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do the fat-cat oil companies — most of the time. And that keeps my personal pollution contribution down.”
    Jeff was remembering more about her with every minute. He watched her hands on the steering wheel and wondered about the rings she wore; the lights overhead and from passing trucks flashed over her hands, lighting them purple and yellow. She turned off the highway after a few minutes and negotiated a number of turns before stopping in front of a small one-story house, one of a row of similar houses, each with a chain link fence around it. She turned around in her seat to ask, “Do you want to wait in the car or come in?”
    â€œI’ll wait,” Jeff decided.
    â€œYou better come in, we may be a while,” she told him. She opened the low gate for them and then took his arm again as they went up the walk to the small porch. A yellow light, covered with the bodies of bugs, shone over the door.
    Inside, two women sat at a kitchen table, folding letters into a pile of envelopes. Most of the house was taken up by this kitchen, which had a sofa at the wall farthest away from the stove and sink, with a small TV set on the coffee table. “Mel,” the women said, “we were wondering where you were.”
    â€œI was meeting someone,” Jeff’s mother said. “The man in my life; let me introduce him, Jefferson Greene. This is Phoebe.”
    â€œHello,” Jeff said, to a young woman whose short, curly dark hair framed her face. Phoebe nodded at him.
    â€œAnd Willa.” Jeff said hello to Willa whose brown hair curled like Phoebe’s into fuzzy curls.
    â€œSit down, Jeffie, my goodness,” his mother told him. He sat obediently in one of the two empty chairs at the table. She took the other. “My son,” she announced.
    Jeff stared at her. She had sounded so proud and glad as shesaid that. Her big eyes moved from one to the other of the people at the table. A smile teased at her mouth.
    â€œFor heaven’s sake,” Phoebe said. “You never said a word.” Both of the women stared at Jeff.
    â€œFrom the marriage?” Willa said.
    â€œOh, yes,” Melody said. “I had to pick him up at the airport, and I was late and so worried — I can’t tell you.” She pressed her hand over her heart. “Talk about anxiety.”
    Melody did not wear a wedding ring, Jeff noticed, but she wore two silver rings with pieces of turquoise set in them, on one hand. On the other hand she wore a big ring with a dark red stone in it and a plain pearl ring. Her fingers were delicate.
    â€œWe’d better get going on this, if we want to do a mailing tomorrow. Jeffie will help, won’t you? It’s women’s lib material,” she teased.
    â€œSure,” Jeff said. “It doesn’t make any difference to me.”
    Melody’s laugh floated over the table. “But it will, Jeffie, it will. You just wait.”
    They folded the letters into envelopes. This was the second of five mailings, “and we’ve got all the facts and figures,” Melody said, her hands working.
    â€œFor all the good it does,” Phoebe said. “I don’t know, sometimes I think women just don’t care.”
    â€œWhat do you expect?” Melody asked, “when we’ve all been brought up to get married and let a man support us.”
    â€œWell, it serves them right,” Willa said. “Sometimes I think I’ll do just that, it would certainly be easier than — earning the money and keeping the house too. Especially when I think of the men who earn more than I do and don’t work as hard. Or as well. It’s just what they deserve, some woman hanging like a leech off them. Then they complain about women.”
    â€œThe trouble with that,” Melody said, her voice serious and sad, “is that it’s bad for you. Bad for women to do that, bad for themselves, because it just perpetuates things. We