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focused mind and another clears the atmosphere after interpersonal strife.”
    Lysander looked over at Delia, raising his gray toothbrush eyebrows.
    “So anyhow,” Delia said hastily. “Is this job about wrapped up, do you think?”
    “This one here? Oh, no,” he said. He plodded toward the sink; he had come down to refill his thermos. Waiting for the water to run cold, he said, “We got several more days, at the least.”
    “Several days!” Delia squawked. She cleared her throat. “But the noisy part: will that be over soon? Even the cat is getting a headache.”
    “Now, how would you know that?” he asked.
    “Oh, Delia can read a cat’s mind,” Eliza told him. “She’s got all of us trained in cat etiquette: what kind of voice to use with them and how to do your eyes when you look at them and—”
    “Eliza, I need those beans now ,” Delia broke in.
    Too late, though: Lysander snorted as he set his thermos under the faucet. “Me, I’ll take a dog any day,” he said. “Cats are too sneaky for my taste.”
    “Oh, well, I like dogs too, of course,” Delia said. (In fact, she wasslightly afraid of dogs.) “It’s just that dogs are so … sudden. You know?”
    “But honest,” Lysander said. It sounded like an accusation. “Okay if I swipe a few ice cubes?”
    “Go right ahead,” Delia told him.
    He stood there helplessly, clasping the neck of his thermos, until she realized that he meant for her to get them. He would be one of those men who didn’t know where their wives kept the spoons. She dried her hands on her apron and went to fetch the bin from the freezer.
    “Last place we worked?” he said. “Putting in a new heat pump? Guy next door owned one of them attack dogs. Dog trained to attack. Lady we was working for warned us all about him.”
    He kept a staunch grip on his thermos while Delia tried to fit an ice cube in. It wouldn’t go. She hit it with the flat of her hand (Lysander not even flinching) and, “Eek!” she cried, for the ice cube flew up in the air and then skittered across the floor. Lysander stared down at it dolefully.
    “Just let me at this little devil,” Delia told him, and she snatched the thermos from him and slammed it into the sink. She ran water over a second ice cube. “Aha!” she crowed, pounding it in. She started working on a third.
    Lysander said, “So we’re hauling in stuff from the truck one day, come to see the attack dog rounding the side of the house. Big old bristle-necked dog like a wolf, growling real deep in his throat. Lord, I thought I would die. Then out steps the lady we worked for like she had just been waiting for this. Says, ‘Come along,’ and takes hold of his collar, calm-natured as you please. Walks him into the yard next door and, ‘Mr. What’s-it?’ she calls. ‘I’m about to shoot your dog dead unless you come out this minute and retrieve him.’ With her voice just as clear, just as cool. That was some kind of woman, believe me.”
    Why was he telling this story? Was it meant to show Delia up? She dispatched the third ice cube with as little commotion as possible. For some reason, she imagined that the woman had resembled Rosemary Bly-Brice. Maybe she was Rosemary Bly-Brice. She wore an expression of tolerant detachment; she bent in a graceful S-curve; she hooked a single finger through the dog’s spiked collar. Unexpectedly, Delia felt a rush of admiration, as if her entrancement with Adrian extended to his wife as well.
    She turned off the faucet, picked up the thermos, and offered it to Lysander. “Why, looky there,” Lysander said. Water was dripping rapidlyfrom the bottom of the thermos. “Why, you’ve gone and broke it,” he said.
    Delia didn’t apologize. She went on offering the thermos, wishing he would just take it and leave. In the supermarket, she recalled at that instant, she had made some reference to Ramsay, and Adrian had assumed she meant her husband. No wonder he hadn’t come by yet! He’d been