Mohawk

want me to pick anything up on the way home?”
    “Like what?”
    “Like a pot roast? Or bananas?”
    “Don’t be silly. I’ll go right down to Howard’s.”
    “I didn’t think I was being silly, Mother. I was offering to save you a trip.”
    “What trip? Two itty-bitty blocks.”
    “Fine.”
    “I don’t like things from those big supermarkets anyway.”
    Anne knew the best thing was to let her mother have her own way, since she’d end up doing as she pleased regardless. “Don’t plan on me,” she told Mrs. Grouse. “I’ve missed a lot of work and tomorrow’s Friday. I’ll probably have to stay late.”
    “I think that’s terrible,” said Mrs. Grouse, who never missed an opportunity to suggest that Anne was ill-treated at work.
    “I’ll tell my boss. He always looks forward to hearing your opinion.”
    “Well, I mean really.…” Mrs. Grouse elaborated, “I never heard of such a thing.”
    Anne resisted the impulse to tell her mother that there was a good deal she’d never heard of. Married to Mather Grouse at seventeen, she had never held a job outside the home she ruled as absolute mistress, whereas Anne, since her divorce, had been a professionalwoman and took pride in it, something Mrs. Grouse had no experience of. During the years Anne and Randall spent in New York, she and her mother remained at cross-purposes, Mrs. Grouse doling out advice in long letters to a daughter whose life was already broader and deeper by half.
    “When Randall gets home, I want him to pick up his room. No heading off to the hospital until it’s done either. I’ll stop by the ward on the way home.” When Mrs. Grouse didn’t answer, Anne said, “Did you hear me, Mother?”
    “Of course I heard you. I’m not deaf.”
    “Goodbye, Mother.”
    On her way Anne took the garbage pails to the curb and set them on the terrace. Mrs. Grouse called to her from the front window, “Did you put the handles up? The dogs—”
    “Yes, Mother. I’m not a child.”
    Her mother was still talking when Anne got in the car and closed the door on her voice. Instead of driving away, she sat where she was and massaged her throbbing temples with her fingertips. Then she checked her appearance in the rearview mirror, suspecting for some reason that she must look terrible. She didn’t, though. There were the lines beneath her eyes that had begun to appear shortly after her return to Mohawk two years before, but they had not deepened significantly. And besides, it wasn’t really age she feared.
    Two doors down the block, staring at her curiously, stood a mangy-looking dog of indeterminate breed. Anne returned his gaze until the mutt became self-conscious and, panting, walked a tight circle. For some reason, staring the animal down cheered her up a little.When Anne backed out of the driveway, the dog’s ears perked and his wet tongue lolled out of his mouth. When she disappeared around the corner, the dog loped forward toward the garbage cans.

8
    Dallas Younger’s life was place oriented, at least as far as it was oriented at all. At certain times of the day or week, only certain places would do, and if he happened to be anyplace else he was vaguely unhappy. He had started spending his Sunday mornings in his brother’s wife’s kitchen shortly after Loraine and David were married. He and Anne had recently split up, which made his Sundays seem pretty purposeless—the only day of the week when he felt any serious dissatisfaction with his life. On the Sabbath Dallas’s two-room apartment, small and cramped and none too clean, always seemed to him small and cramped and none too clean. Only rarely did it seem that way on other days of the week, and when it did, he simply left. But on Sunday mornings Dallas’s haunts were all closed, and the men he drank and shot pool with felt obliged to stay home with their families, at least until the ballgame came on and the bars opened at noon.
    Loraine’s kitchen, thick with the smell of fresh cinnamon rolls,
was
Sunday morning to Dallas Younger. Before his brother’s death, Dallas, who had a key, would be waiting in the kitchen when they returned from church. He would cheerfully accept Loraine’s chiding about being a heathen and David’s pretended angerover his treatment of the Sunday paper, which got rearranged, its pages mixed up and folded the wrong way before David even had a chance to look at it. To make matters worse, Dallas would read aloud from the sports page. Both men