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"He certainly did." "I mean in so many words?" Maggie swallowed. "No," she said, because if there was a cycle to be broken here, she herself had had some part in it; she knew that. She said, "He just told me he'd be there for supper. But anyone could hear how pleased he was." Fiona studied her doubtfully.

"He said, Til be there!' " Maggie told her.

Silence.

" Til be there right after work, Ma! You can count on me!' " Maggie said. " 'Goddamn! I wouldn't miss it for the world!' " "Well," Fiona said finally.

Then she unzipped the tote bag.

"If I were traveling alone I'd make do with just a toothbrush," she told Maggie. "But once you've got a kid, you know how it is. Pajamas, comics, storybooks, coloring books for the car . . . and she has to have her baseball glove, her everlasting baseball glove. You never know when you might rustle up a game, she says." "No, that's true, you never do," Maggie said, and she laughed out loud for sheer happiness.

Ira had a way, when he was truly astonished, of getting his face sort of locked in one position. Here Maggie had worried he'd be angry, but no, he just took a step backward and stared at her and then his face locked, blank and flat like something carved of hardwood.

He said, "Fiona's what?" "She's coming for a visit," Maggie said. "Won't that be nice?" No reaction.

"Fiona and Leroy, both," Maggie told him.

Still no reaction.

Maybe it would have been better if he'd got angry.

She moved past him, keeping her smile. "Leroy, honey, your mother wants you," she called. "She needs you to help her pack.'' Leroy was less easily surprised than Ira, evidently. She said, "Oh. Okay," and gave the Frisbee an expert flip in Ira's direction before skipping toward the house. The Frisbee ricocheted off Ira's left knee and landed in the dirt. He gazed down at it absently.

"We should have cleaned the car out," Maggie told him. "If I'd known we would be riding so many passengers today ..." She went over to the Dodge, which was blocked now by a red Maverick that must be Mrs. Stuckey's. You could tell the Dodge had recently traveled some distance. It had a beaten-down, dusty look. She opened a rear door and tsked. A stack of library books slumped across the back seat, and a crocheted sweater that she had been hunting for days lay there all squinched and creased, no doubt from being sat upon by Otis. The floor was cobbled with cloudy plastic lids from soft-drink cups. She reached in to gather the books-major, important novels by Dos-toevsky and Thomas Mann. She had checked them out in a surge of good intentions at the start of the summer and was returning them unread and seriously overdue. "Open the trunk, will you?" she asked Ira.

He moved slowly toward the trunk and opened it, not changing his expression. She dumped in the books and went back for the sweater.

"How could this happen?" Ira asked her.

"Well, we were discussing her soapbox, see, and-" "Her what? I mean it came about so quickly. So all of a sudden. I leave you alone for a little game of Frisbee and the next thing I know you're out here with beer on your breath and a whole bunch of unexpected house-guests." "Why, Ira, I would think you'd be glad," she told him. She folded the sweater and laid it in the trunk.

"But it's like the second I shut the door behind me, you two got down to business," he said. "How do you accomplish these things?" Maggie started collecting soft-drink lids from the floor of the car. "You can close the trunk now," she told him.

She carried a fistful of lids around to the rear of the house and dropped them in a crumpled garbage can. The cover was only a token cover, a battered metal beret that she replaced crookedly on top. And the house's siding was speckled with mildew, and rust stains trailed from a fuel tank affixed beneath the window.

"How long will they be staying?" Ira asked when she returned.

"Just till tomorrow." "We have to take Daisy to college tomorrow, did you forget?" "No, I didn't forget." "Aha," he said. "Your fiendish plot: Throw Jesse and Fiona together on their own. I know