Free Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew

maddening. So she sat quite still while Polly went to answer the phone.
    Dinah and Lawrence and Pam were sitting on the patio just at that moment before the onset of evening. As the day breaks away, the light settles on the edge of the horizon, seemingly sullen, not giving an inch, just a long horizontal bar of whiteness stretching on and on beneath the graying sky. Then it dissolves into a gentleness so unexpected that the dense and hazy quality of the air seems to be the embodiment of relief. The relief of the burden of that one day.

Chapter Four
    A Party
    D inah did her grocery shopping at the little village store, even though the prices were higher than if she drove into Fort Lyman. She liked the sociability, and she would take the children along to the post office on the opposite side of Hoxsey Street, collect the mail, and then cross over to do each day’s shopping while the children dawdled behind her. In the summers she didn’t shop in great quantities. She didn’t need to, for one thing; she didn’t have the Artists’ Guild shop in West Bradford to attend to—a burden she shouldered almost exclusively September through May—and also she had to carry these groceries home in her arms. Besides, it was her summer luxury, with no other pressing duties at hand, not to think ahead, not to plan in advance.
    She was having a dinner party of sorts this evening, so for once she had come to the store with a careful little list written out on a spare deposit slip she had torn out of her checkbook. Pam had taken all the children swimming that morning, so Dinah lingered among the limited selection of produce. She had tended the Hortons’ vegetable garden with sticky and ill-tempered determination in the afternoon sun, but now as a result she had lettuce and beautiful tomatoes, some splitting with ripeness on the vine. She began to sort through the potatoes in their metal bin; most of them yielded too readily to the pressure of her fingers. She found five that would do and put the paper bag of them into her cart.
    She turned the corner of the aisle, which brought her to the meat counter, and there she came upon her father, who was just being handed whatever he had selected in a brown paper bundle tied with string. He looked predatory there with his neck projecting lengthily from his collar. He peered down at the meat in such sincere deliberation that with his height he was like a great, melancholy buzzard. He turned and saw her and smiled with that rather supercilious amusement he always assumed when they met in town.
    “Hello, Dad. How are you?”
    “Oh, I’m well. I’m well.” And he leaned down to give her a kiss on the cheek. Then he took his package and went off to the checkout. Just as he was walking away from her he turned back obliquely, hindered by his stiff leg from turning easily around. “Say, Dinah,” he said, having to turn his head somewhat over his shoulder to catch her eye, “I really like that little boy of yours,” he said and then continued on his way.
    Dinah moved along to the dairy section, because she saw that the butcher, Jim, who owned the store and had known her all her life and knew all her history, had been embarrassed at having to witness this confrontation. She looked over all the little cartons of cream—real cream, not the chemical-tasting, ultra-pasteurized variety—until she came upon the most recently dated ones, and she put two of those into her cart. She bought some unsalted butter in one big block, not in sticks, because it was so convenient for cooking. Dinah and her father met often in the village; it was unavoidable. They were civil; they weren’t sorry to see each other. But neither of them attempted a conversation of any length. When she saw that her father had left the store, she moved back to the meat counter to study the choices in the display cases. She wanted to grill shish kebabs tonight, and she was hoping to find a sirloin tip roast.
    Jim was washing and drying