"The service will pick it up," said my mother.

"She means Natalie has no phone," said Pammy.

He asked for my address. My mother said, "It's hard to find."

He said all he needed was the address.

"I can take you there," my sister offered. "I'm showing a house at eleven that's two, three blocks from Natalie's."

Kris said later that they wore him down. Pammy was already in her coat, had collected her keys. "I'll run upstairs and give her a couple minutes' notice," she explained, "like I do when a seller's at home and I'm dropping by unannounced."

"If you insist," said Kris.

One Newton village away, I was bending at the waist, brushing my hair from the roots downward. Dressed in once-black corduroy jeans that had been mistakenly bleached and a simultaneously ruined black turtleneck, I had just shouldered my unmade Murphy bed up and into the wall. I heard running steps on my attic stairs at the same moment as Pammy's coy, "You have your first visitor."

I thought she meant only herself, so I yelled from underneath my hair, "Door's open"-prompting a lecture on the unlocked door and the trusting heart. I said, "Okay, enough, h.e.l.lo. Welcome to my new abode."

She shut the door behind her and hissed, "He's here. Kristofer. Downstairs. He came looking for you. He's adorable."

I shot up at the mention of his name, to the obvious delight of double agent O'Connor.

"He came to the office after going to the house first, but no one was there, so he went across the street and guess who helped him out? Sh.e.l.ley."

I led her to my door. "Thanks for bringing him. You can get back to work now."

When she didn't budge, I said, "If you're waiting for a tour, I'd prefer another time."

She put her hand on the doork.n.o.b, but turned back to me. "Aren't you going to change your clothes? Or at least make yourself up?"

I said, "Bye, Pamela. Send him up on your way out."

"He's nice," she said.

I walked her partway down my narrow stairs, held back until I heard brief good-byes and the back door bang behind her.

He didn't gallop up the stairs, and I didn't move. I took a few breaths to steady myself, then called his name.

"Can we talk down here?" he answered.

As soon as I walked across the kitchen threshold I understood that he was angry. His mouth and eyes had a downward cast to them, and his voice was combative. "I went to your house, but no one was there and a neighbor sent me to your mother's office."

"Pammy told me."

Neither one of us moved from our opposite sides of the Zinler kitchen. I tried, "It's nice to see you."

"I thought we were friends," he shot back. "I thought we'd be staying in touch."

"I thought so too."

"Your father said you were out for the evening, and always added something so I knew it was a date: 'She's at a movie. I a.s.sume they'll be going out for a m.u.f.fin after-' "

I laughed at "m.u.f.fin."

He said, "It's not funny, Natalie." He rattled a chair out from the square kitchen table and plunked himself down. "Is your father an idiot? Is he not capable of remembering a phone message?" He picked up the salt and pepper shakers-Kennedy and Khrushchev-and curled his hands around them as if they were c.o.c.kpit controls.

I said, "I called the minute I got the postcard-the minute after I had it out with my parents. And I made up my mind that if your mother didn't give you the message-"

"She told me! Unlike your parents, she left me a note-'Natalie called at six-thirty while you were out. Call her tomorrow.' "

He jumped, or so it seemed, to an unrelated topic. "Did Nelson call you last night?"

I said maybe he tried my parents'- "Of course he did! If I'd had another number, I would have tried it myself."

I asked calmly why Nelson would have called me.

Kris closed his eyes and sighed with the sheer fruitlessness of it all. "An idiotic idea I had. To go someplace. The three of us."

"Where?"

"Away. The Halcyon. A hotel in New York that a friend of his from Cornell runs." He shrugged: stupid.

"New York," I repeated. Neutral ground, and no parents coiled in the gra.s.s. Am I forgiven? I wondered. "Is it in Manhattan?" I asked.

Kris slouched in his seat, as if this were the delicate part that Nelson would have negotiated had he reached me. "Actually," he said, "it's in the Catskills."

"The Catskills," I repeated. "Is that where I come in?"

He waved that away. "All his friends from school work at hotels or run them. They majored in it. It was in the cla.s.s notes, about Robin-'It is with great sadness' blah, blah, blah-and he got, like, a half-dozen invitations, some from people he doesn't even remember."

"Is this a Jewish hotel by any chance?"

Kris said, "I don't know. What makes a hotel Jewish?"

"What's his friend's name?"

"Linette."

"Linette what?"

"Feldman."

I laughed. Kris said there was nothing funny about the name Feldman.

"It's just a coincidence? You two guys head off for a kosher hotel and you decide, after all this time, to swing by and get me?"

