Kay's travel agent was the one who told her that Stuart was claiming squatter's rights and, by all accounts from the clerks in the hardware store, was about to put a wood-burning stove into his shack. He'd ordered a set of the finest fish-scaling knives made in Bar Harbor, Maine, and bought a pair of knee-high boots for walking through the marsh. He'd started going to the AA meetings at the Episcopal church on Wednesday nights, though as far as anyone could tell, he didn't have the slightest drinking problem.

Kay drove over to the north beach the following morning. Stuart wasn't her responsibility, she knew that. Still, there was such a thing as a clear conscience. She'd just take a peek. She parked at the beach lot, then walked the rest of the way on the road, which curved around themarshes and was often filled with mud puddles. A green heron fishing in the reeds frightened her. That was completely ridiculous. She was a member of the Audubon Society, she had been to this beach a thousand times before and had no reason on earth to be nervous. The tumbledown shacks were scattered along the beach, but she knew Stuart's as soon as she saw it. There was a wheelbarrow propped against the far wall and, leading from the front door to the marsh, a path lined on either side with sh.e.l.ls.

Oyster sh.e.l.ls, she could tell that from where she stood on the road, creamy white with purple hearts, dropped from above by gulls to split open on the rocks, then carefully gathered by Stuart. Kay stood there on the road for so long that the heron took her for a statue and came close enough for her to see its heart beating in its chest. By the time she'd turned and walked back to her car, Kay had decided to put off her trip to Jamaica, at least until after Christmas. The weather was good enough right where she was.

Summer was ending with pale golden sunlight and a sky full of geese, already headed south to the Carolinas, where the beaches, she'd heard, were excellent, although not quite as fine as this one, which was just two and a half miles from her front door.

In the last week of August, Marco Polo was found in his driveway with his throat slashed. Jeff Carson covered him with a beach towel, and toward evening he buried him in the backyard, beneath the forsythia, where the dog had always hidden on days when he was to be taken to the vet for a bath. People whose backyards ab.u.t.ted the Carsons' yard pulled down their shades and turned away, rather than watch Miriam throw herself on the dog's grave.

That was too painful to see, it was bad enough that everyone could hear her wailing, all through the night, and that they remembered how she had fed the ba.s.set hound cream and called him sweetie when she took him out for his morning walk.

For days afterward there were bloodstains in the driveway. People kept their pets inside, and George Tenney, who came to comfort Miriam and wound up with her hysterical when he told her they'd probably never find the culprit, took to suggesting that people build kennel runs for their dogs and lock their front doors. By Labor Day, tempers all over seemed to flare, perhaps because of a heat wave, a final burst of summer that often accompanied the beginning of the school term.

Mich.e.l.le Altero had several overwrought girls come to the guidance office on those first days of school, there were rumors that the dog had been killed by a maniac, a slasher who wandered through the marshes and along Cemetery Road looking for his next victim. Mich.e.l.le gave each girl smelling salts and a good talking to, then sent her back to homeroom. But the truth was, even Mich.e.l.le couldn't concentrate on her work. She had tried to discuss with Paul whatever it was that was wrong.

"I just don't feel well," she'd told him. "Things aren't right. "

"Okay," he'd said. "What can we do about it?"

Well, she'd dropped it right then and there, he'd a.s.sumed she wanted him to fix something, but it wasn't like that. It was something inside, some kind of loneliness, a bitter thing for which there was no easy cure. She felt as if her one pleasure in life was her twelve-year-old, Jenny, a sweet, genuine girl who was still enough of a child to take Mich.e.l.le's hand occasionally when they walked down the street and who often asked to have stories read to her when she was sick in bed. Jenny had been particularly helpful lately, perhaps only because she wasafraid her mother's temper might be unleashed. She'd done the laundry the week before as best she could, but accidentally had mixed in the dark colors with the whites, she'd fixed macaroni and cheese one day and brownies from a mix the next.

When Mich.e.l.le saw the plate of unevenly cut brownies on the kitchen table she had burst into tears.

It just wouldn't do. She would have to snap out of this, ready or not.

She had her hair permed, then she set about seriously to work and didn't think about the fact that her husband didn't understand her and her older daughter didn't talk to her, and it was going quite well, actually, this new regime, until the third Friday of the month, a lovely crisp day when the girls at school could at last wear their new corduroy slacks and their denim jackets. She andJulie Wynn had just led a seminar in drug awareness for interested faculty members, and Mich.e.l.le was on her way back to her office when she saw Lydia and Connor beside the water fountain. Lydia's arms were around him, she had to stand on her tiptoes to kiss him, and she didn't stop kissing him until the bell for cla.s.s had rung.

