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upon a time, but now it was largely a matter of bee shots in the spring, flu shots in the fall; and as for childbirth, why, these patients were long past the age. They were hand-me-downs from her father, most of them. (Or even, Sam joked, from her grandfather, who had opened this office in 1902, when Roland Park was still country and no one batted an eye at running a practice out of a residence.)
    She copied Dr. Peterson’s number onto a card and passed it to Mrs. Harper, who examined it suspiciously before tucking it into her bag. “I trust this person is not some mere snip of a boy,” she told Sam.
    “He’s thirty if he’s a day,” Sam assured her.
    “Thirty! My grandson is older than that! Oh, please, can’t I go on seeing you instead?” But already knowing his answer, she turned without a pause toward Delia. “This husband of yours is a saint,” she said. “He’s just too good to exist on this earth. I hope you realize that.”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “You make sure you appreciate him, hear?”
    “Yes, Mrs. Harper.”
    Delia watched Sam escort the old woman to the door, and then she dropped back onto the love seat and picked up her book. “Beatrice,” the hero was saying, “I want you more than life itself,” and his voice was rough and desperate—uncontrolled, was the way the author put it: uncontrolled, and it sent a thrill down her slender spine within the clinging ivory satin of her negligee.
    Maybe, instead of running into Adrian, she could just sit still and let him track her down. Maybe he was even now dwelling on his image of her and cruising the streets in search of her. Or he had looked up her address, perhaps; for he did know her last name. He was parked down the block at this very moment, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.
    She took to stepping into the yard several times a day. She seized any excuse to arrange herself on the front-porch swing. Never an outdoor person, and most certainly not a gardener, she spent half an hour posed in goatskin gloves among Eliza’s medicinal herbs. And after someone telephoned but merely breathed and said nothing when she answered, she jumped up at every new call like a teenager. “I’ll get it! I’ll get it!” When there weren’t any calls, she made a teenager’s bargains with Fate: I won’t think about it, and then the phone will ring. I’ll go out of the room; I’ll pretend I’m busy and the phone will ring for sure. Shepherding her family into the car for a Sunday visit to Sam’s mother, she moved fluidly, sensuously, like an actress or a dancer conscious every minute of being watched.
    But if someone really had been watching, think of what he would see: the ragged disarray of Delia’s home life. Ramsay, short and stone-faced and sullen, kicking a tire in disgust; Carroll and Susie bickeringover who would get a window seat; Sam settling himself behind the wheel, pushing his glasses higher on his nose, wearing an unaccustomed knit shirt that made him look weak-armed and fussy. And at the end of their trip, the Iron Mama (as Delia called her)—sturdy, plain Eleanor Grinstead, who patched her own roof and mowed her own lawn and had reared her one son single-handed in that spotless Calvert Street row house where she waited now, lips clamped tight, to hear what new piece of tomfoolery her daughter-in-law had contrived.
    No, not a one of them would bear up beneath the celestial blue gaze of Adrian Bly-Brice.
    The oldest of the air-conditioning men, the one named Lysander, asked what those hay-bunch things were doing, hanging from the attic rafters. “Those are my sister’s herbs,” Delia said. She hoped to let it rest at that, but her sister happened to be right there in the kitchen with her, stringing beans for supper, and she told him, “Yes, I burn them in little pots around the house.”
    “You set fire to them?” Lysander asked.
    “Each one does something different,” Eliza explained. “One prevents bad dreams and another promotes a