Jane Strekalovsky lives in southeastern Massachusetts. She is a long-time member of Art's seminar. This is her first published story.

     Bunny Pratt’s in love again, in love is Bunny Pratt! The familiar anticipation coils tightly in his chest and the nervy little nip that spices such pleasant tangents makes it feel like Christmas morning. There’s something else this time as well, a faint quirkle of unease that’s new. Not, as in the old days, the worry that Bea will find out—why now, if not before? Something he can’t quite put his finger on. No matter. In love, to Bunny, is a condition essential to well-being, not to be confused with loving and its incumbent responsibilities, serious stuff reserved for Bea. Being in love, Bunny muses on his way downstairs at seven-thirty on a moist summery Monday morning, is like a pastry, bitesize and satisfying on the tongue, just the right amount of sweet before something else takes its place. He smiles. Moderation being everything. Halfway down the stairs he hesitates, caught in the heady scent of honeysuckle that rolls up to greet him from the kitchen, where Bea must have already opened the windows before starting breakfast. Always, he’s going to tell her in the kitchen, that smell will mean July and this house to him. He pats the smooth wood of the banister and trots on down the stairs. Twenty-five Julys in this house and each, when that honeysuckle pops, might be the first all over, and he the twenty-nine he was when he and Bea bought the place.
     Inhaling deeply, he takes the long hall to the kitchen with a spring in his step. Remember the power of the senses, he’ll say to his fiction-writing class this morning, put them to work for you on the page. Twelve pair of eyes will fix on him, rapt. Give us the taste, the smell, the alchemy of memory! Bics will jot, twelve notebooks filling with whatever he has to offer. His colleagues complain of the drudgery of summer classes, comprised as they are mostly of middle-aged women and the odd retired businessman who’s always wanted to write. But invariably a few fresh flowers brighten the tired bouquet, undergrads who need extra credits or want to try a course they couldn’t fit in during the year. Bunny allows himself a degree of pride in the fact that his summer course always enjoys a waiting list, and that this year, he recognizes several of the faces around the table as sophomores and juniors who appeared at one or another of the readings he did from his latest book during the previous winter. Last Monday, not ten minutes into the first class, he spotted a pair of alert dark eyes watching him from the far end of the oval table. Black cherries he thought, storing the image for future reference. He’d called out the names on the roster in front of him on the table, guessing which might be hers. “Pia,” he read. “Mendelsohn?” The barest nod. Charming long neck, cropped hair like dark velvet. He finished the list, but throughout the morning, his eyes had returned to hers until he realized, with an anticipatory frisson, that he was directing much of his presentation to her, after which he was careful to bestow his benign and impartial gaze on each of the dozen in turn.
     “Always,” he begins now, reaching the kitchen where Bea is sitting over coffee and the paper. When she looks up, he smiles down at her and goes on. “I could smell it all the way upstairs,” he says, patting his chest, “that honeysuckle! I could be anywhere in the world and always, that smell would bring me right back to this place. Wonderful!” His voice brims with the vigor of a man who has just stepped from a cold shower.
     “Yummy,” she agrees absently, her glance drifting for a moment to where the vines make a tangled hedge of yellow and white blossoms below the window. “Needs to be cut back though—see how it gets out of hand?” Errant tendrils have latched onto the railing beside the stone steps, burgeoned into a new thicket. Her blue gaze goes back to the paper.
     He pours himself a cup of coffee and sips it, creamless. In a yellow bowl at his place a small heap of Special K is studded with blueberries. He splashes on skim milk and breaks a piece of unbuttered toast in half. These small sacrifices have paid off. The Pratts don’t gray, and except for a slight thinning of his sandy hair, hardly visible from the front, he looks scarcely older than his junior colleagues. Certainly not fifty-four. For that matter, he thinks, glancing across the table, the same might be said of Bea. Serene and tailored in navy blue, fair hair tucked behind small neat ears, still extremely good to look at. Placid, that’s the word for Bea. And presence—she has presence. A faint breeze lifts the curtain at his elbow, mingling the aromas of honeysuckle and coffee, and he crunches his dry toast with satisfaction.
