She shut the passenger door behind her and hurried toward the building with him.
When she got back to the studio, she gathered his supplies—his two bowls and his sacks of kitty litter and cat chow, his litter box and the slotted spatula next to it—and she carried them out to the garbage bin in the alley and dropped them in. Then she returned to the studio. The silence there was noticeable. She couldn’t figure out why, though. It wasn’t as if Desmond had been a noisy cat.
She ought to make her weekly grocery trip now so she could return the car to Robin, but first she thought she’d just sit awhile. She sat on the daybed with her hands folded; she didn’t even try to look busy. She didn’t even turn the radio on. She just sat listening to the silence.
* * *
—
Summer arrived, but David came home for only a few days, because he’d found a job with a theater group. Children swarmed the neighborhood, chanting and laughing and quarreling. The oak tree in the Motts’ backyard had filled out with so many leaves that any small birds on its branches chirped invisibly, but larger birds （hawks? some kind of falcons?） could often be seen circling high above it and then wheeling off again. For the first time Mercy wondered if certain birds were famous among other birds for their distinctive flying style—if they took pride in executing a particularly graceful arc or a breathtaking swoop as the others watched admiringly.
She would give her shoulders a shake, finally, and turn away from the window and go back to whatever painting she’d been working on. The carved pineapple on a newel post. The ball-fringe trim on a curtain. The doorstop shaped like a black iron dog with a tail like an upright feather.
Am I missing something? she thought every now and then. Am I overlooking something?
But she would dismiss the notion, and reach once more for a paintbrush no thicker than an eyelash.
4
Nobody in the Garrett family made much fuss over Easter. Oh, they did buy inexpensive prefilled baskets for their children if they happened to notice some in the supermarket, and they might drop in on a neighborhood egg hunt just to look sociable, but that was about the sum of it.
So when David phoned on an April afternoon in 1982 and proposed driving down that Sunday for Easter dinner, they were all taken aback. Lily was the one he spoke to. She was at work; she managed the store for her father now that young Pickford had become a survivalist and moved to the wilds of Montana. “Wellington’s Plumbing Supply,” she said, and David said, “Lily, is that you?”
“David?” she asked. “Is everything okay?” Because David was not a telephone person, to put it mildly.
“Yes, fine,” he said, “but I’ve had a hell of a time tracking anyone down. First I called Mom: no answer. And then Alice, but she didn’t answer, either.”
“Well, of course not. Alice is harder to find than any of us,” Lily told him.
She said this because it hurt her feelings, a little, that he’d tried Alice before he tried her. In fact, Alice was normally very easy to find. But “Carpool, moms’ group, PTA…” she said.
“So then I figured I’d try Dad,” David told her, hurting her feelings even further. “I’m glad I got you, at least.”
“Huh,” she said.
“I wanted to check about Easter.”
“Easter! What about it?”
“Well, I thought I might drive down for Easter dinner. Bring a friend.”
“A friend?” she asked. （Antenna going up.）
“My friend Greta.”
“Ah.”
She glanced around the store, looking everywhere for Robin. Where was he? This was momentous.
“So will everyone be available, do you think?”
“Of course they will!” she said.
Or they would drop their plans so they could be available; she could guarantee it.
“I was thinking we’d arrive about noon or so,” he said. “We can’t stay over, because we don’t get Easter Monday off.”
“Oh? Greta works at your school?” she asked.
“Right,” he said. “Will you tell the others?”
“Yes, certainly! You know they’ll be—”
“Okay,” he said. “Bye.”
“I look forward to meeting Greta!”
But he had already hung up.
* * *
—
He was thirty years old at the time, an English and drama teacher in a high school just outside Philadelphia. He had taught there for several years. He lived in a house that he rented with an option to buy. In other words, he was settled. Established. And yet he had never, ever, on a single occasion, brought a girl home to meet the family. All they knew of his private life was what he happened to let slip in passing, and when they pressed him for further details—“Spring vacation with your friend Lois? Is this Lois somebody special?”—he grew cagey and changed the subject.