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“Not really. See you at seven-thirty.”
    Balsam was about to say something else when he realized he was holding a dead phone in his hand. He stared at it, wondering why she had hung up so abruptly, then decided she had probably been calling from work, and someone had been waiting for her. With a shrug, he turned his attention to other things.
    An hour later, Peter Balsam found himself walking slowly up the hill to St. Francis Xavier Church. As he walked, he noticed that Neilsville, though still bleak, no longer seemed as threatening as he had originally thought. Familiarity, he thought: he was getting used to the town. He was no longer seeing only the strangeness of the structures in Neilsville. Now he was noticing their uniqueness as well. Some of the houses, he was beginning to realize, were rather interesting in their own way. Yards were, for the most part, neat and well tended, as if the people of Neilsville, knowing that the surrounding landscape was always going to be barren, had decided to create some green oases within the desert. But it wasn’t until his third day in Neilsville, when he had decided to venture away from Main, that Peter had discovered this softer side of Neilsville. Now he walked purposefully along, enjoying the shade of the tree-lined streets and enjoying, too, the privacy the side streets afforded him. On Main Street, he had been too aware of the constant stares of the people of Neilsville as they tried to size up this stranger in their midst. But on Elm, if people watched him from their windows, Peter Balsam was blissfully unaware of it.
    He reached the top of the hill and made his way into the cool, dark church. Just inside the entrance he dipped his fingers in the font and genuflected, then moved down the aisle, genuflected once more, and sank into a pew. For a few moments Balsam simply sat, absorbing the serenity of the church, letting his eyes adjust from the glare of the summer afternoon to the soft light filtering through the stained glass of the clerestory windows.
    Slowly he became aware that he was not alone. A few pews ahead of him, near the alcove dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, a girl sat motionless, her head bowed.He recognized to as the girl who had played alone on the handball court
    Her lips moved silently in prayer, and her fingers worked at the beads clutched in her hands. Balsam watched her for a few minutes, then began to feel as if his stares were intruding on her privacy. Self-consciously, he forced himself to concentrate on his own meditations, and ignore the lonely presence of the girl.
    Thirty minutes later they met at the door of the church. He hadn’t seen her rising from her pew at the same time as he had risen from his own, and he had almost forgotten her presence. But as the two of them emerged from the shadows of the church into the white-hot afternoon, and the somnolence that he always felt in church left him, Balsam smiled at the girl. She looked at him uncertainly, and seemed about to hurry away, so he spoke.
    “Hello,” he said.
    Marilyn Crane looked at the man mutely, and tried to find her tongue.
    “You seem to come here as often as I do,” Balsam continued. “It makes a nice break from the heat of the day, doesn’t it?”
    Her eyes widened, and Balsam wondered if it was possible that the girl hadn’t noticed him yesterday and the day before, as the two of them silently sat in the church. Apparently she hadn’t
    “I’m Peter Balsam,” he said, offering her his hand.
    Marilyn Crane stared blankly at the proffered hand. Then, as if coming out of a daze, she grasped it and introduced herself.
    “I’m Marilyn Crane,” she said. “You’re the new teacher, aren’t you?”
    Balsam nodded. “Are you going to be one of my students?”
    She smiled shyly and bobbed her head, almost as if she was apologizing for her presence. “Latin Three,” she said. Then she added, as an afterthought: “And the psychology course, I hope.”
    “You hope?”