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said.
    “Let’s just see what happens,” the doctor told him. He laid a palm on Pearl’s forehead.
    After that, he must have left. The roar came back to her ears and she didn’t quite hear him go. She was dwel ing on thoughts of Cody and Jenny; it would be lovely to have al her children together. Then suddenly a heavy chil spread across her chest. Why, she thought.
    Dr. Vincent is going to al ow this! Yes, he’s real y going to al ow it. This is it, then!
    Surely not.
    She’d been preoccupied with death for several years now; but one aspect had never before crossed her mind: dying, you don’t get to see how it al turns out.
    Questions you have asked wil go unanswered forever.
    Wil this one of my children settle down? Wil that one learn to be happier? Wil I ever discover what was meant by such-and-such? Al these years, it emerged, she’d been expecting to run into Beck again. How odd; she hadn’t realized. She had also supposed that there would be some turning point, a flash of light in which she’d suddenly find out the secret; one day she’d wake up wiser and more contented and accepting. But it hadn’t happened. Now it never would. She’d supposed that on her deathbed…
    deathbed! Why, that was this everyday, ordinary Posturepedic, not the ornate brass affair that she had always envisioned. She had supposed that on her deathbed, she would have something final to tel her children when they gathered round. But nothing was final.

    She didn’t have anything to tel them. She felt a kind of shyness; she felt inadequate. She stirred her feet fretful y and searched for a cooler place on the pil ow.
    “Children,” she had said. This was just before Cody left for col ege, the day she’d burned Beck’s letters.
    She said, “Children, there’s something I want to discuss with you.”
    Cody was talking about a job. He had to find one in order to help with the tuition fees. “I could work in the cafeteria,” he was saying, “or maybe off-campus. I don’t know which.” Then he heard his mother and looked over at her.
    “It’s about your father,” Pearl said.
    Jenny said, “I’d choose the cafeteria.”
    “You know, my darlings,” Pearl told them, “how I always say your father’s away on business.”
    “But off-campus they might pay more,” said Cody, “and every penny counts.”
    “At the cafeteria you’d be with your classmates, though,” Ezra said.
    “Yes, I thought of that.”

    “Al those coeds,” Jenny said. “Cheerleaders.
    Girls in their little white bobby sox.”
    “Sweater girls,” Cody said.
    “There’s something I want to explain about your father,” Pearl told them.
    “Choose the cafeteria,” Ezra said.
    “Children?”
    “The cafeteria,” they said.
    And al three gazed at her cool y, out of gray, unblinking, level eyes exactly like her own.
    She dreamed it was her nineteenth birthday and that devilish John Dupree had brought her a tin of chocolates and a burnt-leather ornament for her hair. “Why, John, how cunning! Have a sweet,” she told him. In the dream, it puzzled her to know that John Dupree had been dead for sixty-one years. He was kil ed in the Argonne Forest by the Huns. She remembered paying a visit of condolence to his mother, who, however, was not receiving guests. “It’s al been a mistake, apparently,” Pearl told John Dupree. And she fastened up her hair with the burnt-leather ornament.

    “There’s no question,” Jenny said. “We have to cal an ambulance. What’s got into Dr. Vincent?
    Is he senile?”
    “He does al right, for his age,” Ezra said.
    As usual, he seemed to have missed some central point; even Pearl could see that.
    Jenny sighed, or perhaps just made some impatient rustling sound with her clothes.
    “It’s lucky you cal ed me,” she said. “I come and find everything fal ing apart.”
    “Nothing’s fal ing apart.”
    “And why is she lying flat? She’s obviously having trouble breathing. Where’s that big green cushion