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“You’ll have this stuff by eight.”
    After he hung up, he turned the floor fan on, got his cigarettes and lighter, rolled paper into the machine, spread his notes out beside him on the scarred table and hammered the news stories out with four-finger efficiency, pausing very rarely to hunt for word or phrase, taking a familiar excusable pride in his competence.
    When he was showering, his phone rang. It was Elmo Bliss.
    “Jim boy, we got ourselves interrupted this morning before I finished all I had to say.”
    “I got most of the message, Elmo.”
    “But I never did get around to telling you where you fit in so good.”
    “Or where you fit in, Elmo.”
    There was a momentary silence on the line. Jimmy felt a quick apprehension, and was annoyed at himself for feeling alarm. He had a continuing compulsion to irritate Elmo Bliss, like a small boy’s urge to stand too close to the lion cage. Though he could think of no ways in which Elmo could do him any serious harm, there was a flavor of wildness under control about the man which could cause alarm on a visceral rather than a rational basis.
    Bliss chuckled. “You say things right out, Jim boy. Better you should wait until you know, and then say nothing. You come on out here to the place this evening, and we can finish talking. There’ll be some folks around like always, but a better place to talk than the courthouse.”
    “I can’t promise any particular time, Elmo.”
    “This will keep going until you get here, boy.”

Three
    AFTER KATHERINE HUBBLE BROUGHT her two waterlogged children home from the Sinnat pool, she let them change into pajamas while she fixed the evening meal for the three of them. They ate at the round table on the enclosed part of the patio. Roy was eight and Alicia was seven. They had Van’s coloring, and already they had a deep tan which she could never achieve.
    In one sense it seemed the bitterest blow of all that Van should have lost the chance to watch them grow up. But sometimes she caught herself feeling a ridiculously unfair indignation toward Van, as if he had purposely run out and left her with all the problems of discipline, health, education and love.
    And, as always when she was alone with them, she found herself fretting about whether she was handling it all properly.
    Van’s death had stunned the children. They had become irritable, whiny, quarrelsome and disobedient. And at just the time when she could feel that they were beginning to make a goodadjustment, they had to turn the house over to the Brandts and move down to that small apartment on one of the back streets behind the main post office. Though they seemed to understand why it had to be done, in many ways it seemed a more severe emotional shock to them than the loss of their father. It destroyed the security of the known place. Roy, in particular, was a disciplinary problem during the first weeks of the new school year.
    By spring they had begun to handle it better, and when they could at last move back to the Sandy Key house they knew so well, they ran and yelped and grinned the whole day long.
    She tried to maintain as many of the ceremonies of being a family as possible, and she was grateful for the shortness of her work week, but it was still an abnormal situation to have them looked after by someone else during the weekdays.
    She knew she could have found no situation more ideal than the one Claire Sinnat had volunteered. Claire had the twin boys, four years old, the big beach house and the pool and the grounds, a full-time cook-housekeeper, and a full-time girl—a Mexican girl named Esperanza—to look after her kids. Esperanza was chunky, cheerful and devoted to children. On her afternoon off, either Claire filled in or Natalie Sinnat took over. Nat was spending the summer with them. She was nineteen, Dial Sinnat’s daughter by one of his previous marriages.
    “My God, sweetie,” Claire had said. “Shoo them up here every day, or I’ll think you aren’t