Ladder of Years Read Free Page A

to mention money again, but she had to say, “About the check …”
    “Please. I owe you ,” he said. “I owe you more than that. Thanks for going along with me on this.”
    “It was nothing,” she told him. “I just wish there’d been, oh, somebody really appropriate.”
    “Appropriate?”
    “Somebody … you know,” she said. “As glamorous as your wife.”
    “What are you talking about?” he asked. “Why, you’re very pretty! You have such a little face, like a flower.”
    She felt herself blushing. He must have thought she was fishing for compliments. “Anyhow, I’m glad I could help out,” she said. She backed away from him and opened her car door. “Bye, now!”
    “Goodbye,” he said. “Thanks again.”
    As if he had been her host, he went on standing there while she maneuvered out of the parking slot. Naturally she made a mess of it, knowing he was watching. She cut her wheel too sharply, and the power-steering belt gave an embarrassing screech. But finally the car was free and she rolled away. Her rearview mirror showed Adrian lifting a palm in farewell, holding it steady until she turned south at the light.
    Halfway home, she had a sudden realization: she should have given him the groceries he had picked out. Good heavens—all that pasta, those little grains of orzo, and now she remembered his consommé too. Consommé madrilene: she wasn’t even sure how to pronounce it. She was driving away with property that belonged to someone else, and it was shameful how pleased she felt, and how lucky, and how rich.

2
    The trouble with plastic bags was, those convenient handles tempted you to carry too many at once. Delia had forgotten that. She remembered halfway across her front yard, when the crooks of her fingers began to ache. She hadn’t been able to bring the car around to the rear because someone’s station wagon was blocking the driveway. Nailed to the trunk of the largest oak was a rusty metal sign directing patients to park on the street, but people tended to ignore it.
    She circled the front porch and picked her way through the scribble of spent forsythia bushes at the side. This was a large house but shabby, its brown shingles streaked with mildew and its shutters snaggletoothed where the louvers had fallen out over the years. Delia had never lived anywhere else. Neither had her father, for that matter. Her mother, an import from the Eastern Shore, had died of kidney failure before Delia could remember, leaving her in the care of her father and her two older sisters. Delia had played hopscotch on the parquet squares in the hall while her father doctored his patients in the glassed-in porch off the kitchen, and she had married his assistant beneath the sprawling brass chandelier that reminded her to this day of a daddy longlegs. Even after the wedding she had not moved away but simply installed her husband among her sweet-sixteen bedroom furniture, and once her children wereborn it was not uncommon for a patient to wander out of the waiting room calling, “Delia? Where are you, darlin’? Just wanted to see how those precious little babies were getting along.”
    The cat was perched on the back stoop, meowing at her reproachfully. His short gray fur was flattened here and there by drops of water. “Didn’t I tell you?” Delia scolded as she let him in. “Didn’t I warn you the grass would still be wet?” Her shoes were soaked just from crossing the lawn, the thin soles cold and papery-feeling. She stepped out of them as soon as she entered the kitchen. “Well, hi there!” she said to her son. He sat slumped over the table in his pajamas, buttering a piece of toast. She placed her bags on the counter and said, “Fancy finding you awake so early!”
    “It’s not like I had any choice,” he told her glumly.
    He was her youngest child and the one who most resembled her, she had always thought (with his hair the light-brown color and frazzled texture of binder’s twine, his