     Bea folds her paper and pushes it aside, with the air of pushing back covers to hop out of bed. Taking a piece of toast, she spreads butter and marmalade, eats it quickly, gulps the last of her coffee and is on her feet. “Got to go,” she announces, “early meeting.” Something about him catches her attention, and she scrutinizes his face. “You look tired, Buns. Not sleeping?”
     His hand goes to his face as if feeling for something he missed in the upstairs mirror. “I feel great,” he says, but a little grumpiness crimps the edges of the morning and recalls the mild apprehension that teased him earlier. What the hell is it? “I feel great,” he insists.
     “How’s the piece going?” On this morning as on most, he’s already put in a stint in his third floor study, laboring to finish a story promised to his publisher by the end of the month. In the dim pre-dawn hour, his mind can float free and words swarm like moths in the greenish light of his computer screen. When it goes well, it’s better than a good night’s sleep.
     “Great,” he says, popping a Centrum into his mouth. That’s true, and that’s all she wants to hear. Bea doesn’t like his stories. Early in their marriage, she told him that, when he pressed her. “They make me uncomfortable,” she’d confessed with welling eyes. “Like there’s somebody in you I don’t know.” Don’t like was what he knew she meant. “I can’t figure out where they come from, who these people are, they’re so—” and then she’d stopped, maybe unwilling to widen the gap her words opened between them.
     He’d laughed to cover his disappointment, and felt oddly guilty, as if he’d been trying to put something over on her, but his efforts to parse his work phrase by phrase for her had dwindled, and now, polite interest passes for understanding, and they both ignore the difference. “Going great,” he repeats. “Look, I may be late today—student conferences.” He brightens at the thought and smiles up at her. “Don’t wait dinner for me, okay?”
     “Oops,” she says, with a little smile, “I was going to tell you the same thing! I have an overdue report. Kiss,” she trills from the doorway, touching two fingers to her lips and waving them in his direction. “See you.”
     Alone in the kitchen, Bunny considers this happy coincidence. He has, in fact, scheduled a conference for after lunch. He smiles, his mood restored. Possibly for lunch itself. Or dinner. Conferences are hardly necessary the second week, but it’s never too soon, he knows, for students to talk about themselves. Even the apparently confident Ms. Mendelsohn.
     The screen door wheezes, and in comes Sibley, panting on the threshold, red-faced and glistening after an early morning run. Sibley is their only child, home briefly from her summer waitressing job, and Bunny has looked forward to a quiet time with her this morning. Her homecomings have been rare since she chose to go halfway across the country to Grinnell two years ago. He’d hoped she’d want to stay here, go to the University, but there’d been no question of that. “This is your school, Dad,” she’d said firmly when he suggested it, her polite tone leaving no room for him to suggest it again.
     Now she pours herself a cup of coffee at the stove, and reaches to refill his cup before sitting down across from him. “Hey, Dad,” she breathes at him in greeting, her eyes on the paper she’s picked up from where her mother left it. She spreads it out on the table, riffles through, stops at the editorial page, reads softly to herself the first two lines of a piece about disclosure of a senator’s diaries. “Loser,” she comments breezily, and flips the page.
     Sun streams through the window at her side, making her squint, pooling on the table where the paper lies, heating her moist bare shoulder, and she fans herself with a paper napkin and twists away to put her face in shadow. The purple tank top is drenched. She is taller than Bea, with long legs and rounded arms, and her hair, the color of Bunny’s, is coming out of its topknot, sticking to her neck in damp ringlets. The sun behind her is so bright it makes him blink, makes her look on fire. Bunny is awestruck, in part because his appreciation feels so pure, so refined by fatherly distance.
