"We're talking recipes," I lied.

"I don't have the help to do anything fancy," said Mrs. Crowley, her upper arms shaking from the friction of desiccated cheese against metal.

"Maybe I can help," I said. "What needs to be done for tonight?"

"All done," she said, tight-lipped.

"What are we having?" Kris asked.

"Hot turkey sandwiches and Italian lasagna."

Kris and I exchanged looks down the length of her chipped, white enamel work table. I continued to watch her as if I were interested in her craftsmanship. "It's nice that you take the trouble to grate fresh cheese," I said.

"I don't throw anything out," she said.

"I could make a meat sauce for you, if that would help. For the lasagna."

"That's Natalie," Kris explained. "She thinks cooking is entertainment."

Mrs. Crowley harrumphed as if to say, She would. "Sauce is made." She pointed her chin toward the pantry, home of jumbo cans and gallon jars.

"You know what?" I tried again. "What if I made one extra dish, just to entertain myself? A third option."

"Like what?" she said.

"Mind if I poke around?"

I opened the cooler and saw bricks of margarine, milk crates, egg crates, slabs of bacon, sides of salt pork, a fifty-pound bag of Spanish onions, the requisite bus buckets and stainless-steel pans, cabbages, potatoes, carrots. I asked, trying not to sound judgmental, "Mrs. Crowley? Do you have any other vegetables?"

"Such as?"

I didn't dare p.r.o.nounce the first five that defiantly crossed my mind-Belgian endive, watercress, haricots verts, celery root, artichokes-so I said, "Maybe spinach? Or broccoli?"

"In the freezer," she said primly, as if anyone who called herself a cook should know where vegetables came from.

I opened the freezer and poked around among the plastic sacks of lima beans, brussels sprouts, broccoli spears, chopped spinach, rutabaga, crinkle-cut carrots, crinkle-cut french fries, corn Niblets, peas, pearl onions, and mixed vegetables. "You certainly have a great selection," I said.

She allowed a vain smile. "I have a B.S. in nutrition."

Underneath the sacks, I spotted small clear bags of something not packaged by Birds Eye-flat, stiff strips of something mousy brown. I took out one packet, examined it, recognized its contents. "Mushrooms!" I said.

"Oh," said Mrs. Crowley. "Those are his."

"Can we use them?"

"I saute them for him first," she said, in a tone that implied, He can't even do that much.

"He usually labels them," said Kris, turning over a plastic bag. "Here we go: 'Honey mushrooms, 10/74, behind Loon Cottage.' "

"What about a nice mushroom bisque?" I asked.

Mrs. Crowley said, "This crowd doesn't go much for mushrooms."

"What if I made a mushroom lasagna? We could write on the chalkboard, 'Lasagna, red or white.' "

Kris was looking dubious: Why bother?

"Nothing too exotic," I promised. "Noodles, cream, Parmesan, ricotta, mozzarella. I season the mushrooms with lemon, salt, and pepper, and make a bechamel-"

"Fine," she snapped.

I said, "Not because you need a third entree. Just because I'm in the mood. I haven't cooked in weeks-and you know how that gets."

"It's how she relaxes," said Kris.

"I don't have those cheeses," said the cook.

"No problem," said Kris. "I'm going out anyway."

"Honey mushrooms," I said, flapping the plastic bags at him. "I even like their name."

I called mine Lasagna Bianco con Funghi, and, if I say so myself, it was stunning. I resauteed the mushrooms in b.u.t.ter to disguise the taste of cheap margarine, and because Kris brought me farmer's cheese instead of ricotta, the ingredients combined to taste miraculously of blintzes. The top layer caramelized to a finish reminiscent of toasted marshmallows, so that even Mrs. Crowley smiled when I brought it forth and set it down next to hers.

Fortunately, it was a slow Monday. Eight guests selected Italian Lasagna with Meat. Fifteen chose Hot Turkey Sadwich and Dressing with Gravy, Peas, and Cranberry Sauce. Luckily or unluckily, only two diners that Monday night-Natalie Marx and Kristofer Berry-chose the gourmet option.

