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He stood close to the wall, one hand braced against an exposed stud, leaning away from her, most of his weight settled on one long leg. He was wearing a pair of blue jeans, old and faded, an equally ancient navy corduroy shirt, and a pair of desert boots. His brown hair and the lenses of his glasses were flecked with sawdust. He caught her gaze, then looked away, unhooking his glasses and squinting at a point beyond her shoulder as he slowly wiped them on the clean handkerchief he pulled from his back pocket.

Annie was struck afresh by the odd beauty of his slightly skewed features-the way his nose seemed to knuckle in at the bridge, and the way his cheekbones seemed to slant at slightly different angles, giving one eye the appearance of being not quite level with the other. Under the thick fringe of his lashes, he seemed to be viewing everything with faintly amused suspicion.

She felt an odd, downward-slipping feeling in her chest. You may take two giant steps and three baby ones. She was somehow back in third grade, playing MotherMay-I out on the school’s kickball court.

So whose permission did she need now to cross the distance that stretched between her and Joe? It wasn’t as if she had far to go … only two or three steps. But Annie could not bring herself to make the move.

Then Joe hooked his glasses back over his ears, and said cheerily, “Listen, it’s pretty noisy out here. Let’s go inside where we can hear ourselves think. You feel like a cup of coffee?”

Annie nodded, afraid to trust her voice.

In the kitchen, Joe poured two ceramic mugs, and carried them upstairs to the dining room, which was deserted except for a couple of coffee-skinned waiters setting out tablecloths and napkins. Joe chose a booth under a Wyeth print of a pumpkin field at harvest time.

“Everything okay with Laurey?” he asked cautiously, sipping at his coffee like someone who doesn’t

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really want it, but needs something to do with his hands.

I didn’t come here to talk about Laurel, she felt like shouting.

“Laurey’s fine,” Annie said, regretting at once the hard edge in her voice. “And you?” she added quickly. “How have you been, Joe?”

“Fine. Just fine.” His greenish-brown eyes regarded her with a puzzled look, as if to say, Then why did you come?

“And your father? I heard he was in the hospital.”

Joe gave a dry laugh that didn’t quite mask the concern he clearly felt. “Marcus? It’d take more than a heart attack to take the starch out of him. He’ll be okay.”

“Joe, I …” Annie set out to say how much she’d missed him, but the words wouldn’t come. God, it had been easier when the thing separating them had been three thousand miles of. ocean.

“How’s the search for shop space going? Have you found anything yet?” he asked quickly … a little too quickly.

“I think I may have,” she replied. “But I haven’t made up my mind yet. It’s a little grungy.”

“You should’ve seen this building before I took over. It was a wreck,” he told her. “Looked like the morning after a Hell’s Angels New Year’s Eve bash.”

What Annie was seeing in her mind, though, was a hole punched in a livingroom wall. A hole the exact size of Joe’s fist, with bits of plaster clinging to its ragged edges and hairline cracks radiating out into the wall around it like tiny thunderbolts. Beside it, like a flash of light after an explosion, Joe’s face seemed illuminated somehow, like the face of a prophet in a Renaissance painting. Something in his expression, in that instant, drove a sharp splinter of doubt into her, and she’d wondered, back then, God, could he have been telling the truth about Laurel?

Now, three months and twenty-one days later, seated across from Joe in the afternoon light that slanted in through the curved front window and formed a pane of glaring brightness on the table between them, Annie

thought: Is it too late? Did we really ruin everything for us?

“Judging from the places I’ve looked at so far, I can imagine,” she said, pushing that painful memory aside. She pressed her hands together in her lap, feeling her fingertips sting where she’d bitten them. Her palms felt moist and itchy.

And then she became aware that Joe was leaning forward, frowning slightly.

“Annie … are you all right?” “Yeah, sure …” She caught herself. “No … I’m not okay. Joe, I don’t think I’ve been okay since September. You don’t know how many times I’ve wanted … well, I did try to talk to you about it, to explain, but maybe it was too soon. Maybe …”

A strange expression crossed Joe’s face, a look she couldn’t quite read, but that scared her and made her stop. “Look,” he said, “if it means anything … I … I shouldn’t have blown up the way I did.”

