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By Root 3001 0

a wrong number consume an entire evening. "Hello?" she'd said into the phone, and a man had said, "Laverne, stay right there safe in your house. I just talked to Dennis and he's coming to fetch you." And then had hung up. Maggie cried, "Wait!"-speaking into a dead receiver; typical. Whoever it was, Ira had told her, deserved what he got. If Dennis and Laverne never managed to connect, why, that was their problem, not hers. But Maggie had gone on and on about it. " 'Safe,' " she moaned. " 'Safe in the house,' he told me. Lord only knows what that poor La-veme is going through." And she had spent the evening dialing all possible variations of their own number, every permutation of every digit, hoping to find Laverne. But never did, of course.

Cartwheel, Pennsylvania, was so close it could practically reach out and grab them, to hear her talk. "It's on that cutoff right above the state line. I forget the name," she was saying. "But I couldn't see it anywhere on that map you got at the service station." No wonder she'd been so little help navigating; she'd been hunting Cartwheel instead.

Traffic was surprisingly sparse for a Saturday. Mostly it was trucks-small, rusty trucks carrying logs or used tires, not the sleek monsters you'd see on -. They were traveling through farm country at this point, and each truck as it passed left another layer of dust on the wan, parched, yellowing fields that lined the road.

"Here's what we'll do," Maggie told him. "Stop by Fiona's just for an instant. A teeny, eeny instant. Not accept even a glass of iced tea. Make her our offer and go." "That much you could handle by telephone," Ira said.

"No, I couldn't!" "Telephone when we get back to Baltimore, if you're so set on baby-sitting." "That child is not but seven years old," Maggie told him, "and she must just barely remember us. We can't take her on for a week just cold! We have to let her get reacquainted first." "How do you know it's a week?" Ira asked.

She was riffling through her purse now. She said, "Hmm?" "How do you know the honeymoon will last a week, Maggie?" "Well, I don't know. Maybe it's two weeks. Maybe even a month, I don't know." He wondered, all at once, if this whole wedding was a myth-something she'd invented for her own peculiar reasons. He wouldn't put it past her.

"And besides!" he said. "We could never stay away that long. We've got jobs." "Not away: in Baltimore. We'd take her back down to Baltimore." "But then she'd be missing school," he said.

"Oh, that's no problem. We'll let her go to school near us," Maggie said. "Second grade is second grade, after all, the same all over." Ira had so many different arguments against that that he was struck speechless.

Now she dumped her purse upside down in her lap. "Oh, dear," she said, studying her billfold, her lipstick, her comb, and her pack of Kleenex. "I wish I'd brought that map from home." It was another form of wastefulness, Ira thought, to search yet again through a purse whose contents she already knew by heart. Even Ira knew those contents by heart. And it was wasteful to continue caring about Fiona when Fiona obviously had no feeling for them, when she had made it very clear that she just wanted to get on with her life. Hadn't she stated that, even? "I just want to get on with my life"-it had a familiar ring. Maybe she had shouted it during that scene before she left, or maybe later during one of those pathetic visits they used to pay after the divorce, with Leroy bashful and strange and Mrs. Stuckey a single accusatory eye glaring around the edge of the living room door. Ira winced. Waste, waste, and more waste, all for nothing. The long drive and the forced conversation and the long drive home again, for absolutely nothing.

And it was wasteful to devote your working life to people who forgot you the instant you left their bedsides, as Ira was forever pointing out. Oh, it was also admirably selfless, he supposed. But he didn't know how Maggie endured the impermanence, the lack of permanent results-those feeble, senile patients who confused her with a long-dead