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is your mother?’
    He spoke to her differently now than he had before; more slowly, carefully. It made her smile.
    The young man – Donald, wasn’t it – rose and stood with his hands on his hips. Rain had darkened the shoulders of his jacket and dripped from the bill of his baseball cap. A car rumbled past, throwing a fan of water against his legs. He didn’t even turn around.
    ‘Now this is something,’ he said to himself. ‘Really something .’ He waved his hands skyward in bafflement. To Sarah, the man resembled a perplexed rain god at that moment.
    He startled her briefly. His hand, cold and callused, reached out and took hers. Her eyes widened uncertainly, but he smiled that nice, crooked, smile, and said, ‘You can’t sit out here, girl. You’ll get pneumonia for sure. Come on, we’ll get you some coffee. What happened? Did you get lost?’
    No. Of course not! Sarah knew exactly where Mother was, but she could not go in to get her – it was a place for grownups and she was not allowed.
    But it was terribly cold now, and so she let the young man with the crooked smile and strong hands take her from the bus stop bench and rush her away through the cold, sad rain.
    The rain continued in a steady downpour. It pinged off the steel awnings over the shops along the street; turning briefly to hail, the sound was like random machine-gun fire. Thunder crashed close at hand and the ground under their feet seemed to move with its intensity. With his head bowed to the wind and rain, Don March plodded on, towing the slender reluctant girl behind him.
    At the corner coffee shop, he stopped, read the hand-lettered sign on the door and cursed. He peered into the window, shielding his eyes with his free hand.
    ‘They’re closed, damn it.’ He looked around futilely; Sarah was trembling badly with the cold and damp.
Where was the girl’s mother?
He thought briefly of going to the police station, but immediately discarded the impulse; it would scare her to death, probably. Poor thing, poor drenched, lost thing, standing there with her wilted hat in hand. And still she smiled, if hesitantly. The damp and wind had formed her thin dress to her body as close as a second skin. She wore no underwear. Don felt an unexpected surge of sexual response. Then, disgusted with himself, he managed to banish the feelings.
    ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing else for it. We’ll go to my place. I won’t leave you out in this weather.’ And they struggled on. The wind was so heavy now that it was difficult to walk against. The driving rain stung their eyes.
    They had nearly reached his studio – two rooms over a Hallmark shop – when a young man in a torn red sweatshirt careened past them, cursing wildly to himself and the storm. His face was bruised badly; the falling rain mingledwith the blood trickling down his cheek. He narrowly avoided colliding with Sarah and rushed on, staggering through the storm, his curses smothered by the thunder. They saw him run out onto the long pier, his arms flung skyward.
    Sarah tugged Don in that direction, but he held her back. ‘Come on. There’s nothing we can do for that poor fellow. The police will take care of him.’
    Oh, yes
. That was right, Sarah thought. The last time it had happened to Eric, the policemen had come for him, and Mother had told her the same thing.
    ‘It’s all right, Sarah. All right now. The police will take care of your brother.’

    Donald March’s studio, reached by way of a flight of outside wooden steps, was cluttered, cold and damp. The first thing that Don did was to light the kerosene heater sitting in the center of his room.
    ‘We’ll have to get you out of your clothes,’ he said to Sarah. ‘I’ll look around and find something dry you can put on.’
    Sarah was studying his unframed photographs, pinned or stapled to a sheet of pressed cork attached to the wall. A few shots of the ocean at sunset, the dying red sun communing with the conquering