"I need it more than you do," Freed said. "My car was stolen."

The phone rang and Francie got up to answer it. Perry saw her turn on the kitchen light. Things looked better in the living room, where it was dark except for the fire. The clutter from the party the night before was still all over the room, but sitting and looking into the fire, he could forget about it. He intended to help her pick it up on Sunday, before he left to give Freed a ride to his house in Maine. He looked back to the kitchen, where Francie stood with her back to him, talking on the phone. Sometimes it bothered him that he was just one of the people she liked to have around all the time, although it meant a lot to him that they had all been friends for so long.

As they sat silently they could hear Francie talking on the phone. Perry heard the name Beth Ann twice and concentrated on the log crackling in the fire. He had gotten so he didn"t think about her much, and that day he had had to listen to her spoken about too much.

"That was odd," Francie said, coming back and sitting next to Perry. "That was Delores" mother, and she said she wanted me to know that Delores and Meagan were coming to my house-that they had left yesterday in a hurry and had asked her to call. Did Delores say that to you?"

"I think she said she was coming this way, but she didn"t say she was about to leave."

"And her mother said that Delores is going to live with Carl in New Hampshire. Do you know anything about that?"

"No," he said.

"We ought to get going," Nick said. "We"ve got to go to Anita"s mother"s tomorrow."

Anita groped behind her for her cowboy boots. They were fine boots, her Christmas present, with red roses painted on the sides and pointy toes and high heels.

"You ever want to borrow these, you could add a little kink to your dirty pictures," Anita said, and Francie smiled in embarra.s.sment. Anita rolled her white wool slacks down over the boots and pushed herself up with a groan. Nick stood with her, holding the pan that had once held chicken but now held bones.

"Thanks for the good dinner," Perry said. "Thanks for cooking it, Anita."

"Oh, it was nothing," Anita said, fanning out her fingers and pushing her fingertips into her chest. She had on a cashmere sweater that looked electrified in the firelight. Her belly protruded because she was four months pregnant.

"Good night," Nick said, kissing Francie on the forehead. Freed reached up and silently shook hands with both of them. T.W. got up and walked them to the door. When he had waved them off, the door closed and the draft stopped. T.W."s hair was dusted with snow when he came back to the fire.

"I"m going to bed down in your spare room, Francie. You"re welcome to share the bed, Freed," he said.

"I think I"ll sleep in the attic," Freed said.

"I"m sleeping there," Perry said.

"I know it, a.s.shole. I was just kidding."

Freed and T.W. walked out of the living room, clowning, with arms around each other"s waists, swaying their hips with all the grace of cows walking on ice. Francie looked after them without saying good night.

"What"s the matter?" he said.

"I"m annoyed is what"s the matter."

"Why?"

"First of all, that phone call. People"s mothers calling me and informing me of what"s going to happen to me-some woman I"ve never met calling to tell me that her crazy daughter and grandchild are headed for my house to stay with me."

"Come on," he said. "You"ve always felt sorry for Delores."

"And all that talk about her oak table. I never asked for the d.a.m.n table to begin with-she put it in my house and then she took it out, and now she wants me to track it down."

"It"s sad," he said. "It"s sad if she"s so crazy that she"s trying to track down a table n.o.body has seen for years."

"And I"m touchy about Anita, and her talking about my dirty pictures. She"s trying to embarra.s.s me because she resents it that I have a career, when she"s pregnant."

He remembered going to Francie"s house once when Francie was still married, and he and Francie"s husband had sat on the mattress playing checkers while she painted. The radio was playing. People and noise didn"t distract her, usually. He liked it that when she painted, she acted like a painter: she backed up from the canvas, tilted her head from side to side, moved forward to put a small blot of paint on the canvas, stood back, smiled. He lost the game of checkers. Winning had never been very important to him, but it would have pleased him if Francie had known that he had won-if the "Aha!" had come from him instead of from Francie"s husband. Francie herself was both casual about her art and compet.i.tive. She would paint quietly, showing nothing, for many months. But if she entered a show and didn"t win first prize, she would be furious, drag out all her canvases to show her friends, pointing out how good they were. Sometimes there was some doubt in her mind-you could tell by the way her enthusiasm came out with a questioning tone-but most of the time failure made her angry, and she resisted the idea of it by talking about all the things that were done right, with originality, in her work. The first time she did that it had taken him aback-all his friends were humble, if not self-deprecating, and he had thought at first that Francie was putting him on. He probably listened to her talk about her work for half an hour with a silly smile on his face before he realized that his expression was inappropriate. Though when other people said, occasionally, that she was an egomaniac, he defended her, saying that it was mature to believe in yourself. Sometimes even Francie knew that she went on about the importance of what she was doing too much; she had a sense of humor about it, and would mock herself: she had a long gray ap.r.o.n she painted in, with GREAT ARTIST stenciled across the back.

