The Progress of Love

hand up to his cheek, and it came away black. “Smoke,” he said.
    She was so calm that he thought perhaps she had had a tiny stroke, a loss of memory, just enough to let her mind skip over the fire. But she hadn’t.
    “I didn’t even use any coal oil,” she said. “Dane, I didn’t use coal oil or anything. What would make it flare up like that?”
    “It wasn’t a wood stove, Aunt Violet. It was on top of the gas burners.”
    “Oh, Lord.”
    “You must have thought you were burning papers in the wood stove.”
    “I must have. What a thing to do. And you came and put it out.”
    He was trying to pick the black bits of paper out of her hair, but they disintegrated under his fingers. They fell to smaller bits, and were lost.
    “I have you to thank,” said Violet.
    “What we ought to do now,” he said, “is take you over to the hospital, just to make sure you’re all right. You could have a restfor a few days while we see about cleaning up the kitchen. Would that be all right?”
    She made some groaning but peaceable sound that meant yes.
    “Then maybe you’d like to come out and stay with us for a while.”
    He would talk to Theo that night; they would have to manage something.
    “You’d have to watch me that I didn’t burn the place down.”
    “That’s all right.”
    “Oh, Dane. It’s no joke.”
    Violet died in the hospital, the third night, without any warning. A delayed reaction, perhaps. Shock. Dane burned all the papers in the back-yard incinerator. She never told him to; she never mentioned what she had been doing. She never mentioned the girls again, or anything that had happened that summer. He just felt that he should finish what she had started. He planned, as he burned, what he would say to those girls, but by the time he finished, he thought he was being too hard on them—they had brought her happiness, as much as trouble.
    While they were still sitting on the back steps, in the hot, thinly clouded early afternoon, with the green wall of corn in front of them, Violet had touched her scratches and said, “These remind me.”
    “I should put some Dettol on them,” said Dane.
    “Sit still. Do you think there is any kind of infection that hasn’t run its course through my veins by now?”
    He sat still, and she said, “You know, Wyck and I were friends, Dane, a long, long time before we were able to get married?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, these scratches remind me of the way we met, to be friends the way we were, because of course we knew each other by sight. I was driving my first car, the V-8 that you wouldn’t remember, and I ran it off the road. I ran it into a bit of a ditch and I couldn’t get out. So I heard a car coming, and I waited, and then I couldn’t face it.”
    “You were embarrassed you’d run off the road?”
    “I was feeling badly. That was why I’d run off the road. I was feeling badly for no reason, or just a little reason. I couldn’t face anybody, and I ran off into the bushes and right away I got stuck. I turned and twisted and couldn’t get loose, and the more I turned the more I got scratched. I was in a light summer dress. But the car stopped anyway. It was Wyck. I never told you this, Dane?”
    No.
    “It was Wyck driving someplace by himself. He said, stay still there, and he came over and started pulling the berry canes and branches off me. I felt like a buffalo in a trap. But he didn’t laugh at me—he didn’t seem the least surprised to find a person in that predicament. I was the one who started laughing. Seeing him going round so dutiful in his light-blue summer suit.”
    She ran her hands up and down her arms, tracing the scratches with her fingertips, patting them.
    “What was I just talking about?”
    “When you were caught in the bushes, and Wyck was working you out.”
    She patted her arms rapidly and shook her head and made that noise in her throat, of impatience or disgust. Annhh .
    She sat up straight and said, in a clear, but confiding voice, “There is a wild pig running through the corn.”
    “And you were laughing,” Dane said, as if he hadn’t heard that.
    “Yes,” said Violet, nodding several times and struggling to be patient. “Yes. We were.”

C IRCLE OF P RAYER
    Trudy threw a jug across the room. It didn’t reach the opposite wall; it didn’t hurt anybody, it didn’t even break.
    This was the jug without a handle—cement-colored with brown streaks on it, rough as sandpaper to the touch—that Dan made