He repeated "after all this time" acidly. "Like I haven't tried? Like I wasn't the one who called every other day, and now show up to get a reading on this thing? And so what if I talked him into it? What's so bad about one brother enlisting another brother to rig up a weekend that might make one of us feel better?"

It was a signed confession, and one I should have accepted with grace. But I had inherited Audrey Cohen Marx's tendency to keep jabbing after the bell had rung. "Don't you think it's a little insulting?" I pushed on. "Like, 'Here's a place we could bring Natalie'?"

Kris stood up and, striving for a dramatic exit gesture, fastened the one open snap on his vest.

"Kris," I said.

He didn't look at me, but surveyed the room. "The last time we were alone?" he said. "In the kitchen? I had the impression-correct me if I'm wrong-that you and I were going to kiss."

I said, "That was my impression, too."

"But you took off."

"I know."

"You shook my hand in front of twenty people and drove off with your parents and I never heard from you again."

I was studying his face, having forgotten that his eyes were a light tortoisesh.e.l.l brown and that there was a faint scar perpendicular to his upper lip. I saw a muscle twitch under one eye. "How mad are you?" I asked.

He said, his voice still hard, "It's negotiable." After hesitating, he sat down and folded his arms across his chest, not meeting my eyes.

"Want to take off your vest?"

He shook his head.

"Tea or coffee?"

He said, "No, thanks."

I said, "You're right. I did run out like a brat. I went home, I slept a lot. Watched TV. Then it was New Year's. Had Chinese takeout with my parents-sweet-and-sour chicken. Awful. Then it was Valentine's Day. My father brought me chocolate-covered cherries. I worked in my mother's office. Cooked them dinner most nights. They brought me breakfast in bed on my birthday-poached eggs. I developed a rash on my hands that the doctor said was actually in my head."

"Due to ...?"

"Stress."

"What kind of stress?"

"Personal," I said. "Emotional. Romantic."

He swallowed, still didn't look up.

"I saw a couple of doctors and they gave me creams." I held out my red hands. "See for yourself."

He unfolded his arms, examined my hands unhappily, as if they were gift gloves of the wrong size and color.

"Neurodermat.i.tis," I continued. "The cream treats the symptoms, but I'm supposed to be working on the underlying cause."

He said, "I didn't break out in any rashes, but I could have."

I said, "If I had known, I would have called you back immediately."

He wasn't ready to call a truce, but he didn't take his hands away. Pipes carrying hot water knocked inside a wall. A radiator hissed. Finally Kris asked, "Why did you leave like that? How do you think it made me feel?"

I said I didn't know. I wasn't sure what had or hadn't happened on Christmas night. Maybe I had misunderstood; maybe I'd been standing under mistletoe and had misinterpreted his near-kiss. Because nothing was said afterward, was it? Not that night or in the morning.

"Because it was obvious-"

"The message I got was, You were welcome here, Natalie, until things got personal."

Kris said, "Bulls.h.i.t. Not from me, you didn't. Not from Nelson, either, or my father, and certainly not from the Fifes."

I raised my eyebrows to elicit the unspoken name.

"It would be helpful," he said, "if you could differentiate between me and my mother."

I said I did. I knew from the first moment I arrived that he was my ally- "Ally! Is that like buddy? Because we all know what that means."

I said, "Give me a break here. I'm thrilled to see you. Maybe I haven't said that yet." My hands were lying on his, lightly, clinically. I inched them forward to stroke the soft skin at his wrists.

He looked stumped, as if trying to decipher an impenetrable clue. "What does this mean?" he asked, staring at our hands.

I said, "I'll go with you."

There was the awkward matter of the extra night. Linette Feldman was expecting the Berry brothers for the weekend, and this was Thursday. One constraint, I explained, was that I was meeting my future boss at three at a restaurant-supply store.

"Can you put it off until next week?"

I said, "What is it that you do for a living, anyway?"

"Night manager. The Inn at Lake Devine."

"There's no such job."

He shrugged. "They feed me and don't rent out my bed, so I do what needs to be done. Nelson was supposed to be general manager someday, but that got screwed up when he went into teaching. So I'm the crown prince until they decide if Gretel's better suited to the family business."

"How is Gretel?" I asked.

We were on our second pink grapefruit, my only provision. He said, "She's the same." He sprinkled sugar from my landlord's bowl onto another half and asked, "What are your other constraints?"

I said, "Do you know if it's expensive?"

"Nelson is Linette's guest," he said, "and you'll be mine."

"Is this a date?" I asked.

He looked dismayed at having to revisit what had already been settled. I jumped in to explain I meant Nelson-Nelson and this Feldman friend. Was this invitation purely a professional courtesy?

"Nelson would say that ..."

"But?"

"He's very lonely."