     “Dad?” Her sidelong glance catches him staring. As if she has just registered his presence, she straightens, shading the sun-struck side of her face with a palm so she can look him in the eye. “Dad,” she begins, and he’s all ears, because now her tone is serious. But after a brief hesitation, she jumps up to pour half her coffee into the sink and open the freezer, from which she scoops ice cubes to drop in what’s left. He watches as she takes another cube and lets it melt against her throat. “Hot, hot, hot, already,” she says. “I’m glad I did that early.”
     “Ran.”
     “Yeah.” Her back is toward him, as she puts a bagel in the toaster and by the time she sits again, her tone is light. “You used to run,” she says. “Give it up?”
     He’s taken aback, wonders if he looks to her as if he’s given it up, launches into an explanation of the exercise schedule he’s worked out for himself. Tuesdays and Thursdays, he tells her, before dinner, if he’s not playing tennis, which he tries to do a couple times a week, maybe they could get a game themselves while she’s here, what does she think? Finished eating now, she’s up, brushing crumbs from her place into her palm, clearing her dishes.
     “There’s a thought,” she says, and the warm scent of her passes like a cloud at his shoulder as she moves toward the hall. “Maybe we’ll do just that.” Then she’s gone, and alone in the sunny kitchen, Bunny wonders what it was he’d meant to say to her this morning, and what she didn’t say to him.
     A short time later, after several blocks’ walk from his house on the edge of the campus and a quick traverse across the leafy quad, he’s in his office in the old brick building that houses the English Department. He could have mentioned to Sibley the brisk constitutional this daily route provides, not a run, of course, but certainly an important part of his regimen. His is a corner office, befitting his seniority, with two long windows that look across the campus to the mountains, and as he shoves one up to let in the balmy air, he catches sight of Ms. Mendelsohn among the students crossing the grass. She is alone, striding purposefully toward the main door two floors below his window. Her work shows promise, he can tell her that, will tell her that this afternoon. A sweet flashback of honeysuckle makes his nostrils twitch.
     He lets the students wait a few minutes past the hour appointed for their class, then makes his entrance, briefcase in hand, and in the expectant hush, crosses the room to take the chair left for him at the head of the oval table. Arranging stacks of papers in front of him, he’s aware that Pia Mendelsohn is directly in his line of vision at the other end of the table, which would be excellent, except that the bright square of window at her back makes her face a dark blur even when she looks in his direction. He has a better view of Ziggy Hopper, the graduate intern whose business it is to assist with manuscript reading, and whose lanky frame is draped over the chair next to Pia. Hopper wears a black T-shirt, an earring, and a day’s growth of fuzz on his chin, but Bunny recognizes the intent expression behind his rimless glasses from his own days as a graduate intern, when he read manuscripts for a professor he still thinks of as a mentor. It was into that class that Bea had come as an earnest senior, with a notebook of poems he honestly liked, long hair like milkweed floss, and clear blue eyes that fastened on his every time he looked her way.
     The three stacks of manuscripts copied for today are working their way around the table, and Bunny leans forward, rubbing his palms together with a down-to-business air, and launches into the patter with which he customarily gets things moving. Little jests to put the nervous at ease, a noncommittal introduction of each piece, and then it’s time to sit back while the students read and critique themselves before turning to him for an ultimate judgment. The air is almost sultry now, and his mind wanders before the first reader has set aside her third page. It doesn’t help that it’s the Watrouse woman, her thin voice rushing over her own words until he has to ask her, masking regret with a gracious chuckle, to slow down, for fear someone may ask to hear the piece again, when he’d really like to tell her to for God’s sake hurry up! At the end of the first class, she’d hung by the door to waylay him with a timid hand and tell him how she’d discovered they’d been classmates at Vanderbilt, she was sure he didn’t remember. Taking in the salt and pepper bob, bright grosgrain headband, the face like an anxious pudding, he’d known she had to be off by several years, but in the interest of quick escape, had murmured in a tone of polite surprise, “Is that so?” before turning on his heel.