He looked at Francie, slumped by the fire.

"You"re in a bad mood," he said.

"You don"t think Anita said that to embarra.s.s me?"

"I don"t know," he said. He threw a chip of wood into the fire.

"Anita and her hundred-dollar boots she walks around in the snow in."

"Go to bed," he said. "You"ve tolerated all of us for long enough today."

"Everybody has to be so teasing. n.o.body can talk straight. Freed has to pretend he"s taking the attic. T.W. and Freed have to pretend they"re gay because they"re sleeping in the same double bed. Everybody"s got their act down."

"What"s the matter with you?" he said again.

"What"s the matter is that it will be six months before I have a show, and nothing happens. I sit around here all day alone and I paint. When people come they want to make jokes about my being my own model, as though I"m narcissistic."

"Your paintings are good," he said. "You know they are. n.o.body else paints the way you do."

"You like them?"

"I admire them. They"re very good. I think you should hang them on the walls."

In the living room there was one picture-a photograph taken by Anita of oil drums in the snow in New Jersey the winter before. It was a large 11" 14" photograph hanging on the longest wall of the room. When Francie"s husband left, she took down the drapes and gave him the pictures from the walls. Perry didn"t ask about it because he thought he understood.

"Put some up," he said. "You shouldn"t just lean them against your bedroom wall."

She bent her knee and put her forehead to it. "I guess I am in a bad mood," she mumbled. "I guess I might hang some of them up. But the earlier ones-not the ones of me."

"Loan me one," he said. "I"d like to hang one in my house."

"Seriously?"

"Seriously."

"Then I"ll give you one. Which one do you want?"

She got up and went toward her bedroom. He walked behind her and noticed, as they pa.s.sed the kitchen, that she had left the phone off the hook.

There was a mattress on the floor of Francie"s room. There were hooks shaped like eagles on the wall in front of the bed, on which she hung clothes. There were bamboo curtains, and in the corner there was a tall plant with four leaves at the top. He thought the room was even more depressing than the one she had lived in, in the house they had shared. Her husband had taken the furniture when he went, and although she had gone to auctions and replaced some of the furniture in some of the rooms, she had put only a mattress back in the bedroom. Seeing the clothes on hooks reminded him of the way coats were hung in his schoolroom in the winter when he was young. In place of the line of yellow boots beneath them were Francie"s self-portraits.

"This one?" she said. The painting she propped against her side was one of her best; she had painted it in front of the fire, and the pink glow of the firelight on her bare legs was just right. He looked from the picture to Francie, wanting to say that what he would like was the person propping up the painting, but the expression on her face (shy but earnest; it was easy to see that she took her painting seriously) kept him from saying anything except that it was one of her best, she should keep that one and give him another.

She shook her head. "I"ll leave it in front, and you can take it when you go."

He touched his lips to the top of her head with a small kiss and gave her a hug and went out of the room for a drink of water, then climbed the stairs to bed. His foot felt sore, and too large for the cast. He put the light on in the attic and went over to the stool with the piece of fabric and the sh.e.l.l on it. He stroked the fabric and held the sh.e.l.l to his ear to listen to the roar, carefully holding his free hand on the material so he wouldn"t disturb her still-life arrangement. The sound inside the sh.e.l.l was very loud in the attic. He put it back and turned off the light bulb and lay on the bed. Like a child, he scrawled "Francie" on the fogged windowpane above the mattress, then, before falling asleep, erased it with the side of his hand.

n.o.body could understand how Delores and Carl had made such good time driving, but they said they were speeding the whole way, and that one slept while the other drove. They came to Francie"s door late Sunday night-early Monday morning, actually-with Meagan thrown like a sack over Carl"s shoulder. "She had hiccups half the way here," Carl sighed, sinking down in the nearest chair with Meagan still sprawled up against him.

"But what are you doing with your coats on?" Delores asked. "What"s going on?"

"We were on our way out. Freed has got to teach school tomorrow."

"Freed!" Delores said, running over to him and throwing her arms around his neck.

