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"Don't you think I've tried? I've talked till I'm blue in the face. But everything I say seems to come out wrong. She takes offense, I take offense; we just get all tangled in knots, somehow. By now we're used up. We're worn down into the ground." Well, she certainly knew what that felt like.

"Couldn't you just consider it?" he asked.

She tilted her head.

"Just consider the possibility?" "Oh," she said, "the possibility, maybe . . ." He said, "Yes! That's all I'm asking! Thanks, Ma. Thanks a million." "But, Jesse-" "And you won't tell Dad yet, will you?" "Well, not for the time being," she said lamely.

"You can picture what he would say," he said.

Then he gave her one of his quick hugs, and he was gone.

For the next few days she felt troubled, indecisive. Examples came to mind of Jesse's fickleness-how (like most boys his age) he kept moving on to new stages and new enthusiasms, leaving the old ones behind. You couldn't leave a wife and baby behind! But then other pictures came too: for instance, the year they'd all got the flu except for Jesse, and he had had to take care of them. She had glimpsed him blurrily through a haze of fever; he had sat on the edge of the bed and fed her a bowl of chicken soup, spoonful by spoonful, and when she fell asleep between swallows he had waited without complaint until she jerked awake, and then he fed her another spoonful.

"You haven't forgotten, have you?" Jesse asked now whenever he met up with her. And, "You won't go back on vour promise, will you?" "No, no . , ." she would say. And then, "What promise?" What had she let herself hi for, exactly? He tucked a slip of paper into her palm one evening-an address on Whitside Avenue. The clinic, she supposed. She dropped it in her skirt pocket. She said, "Now you realize I can't-" But Jesse had already evaporated, dexterous as a cat burglar.

Ira was in a good mood those days, because he'd heard about the computer job. It had come through, as Jesse had foreseen, and he was due to start training in September. "This is more like it," Ira told Maggie. "This is something with a future. And who knows? Maybe after a bit he'll decide to go back to school. I'm sure they'll want him to finish school before they promote him." Maggie was quiet, thinking.

She had to work on Saturday, so that kept her mind off things, but Sunday she sat a long time on the porch. It was a golden hot day and everyone seemed to be out walking infants. Carriages and strollers wheeled past, and men lunged by with babies in backpacks. Maggie wondered if a backpack was one of the pieces of equipment Jesse considered essential. She would bet it was. She cocked her head toward the house, listening. Ira was watching a ball game on TV and Daisy was away at Mrs. Perfect's. Jesse was still asleep, having come in late from playing at a dance in Howard County. She'd heard him climb the stairs a little after three, singing underneath his breath. Girlie if I could I would put you on defrost , . .

"Music is so different now," she had said to Jesse once. "It used to be 'Love Me Forever" and now it's 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.' " "Aw, Ma," he had said, "don't you get it? In the old days they just hid it better. It was always 'Help Me Make It Through the Night.' " A line came to her from a song that was popular back when Jesse was a little boy. / must think of a way, it went, tactfully, tentatively, into your heart . . .

When Jesse was a little boy he liked to tell her stories while she cooked; he seemed to believe she needed entertaining. "Once there was a lady who never fed her children anything but doughnuts," he might begin, or, "Once there was a man who lived on top of a Ferris wheel." All of his stories were whimsical and inventive, and now that she considered, she saw that they had had in common the theme of joyousness, of the triumph of sheer fun over practicality. He strung one particular story out for weeks, something about a retarded father who bought an electric organ with the grocery money. The retarded part came from his aunt Dome, she supposed.