Queen Anne's Lace

the courage to write. She was a stolid, unattractive young woman with heavy breasts, a pockmarked complexion, and an ugly scar that gave her mouth a sinister look. She moved slowly and seemed, he thought, to be a bit simple-minded. In her late teens and clearly destined to be a spinster, Greta lived with her mother and aunt on the other side of town and went home every evening after she had finished serving dinner and tidying the kitchen. Adam had never left for Annie’s until after the girl had gone for the evening, and he was back at home before she came to work in the morning. He even made sure that his sheets were rumpled, as if he had slept all night in his bed.

But in the past few days, Greta had seemed to regard him with a new and different expression that he couldn’t read. He was afraid she had somehow discovered the truth. He was unnerved.

And then he happened on what he thought was an easy way to gain the girl’s confidence and ensure her silence. Delia had never been a sympathetic mistress. None of the several girls who had worked for her had been able to please her, this one least of all—and least of all now, it seemed. Her leisurely weeks of parties and sophisticated social gatherings in glamorous Galveston had not sweetened Delia’s disposition, and she made no secret of the fact that she wasn’t happy about returning to Pecan Springs. She was curt with Adam and short-tempered even with Caroline.

But it was Greta who had become the chief target of Delia’s ire. The girl could do nothing right. If it wasn’t the cooking that Delia found fault with, it was the laundry, and the ironing, and the making of beds. Never the most compliant of workers, the young woman retaliated by becoming balky. She was silent and sullen, and there were mistakes at table. Salt for sugar, for instance, in the crystal bowl from which Delia sweetened her breakfast fruit, and sour cream instead of top cream for her coffee. Black ink was spilled on the rose-colored parlor carpet, and the next day, two glass lamp chimneys were found to be mysteriously broken.

Trying to keep the peace, Adam intervened. When Delia discovered the broken lamp chimneys, her hand flew out to slap Greta’s face. But Adam seized her arm and made her step backward, and Greta threw him a look of astonished gratitude.

Something similar happened the following evening, when there was no hot water for Delia’s bath and Adam stepped in to stop a tongue-lashing. In that instance, Greta’s gratitude was even more obvious. She clearly viewed him as her protector, and he decided his strategy must be working. From then on (and never imagining that he might be misunderstood), he took Greta’s part whenever he saw the opportunity and made a point of smiling sympathetically at her when Delia was looking the other way. Even if the young woman suspected him of anything, he felt confident that she wouldn’t confide it in her mistress.

Now that Delia was home, of course, Adam could not see Annie. Because his wife’s arrival was a surprise, he had not even been able to say a proper good-bye, and the sad loss of their hours together left him empty and hollow. Over the next few days, he saw her through the open windows of her workroom and kitchen and heard her singing as she tended her vegetables on the other side of the hedge. And once, when he saw her lifting her arms to smooth her auburn hair into its customary knot on the top of her head, he glimpsed the tantalizing curve of her breast and felt the hot desire knot in his belly. He thought longingly of waiting until Delia was asleep and then going next door, not to make love but just to talk with Annie, to hear her dear voice and touch her sweet face.

He didn’t, of course, but not for fear of being discovered. His wife and daughter were in the house, and Adam had just enough integrity left to resist betraying them while they were both present. Given that he had already committed the ultimate betrayal, this was a quixotic distinction, and he knew it. But he needed to think of himself as an honorable man, and maintaining the fiction of his faithfulness while Delia and Caroline were at home seemed the honorable thing to do, the only thing he could do. So he resolutely turned away from any glimpse of Annie and tried to put her out of his thoughts.

The unceasing pain that this effort cost him, he thought with a rueful self-knowledge, was the punishment for his foolish wish to appear to be honorable when he wasn’t.

• • •

ANNIE felt the same pain, and for very much the same reason. She had no regrets, for she knew that what she and Adam had was a deep, true love, the coming together of two people who had found in the other what each lacked, what each needed. Surely what they had shared couldn’t just vanish, as if it had never happened.

But as the days went on, she had to ask herself what was to become of their relationship, now that Adam’s wife had returned home. Delia herself was not to be seen, and when Annie spoke briefly with Greta, the Hunts’ hired girl, she said that Mrs. Hunt was ill—not seriously, but enough to keep her at home. Their clotheslines were on either side of the low hedge between the two houses, which made it easy to talk as they hung up the laundry or took it down, and Annie cultivated their conversation.

In the beginning, the young woman wasn’t very forthcoming. Annie often heard Delia shrieking at Greta and one morning after a particularly loud exchange, she had seen a darkening bruise on her cheek, as if from a slap or a blow. She felt a natural