Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

seat. “Taking the scenic route today, courtesy of Miss Helen Rosie-face.”
    “Maybe we ought to just go on,” Jinny said. “Maybe we ought to just go on home.”
    Helen broke in, almost shouting. “I don’t want to stop nobody from getting home.”
    “Then you can just give me some directions,” Neal said. He was trying hard to get his voice under control, to get some ordinary sobriety into it. And to banish the smile, which kept slipping back in place no matter how often he swallowed it. “Just let’s go to the place and do our errand and head home.”
    Half a slow block more, and Helen groaned.
    “If I got to I guess I got to,” she said.

    It was not very far that they had to go. They passed a subdivision, and Neal, speaking again to Jinny, said, “No creek that I can see. No estates, either.”
    Jinny said, “What?”
    “ Silver Creek Estates . On the sign.”
    He must have read a sign that she had not seen.
    “Turn,” said Helen.
    “Left or right?”
    “At the wrecker’s.”
    They went past a wrecking yard, with the car bodies only partly hidden by a sagging tin fence. Then up a hill and past the gates to a gravel pit that was a great cavity in the center of the hill.
    “That’s them. That’s their mailbox up ahead,” Helen called out with some importance, and when they got close enough she read out the name.
    “Matt and June Bergson. That’s them.”
    A couple of dogs came barking down the short drive. One was large and black and one small and tan-colored, puppylike. They bumbled around at the wheels and Neal sounded the horn.
    Then another dog—this one more sly and purposeful, with a slick coat and bluish spots—slid out of the long grass.
    Helen called to them to shut up, to lay down, to piss off.
    “You don’t need to bother about any of them but Pinto,” she said. “Them other two just cowards.”
    They stopped in a wide, ill-defined space where some gravel had been laid down. On one side was a barn or implement shed, tin-covered, and over to one side of it, on the edge of a cornfield, an abandoned farmhouse from which most of the bricks had been removed, showing dark wooden walls. The house inhabited nowadays was a trailer, nicely fixed up with a deck and an awning, and a flower garden behind what looked like a toy fence. The trailer and its garden looked proper and tidy, while the rest of the property was littered with things that might have a purpose or might just be left around to rust or rot.
    Helen had jumped out and was cuffing the dogs. But they kept on running past her, and jumping and barking at the car, until a man came out of the shed and called to them. The threats and names he called were not intelligible to Jinny, but the dogs quieted down.
    Jinny put on her hat. All this time she had been holding it in her hand.
    “They just got to show off,” said Helen.
    Neal had got out too and was negotiating with the dogs in a resolute way. The man from the shed came towards them. He wore a purple T-shirt that was wet with sweat, clinging to his chest and stomach. He was fat enough to have breasts and you could see his navel pushing out like a pregnant woman’s. It rode on his belly like a giant pincushion.
    Neal went to meet him with his hand out. The man slapped his own hand on his work pants, laughed and shook Neal’s. Jinny could not hear what they said. A woman came out of the trailer and opened the toy gate and latched it behind her.
    “Lois went and forgot she was supposed to bring my shoes,” Helen called to her. “I phoned her up and everything, but she went and forgot anyway, so Mr. Lockyer brought me out to get them.”
    The woman was fat too, though not as fat as her husband. She wore a pink muumuu with Aztec suns on it and her hair was streaked with gold. She moved across the gravel with a composed and hospitable air. Neal turned and introduced himself, then brought her to the van and introduced Jinny.
    “Glad to meet you,” the woman said. “You’re the lady that isn’t very well?”
    “I’m okay,” said Jinny.
    “Well, now you’re here you better come inside. Come in out of this heat.”
    “Oh, we just dropped by,” said Neal.
    The man had come closer. “We got the air-conditioning in there,” he said. He was inspecting the van and his expression was genial but disparaging.
    “We just came to pick up the shoes,” Jinny said.
    “You got to do more than that now you’re here,” said the woman—June—laughing as if the idea of