Free Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler Page B

buttons were buttoned, and she patted her locket into place between her collarbones. Once again she heard Adrian say, “Why do you always wear a necklace?” And then, “Lie down with me, Delia,” and just as in her high-school days, she felt stirred even more by the memory than by the event itself. If she hadn’t already been seated, her legs might have buckled.
    Maybe she could say she was visiting Bootsy. Not for a whole night, of course, but for an evening. Certainly no one in her family would bother checking up on her.
    She parked in the driveway, which was clear now of all cars except for Sam’s. Smoke billowed from the yard on the other side of the house. He must be firing up the grill for dinner.
    She followed the trail of smoke to the little flagstone rectangle beneath the office windows. Yes, there he was, peering at the grill’s thermometer with his glasses raised. He still wore his shirt and tie and his suit trousers, minus his white coat. He looked so professional that Delia felt a flash of anxiety. Didn’t he know everything? But when he straightened, lowering his glasses, all he said was, “Hi, Dee. Where’ve you been?”
    “Oh, I was … running a few errands,” she said.
    She was amazed that he didn’t ask why, then, she had returned empty-handed. He just nodded and tapped the thermometer with his index finger.
    Climbing the steps to the kitchen door, she felt like a woman emerging from a deep, thick daytime sleep. She walked past Eliza and drifted toward the hall. “Are you going to grill the vegetables too? Or put them in the oven?” Eliza called after her.
    There wouldn’t be space for them on the grill. They would have to go in the oven, and she meant to say as much to Eliza but forgot, lost the words, and merely floated into the study. It was unoccupied, thank heaven. She didn’t believe she could have waited till she reached the phone upstairs. She lifted the receiver, dialed Adrian’s number, let his phone ring twice, and then hung up—her way of letting him know that this was not his mother-in-law. She redialed, and he answered halfway through the first ring. “Is that you?” he asked. His voice sounded urgent, intense. She sank onto a footstool and gripped the receiver more tightly.
    “Yes,” she whispered.
    “Come back here, Delia.”
    “I wish I could.”
    “Come back and stay with me.”
    “I want to. I do want to,” she said.
    Sam’s mother said, “Delia?”
    Delia slammed the phone down and jumped to her feet. “Eleanor!” she cried. She thrust her hands in the folds of her skirt to hide their tremor. “I was just—I was just—”
    “Sorry to barge in,” Eleanor said, “but nobody answered the door.” She advanced to kiss the air near Delia’s ear. She smelled of soap; she was an unperfumed, unfrilled woman, sensibly clad in a drip-dry shirt-dressand Nikes, with a handsome face and clipped white monkish hair. “Didn’t mean to interrupt your conversation.”
    “No, I was just winding it up,” Delia told her.
    “It appears that someone has left some articles on your front porch.”
    “Articles?”
    Delia had a fleeting vision of Dr. Adwater’s article on charisma.
    “Badminton sets and rafts and such, scattered all about where anyone might stumble on them.”
    Eleanor was the kind of guest who felt it her duty to point out alarming flaws in the household. How long had their toilet been making that noise? Did they know they had a tree limb about to come down? Delia always countered by pretending that she was a guest herself. “Imagine that!” she said. “Let me take you to Sam. He’s out by the grill.”
    “Now, I thought you weren’t going to any fuss,” Eleanor told her, leading the way from the study. Instead of a purse, she had one of those belt packs, glow-in-the-dark chartreuse nylon, riding in front of her stomach like some sort of add-on pregnancy. It caused her to walk slightly swaybacked, although ordinarily her posture was