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gaining on it at all, still disputing, as it sailed along in the current. “I was winning that argument!” her father said.
    “Well, I was laughing too hard to keep up my side of it.” The hat finally caught on a snag, and that was the whole story, but it always made them laugh. The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed. In a calm, affectionate way they studied each other.
    Ames said, “I understand that boy of yours is coming home.”
    “So he tells me. He sent a letter.”
    “Will the brothers and sisters be coming, too?”
    Her father shook his head. “I’ve made some phone calls.” There it was, the parting of the sea. “They agree it would be best for them to wait until he wants to see them. He was never much at ease with them. I believe I was at fault in that. Of course, it’s good that Glory is here to help,” he said, remembering she was in the room. So she went into the parlor, sat beside the muttering radio, and worked a crossword puzzle. She thought, Is it good that I am here? That might be true. I will have to remember not to be angry. She reminded herself of this because Jack would probably still be insufferable and she had spent all her patience elsewhere.
    W HAT FOLLOWED WERE WEEKS OF TROUBLE AND DISRUP tion, dealing with the old man’s anticipation and anxiety and then his disappointment, every one of which made him restless and sleepless and cross. She spent the days coaxing her father to eat. The refrigerator and the pantry were stocked with everything he thought he remembered Jack’s having a liking for, and he suspectedGlory of wanting to give up too soon and eat it all on the pretext of avoiding waste. So he would accept nothing but a bowl of oatmeal or a poached egg, while skin thickened on cream pies and lettuce went limp. She had worried about what to do with it all if Jack never came. The thought of sitting down to a stale, humiliated feast with her heartbroken father was intolerable, but she had thought it anyway, to remind herself how angry she was, and with what justification. She had in fact planned to smuggle food out of the house by night in amounts the neighbor’s dogs could eat, since it would be too old to offer to the neighbors themselves, and they would no doubt feed it to the dogs anyway, tainted as it was with bitterness and grief.
    Glory had rehearsed angry outbursts in anticipation of his arrival. Who do you think you are! and How can you be so inconsiderate! which became, as the days passed, How can you be so mean, cruel, vicious, and so on. She began to hope he would come so she could tell him exactly what she thought. Well, of course she was angry, with those loaves of banana bread ripening noisomely in the pantry. What right do you have! she stormed inwardly, knowing as she did that her father’s only prayers were that Jack would come, and that Jack would stay.
    “He says here ‘for a while’! A while can be a significant amount of time!” They had Jack’s address after the Great Letter came, the one that made her father weep and tremble. Her father sent another note and a little check, in case the first had gone astray. And they waited. Jack’s letter lay open on the breakfast table and the supper table and the lamp table and the arm of the Morris chair. He had folded it away once, when Reverend Ames came for checkers, presumably because he did not want a doubtful glance to fall on it.
    “Yes, he will definitely be coming,” he would conclude, as if uncertainty on that point had to do with the language of the letter. Two weeks passed, then three days. Then came the Telephone Call, and her father actually spoke with Jack, actually heard his voice. “He says he will be here day after tomorrow!” Her father’sanxiety turned to misery without ever losing the quality of patience. “I believe it could only be trouble of