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somewhere.”
    “I like Pete,” I said. “He’s a good man.”
    “Betty too,” Sarah said. “She’s a good kind woman and I’m glad she and Pete have each other.”
    “Things come around sometimes,” I said. “Things work out.”
    Sarah didn’t say anything. She bit her lower lip for a minute. Then she went on into the back room to finish scrubbing. I satdown on the sofa and smoked a cigarette. When I’d finished, I got up and went back to the other room and my mop bucket.
    The next day, Friday, we finished cleaning the house and did most of our packing. Sarah wiped down the stove once more, put aluminum foil under the burners, and gave the counter a last going over. Our suitcases and few boxes of books stood in one corner of the living room, ready for our departure. We’d have dinner tonight with the Petersens and we’d get up the next morning and go out for coffee and breakfast. Then we’d come back and load the car; there wasn’t all that much left after twenty years of moves and disorder. We’d drive to Eureka and unload the car and put things away in Sarah’s efficiency apartment, which she’d rented a few days before, and then sometime before eight o’clock that night she’d drive me to the little airport where I would begin my trip east, planning to make connections with a midnight flight leaving San Francisco for Boston, and she would begin her new life in Eureka. She’d already, a month before, when we began discussing these matters, taken off her wedding ring—not so much in anger as just in sadness one night when we had been making these plans. She had worn no ring at all for a few days, and then she had bought an inexpensive little ring mounted with a turquoise butterfly because, as she said, that finger “felt naked.” Once, some years before that, in a rage, she had twisted the wedding band off her finger and thrown it across the living room. I had been drunk and left the house and when we talked about that night a few days later and I asked about her wedding ring, she said, “I still have it. I just put it in a drawer. You don’t really think I’d throw my wedding ring away, do you?” A little later she put it back on and she’d kept wearing it, even through the bad times, up until a month ago. She’d also stopped taking birth-control pills and had herself fitted with a diaphragm.
    So we worked that day around the house and finished the packing and the cleaning and then, a little after six o’clock, wetook our showers and wiped down the shower stall again and dressed and sat in the living room, she on the sofa in a knit dress and blue scarf, her legs drawn up under her, and me in the big chair by the window. I could see the back of Pete’s restaurant from where I sat, and the ocean a few miles beyond the restaurant and the meadows and the copses of trees that lay between the front window and the houses. We sat without talking. We had talked and talked and talked. Now we sat without talking and watched it turn dark outside and the smoke feather up from the restaurant chimney.
    “Well,” Sarah said and straightened out her legs on the sofa. She pulled her skirt down a little. She lit a cigarette. “What time is it? Maybe we should go. They said 7:30, didn’t they? What time is it?”
    “It’s ten after seven,” I said.
    “Ten after seven,” she said. “This is the last time we’ll be able to sit in the living room like this and watch it get dark. I don’t want to forget this. I’m glad we have a few minutes.”
    In a little while I got up for my coat. On my way to the bedroom I stopped at the end of the sofa where she sat and bent and kissed her on the forehead. She raised her eyes to mine after the kiss and looked at me.
    “Bring my coat too,” she said.
    I helped her into her coat and then we left the house and went across the lawn and the back edge of the parking lot to Pete’s house. Sarah kept her hands in her pockets and I smoked a cigarette as we walked.