     As the class listens, he is free to watch Pia at the end of the table, and note with satisfaction that the sun has shifted just enough so her features are no longer in deep shadow. Her eyes are on her notebook and the pen with which she is making slow, circular motions in the margin of the page. If she has read the note with which he concluded his comment on her paper, she is giving no sign, which pleases him, signifying as it does, a nice discretion. There was plenty in the paper to discuss, certainly enough to give him reason to suggest they do it over a sandwich at the U, and with another month, five weeks to be exact, in the course, there is plenty of time, too, to help her develop what he can assure her is a considerable talent. For now, he is content in the knowledge that he has at least ten minutes to concentrate on the way the downy feathers of her dark hair ruffle adorably with every breath from the open window behind her. Watching is something Bunny does well, something he has found useful since long before he met Bea. One can tell a lot by watching, without having to make a move until acceptance is a pretty sure thing. Being in the right place at the right time is what’s important, never leaving things to chance, but arranging circumstances so they appear to be exactly that. Doorways are a great place to stand, Bunny has learned. All things—most things, some pretty good things— come to him who waits.
     Roused by a difference in the atmosphere, as if somewhere a mosquito has settled, he realizes the sound of Watrouse’s voice has stopped and she is waiting for someone to make a comment. Dear lady, he would like to say, get a diary. Fortunately Ziggy has been assigned this manuscript and nothing is required of Bunny beyond thoughtfully raised eyebrows and a nod. But when the discussion peters out, the moment seems prime for him to use her piece as a jumping off point. “It would be good practice,” he says in a low voice, as if speaking to her privately, “to keep a journal, and learn to extract the essentials.” He pauses to let his gaze travel around the table, and his tone grows resonant. “Remember the power of the senses, when you reach into memory for a piece of this sort—put them to work on the page, let us see it, smell it, let us taste it—” He does not look at Pia, but a sixth sense tells him her black eyes are waiting. “...the alchemy of memory,” he finishes, letting his voice drop.
     It’s painless to sit through the two remaining pieces, the one about gender confusion on an Iowa farm and the other about videotape and murder at a New England boarding school, because his mind is busy with post-lunch possibilities. He sees Pia’s eyes flick over the lines of his writing on her pages. When the class is over, and the manuscript assignments determined for the next day, he lets the students file out first, and remains standing at his place repacking his briefcase. Evidently preoccupied with the business of sorting papers, he seems not to notice Pia waiting at his side, and she has to speak to make him turn with apparent surprise, and an apologetic little smile. “Dr. Pratt?” she begins, her paper in her hand, so he can see his own even writing across the top, and he stops her with a kindly chuckle.
     “Edmund,” he tells her. “I try to keep this class on a first name basis. Makes for easier give and take, don’t you think?” Her eyes are sharp, but very pretty, with thick dark lashes, and she seems to wear no makeup, but has fine gold rings in both ears and a strand of colored beads swinging from one. It’s the first chance he’s had to take her in at such close range, and drinking in the vision of olive skin and the soft full mouth he feels slightly breathless.
     “Well,” she says, as if she should have thought of that, “great. Edmund. Anyway. Pia.” She shifts her knapsack onto the table and taps a finger on the note he’s written on her paper. “You said we should meet— is now okay, or do we need to do it after lunch, like you said?”
     “Well,” he considers, “you’re here now—I don’t see why we need to wait till after lunch.” He consults his watch. “Already noon!” he says, as if time has snuck up on him, and when she looks at her watch, too, suggests offhandedly, “I suppose we could do what we have to do and get a bite at the same time, what do you think?”
     Her face charms him, lighting as it does with apparent pleasure, the big dark eyes pools of possibility above her smile. But she is neither coy nor flustered by the attention, and he finds her straightforwardness intensely appealing. As if they are peers, she cocks her head and goes along. “Great,” she agrees, in the same offhanded tone.