We ate our squares of creamy white lasagna, p.r.o.nounced them delicious, drank wine, had a brick each of Neapolitan ice cream, had coffee, felt great, played one game of Nok-Hockey and two games of Ping-Pong in the game room, said conspicuous good nights in front of witnesses, went to our allegedly separate rooms, rendezvoused two hours later at midnight, fell into each other's arms, kissed each other's faces and necks and other exposed stretches of hot skin as our clothes came off, and made love as quietly as we could manage in the face of our urgency and ardor. We had a short, drowsy postcoital conversation, in which we speculated on the likely locations of Nelson and Linette, and discussed our plans to leave the next day, together. Soon afterward, Kris tiptoed down the back stairway, out the delivery entrance, and down the path to the little white house.

At or about three A.M., I was seized by the worst stomach pains of my life. Soon after, Kris's vomiting and groaning woke the Berrys, who suspected food poisoning. Remembering we had eaten identical meals, they rushed over to find me groaning, unable to leave the bathroom, weak, delirious, and begging for water. They called an ambulance and their doctor, who called Poison Control, who located a mushroom expert in the botany department at UVM, who predicted we would-if we survived the acute phase and the honeymoon phase, which was the fingerprint of this poisoning-slip into a coma and die.

Ingrid called my parents. My brother-in-law, the only steady hand, was enlisted to drive the hysterical Marxes north to the community hospital, where we would become doomed medical celebrities. My mother wailed, begged for magic serums, antidotes, transfusions, operations, specialists, and modern medicine. Why couldn't I be airlifted to Children's; no, Beth Israel; to Ma.s.s General; to Peter Bent Brigham; to anywhere outside this G.o.dforsaken town, with its two G.P.s and no medical schools?-code, for "I want a Jewish doctor."

The mycologist, a bald, smoothly round, and pale man, who looked like a mushroom himself, came the next day and stayed. It was he who played detective, dissecting and a.n.a.lyzing my ca.s.serole, examining the remaining unused Baggie, which he personally rescued from the Dumpster after Mrs. Crowley had purged the freezer, her last act before quitting. It was he who found the single Autumn Skullcap-Galerina autumnalis-among the harmless Armillaria mellea; he who dressed down the already distraught Mr. Berry, ordering him to avoid all little brown mushrooms, because this is what happens when the picker has not carefully examined each and every spore.

The Vermont expert brought in out-of-state experts, who hovered behind the doctors as they caucused in our separate ICU rooms, moving in to interview the victim-chef, read our charts, muse over test results, feel for coldness of the skin, peer into our jaundiced eyes, lobby for tests of the vital organs that were expected to fail. "If recovery occurs," I heard them begin, just outside my door and my semiconsciousness. One loudmouth explained in a hallway caucus that autopsies in these cases reveal necrosis of the liver and kidney. His voice carried to my parents, who thought it was the announcement of my death. Their cries boomeranged back down the hall to my bed, and pitched me to my first upright position and my first coherent calls for help.

There was nothing the four parents could do but wait and watch and refuse each other's overtures, everyone hating and blaming whomever their gaze fell upon across the uncarpeted waiting room. Most of all they fell on hapless Mr. Berry, who had, as the Board of Health saw it, gathered the toxic Autumn Skullcaps along with the beautiful brown Honey Mushrooms from the same mossy log. Half-delirious, I thought our parents and the doctors were lying to me, swearing Kris was alive, while he, down the hall, was daily trying to trick them into admitting I was dead. "Did you go to Natalie's funeral?" he asked his parents.

"Natalie is alive," they would say to each of his questions. "Why don't you believe us?"

"Prove it," he would say.

One night, late, the nicest nurse in the world, a huge muscle man with a gray buzz cut and SEMPER FI tattooed on a bicep, carried me-in two johnnies-and my IV pole to the door of Kris's room.

"See," he said. "Okay? Do you believe me now?"

I said, "How do I know he's not in a coma?"

"Look at the tray. He ate two turkey dinners."

I said, "Please, Hank."