Connor saw Mich.e.l.le first. He took Lydia's hand and nodded. Lydia stared across the hallway at her mother as if she were a total stranger.

"Get into my office," Mich.e.l.le said to her daughter. "Now."

"She's only late to cla.s.s because of me," Connor said, unaware that no one was interested in what he had to say. Not about this.

"You're not my boss," Lydia said to her mother. She was wearing long silver earrings that chimed when she tossed her head. "I don't have to do whatever you tell me."

"Oh, yes you do," Mich.e.l.le said.

"Technically, she really doesn't have to," Connor said. "There's a five-minute grace period after the bell."

His voice broke, but his eyes were steady and clear. He was so tall that Mich.e.l.le had to look up to see how blue they were. She was the first one Robin had called, minutes after he'd been born, and she'd sat up all that night to finish the baby blanket she'd been crocheting.

Blue and white, a basket st.i.tch, and Robin had marveled over the match with his eyes.

"Don't you dare talk to me," Mich.e.l.le told Connor. "Don't say one d.a.m.n word to me."

"You wonder why I don't tell you anything?" Lydia said. "You wonder why I despise you?"

"This is not going to continue," Mich.e.l.le said.

She left school, although dismissal wasn't for another hour, and drove to Robin's in less than ten minutes, probably ruining the gearshift on the way. Robin was out in the driveway, shoveling mulch into the bed of her truck.

"What?" she said when Mich.e.l.le came tearing up the driveway.

"What's wrong?""Your son," Mich.e.l.le said. She was standing in mulch up to her ankles, and her face was so hot she looked sunburned.

Immediately Robin thought car accident. She leaned against her truck for support. She used to worry about that when Roy worked at night and there was ice on the roads, sometimes she wouldn't fall asleep until she heard him come home.

"He's the one that Lydia wouldn't tell me about. It's Connor."

"No," Robin said. "They hate each other."

Mich.e.l.le took off her jacket and tried to breathe deeply.

"Don't they?" Robin said, more uncertain now.

"All this time, he was the one she was running off to meet. He's like his G.o.dd.a.m.n father. I'd bet he'd f.u.c.k anything, just like Roy. But he's not getting my daughter."

Robin took a step back. She refused to believe she had heard Mich.e.l.le correctly. As a matter of fact, her ears were ringing, she could have easily misunderstood.

"It's up to you to stop him," Mich.e.l.le said. "I want you to keep him away from Lydia."

Robin looked at Connor's bike, which he'd left near the back gate.

Just the other night he suddenly decided he would go see his father, or at least that was what he'd told her. Robin had been so grateful to have that time with Stephen that she hadn't thought to question Connor.

But then she'd happened to look outside as he was getting on his bike, and he'd looked so joyful, intoxicated almost, that she'd been thrilled by his youth.

"Did you hear what I said?" Mich.e.l.le asked. "He's not to see her."

"It's not up to me," Robin said. "I can't stop them."

"You'd better," Mich.e.l.le told her. "You started it."

"Wait a minute," Robin said. "Are you blaming me?"

"Because you always let Connor get away with murder? You never disciplined him, not ever. And now you're more concerned with who you're s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g than what your son is doing every night. And don't tell me you're not at it with this a.s.sistant of yours. I can see right through you."

"We'd better stop." Robin was truly frightened of where this had led them. "Right now."

"Maybe I'd better call Roy," Mich.e.l.le said. "Maybe what's going on is statutory rape. This is the sort of thing that runs in families."

"Maybe you'd better f.u.c.k yourself."

"Oh," Mich.e.l.le said, "is that the way it is?"

Robin grabbed her shovel and started to clear away the mulch. Her breathing was coming too hard, but she refused to cry, and all the tears she might have shed went downward, until they formed a lump in herthroat so large she couldn't have spoken even if she'd known what to say.

"Okay," Mich.e.l.le said. "Fine. That's the way it is."

Robin kept shoveling while Mich.e.l.le got into her car and pulled away.

Once, a long time ago, they had painted a sign with tempera on a large piece of pressed wood--NO ONE ALLOWED--and hung it on the trunk of the tree they most loved to climb, the big oak at the back of the estate.

For years it did not matter if anyone else in the world existed, no one was allowed past the gates of their friendship. Robin's hands shook as she finished her work, but she kept on going, pulling the hose around the side of the house to wash the last bits of crushed mulch off the driveway. When she saw Connor and Lydia approaching, she turned off the hose and wound it in a circle so it wouldn't get tangled. She knew enough to wait and let them do the talking.

"We were going to tell you," Connor said.

Robin looked at her son and saw how young he was and how little he knew, and she wanted to weep. Instead, she wiped her hands clean on her jeans.

"When?" Robin said. "After your firstborn arrived?"

" You don't have to worry about that, " Lydia said. "That's taken care of."

