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Christmas, but she’s up to it now. She’ll be dancing around that kitchen.”
    “I’ll come cook it,” Susan says.
    “That’s very nice of you,” Pete says.
    Laura is baking bread. She is probably not still baking. It is probably out of the oven. The Ox is probably eating it. Charles is hungry; he would like some of that bread. More than that, he would like that dessert. More than that, he would like Laura.
    “Kids dance nowadays, don’t they?” Pete says, riding down in the elevator.
    “Not much,” Susan says. “Nobody does much of anything any more. I don’t even think there are many drugs on campus.”
    “I should hope not,” Pete says.
    “Well,” Charles says. “We’ll see you in a couple of days.”
    “Right,” Pete says. “Where are you parked?”
    “To the left,” Charles says.
    “Me too,” Pete says.
    As they walk down the street, Pete says, “How’s the car holding out?”
    “It runs okay. Uses a lot of gas.”
    “If you ever want a good car wax, let me recommend Turtle Wax,” Pete says. “That’s really the stuff.”
    “I’ll remember that,” Charles says.
    “No you won’t,” Pete says.
    “Turtle Wax,” Charles repeats, not wanting to have to hear again that he doesn’t like Pete.
    “You don’t like me a damn,” Pete says. “But it’ll be good to have you to dinner all the same.”
    There is an awkward moment when they reach Charles’s car.
    “Headed home?” Pete says.
    “Yeah. We’ll see you.”
    “I guess I’m headed there,” Pete says, shrugging his shoulder toward a bar.
    “Well, we’ll see you,” Susan says.
    Pete nods his head. “See you,” he says.
    “Poor Pete,” Susan says in the car.
    “Nobody told him to marry her.”
    “She did. She told me that once. She told him that if he was going to come over all the time, he should marry her.”
    “Well, that should have told him,” Charles says.
    “I feel sorry for him,” she says.
    “Your friend left,” he says. “I forgot to tell you.”
    “She didn’t have a good time, I guess.”
    “What do you care? She’s just some girl on your floor.”
    “Yeah,” Susan says. “She might have had a good time with Sam.”
    “I don’t care if she had a good time or not,” Charles says.
    “Sam’s really something,” Susan says. “Is he still selling clothes?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Maybe we could ask him to dinner at Pete’s place,” Susan says.
    “He wouldn’t come.”
    “How do you know?”
    “He doesn’t like Pete.”
    “Does he know him?”
    “We ran into him once in a hardware store. We were there to get a hammer for Sam. Pete got onto a thing about ‘security systems’—how Sam owed it to himself to install ‘a high-power security system.’ He ran around pointing out locks and bolts. You know—Sam hasn’t got anything anybody would bother to steal. He thought Pete was a jackass.”
    “You’re the one who always says that. Sam probably didn’t say anything like that.”
    “He said, ‘What a goon.’ ”
    “Maybe he’d go to dinner anyway. You’d like him there.”
    “Sure I would. I’d like to put him through that.”
    “He came before.”
    “That was when she was a lot better. The last time he came, her dress kept slipping off her at the table, and he was humiliated. You remember. You were there, weren’t you?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Sure. It was just before you started college. Pete was in Chicago. She kept saying, ‘One of my men might be gone, but I have two others.’ Sam was humiliated.”
    Susan combs her hair. She leaves her black mittens on, and Charles thinks that she looks like some weird animal with big paws. She’s a nice sister. He wishes he could think of something to do with her.
    “If you stop at a store, I’ll buy something to fix for dinner,” she says.
    “You feel like fixing dinner?”
    She shrugs. Laura likes to cook. Laura and the Ox are probably eating a late dinner together in their cold A-frame. Tomorrow he will see