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and I was glad to see her do it, since I hated for the milk to go to waste.
    “Joanie, explain something to me, please.”
    “If I can. What?”
    “It’s about your sister-in-law.”
    “She’s not too friendly, Liz. She blames me for what happened to her brother—my husband, Ron. And then there’s my son. She’s taking care of him now, supposedly to help me, but what she really would like is to keep him.”
    Joan nodded as though I’d just confirmed something she’d been thinking. “She didn’t think I could see her, but I could, out of oneside of my eye. And that bundle of soiled clothes, the ones you were going to wash that she grabbed out of your hand, she was holding them to her face, burying her nose in them, and smelling them, Joan, I’d swear that’s what she was doing—I can’t be mistaken about it. She was smelling your little boy’s clothes, not the clean ones, the dirty ones.”
    “It doesn’t surprise me at all.”
    “Well, what would make her do that?”
    “She’s hipped on him, Liz. She always was, but even more since Ron’s death. I’m telling you, she’s trying to steal him off me.” I explained about Ethel’s surgery, the hysterectomy I suppose it was, and she sat thinking that over. Then: “Are you willing, Joan? You want to give the boy up? Is that how you want it to be?”
    “I’m here to tell you it’s not.”
    “Then you got a thing on your hands.”
    “I know I have, but as of now I’m helpless to move in and block it.”
    “Why’d you let her take him in the first place?”
    “She forced it,” I said, “made it clear I could go along willingly or she’d call the state and have him taken away from me permanent, by showing them how we were living. Never mind that it was Ron that reduced us to it. She’d just show them we had no gas, no electric, no money in the bank, that I had no income and no prospect of earning any …”
    “Well, she’d have been wrong about that.”
    “That’s so,” I said, “but now that I’m working, it means I couldn’t take Tad back even if Liz were willing. Not while I’m out eight or nine hours a day, six days out of seven, and Tad still so young. He needs care and attention, and if I’m not around—I have to leave him with her, whether I like it or not.”
    “She’s got it bad, Joanie.”
    “Don’t I know it.”
    *
    Liz had a second cup while I finished my first, and when I’d washed up she said we should be getting started, “so you get there by four o’clock. Jake’s particular about his set-ups.”
    “O.K., but there’s something I have to do first.”
    What I had to do was look up Earl K. White III in the phone book. I did, and he was listed, at least his residence was, on one of the streets of College Heights Estates, the swank part of University Park, but no phone. I looked in the District book, and sure enough he was there, in boldface type, with “Investment Secs” after his name. What that meant I didn’t quite know, but I looked under that head in the yellow book, and lo and behold there was a big ad that went something like this:
    Earl K White III
    Investment Securities
    Successor to Earl K. White, Jr.,
    And Earl K. White —
    Three Generations of Financial Stewardship
    Since 1913
    MEMBER, NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE
    That seemed to cover everything. At last, I knew who Earl K. White III was. I rejoined Liz, telling her: “O.K., let’s not keep Jake waiting.”

7
    Mr. White came in at five on the dot, and Mrs. Rossi, or Bianca, as she now told me to call her, brought him directly to my station, giving him the same table as he’d had the day before. He ordered tonic as before, and of course Jake had the bottle open and was pouring by the time I got to the bar. I took it to the table, served it, disposed of the bottle, and took my place by the men’s room, all in just a few seconds. But he beckoned me over, telling me: “If you tried, you could be more sociable, Joan.”
    “I come when called,” I