Like a black hole, it would swallow her up in time.

She wondered where Ben was. Wondered if he had gone to the post office. Or the Tavern. Or the library.

She laced her fingers together on the table, them unlaced them and laid them flat on the inlaid tiles. Her hands were slender, straight, and efficient hands, their fingernails neatly filed and unpainted. After years of being washed umpteen times a day, moisturizing was little more than a placebo.

She had a worker's hands. They showed their forty-two years in every crease, every tiny scar, every vein that hadn't been as prominent the year before.

She sighed and looked at the window. Her reflection looked back, midnight black hair that was cut on an angle toward her chin to give a look of practical chic. Her face was pale and slim. She was a petite woman whose knowledge level had always added inches to her height.

Her knowledge level was zip now, making her feel small, forlorn, and powerless. She laced her fingers together again, unlaced them seconds later, then tucked them in her lap.

She thought about the past and how efficiently she had run her life, thought about the trauma of the present, worried about the future.

Once Dougie was off to college, it would be just Ben and her in ways that it had never, in the entire course of their marriage, ever been.

She heard Ben's car turn into the driveway and, shot through with sudden jitters, rose from the chair. There were things to do, always things to do. Idleness accomplished nothing and only left more to be done down the road. She could start dinner, or put in a load of laundry, or water the plants, or call the bank about the new bankcard that was overdue.

But she didn't do any of those things. It was as though the paralysis that was in command of her mind now spread to her knees. She sank limply down on the chair.

He parked the car. She heard the door slam shut, I heard his footsteps on the walk, then the steps. He opened the kitchen door, came in, and stopped short.

"Angie. I didn't know you were home."

"I parked in the garage," she said, wondering what would have happened if she hadn't, whether he would have driven on past. He wasn't pleased to see her, she could hear it in his voice. Uneasy, she rubbed her fingers together, steepling the thumbs.

ills something wrong?" he asked warily.

l She nearly laughed. Was something wrong? The most basic thing in their lives was wrong. She gaped at him.

I meant," he specified, "are you sick?"

She shook her head.

"Dougie isn't due home for two hours," he pointed out.

I know."

- He regarded her cautiously, waiting, poised at the door as though he could go either way, in or out, with a word.

"Why is it I feel like the guilty one?" she asked when she couldn't stand him staring at her, silent, guarded, subtly accusatory.

"You're the one having the affair, but lsm guilty. It doesn't make sense."

His look said it made sense indeed. She was the one who had deprived him during their marriage and driven him to seek comfort in another woman. If he had been wrong in taking a mistress, she had been wrong long before that.

She felt a heaviness in her legs, her middle, her arms, and for the first time wondered if there was a positive side to paralysis. It freed its victim from action, from response and responsibility.

But if she didn't act, no one would. Ben had always taken his lead from her, and she had never minded before. Right now, she did. She wished that for once he would be the initiator.

But she had trained him well. He waited.

Finally, with a sigh, she said, I think we have to talk."

"We?" Ben asked. "Or you?"

"You," she shot back, pouring into that single word every bit of the negative feeling she had. Ben had hurt her beyond belief.

Nothing she had done to him merited that. "I need you to tell me what's happening here. We go through the bare motions of life as usual, but it's a farce. Our family is falling apart.

We walk around each other. We avoid looking each other in the eye.

There's zero communication."

He didn't move a muscle.

"Ben?"

He shrugged. "What can I add? You just said it all."

She took a shaky breath. Old habits died hard, he wasn't helping in the least.

Quietly, wearily, humbly, she said, "Please, Ben. Tell me what you're thinking. What you're honestly thinking. I'm not telling you anything, I'm asking. I don't know what's going on in your mind. I don't know what you want. I don't know what I'm supposed to do."

"That's a change," he said.

She looked at her hands. "Okay. I deserved that." She looked away.

"But it's been a way of life, knowing what to do. I've always taken pride in it, and no oneincluding youever discouraged me from being that way. But I never thought I was putting you down. You may have felt that, but I didn't intend it. I was just being me."

"Little Miss Perfect."

She studied her hands. The force of his resentment continued to stun her with sharp, grazing blows. Gathering the tatters of her self-esteem, she said "Obviously not, or I wouldn't be sitting here right now. Talk to me, Ben. Tell me where we go next. Tell me what you want to happen. You say that I never hear you. I'm trying to do that now, but I can't hear unless you speak."

He stuck his hands in the waist of his cords and stood thinking for a while before finally saying, "Okay. We have to do something about Doug. He's annoyed with both of us right now.

I doubt he says any more to me than he does to you. I got a call from his Spanish teacher this morning asking if there was a Droblem at home."

"How did she know?" Angie asked in sudden horror. She suddenly imagined the whole world knew, and she was appalled.

"He failed a test yesterday. He's never done that before."

"Not by a long shot," Angie said, feeling an awful defeat. It wasn't the grade. No one made it through school without an F or two. He could make up the test or average it in with his others. That wasn't the point. The point was that he wouldn't have failed a test if he wasn't deeply upset.

"So," Ben said, "we have to talk with him."

Several weeks before, Angie would have done that on her own. But Ben had accused her of being controlling and manipulative. So she asked, "What should we say?"

He shifted one shoulder. "I don't know."