"Do I know this woman?" Freed said, rubbing the palm of his hand down her spine after he hugged her. Freed and Delores had been lovers ten years before.

"My Pontiac was stolen," Freed said. "Ask anybody."

"What?" Delores said, looking around. "What"s the joke?"

"His car was stolen," Perry shrugged.

"Do you want some coffee, Delores? Do you, Carl?" Francie said.

"I don"t care," Carl said. "I"ll do anything."

"I can"t let you two take off when I just got here," Delores said.

"I"ll write out directions to my house," Perry said. "The three of you can come up and stay with me."

"That"s right," Delores said. "You have that big house now."

"Francie," Carl said, "you look freakishly beautiful. You"ve kinked up your hair and your b.u.t.t is unnaturally shapely."

"T.W. was here," Francie said to Carl, ignoring what he had just said. "He would have stayed around if he had known you would be here so soon, I know."

"How"s your ex-husband, Francie? It looks like you decided to go on living after he pulled out. Last time I was here there wasn"t a chair to sit in. How"s Beth Ann, Perry? Might as well state all the s.h.i.t that"s in my mind and calm myself down."

Delores broke in, saying, "She has nightmares," to Francie and pointing to Meagan. "They took her to Disney World and she screams in the night."

Carl picked up a small bottle from the table and shook it back and forth absently. Meagan shifted on him and was still again. The bottle was Hard As Nails, which T.W. coated the middle fingernail of his right hand with, to keep the nail in good shape; to relax, when he was not playing electric music with the band, T.W. played the banjo.

"Did Anita have her kid yet?" Delores asked.

"No-she"s just four months pregnant," Freed said. "How did you know about that?"

"She wrote me."

"What did you do to your foot, Perry?" Carl said, standing.

"I broke it."

"I can see that your foot is broken. Forgive me for speaking imprecisely: how did you break your foot, Perry?"

"I fell down. I was stepping off of a stone wall in the woods and my foot went out from under me in wet leaves beneath the wall."

"Oh Christ, I"ve got to teach in the morning," Freed said. "I hate to bust things up, but are we about to move?"

"I"ll spread out the sleeping bag for Meagan," Perry said. He went down the hall and turned the radiator all the way on in the bedroom, unrolled the sleeping bag at the foot of the bed. He went back to the living room and got Meagan, who flopped into his arms without waking up. He carried her to the sleeping bag and put her inside and closed the top over her without zipping it. If she had nightmares, it wouldn"t do to zip her in. There were little flecks of dried skin on her eyelids, and beneath her eyes were bluish circles. Her face was a little sunburned from Florida. "Do you remember me, Meagan?" he whispered. He smiled at her and turned off the light. Meagan never moved.

"How"s T.W."s band?" Carl asked when he came back into the room.

"Are you giving me a ride home or not?" Freed said.

"What are you going to do without a car?" Delores asked.

"I can borrow my neighbor"s truck. I don"t know," Freed said. "Hopefully they"ll find it and it won"t be wrecked."

"T.W. says they"re making money. He had a new demo tape down here that was very good."

"Come on," Freed said, pulling at the sleeve of his leather jacket.

"One minute," Perry said. He went into Francie"s bedroom and got the painting and hobbled out to the car with it. Freed came out the door behind him, and then Francie, carrying his crutches, saying, "Aren"t you even going to say goodbye?"

"I"m just carrying this out to the car."

"I"m sitting in the car," Freed said. "I"m sitting in the car until you decide to start driving it."

"I hope they find your car, Freed," Francie said.

"Del looks great," Freed sighed, and pushed around the snow with the toe of his boot. "That"s all I need to see."

"Oh-are you giving them directions to your house?" Francie asked Perry.

He closed the trunk and wiped the snow off his hands on his jeans.

"Just one second," he said to Freed.

"Thank you for the weekend, Francie," Freed said. "I"m going to sit here and freeze until he decides to get going."

"He has to give directions-"

"I understand what"s being said, Francie." He closed the car door, opened the window a crack to let the smoke from his cigarette leave the car. Freed was talking to himself in the car about how he was going to sit there until they got going.

Perry went into the house and found a piece of paper and wrote directions and a map. He gave it to Carl, who pocketed it and said, "Thanks. When are we welcome?"

"Any time," he said. "Come up as soon as you can."

"Thank you," Delores said. "We can help you work on the house."

He nodded. He could not remember ever seeing Delores do anything with her hands.

"Goodbye, Francie," he said, giving her a hug. "Stop entertaining people and do your painting."