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later months, the fat underlip had grown to grotesque proportions in David’s memory, like part of a monkey’s behind. David had thought, why on earth? And it had shaken him so, he had not regained the fortitude that day to go back to his aunt’s house until it was time to go to bed.
    When he had telephoned Annabelle the next day at noon, her mother said that she and Gerald had left. David caught an afternoon plane back east. His family—which was his aunt and uncle and his cousin, David’s father having died when he was ten and his mother four years later—knew by then that he was in love with Annabelle. David was sorry that they knew, because while their knowing might have pleased him if he had had Annabelle with him, it now did him not a bit of good. And his Uncle Bert, in his shy but matter-of-fact way, not looking at David as he spoke, had told him he thought this was another case of his “picking the wrong girl—like that Joan Wagoner.” David had said nothing, but it infuriated him that Bert had put Annabelle on a par with Joan Wagoner, a girl he found it hard even to remember, a girl he had known at seventeen or eighteen! Joan had married some ass too. That was the only similarity. When his uncle and aunt and his cousin had seen him off on the plane, they had looked at him with sad, wondering expressions, as if they had just learned that he had some terrible disease that they could do nothing about.
    At that time he had known Annabelle for five months, but what did time matter in love? A second, a year, a month—what they measured didn’t apply. When Annabelle had smiled and said “Hello” to him that spring day at the church bazaar grounds, he might as well have answered, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. My name is David. What is your name?” He had been helping his aunt build her booth that day, and he remembered straightening up, dropping the saw, and walking toward the piano music that was coming from behind a big sheet of cardboard. The cardboard leaned against a piano. She was half in sunlight, half in shade, but the sunlight was on the keys and on her wonderful hands. There were little ribbons of black velvet at the bottoms of her short sleeves. Her light brown hair was parted in the middle and fell full and soft behind her head, like a brown cloud. He stood for what was perhaps five seconds—that was something he would never know—and then she saw him, looked once and then again and stopped her playing and said, “Hello,” with a smile, as if she already knew him. He walked to her house with her that day (eighteen blissful blocks) and he proposed a soda or a Coke and she declined, but she promised to take a walk with him the following evening, after dinner. She couldn’t have dinner with him, she said, because she had to cook her family’s dinner. She had two brothers. Her mother knew David’s aunt, Annabelle said, and David wondered why he and she had never met before, because even though he had been away at school so much of the time, he was home on vacations. “Bad luck, I guess,” Annabelle said in a drawling way through a shy smile that made her seem younger than she was. She told him the piece she had been playing was a Chopin étude. Walking home that day, David had tried to remember it and failed, but its spirit filled him to the brim.
    The third time he had seen her, when they were walking under some trees not far from her house, he had taken her hand, their arms had touched as they slowly walked, touched and separated until it was no longer bearable, and they stopped and turned to each other.
    His aunt had liked Annabelle well enough when David had brought her to the house, but her attitude had been, it seemed to David, one of incomprehensible indifference. He hadn’t blurted out to his aunt that he was in love with Annabelle Stanton, perhaps because he hadn’t thought it necessary,