Lenore rubs her hand down the side of her face and says good morning to Julie and Sarah, who have come downstairs. Sarah does not want orange juice; she already looks refreshed and ready for the day. Lenore pours a glass for Julie. George calls from the hallway, “Ready to roll?” Lenore is surprised that he wants to leave so early. She goes into the living room. George is wearing a denim jacket, his hands in the pockets.
“Morning,” he says to Lenore. “You’re not up for a hike, are you?”
Lenore looks at him, but does not answer. As she stands there, Sarah walks around her and joins George in the hallway and he holds the door open for her. “Let’s walk to the store and get Hershey bars to give us energy for a long hike,” George says to Sarah. They are gone. Lenore finds Julie still in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil. Julie says that she had a bad night and she is happy not to be going with George and Sarah. Lenore fixes tea for them. Maria sits next to her on the sofa, sipping orange juice. The baby likes company, but Maria is a very private child; she would rather that she and her mother were always alone. She has given up being possessive about her father. Now she gets out a cardboard box and takes out her mother’s collection of postcards, which she arranges on the floor in careful groups. Whenever she looks up, Julie smiles nervously at her; Maria does not smile, and Lenore doesn’t prod her. Lenore goes into the kitchen to punch down the bread, and Maria follows. Maria has recently gotten over chicken pox, and there is a small new scar in the center of her forehead. Instead of looking at Maria’s blue eyes, Lenore lately has found herself focusing on the imperfection.
As Lenore is stretching the loaves onto the cornmeal-covered baking sheet, she hears the rain start. It hits hard on the garage roof.
After a few minutes Julie comes into the kitchen. “They’re caught in this downpour,” Julie says. “If Sarah had left the car keys, I could go get them.”
“Take my car and pick them up,” Lenore says, pointing with her elbow to the keys hanging on a nail near the door.
“But I don’t know where the store is.”
“You must have passed it driving to our house last night. Just go out of the driveway and turn right. It’s along the main road.”
Julie gets her purple sweater and takes the car keys. “I’ll be right back,” she says.
Lenore can sense that she is glad to escape from the house, that she is happy the rain began.
In the living room Lenore turns the pages of a magazine, and Maria mutters a refrain of “Blue, blue, dark blue, green blue,” noticing the color every time it appears. Lenore sips her tea. She puts a Michael Hurley record on George’s stereo. Michael Hurley is good rainy-day music. George has hundreds of records. His students used to love to paw through them. Cleverly, he has never made any attempt to keep up with what is currently popular. Everything is jazz or eclectic: Michael Hurley, Keith Jarrett, Ry Cooder.
Julie comes back. “I couldn’t find them,” she says. She looks as if she expects to be punished.
Lenore is surprised. She is about to say something like “You certainly didn’t look very hard, did you?” but she catches Julie’s eye. She looks young and afraid, and perhaps even a little crazy.
“Well, we tried,” Lenore says.
Julie stands in front of the fire, with her back to Lenore. Lenore knows she is thinking that she is dense—that she does not recognize the implications.
“They might have walked through the woods instead of along the road,” Lenore says. “That’s possible.”
“But they would have gone out to the road to thumb when the rain began, wouldn’t they?”
Perhaps she misunderstood what Julie was thinking. Perhaps it has never occurred to Julie until now what might be going on.
“Maybe they got lost,” Julie says. “Maybe something happened to them.”
“Nothing happened to them,” Lenore says. Julie turns around and Lenore catches that small point of light in her eye again. “Maybe they took shelter under a tree,” she says. “Maybe they’re screwing. How should I know?”
It is not a word Lenore often uses. She usually tries not to think about that at all, but she can sense that Julie is very upset.
“Really?” Julie says. “Don’t you care, Mrs. Anderson?”
Lenore is amused. There’s a switch. All the students call her husband George and her Lenore; now one of them wants to think there’s a real adult here to explain all this to her.
“What am I going to do?” Lenore says. She shrugs.
Julie does not answer.
“Would you like me to pour you tea?” Lenore asks.
“Yes,” Julie says. “Please.”
George and Sarah return in the middle of the afternoon. George says that they decided to go on a spree to the big city—it is really a small town he is talking about, but calling it the big city gives him an opportunity to speak ironically. They sat in a restaurant bar, waiting for the rain to stop, George says, and then they thumbed a ride home. “But I’m completely sober,” George says, turning for the first time to Sarah. “What about you?” He is all smiles. Sarah lets him down. She looks embarrassed. Her eyes meet Lenore’s quickly, and jump to Julie. The two girls stare at each other, and Lenore, left with only George to look at, looks at the fire and then gets up to pile on another log.
Gradually it becomes clear that they are trapped together by the rain. Maria undresses her paper doll and deliberately rips a feather off its hat. Then she takes the pieces to Lenore, almost in tears. The baby cries, and Lenore takes him off the sofa, where he has been sleeping under his yellow blanket, and props him in the space between her legs as she leans back on her elbows to watch the fire. It’s her fire, and she has the excuse of presiding over it.
“How’s my boy?” George says. The baby looks, and looks away.
It gets dark early, because of the rain. At four-thirty George uncorks a bottle of Beaujolais and brings it into