Lydia had always been this way, serious and matter-of fact. When she was six she had asked Robin how she could stand to touch the bonemeal she fed to her plants.

"Well, I would demand to know who those bones came from," Lydia had said.

Robin had thrown her arms around the girl, and although she felt like doing that now, all she did was nod and say, "That's good."

"My mother's just a b.i.t.c.h," Lydia said. Her face was drawn, she sounded much too harsh and grown-up.

But Robin knew this wasn't the truth, it was simply that Mich.e.l.le refused to see that not everything made sense, love least of all.

In a little while Stephen would be coming back from the market-he had gone off to do Old d.i.c.k's weekly shopping, and would drag home the groceries in the twowheeled cart Ginny had used for marketing before the problem with her legs. Robin's grandfather was extremely pleased with this arrangement, because Stephen always bought two apple pies, the fresh ones, from the bakery aisle, and together he and Stephen had somehow managed to convince Ginny there wasn't a bit of sugar in the recipe. Nothing could be done once people fell in love, really, there was nothing anyone could say. Let a chart be printed up, predicting doom and disaster, and unfurled on the kitchen table. Let it be made out of steel and lead, and still it would burn up like an old piece of parchment. Every time she saw Stephen from her kitchen window, Robin felt some ridiculous, incurable hope inside her. Every time she set out the cobalt-blue dinner plates and the silverware, every time she kissed him, every time she saw the way he looked at her, it happened all over again. Who would choose to stop that? Who would even try?

Lydia and Connor were both staring at Robin, waiting for whatever camenext. They looked so nervous, standing there in the driveway, their schoolbooks tucked under their arms, that Robin felt the lump in her throat begin to dissolve.

"Why don't you stay for dinner?" she said to Lydia.

The minute she'd uttered the invitation, she knew that if Connor had been just a little older, or a little younger, he would have thrown his arms around her. As it was, his look of grat.i.tude would have to be enough. All she could hope for was that when it came time for him to judge her, he wouldn't have forgotten what every boy should know. He wasn't the only one who wanted something to last longer than a lifetime.

He wasn't the only one who knew how that felt.

FORTY YEARS AGO Ginny Thorne had believed that her life was already over, and she couldn't have been more glad of it. She'd been cleaning house for Mr. Aaron long enough that the house practically ran itself, and her girls were grown and moved away, and she could finally allow herself to consider how much she would prefer to die rather than continue with this thing that had been given her as a life. She scribbled good-bye notes to her daughters and left her gold necklaces in two white envelopes, with each girl's name printed carefully on the flap to ensure that there'd be no arguing. Every night when she lay down and closed her eyes she said farewell to the earth as she knew it, and every morning when she opened her eyes and found herself still alive she cursed whatever power it was that controlled her fate.

No one who knew her would have ever imagined the depth of her bitterness or guessed that she thought the human race horrid and evil.

She played bingo every Thursday night and seemed just as cheerful as always, once a week she took Mr. Aaron's silverware out of the teak storage boxes and polished each fork and spoon, although no one had thought to use them since Mrs. Aaron had died. Had she been asked, all those years back, if she believed in heaven and h.e.l.l, she would have had to say she supposed she did, at least it was true of h.e.l.l, because she was condemned to it, of that she was certain.

It was the little things that set her husband off--an apple not quartered correctly, the telephone ringing at suppertime, four rainy days in a row. She never knew what would anger Donald, and she wouldn't know until bedtime-- when the girls were at home he'd waited till they'd gone to sleep, growing more furious with each pa.s.sing hour.

He rarely left marks. Instead, he would twist her arm until the bones popped and pull her hair so that it came out in clumps. He would call her names she wouldn't dream of repeating and make her beg for forgiveness--for what, it really didn't matter. Once, he had covered her face with a pillow until she blacked out, and as she did, she a.s.sumed that the end had finally come, and she was grateful. When the life rushed back into her, she locked herself in the bathroom and wept.

She might never have fought back if he hadn't come after her up at Mr.

Aaron's house. It was a cold, rainy day and she was in the kitchen, she lit a fire in the fieldstone fireplace, which was so large a pine sapling could have fit neatly between the andirons, then set about mopping the floor. Every day before she left for home, she placed Mr.

Aaron's dinner on the kitchen table, since he didn't care to eat alone in the dining room. Tonight she had fixed him lamb chops and peas, and she was about to pull the dinner rolls out of the oven when she heard Donald's car coming down the gravel driveway. Only something awful, she knew, would make him come after her here instead of waiting for bedtime.

Quickly, she thought of things she might have done wrong, but the listwas endless, and by the time he walked through the side door, she'd given up trying to guess.