     As a faculty-student pair, they aren’t standouts at the U, which is a favorite place for certain of his colleagues to hold court, and a reasonable venue for a conference. A small table is empty in a relatively quiet corner, and they set out their trays, yogurt and a salad for him, and for her, a plate of rice, beans, and some kind of sprouts. Bunny avoids beans, the sight of her heaped plate makes his stomach clench, but the length of lash curling on her cheek as she loads her fork is beguiling, and her healthy appetite piques his. The tiny table rocks at the least pressure from his elbow. He believes he can feel heat from her bare knees, that with the least movement forward, they will touch his. He wishes he’d worn shorts. Her proximity is intoxicating, but he can no longer afford the luxury of merely watching. His tongue is heavy with the burden of filling the silence between them with something she will want to hear.
     “Your story was quite fine,” he begins, clearing his throat and spearing lettuce. She looks up, chewing and expectant. “The class will probably tell you it’s hard to keep track of so many characters in a piece this short.” He breaks off, filling his mouth with salad as she shrugs and swallows.
     “Maybe,” she acknowledges. “So we’ll see, but I’m more interested in what you have to say. They really have to be there, you know, all those people? Or it’s not the same story.”
     He’d like to ask her what he is always asked—how much of it is real? Such a question belongs to the student, not the teacher, and asking will muddy things between them. But the answer could affect his own scenario, for if the intensity and passion of her story have sprung from imagination, it’s an imagination he’d like to be part of. If not, she may disturb the neat parameters of his life.
     “Is it believable?” she asks. Her face is open, she clearly wants the truth.
     He hesitates. “Believable,” he has to tell her, and swallows his own question, feeling a kind of intimacy he’s not seeking forced on him by this honesty. Bunny does not want to be trapped in the dark closet of someone else’s soul. He skips ahead to safer ground. “You seem to be pretty sure of what you’re doing, and I expect you can stand up to whatever the class dishes out.”
     The set of her chin is firm, her tone matter of fact. “Oh, yeah.” Her smile is delicious. “I told you, it’s really only the teacher I want to hear from.” This makes perfect sense to Bunny, who expects and relies on this dynamic he would say has no place in a class billed as a student-centered workshop. The light in her eyes puts him back on track, and his mind flips through a catalogue of places he knows within an hour’s drive where long and lovely afternoons have been spent in the past with other interesting and interested students.
     But as he is about to tender, with faint self-deprecation, a few words on the benefits of general workshop feedback, and before he can suggest more leisurely feedback from himself, she has deftly swiped the last few grains of rice onto her fork with a finger, crumpled her napkin and bounced up. Her dark eyes are bright and her smile red and sweet as she looks down at him. He takes the hand she sticks out, its warm sturdiness a memory even as their palms touch. Then it’s out of his grasp, lifting in a little wave to someone behind him. “I guess I have to go,” she says, “but what you’re saying is, just keep on like I am, right? I can handle that.” The black knapsack is in the air, on her shoulder. “Thanks so much for lunch—the class is really great.” She’s already past him, her words wash by his ear. “See you tomorrow.”
     “Tomorrow,” echoes Bunny to the lettuce left on his plate, neat o’s of red onion set off to one side. A flat mid-afternoon feeling settles upon him. “Well,” he says. “Well.” As he gets up, the little table lists right, and his fork skitters to the floor.
     Returning to his office, he surrounds himself with neat stacks of student manuscripts, reads until almost five, composes thoughtful comments for each on his computer. When he has finished, everything around him is in order. The light in the room has softened, and when he goes to the window to close it, the green quadrangle is empty of all but a band of Frisbee players, and the mountains beyond the campus are lost in blue haze. Pia’s story floods back into his consciousness. If things were different, if he could start fresh, he’d risk asking now that behind-the-hand question of a fellow traveler—how much of it is true? He’s not sure whether the little pang in his chest is for her, if the story is her own, or for him, because now he’s blown the chance to find out. He did truly appreciate her promising work, it was indeed part of her attraction, and of course, he would have gotten around to that, very soon he would have addressed that. Well. Tomorrow may be a good day to discuss the role of experience in the making of credible fiction. Refine the dross of detail, he will tell them, temper your reality so it can become ours.
