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away.
    "This isn't right," she said after a moment. "It would be wrong." She appeared suddenly stricken. "Another woman's bed!"
    "What?" Though Bower knew her not at all, he thought there was a serious chance she might be joking.
    "We can't," she said with surprising firmness.
    "Oh."
    "No, Frank. Sorry."
    Bower was extremely disappointed. But edging his interior horizon, on a different quarter, appeared the faraway contours of relief. He tried to swallow the humiliation.
    "You're a mercurial character. Aren't you?"

    "Yes, I am," she said.
    "I see."
    "And here we are," she said. Suddenly she laughed, and for a moment she was lively and humorous again. "Out in the sticks. Don't you believe it's a woman's privilege to change her mind?"
    "Oh, come on, Margaret." He was unsettled by her laughter and the cliché. She showed the expression he had learned to dread. The smile.
    Driving her home was an embarrassment. He thought of switching on the car radio but decided it might only make things worse. Music would be irony. A stranger's voice would sound like mocking witness.
    When they were back in the city, heading downtown along St. Paul Street, she told him brusquely that she lived in the Belvedere. It was an old hotel near the Washington Monument that had faded and then turned condo.
    Margaret offered no goodbyes when they pulled up before the tastefully renovated entrance. They parted in the welter of Bower's shamed silence. Setting out for his own house in Roland Park, he kept his eyes on the road. As a result, he failed to see her climb into one of the cabs that always waited in front of the gay bar and club catty-corner to the Belvedere.
    In the cab, Margaret made a call to her daughter. She was fatigued from the drive and irritable.
    "Clean up, my dear."
    Arriving, she found that Cordelia had cleaned up, after a fashion. At least there were no dishes in the sink. Nor was there—aside from a couple of withered apples, a moldering box of take-out rice, and a baby's bottle containing milk of indeterminate freshness—any food in the refrigerator.

    "Christ, don't you eat?" Margaret asked.
    "Yeah, I eat," Cordelia said, pouting. "How about you?"
    Margaret inspected her.
    "You don't look well."
    "Oh, thanks," Cordelia said.
    In Cordelia's room, Margaret found her grandson, diaper unchanged, lying uncomfortably with twisted covers and looking as though he had cried himself to sleep. As she stood there, the child awakened and whimpered.
    "Wash that child and change him. How can you be so irresponsible?"
    "All right, all right," Cordelia whined. Except for the petulant inflection, Cordelia had a cultivated voice like her mother's. In the bedroom, the baby cried savagely.
    "Happy now?" asked Cordelia. She went into her room and slammed the door. Margaret took her sleek coat off and hung it carefully. Then she eased herself onto the living room sofa, took off her sensible shoes and put her feet up. She lay with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds from the next room, where Cordelia was alternately muttering to herself and crooning to the baby. After the child had been quiet for a while Cordelia came out, wearing her bomber jacket with its tombstone patch, ready to hit the street.
    "Don't you think his eyes look odd?" Margaret said without rising.
    "But he has beautiful eyes," Cordelia told her mother. "Angel eyes."
    "You're slamming meth, aren't you, dear?"

    Cordelia marched toward the apartment door, then turned in rage. Her mother cut off any reply.
    "I've tried to persuade you. Your teeth will fall out. You'll age."
    "Thanks again, Slim."
    "I don't want to sit by and watch you lose your looks." She sat up to address her daughter. "And your mind. Tweakers are the most boring people. Who taught you to fix?"
    "I knew how."
    "No, baby. I'm sure it was Donny."
    Cordelia opened the apartment door and started out.
    "Just a moment, dearest. Where to? Leaving mother to babysit? Mother had a tough day."
    "Really? Ball some poor