"You wh.o.r.e." Those were the first words out of Donald's mouth, right there in Mr. Aaron's kitchen.

He began to berate her for leaving the doors in their house unlocked, he'd found them that way when he came home from the hardware store, where he was a clerk, and maybe they'd been left unlocked for a reason.

Some man, that's what he was thinking, in spite of the fact that at this point in her life, Ginny wanted nothing whatsoever to do with men.

Donald was still good-looking, and he had a polite sort of voice, which made every wicked thing he said feel doubly wounding. But perhaps because the kitchen was larger than their own living room, and the wood in the fireplace popped, hard and loud, like a shotgun, his words seemed more puny than usual.

"This isn't the place," Ginny found herself saying, and to her surprise, she meant it.

"You're telling me what to do?" Donald said. "Is that it?"

This time when he went for her, she moved away instead of simply closing her eyes. Her back was to the hearth and she felt as though her blood were boiling. Years and years later she still remembered the intensity of her single thought: I will not let him get me fired.

When Donald grabbed her hair, she reached for the iron poker beside the fireplace, a rush of soot circled toward her and blackened her face.

He was pulling the hair right out of her head, and she was thinking that if Mr. Aaron had any idea of what was going on under his roof, he'd get rid of her in a second and then she'd be trapped at home, in a house she had come to despise simply because it belonged to her husband. She was in such a panic thinking of this that she didn't notice when Richard Aaron walked through the kitchen door, drawn by the scent of dinner rolls. By that time Donald had grabbed her around the throat, as if he intended to break her neck, and that was when she hit him with the poker, as hard as she'd ever hit anything in her life.

Donald staggered backward, his head had been smashed open. As he fell to the floor he went for her one last time, grabbing out such a large handful of hair that from that time forward Ginny had a bald spot on the side of her head. By then, the dinner rolls were burned black.

Ginny stood exactly where she was, her shoes in a pool of blood, as Richard Aaron went to the phone and called the police. All she could think of was that she had just mopped the floor, and now it was ruined.

"It's Donald Thorne," Richard Aaron told Sam Tenney, George's father, with whom Aaron occasionally played poker. "He's slipped on my wet kitchen floor and managed to crack his head in two."

"I killed him," Ginny said, after Richard Aaron had hung up the phone.

It was a simple self-evident fact, and Donald had always been irritated by the way she stated what was already obvious, but Richard Aaron hadn't seemed to notice there'd been a murder. He ate a blackened dinner roll, then wiped the sooty crumbs off his vest.

"The h.e.l.l you did," he said. He took the poker out of Ginny's hand and held it in the fire, to burn away the blood, then returned it to itsproper place. "He killed himself."

That night Ginny didn't go home. She moved into the apartment above the garage, thinking it was only temporary, but then, when Mr. Aaron's grandchildren came up from Miami, she stayed on and sold the house she hated, dividing the profit between her two girls. She remained when it became clear that Mr. Aaron's son had lost all his father's fortune, and even after Robin and Stuart had grown up and moved out it didn't seem right just to leave.

When the big house began to fall apart and there was no money left to repair the roof and pay for the heating bills, Richard Aaron moved into the carriage house with her, and the fact that he often couldn't pay her weekly salary seemed perfectly natural as well. Through all that, they never said a word about what had happened in the kitchen, even though Ginny knew that her life had started that day. She'd begun to believe in heaven. Each morning when she woke up she found herself awed by the shape of the clouds, the color of the sky, and for that she had no one to thank but Mr. Aaron.

One morning in October she woke with a headache, but she chose to ignore it. Later, when the pain spread to her arm, she knew it was another stroke. She'd had a series of little strokes that she'd failed to mention to anyone, preferring to think of them as blackouts, but this was a bad one. When Old d.i.c.k called for his tea, she couldn't answer.

When her older daughter, Nancy, phoned, Ginny picked up the receiver, then could make only small croaking sounds, as if she'd been turned into a frog. By evening she was able to convince herself that she was on the mend, but when she brought Old d.i.c.k his supper he wasn't so easily fooled.

"I don't like the way you look," he announced.

"Well, that's nothing new," she shot back.

Old d.i.c.k asked for the phone, insisting he wanted to call Robin, but in fact he was calling Ginny's daughter. At seven Nancy arrived, and she and Old d.i.c.k both decided that the time had come for someone to look after Ginny. Old d.i.c.k asked again and again if the nursing home in New Jersey was good enough for Ginny, and her daughter a.s.sured him again and again that it was. Ginny's suitcases were packed and brought down to the car. Still she refused to leave. She went into Old d.i.c.k's room and locked the door behind her so Nancy wouldn't interfere.

"I'm not ready to retire," Ginny said.

"Fine." Old d.i.c.k nodded. "You're fired."