Free Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler

room; he had moved there after Rosemary left him, so Delia felt free to stroll into the master bedroom while flipping to page three. She went over to stand near a bureau—just trying to get more reading light from the window above it, she could argue. Behind her, Adrian straightened her collar. His fingers made a whispery sound. “Why do you always wear a necklace?” he asked, very close to her ear.
    “Hmm?” she said in a small voice. She turned another page, blindly.
    “You always wear a string of pearls, or a cameo, or today this heart-shaped locket. Always something snug around your throat, and these little round innocent collars.”
    “It’s only habit,” she said, but her thoughts were racing. Did he mean that she looked silly, unsuited to her age?
    He had never asked how old she was, and although she wouldn’t have lied to him, she didn’t feel any need to volunteer the truth. When he’d told her that he himself was thirty-two, she had said, “Thirty-two! Young enough to be my son!”—a deliberate exaggeration, calculated to make him laugh. She had not mentioned the ages of her children, even. Norhad he inquired, for like most childless people, he seemed ignorant of the enormous space that children occupy in a life.
    Also, he had a slightly skewed image of her husband. She could tell from some of his remarks that he was picturing Sam as beefy and athletic (because he jogged) and perhaps possessed of a jealous disposition. And Delia had not set him straight.
    All it would take was bringing the two men together once—inviting Adrian for supper, say, as a neighbor left wifeless and forced to cook for himself—and the situation would lose all its potential for drama. Sam would start referring to “your pal Bly-Brice,” in that sardonic way of his; the children would roll their eyes if she talked to him too long on the phone. But Delia made no move to arrange such a meeting. She had not so much as spoken his name to anyone in her family. And when Adrian’s hands left her collar to settle on both her shoulders and draw her closer, she didn’t resist but tipped her head back to rest it against his chest. “You’re such a little person,” he said. She heard the rumble of his voice within his rib cage. “You’re so little and dainty and delicate.”
    Compared with his wife, she supposed he meant; and the notion pulled her upright. She walked away from him, briskly realigning pages. She circled the bed (Rosemary’s bed! covered with a rather seedy sateen quilt) and approached the closet. “What I want to know,” she said over her shoulder, “is can you really make a living this way? Because a magazine like yours is kind of specialized, isn’t it?”
    “Oh, I’m not so much as breaking even,” Adrian told her offhandedly. “Pretty soon I’ll have to fold, I guess. Switch to something new. But I’m used to that. Before this, I published a bulletin for rotisserie-baseball owners.”
    The closet was filled with Rosemary’s clothes—tops, then dresses, then pants, so there was an orderly progression from short to long; and they hung evenly spaced, not bunched together as in Delia’s closet. According to Adrian, Rosemary had abandoned every single one of her possessions when she left. All she took was the black silk jumpsuit she was wearing and a slim black purse tucked under her arm. Why did Delia find that so alluring? This was not the first time she had stood mesmerized in front of Rosemary’s closet.
    “And before that,” Adrian said, “I had a quarterly for M * A * S * H fans.” He was behind her again. He reached out one finger to stroke the point of her bent elbow.
    Delia said, “How’ve you been supporting yourself all this time?”
    “Well, Rosemary had a bit of an inheritance.”
    She closed the closet door. She said, “Did you know that before you married her?”
    “Why do you ask?”
    “Lately I’ve been wondering if Sam married me for my father’s practice,” she