     He’s home by five-thirty. The house is silent, long patches of sun bright on the living room floor, and Bunny feels like a truant in its emptiness. But the glitch in his expectations has left time for a run before Bea and Sibley get home and he perks up and hustles to change, to stand briefly before the mirror on the bathroom door appraising his reflection in running shorts and tee. This kind of self-examination is rare for Bunny, who from an early age has counted his good looks and charisma as a blessing, without conceit. The mirror justifies his faith in the benefits of regular tennis and a low fat diet—skin taut, good muscle tone, neck still firm, and just the right degree of shadow and crease around the brown eyes to make them interesting. A lucky man.
     The air is balmy and fragrant with the raw green scent of cut grass as he jogs at the edge of his neighbors’ lawns, down College Street and for several blocks along Elm. Thanks to the daily constitutional he mentioned to Sibley, his wind is good, he huffs only slightly on the upward swing of the loop back home, and is almost in sight of the house when with a lurch, his foot twists under him, and the uneven sidewalk rushes to meet the splayed palms and knee of a three-point landing that barely saves his face. In plain sight of cars that roll slowly by, of people maybe eating dinner at windows just yards across the lawns, he sits appalled. But in the next instant he is up, wincing as pain shoots from ankle to knee, hoping to appear casual as he steadies himself against the tree whose root snared him. It takes all his concentration to hobble home, to measure his steps as if he’s just slowing to cool down. Hopping would be less painful, but strenuous and embarrassing.
     There are no steps at the back door, and he hitches over the threshold into the kitchen, sinks into a chair with relief, and resting the injured ankle on his other knee, tests with gingerly fingers to determine whether it is sprained or merely strained. By the time his breathing has slowed to a pant, it seems clearly just a bad wrench. His ears ring with the silence, and he allows himself a moment of self-pity. It’s after seven, Bea really should be here by now. Even the cat, who usually meets him in the driveway, hasn’t come home for dinner. Dutifully, he limps to the fridge, removes a can of catfood, scrapes it into her dish. There is nothing for his dinner except a bowl of something Sibley had last night, red beans and some kind of sprouts. With a sigh, he collects a bowl of ice, a good-sized dishtowel, and a plastic baggie, and makes his way upstairs to shower off sweat turned clammy by pain.
     By the time he is clean and dressed, has ascended to his third floor study and settled in front of his computer, it’s twilight. In the bowl on the floor his bare foot aches where an ice cube has slipped from the dishtowel bandage above it and lodged under his arch, but the pain in the ankle has dulled to a throb. The heat at the top of the house is oppressive, the air at the open windows flat, as if the sun has steeped away its earlier fragrance, and when he switches on the machine and begins to review notes from this morning’s work, his fingers are leaden, and a curious sadness wells in his chest like a yawn. Fatigue washes over him and for just a moment, he closes his eyes.
     Maybe he sleeps for an hour, maybe only minutes before, quite conscious of being unconscious, Bunny finds himself in the locker room of the club, impeccable in tennis whites, except for the Wilson shoe missing from his left foot. Untroubled by this, he makes his way out into the bright sun of the court, only slightly unbalanced by the shoe’s absence. The court is hot even through the thick white cotton of his sock. With surprise and delight, he recognizes the cropped dark hair of the girl testing her swing across the clay and when he squints he sees for sure the dark eyes and even at such a distance, the lashes he remembers from lunch. The net is down between them, and he laughs as he stumbles forward in his sock foot to raise it. “I’m a little off,” he calls to her, jabbing a finger toward his ankle, but she just smiles back, and though the ankle twinges a bit as they begin to rally, it soon feels fine.
