The Progress of Love

the winter he took pottery classes. He made six little handleless cups to go with it. The jug and the cups were supposed to be for sake, but the local liquor store doesn’t carry sake. Once, they brought some home from a trip, but they didn’t really like it. So the jug Dan made sits on the highest open shelf in the kitchen, and a few odd items of value are kept in it. Trudy’s wedding ring and her engagement ring, the medal Robin won for all-round excellence in Grade 8, a long, two-strand necklace of jet beads that belonged to Dan’s mother and was willed to Robin. Trudy won’t let her wear it yet.
    Trudy came home from work a little after midnight; she entered the house in the dark. Just the little stove light was on—she and Robin always left that on for each other. Trudy didn’t need any other light. She climbed up on a chair without even letting go of her bag, got down the jug, and fished around inside it.
    It was gone. Of course. She had known it would be gone.
    She went through the dark house to Robin’s room, still with her bag over her arm, the jug in her hand. She turned on theoverhead light. Robin groaned and turned over, pulled the pillow over her head. Shamming.
    “Your grandmother’s necklace,” Trudy said. “Why did you do that? Are you insane?”
    Robin shammed a sleepy groan. All the clothes she owned, it seemed, old and new and clean and dirty, were scattered on the floor, on the chair, the desk, the dresser, even on the bed itself. On the wall was a huge poster showing a hippopotamus, with the words underneath “Why Was I Born So Beautiful?” And another poster showing Terry Fox running along a rainy highway, with a whole cavalcade of cars behind him. Dirty glasses, empty yogurt containers, school notes, a Tampax still in its wrapper, the stuffed snake and tiger Robin had had since before she went to school, a collage of pictures of her cat Sausage, who had been run over two years ago. Red and blue ribbons that she had won for jumping, or running, or throwing basketballs.
    “You answer me!” said Trudy. “You tell me why you did it!”
    She threw the jug. But it was heavier than she’d thought, or else at the very moment of throwing it she lost conviction, because it didn’t hit the wall; it fell on the rug beside the dresser and rolled on the floor, undamaged.
    You threw a jug at me that time. You could have killed me.
    Not at you. I didn’t throw it at you.
    You could have killed me.
    Proof that Robin was shamming: She started up in a fright, but it wasn’t the blank fright of somebody who’d been asleep. She looked scared, but underneath that childish, scared look was another look—stubborn, calculating, disdainful.
    “It was so beautiful. And it was valuable. It belonged to your grandmother.”
    “I thought it belonged to me,” said Robin.
    “That girl wasn’t even your friend. Christ, you didn’t have a good word to say for her this morning.”
    “You don’t know who is my friend!” Robin’s face flushed abright pink and her eyes filled with tears, but her scornful, stubborn expression didn’t change. “I knew her. I talked to her. So get out!”
    Trudy works at the Home for Mentally Handicapped Adults. Few people call it that. Older people in town still say “the Misses Weir’s house,” and a number of others, including Robin—and, presumably, most of those her age—call it the Half-Wit House.
    The house has a ramp now for wheelchairs, because some of the mentally handicapped may be physically handicapped as well, and it has a swimming pool in the back yard, which caused a certain amount of discussion when it was installed at taxpayers’ expense. Otherwise the house looks pretty much the way it always did—the white wooden walls, the dark-green curlicues on the gables, the steep roof and dark screened side porch, and the deep lawn in front shaded by soft maple trees.
    This month, Trudy works the four-to-midnight shift. Yesterday afternoon, she parked her car in front and walked up the drive thinking how nice the house looked, peaceful as in the days of the Misses Weir, who must have served iced tea and read library books, or played croquet, whatever people did then.
    Always some piece of news, some wrangle or excitement, once you get inside. The men came to fix the pool but they didn’t fix it. They went away again. It isn’t fixed yet.
    “We don’t get no use of it, soon summer be over,” Josephine said.
    “It’s not even the middle of June,