“How could you not have?” she cried. “How could you … after the way I acted, the things I said?”

Now, in the clear light of reason, her accusations seemed even more unfair. After all, she hadn’t told him about Emmett, had she? Even if Joe had made love to Laurel, would that have been so much worse than her sleeping with Emmett?

“You only said what you thought was true.” He shrugged. “Come on, Annie, you’ve always been harder on yourself than on anyone else.”

Annie felt oddly taken aback. How could he be so forgiving? Or was it just that he didn’t care enough to be angry anymore … and he’d put the whole episode behind him and moved so far ahead of it, and of her, that there was no way she could ever catch up?

“Joe …” She felt her throat catch, and she had to stop and take a short, gulped swallow. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean those terrible things I said. I don’t blame you if you can’t forgive me.”

“But I have.” He regarded her calmly, too calmly. “I forgave you a long time ago, Annie. That’s not why

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you’re here, is it? Because I think you know that already. It’s never really been a question of forgiveness, has it?”

She could see now that she was wrong about Joe not feeling anything. His gaze, though steady and kind, seemed terribly strained.

“What I’m saying is that it doesn’t change anything,” he went on. “Forgiving isn’t the same as forgetting, Annie. I know that better than anyone, believe me.” For an instant, he stared off into space as if he were turning inward, trying to see something inside himself. Then, seeing her again, he curved his mouth down in a slow, sad smile. “Please, don’t misunderstand me. I think maybe it happened for the best.”

Annie felt like a brittle eggshell about to crack. Nothing she had ever faced had ever made her feel this helpless or abandoned. Not even when she was little, standing on the sidewalk in front of school, watching the shadows grow longer and longer, Waiting for Dearie to pick her up, praying she hadn’t forgotten, or wasn’t too drunk.

“The best?” she croaked. “How can you say that? Joe, I need you.”

“You don’t need me, Annie … you don’t need anyone, not really. I think that’s partly why I fell in love with you, but maybe also why I couldn’t admit it to myself for so long. Your strength, your determination … it’s like this fire in you, and it makes you shine, makes everyone around you want to draw in close. But the thing is—you can’t get inside a fire, not without getting burned.” He gave her a look of infinite sadness. “Annie, it wouldn’t have worked, you and me.”

Tears flooded her eyes, but with a force of will she kept them from spilling over. She wanted to tell him, insist that he was wrong … dead wrong … that she did need him. That the only reason she was strong was because she’d had to be. Who else would’ve taken care of her, and of Laurel? But the look in his eyes said it was too late.

“I love you, Joe,” she told him instead. “More than you know.”

His face seemed to contort with pain … then he straightened himself, and shook his head.

334

EILEEN GOUDGE

“No, you think you do. But don’t you see … love and trust, they come together in the same package, two for the price of one. And you can’t separate them. If you try to … the whole thing comes apart.”

It hurt, a pain in her chest, a fierce cramp in her belly. At the same time, she thought, He’s right. That was the awful part. He was right, absolutely right . . , except for one thing. If she had never loved him as he seemed to be saying, then why did she now feel as if she were being stabbed in the heart?

“I think … we’ve both said enough for now,” she told him. “I think I’d better be going.” Annie slid off the bench, and rose heavily to her feet.

Joe didn’t try to stop her.

“Tell Laurey I’ll pick her up at seven tomorrow,” he called after her.

Right. Tomorrow night was their Lamaze class. She felt a swift, unexpected thrust of resentment. It was all so cozy … just like a real, married couple. Anyone would think it was Joe’s baby. Then it struck her: Suppose Joe is falling in love with her?

Why not? Laurel’s beautiful, talented, lovable. Why shouldn’t he?

Nevertheless, the idea sent a new wrench of pain through her chest.

Because if she were to lose Joe to Laurel, that would mean losing Laurel as well … the two people around whom her whole life revolved, the only two she really loved. And how could she keep going after that?

Annie watched the white-gowned mohel—a gentlelooking man of forty or so with a short, dark beard—squeeze the clamplike device over the baby’s tiny penis, severing its foreskin with a single neat snip. Beside her, she heard Sarah, the baby’s mother, let out a tiny mewing cry, and out of the corner of her eye saw Sarah hide her pale, drawn face against her husband’s shoulder. Annie winced inwardly. She knew how Sarah had to be feeling

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… wishing she could take away her son’s pain and make it hers.