     Then, weirdly, he is no longer in the sun, but in deep shadow on a bench under trees near the backboard, and she is on his lap, her bottom a sweet weight on his thighs, her back warm against his chest. His fingers are in the dark feathers on her nape, and he is breathless, heart leaping, astounded at how this has come about after the disappointment of lunch. His hand is on her cheek to turn her face, so he can ask her how, because she knows just what he wants to know—tell me, and I’ll believe you, he is about to say, and then the sun shoots through the trees and lights her hair to the color of his, hair that tumbles over his hand in ringlets, and when she turns to face him, the eyes are blue, blue as Sibley’s, the mouth half-open, puzzled, as she says, like this morning, “Dad?”
     His eyes fly open, and in the moment before he can grasp what has shocked him awake, his heart thumps and sweat springs up along his collar. His study is quite dark now, lit only by the blank green face of his computer, where tiny dots race corner to corner to attract his attention. A reprise of the dream makes him grunt with the force of recollection, before it sinks out of reach for good. His nostrils flare at a faint breath of cool air from the dormer window at his elbow, and he gulps it in like a man just saved from drowning.
     Wet plastic sticks to his bare toes, and the dishtowel is clammy on his instep. He switches on the gooseneck by his side, looks down. The bowl has tipped, the ice is now a puddle under his chair, but the ankle feels better, and reaching down, his fingers locate no real swelling, just pruniness around the toes. Standing, he tries a little weight on the foot, and despite a faint twinge, is able to mop up the mess under his chair and limp to the adjacent bathroom to wring out the towel, discard the soggy bag, and pat his foot dry. He’s hungry, that seems a good sign, and no wonder, his watch tells him it’s almost nine-thirty. Still quiet downstairs, as far as he can tell, and outside, a yellow arc of moon is cutting through the trees. Where the hell is Bea?
     The night is a loss as far as work goes, and he switches off the computer. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe he should see it as a fresh start. Stooping, he pulls out the bottom desk drawer in which he has stored the thick manila package containing his only novel, a package that has sailed off repeatedly in the past few years, only to come back each time, faithful as a homing pigeon. It remains a mystery to him why what he considers his best work is less intriguing to publishers than his several collections of poetry and short fiction. The finely-crafted articulation of a resonant moment seems to be his marketable forte, but the satisfaction of each new publication has been short-lived, always pre-empted by the itch to send forth a major, well-woven piece that will return only between hard covers in a handsome jacket. Flush with resolution, he sets the package beside the computer, where it will be close at hand in the early hours of tomorrow. Another revision may be just the ticket.
     Hardly limping, he makes his way down to the second floor, where light from below brightens the gloom of the landing. Voices waft from the kitchen, unintelligible, but giving welcome notice that they are home, and he is visited by a pang that no one has come to find him. Hungry as he is, he yearns more for bed than food, for Bea’s small back warm against his chest, for his fingers on the heat of her through one of the thin white cotton nighties she favors. Tonight, even the underpants she insists on wearing to bed will not annoy him. He quickens his pace, then winces as the ankle reminds him to take it easy.
     The night air is sweet and much cooler as he nears the first floor and hears Bea’s voice, low, argumentative, and Sibley’s, higher-pitched, breaking in. Argument is rare between them, makes him prick up his ears. “This is not a mistake I’d expect you to make,” Bea is saying. “How can you grow up the way you have and not see this for what it is?”
     “It’s not like that at all, Mom, he’s not like that. And it’s not a mistake.” Despite the tone of the conversation, she seems to be eating something. “I know just what it is, and I’m not a baby.”
     “Twenty,” says Bea, and Bunny hears the sigh, but no anger. “Twenty is a baby. And if you think your father will understand, you can think again.”
     They must hear him stumping down the hall, because the voices stop before he reaches the pantry. In the bright light of the kitchen, Bea looks a little washed out in her navy linen. “Bunny,” she says, spotting him in the doorway. “You are here.”
     Sibley is perched on the wide windowsill, spooning in last night’s leftover beans. Her blue eyes fix on him, dredging up his dream, and he steadies himself against the doorframe.
     “Twenty is a baby,” he says. “What won’t I understand?”
     “Buns,” says Bea, taking in his one-legged stance and the bare foot. “For Heaven’s sake, Bunny, what have you done to yourself?”

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