then they shook hands and Miss Pennington asked Ian what she could do for him. They sat down at two desks in the back of the room and I stood next to Ian."

"You were supposed to leave them on their own."

"I couldn't. They sort of, like, included me. Ian said, 'Daphne, here, wanted me to discuss with you ...' and all like that."

"Well, I don't guess it matters much at this stage," Thomas told Agatha. "They wouldn't right away start making out or anything."

"Miss Pennington wore her blue scoop-necked dress," Daphne said. "We all just wait for that dress. It's got a lacy kind of petticoat showing underneath, either attached or not attached; we never can make up our minds. And usually she pins this heart-shaped locket pin to her front but not this time, and I was glad. We think there may be a boyfriend's photograph inside."

"You mean she might already have somebody?" Thomas asked, frowning.

"Who cares? Now that she's met Ian."

"She liked him, then," Agatha said.

"She had to like him. He was sitting where the sun hit his hair and turned it almost yellow on top, you know how it does. He kept his cap off and he didn't say anything religious, not once. Miss Pennington kept smiling at him and tipping her head while he talked."

"Gosh, this is going better than we'd hoped," Thomas said.

"And when he called her 'Miss Pennington,' she put her hand on his arm and said, 'Please. Ariana.'"

"Gosh."

"She told him I was one of her very best students and she didn't know why I was concerned about my homework, but she appreciated his coming and she just thought it was so refreshing to see a man involve himself in his children's education."

"She did understand we're not really really his, didn't she?" Agatha asked. "She knows he's not married, doesn't she?" his, didn't she?" Agatha asked. "She knows he's not married, doesn't she?"

"She must, because she had my file opened out in front of her. And besides, Ian told her, 'It's not only me who's involved. Both their grandparents used to be teachers, and they help quite a bit, too.'"

"Well, I wish he hadn't of said that. It's mostly mostly him, after all." him, after all."

Thomas said, "No, this way is better. Now she doesn't think she'll be totally saddled with kids when she marries him."

"Everyone in my school is going to die of jealousy," Daphne said. "Boy! I can't wait to see DeeDee Hutchins's face, and that stuck-up Lolly Kaplan."

"So get to the end," Agatha told her. "Did you do like we planned about dinner?"

"I did exactly like we planned. When Ian got up to go he said, 'Well, I really do thank you, Miss Pennington-'"