He carried me across the threshold. "Kris?" I whispered.

"Hey! Berryboy," said Hank, louder.

Kris opened his eyes.

I said, "Are you alive?"

He said, "I am if you are."

I cried, "It's all my fault. I never returned your father's book."

He said, looking like a prisoner of war, but sounding like himself, "Baloney!"

I cried into Hank's thick neck, thrilled, knowing that a dying man would utter something more poetic.

"Can't she walk?" Kris asked Hank.

Hank groaned, pretending to be annoyed, and put me down gently.

I said, "You wouldn't give us a minute?"

He said, "One minute. But sit in that chair."

"How about on the bed?"

"When are they letting us out?" Kris asked him.

"You're wasting your valuable time," said Hank. "I'd be smooching by now if it was me."

I tried to sit on the edge of his bed, and when I couldn't manage the hop, I fell to my knees. "I thought they were lying," I sobbed.

"About what?"

"About you."

I felt his hand smoothing my hair. "The Polaroid didn't help?" he asked.

I wiped my face on his sheet and looked up. I said, "I was scared and delirious. I thought it was a setup, a snapshot they took before you died."

"Smiling? Giving the peace sign?"

I whimpered.

"The notes didn't do it, either?"

I said, "They weren't notarized. I only had my father's word."

He smiled, and his eyes shimmered. "You must really love me," he said.

Eventually, they let us watch TV and take meals together, and once, with Hank standing guard, we had an illegal fifteen minutes in the shower. My parents' generalized fury at all things Berry softened as they paced with Ingrid and Karl, waiting-first, for their children to die, and then for them to come back.

They returned to Newton after a three-week vigil, after the doctors announced the danger past, and the famous mycologist said we'd simply ingested too few specimens to die. Everyone kissed and meant it-Ingrid and Eddie, Audrey and Karl, Gretel, doctors, nurses, orderlies, phlebotomists, Hank.

"I'll visit her every day and call you," Ingrid promised Audrey.

"Collect," said my mother.

"If you insist," said Ingrid.

"You're not taking Natalie home with you?" Kris asked when my parents went in to say good-bye.

They said, No, not this time. No.

"If the Inn doesn't reopen, I won't have a job," he said.

My mother held up a hand to shush him, imperiously, like the chairman of a congressional committee. "I used to think that was important," she said. "Now I'm only interested in things like life and death."

"I never understood what you did there anyway," my father said.

TWENTY-SIX.

The cost to the Berrys was the hotel. "Poisonings at the Inn at Lake Devine" went forth from Green Mountain Medical Center and the Vermont Department of Public Health to the streets of Gilbert, to provisioners, to rival innkeepers, to travel agents, to tourists, to subscribers of mycology newsletters, to leaf-peepers, to stringers, to wire services.

Ingrid and Karl had to hold their heads up in Gilbert, had to endure further humiliations, such as hiring an outside caterer and hall for Gretel's wedding reception. The Inn was also cited for mouse droppings in a pantry drawer and a failure to post an EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS sign in the downstairs lav-transgressions that would never have made the papers but for Mr. Berry's picking little brown mushrooms containing deadly amanitins and my baking them into a near-fatal pie.

We knew that our tiny hospital wedding-with no relatives in attendance, Hank as witness, cake from the cafeteria, flowers from Maternity, and officiating by the mayor, who, unavoidably, had issued the executive order to close the Inn-while not the unwelcome news it once would have been, was the silver lining that would remind the public about the cloud over the hotel.

"Is she pregnant, too?" my mother-in-law of one hour asked when Kris called to tell her our news.

He said, "Let's start this conversation over: I announce to you, in a tone suggesting that your most floundering and least favorite child has returned from the dead to find true love. What does a mother say to that?"

I could hear her grousing syllables crackling over the wires.

"For love, Ma," he said impatiently. "I love Natalie, and she loves me, and when you feel this strongly, you get married."

Blotches started on his neck and rose to his face. "Yeah, well ... life is short, isn't it? Some of us learned that this winter."

I signaled, It's okay. It doesn't matter. Say good-bye.