Mohawk

right there under the manifold, as if I know what a
manifold
is. Then he gets tired or discouraged and guess who gets to clean up. All the while Mother’s bellowing from the other end of the house that she’s ready to get out of the tub and have I finally gone away and left her to drown.”
    When the shrimp arrived, both women ate eagerly. Di crunched hers all the way down to the tails. “God, they were good,” she said once nothing was left but ice and cocktail sauce. “It’s odd, too. I never enjoy food. Let’s get some more.”
    “Let’s split an order.” Anne really didn’t want any more, but neither did she want to disappoint her cousin. When the shrimp came, she insisted Di eat three out of four.
    Everything was fine until Di, who was chattering happily, stopped and began to sweat. When she excused herself, Anne allowed her a few minutes before following into the rest room. Diana was on her knees, her head half in the commode. When she finished, Anne helped her to her feet and over to the mirror where Diana examined her streaked face and touched up her makeup as best she could. “You were right. It’s mostly just messy,” she said. “Leave me alone for a few minutes, okay?”
    Anne went back to the dining room and paid thecheck, then walked her cousin out to the parking lot. “Let me drive you home,” she said.
    “No. I left the alcohol inside, along with that beautiful shrimp. It’s unthinkable to pay that price for shrimp and then leave it behind.”
    “These things happen.”
    “Not to me. Promise you won’t tell Dan.”
    “Why? Lord knows, he’s been there.”
    “It isn’t that,” she said. “I just don’t want him to suspect how badly I needed to … to act like this. He’d feel bad if he knew.”
    “He’s a big boy.”
    Her cousin smiled. “Not really.”
    “Drive extra carefully. I can’t afford to lose my best friend.”
    Diana looked both surprised and pleased. “We
are
good friends, aren’t we?”
    “Of course.”
    Diana rooted around in her bag until she found the keys to her Volkswagen. She refused to learn how to drive Dan’s customized Lincoln, afraid that in a moment of crisis she’d become confused and lose it. She turned the key in the VW’s ignition, but only idled the engine. “Do you remember that night the four of us were coming back from the lake?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “I wanted to go in that night. God, how I wanted to. But I just couldn’t. Isn’t that sad?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe not.”
    “I think it is. I envied you so much, the way you always did whatever you wanted. I guess I still do.”
    “I’m not so wild any more.”
    “You can get mad, at least. Sometimes, I think if Icould just get good and mad.… I don’t know.… I envy you, anyway.”
    “Please don’t, Diana. I mean it.”
    “How can I help it. Look at you.”
    Anne said nothing. Telling Diana that she was married to the man Anne herself had been in love with all her adult life wouldn’t be much of a comfort.
    “I’ve always felt, somehow, that that night was a crossroads for all of us. You and Dallas. Dan and me. If I hadn’t been so … who knows? Everything might have turned out differently.”
    “I doubt it,” Anne said truthfully. “There are times when I suspect it’s all mapped out before we’re born.”
    “No,” Diana said. “It has to be us. Otherwise there’s no sense. Otherwise.…”
    Anne reached in and patted her cousin’s hand on the steering wheel. “Give Dan my best.”
    “I will,” Diana promised. “Poor Dan.”

11
    Growing up in Mohawk, Anne Grouse had little opportunity to mix with any but the sons of shopkeepers and leather cutters and gas station owners. Of these, Dallas Younger had been the most dashing. By local standards he was an athlete of considerable skill, with just the hint of a bad reputation, which made him doubly attractive to Anne, a year his junior. After a quarrel with his family, Dallas had simply moved out of their home and into a room above the Scallese Drugstore, living the kind of independent life that made him the envy of every boy in Mohawk High. When a graduating senior got pregnant, suspicion had immediately fallen on Dallas Younger, because he and the girl had once dated and because a seventeen-year-old boy with a place of his own might be expected to put it to good use.
    When Anne started going out with him, it was with the expectation that he would educate her. She, too, had a reputation for