covered her head-she and Uncle Alfred ran to the house. Even Noah and Simon felt the hailstones' sting; they retreated, too. Someone shouted that a hailstone had broken a champagne glass, left on the terrace. The hailstones struck with such force that the people crowded close to the windows stepped back, away from the glass. Then my mother rolled down the car windows; I thought she was waving good-bye but she was calling for me. I held my jacket
over my head, but the hailstones were still painful. One of them, the size of a robin's egg, struck the bony knob of my elbow and made me wince.
'Good-bye, darling!' my mother said, pulling my head inside the car window and kissing me. 'Your grandmother knows where we're going, but she won't tell you unless there's an emergency.'
'Have a good time!' I said. When I looked at Front Street, every downstairs window was a portrait-faces looking at me, and at the honeymooners. Well, almost everyone-not Gravesend's two holy men; they weren't watching me, or the newlyweds. At opposite ends of the house, alone in their own little windows, the Rev. Lewis Merrill and the Rev. Dudley Wiggin were watching the sky. Were they taking a religious view of the hailstorm? I wondered. In Rector Wiggin's case, I imagined he was seeing the weather from the point of view of an ex-pilot-that he was simply observing that it would be a shitty day to fly. But Pastor Merrill was searching the heavens for the source of such a violent storm. Was there anything in the Holy Scriptures that tipped him off about the meaning of hailstones? In their zeal to demonstrate their knowledge of appropriate passages from the Bible, neither minister had offered my mother and Dan that most reassuring blessing from Tobit-the one that goes, 'That she and I may grow old together.'
Too bad neither of the ministers thought of that one, but the books of the Apocrypha are usually omitted from Protestant editions of the Bible. There would be no growing old together for Dan Needham and my mother, whose appointment with the ball that Owen hit was only a year away. I was nearly back inside the house when my mother called me again. 'Where's Owen?' she asked. It took me a while to locate him in the windows, because he was upstairs, in my mother's bedroom; the figure of the woman in the red dress was standing beside him, my mother's double, her dressmaker's dummy. I know now that there were three holy men at Front Street that day-three guys with their eyes on the weather. Owen wasn't watching the departing honeymooners, either. Owen was also watching the skies, with one arm around the dummy's waist, sagging on her hip, his troubled face peering upward. I should have known then what angel he was watching for; but it was a busy day, my mother was asking for Owen-I just ran upstairs and brought him to her. He didn't seem to mind the hail; the pellets clattered off the car all around him, but I didn't see one hit him. He stuck his face in the window and my mother kissed him. Then she asked him how he was getting home. 'You're not walking home, or taking your bike, Owen-not in this weather,' she said. 'Do you want a ride?'
'ON YOUR HONEYMOON?' he asked.
'Get in,' she said. 'Dan and I will drop you.'
He looked awfully pleased; thai he should get to go on my mother's honeymoon-even for a little bit of the way! He tried to slide into the car, past her, but his trousers were wet and they stuck against my mother's skirt.
'Wait a minute,' she said. 'Let me out. You get in first.' She meant that he was small enough to straddle the drive-shaft hump, in the middle of the seat, between her and Dan, but when she stepped outside the Buick-even for just a second-a hailstone ricocheted off the roof of the car and smacked her right between the eyes.
'Ow!' she cried, holding her head.
'I'M SORRY!' Owen said quickly.
'Get in, get in,' Mother said, laughing. They started to drive away. It was then Hester realized that Owen had successfully made off with her panties. She ran out in the driveway and stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the slowly moving car; Dan and my mother, facing forward, stuck their hands out the windows, risking the hailstones, and waved. Owen turned around in the seat between them and faced backward; his grin took up his whole face, and it was very clear, from the flash of white, what he was waving to Hester.
'Hey! You little creep!' Hester called. But the hail was turning back to rain; Hester was instantly soaked as she stood there in the driveway-and her yellow dress clung to her so tenaciously that it was easy to see what she was missing. She bolted for the house.
'Young lady,' my Aunt Martha said to her, 'where on earth are your ...'
'Merciful Heavens, Hester!' my grandmother said. But the heavens did not look merciful, not at the moment. And my grandmother's crones, observing Hester, must have been thinking: That may be Martha's girl but she's got more of Tabby's kind of trouble in her. Simon and Noah were gathering hailstones before they could
melt in the returning rain. I ran outside to join them. They let fly at me with a few of the bigger ones; I gathered my own supply and fired back. I was surprised by the hailstones' coldness-as if they had traveled to earth from another, much icier universe. Squeezing a hailstone the size of a marble in my hand, feeling it melt in my palm, I was also surprised by its hardness; it was as hard as a baseball. Mr. Chickering, our
