Mohawk

flushed and irritable. Even as a child she couldn’t understand summer’s appeal. In mid-July, tar shimmering on the roads, her mother would add to the pulsing heat with oven-cooked dinners. The kitchen would throb and glow red while Mrs. Grouse wondered if it might not be the center of all the world’s heat. The kitchen could not contain it all, and the upstairs bedroom where she and two of her sisters slept would remain stifling, undisturbed by any cooling breeze, until well after midnight. Mrs. Grouse’s mother was not the kind of woman to surrender to weather; in fact, she taught her daughters that the righteous surrendered to God alone. And so, in the middle of August when the mercury climbed into the nineties and dogs fought viciously in the dust—and did worse than fighting, the hair standing straight up on the backs of their necks—her mother’s oven would give birth to steaming casseroles.
    Mrs. Grouse always remembered her mother fondly, especially since that good woman’s final righteous surrender, and constantly wished she had been able to impress her mother’s virtues on her own daughter Anne, whose habits of premature surrender were, to a womanlike Mrs. Grouse, alarming. During the summer, Anne simply refused to cook a real meal, subsisting on salads and fruit. Mrs. Grouse failed to see how a person could give so much ground and still have the necessary strength to wage life’s urgent battles.
    Summer was full of horrors. Mrs. Grouse hated everything that crawled or flew. For a woman in her seventies, she was lethal with a flyswatter and her vigilance, where summer’s insects were concerned, unsurpassed. Every spring, when the markets ran specials on Raid, Mrs. Grouse bought a brace of large cans, and soaked the baseboards daily. Consequently Anne refused to enter the downstairs flat unless all the windows were thrown open, an inference Mrs. Grouse resented deeply.
    One afternoon in late June, Mrs. Grouse was sweeping the front porch when she noticed something that greatly attracted her interest. For two days it had rained, and the narrow strip of lawn between the house and the sidewalk was moist and green. When Mrs. Grouse examined it closely, however, she noticed thousands of small holes, as if some demented child with a pointed stick had spent the entire night systematically poking the ground until it was uniformly perforated. That’s what they were, all right. Holes. She was on her hands and knees studying them when Mr. Murphy, who lived two doors down, discovered her. “Nightcrawlers,” he said, peering over his spectacles.
    Mrs. Grouse frowned up at him.
    “Rain brings them up,” he explained. “Worms.”

39
    There is a new sign above the Mohawk Grill. It is much larger than the old one and this, the new, sports fancy calligraphy.
The Grotto
, it reads. Beneath, in smaller script,
Beverly and Harold Saunders, Your Hosts
. The lunch counter hasn’t changed, except that the cash register has been moved near the front door, where it is guarded by Harry’s wife, who has the reddest hair Officer Gaffney has ever seen. She reminds him of a bulldog that suspects you have a bone—its bone. A redheaded bulldog.
    The policeman has never been in the new restaurant, which is separate from the old room and dimly lit. He prefers the lunch counter, where the lighting is good and men can talk to one another over the tops of their racing forms, should they feel the need. Next door is mostly for women who like to eat salads in what the redhead calls “an intimate setting.” The girl is a waitress in the next room, but she’s in and out of the grill to pick up orders. When she leans in front of him, Officer Gaffney can smell her and see the outline of her brassiere through the fabric of her uniform. Some days she doesn’t even wear a brassiere, and he then feels a hollow longing that makes him reconsider his life andwonder about many things. Sometimes he even envies Harry, who at least has The Bulldog.
    “Hi, sweetheart,” he says when the girl comes over to collect a burger and side order of fries. He tries to make the “sweetheart” sound casual; after all, they’re related. But somehow he always sounds a little like a beggar. “How’s the little one?”—though he knows the baby is fine, remembers it tugging at her breast. “Hear from that no-’count of yours?”
    But she’s gone again. If the girl was aware of him, she didn’t think him important enough to answer. Or perhaps