She realized that was the way she felt about Laurel—or used to, anyway. Now, every time she looked at Laurel’s big belly, the love and sympathy she started to feel was bitten off by a surge of anger. She still couldn’t bring herself to forgive her sister. If it hadn’t been for Laurel, then she, Annie, would still be with Joe. And Laurel, damn her, wasn’t even sorry. Look at her, Annie thought, she’s glad I’ve broken off with Joe. She doesn’t care how much it hurts me.

And the way she acts, it might just as well be Joe’s baby.

“See how brave he is! Hardly a peep,” Rivka whispered to Annie. Her round face was beaming. “Forgive me if I’m kvelling, but from this boy we’ll shep naches, he’ll make us proud, I can feel it.”

Then with a big intake of breath, baby Yusseleh began to shriek. Annie watched as the mohel calmly wrapped a bit of gauze about the newly circumcised penis and deftly pinned on a clean diaper. He handed the baby to his nervous-looking grandfather Ezra, and began intoning the blessings, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as he did.

Every eye in the group of twenty or so seemed to be on the little star of the show, but now what Annie was noticing was Laurel, standing off to one side, well away from the knot of people clustered about the cloth-draped table in the middle of Rivka’s living room. Except for her big stomach, she looked haggard, morose. Was she thinking that she might never hold her own baby the way Sarah was beginning to cuddle and soothe little Yusseleh?

In spite of herself, Annie wanted to go to her sister. How awful she must feel! Annie wished somehow she could turn back the clock, and soothe Laurel as she had when her sister was a baby herself.

Then a wave of bitterness welled up in her. Why, she asked herself for the thousandth time, had Laurel wanted to hurt her by pretending her baby was Joe’s?

Why?

336

EILEEN GOUDGE

Now Dolly was sidling over to Laurel, hooking an arm about her thin shoulders. Annie felt a pang of jealousy. Or was it resentment? It should be her, not Dolly consoling Laurel. So why couldn’t she do it? Why couldn’t she forgive Laurel? Why couldn’t she let herself believe—as Laurel had insisted over and over’—that her sister would have told her the truth about Joe, if only Annie hadn’t gone flying off the handle before she could?

Now she watched as Laurel turned her head into Dolly’s shoulder, her long hair sliding forward, hiding her face from view. Was she crying? Annie felt as if, like Yusseleh, she’d been cut, except her cut was on her heart, a tiny nick. With a small, unsteady motion, she found herself threading her way across the small room crowded mostly with bearded men in dark-colored fedoras and tsitsiss, which looked like clumps of long threads hanging from beneath their black suit coats, and with women in longsleeved, high-necked dresses and stylish shaitels. And crowded too with a churning sea of children, babies crawling at her feet, toddlers lurching and bumping into her knees, little boys and girls scooting trucks and tops across the floor.

Stupid to have brought Laurel here. Annie realized she should’ve known it would be too much, seeing all these happy kids, reminding her of what she stood to lose. Annie definitely should have talked Laurel out of coming… .

Now Laurel looked wretched, and Annie couldn’t bring herself to comfort her. Why did Dolly have to butt in? And what was she doing here in the first place? Rivka and Dolly weren’t at all close, just acquaintances. Probably it was Dolly who’d invited herself.

Annie stopped then, almost tripping over a fat blond baby in blue corduroy overalls trying to pull himself up on the leg of the coffee table. Dolly, she told herself, was only trying to be nice. And she’d been so terrific with Laurel, really, not a bit of reproach for her getting pregnant, and always ready to chauffeur her to the obstetrician, or to a fabric store for sewing supplies, or to Eastern Artists for more drawing paper, pencils, pastels.

If only Dolly were less there. Her very presence

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sometimes seemed overwhelming, and her generosity, too. Was it possible that someone’s kindness could be just too much, the way too many sweet things can make you sick?

Yet some part of Annie yearned to be comforted by Dolly, too. How would it be, she wondered, to rest her cheek against Dolly’s deep, soft bosom, feel her plump, beringed hand stroking her hair?