The Progress of Love

if you won’t ask? You can’t, that’s for sure. What about when Dan left—what if you’d prayed then? I wasn’t in the Circle then, or I would have said something to you. Even if I knew you’d resist it, I would have said something. A lot of people resist. Now, even—it doesn’t sound too great with that girl, but how do you know, maybe even now it might work? It might not be too late.”
    “All right,” says Trudy, in a hard, cheerful voice. “All right.” She pushes all the floppy flowers off her lap. “I’ll just get down on my knees right now and pray that I get Dan back. I’ll pray that Iget the necklace back and I get Dan back, and why do I have to stop there? I can pray that Tracy Lee never died. I can pray that she comes back to life. Why didn’t her mother ever think of that?”
    Good news. The swimming pool is fixed. They’ll be able to fill it tomorrow. But Kelvin is depressed. Early this afternoon—partly to keep them from bothering the men who were working on the pool—he took Marie and Josephine uptown. He let them get ice-cream cones. He told them to pay attention and eat the ice cream up quickly, because the sun was hot and it would melt. They licked at their cones now and then, as if they had all day. Ice cream was soon dribbling down their chins and down their arms. Kelvin had grabbed a handful of paper napkins, but he couldn’t wipe it up fast enough. They were a mess. A spectacle. They didn’t care. Kelvin told them they weren’t so pretty that they could afford to look like that.
    “Some people don’t like the look of us anyway,” he said. “Some people don’t even think we should be allowed uptown. People just get used to seeing us and not staring at us like freaks and you make a mess and spoil it.”
    They laughed at him. He could have cowed Marie if he had her alone, but not when she was with Josephine. Josephine was one who needed some old-fashioned discipline, in Kelvin’s opinion. Kelvin had been in places where people didn’t get away with anything like they got away with here. He didn’t agree with hitting. He had seen plenty of it done, but he didn’t agree with it, even on the hand. But a person like Josephine could be shut up in her room. She could be made to sit in a corner, she could be put on bread and water, and it would do a lot of good. All Marie needed was a talking-to—she had a weak personality. But Josephine was a devil.
    “I’ll talk to both of them,” Trudy says. “I’ll tell them to say they’re sorry.”
    “I want for them to be sorry,” Kelvin says. “I don’t care if they say they are. I’m not taking them ever again.”
    Later, when all the others are in bed, Trudy gets him to sit down to play cards with her on the screened veranda. They playCrazy Eights. Kelvin says that’s all he can manage tonight; his head is sore.
    Uptown, a man said to him, “Hey, which one of them two is your girlfriend?”
    “Stupid,” Trudy says. “He was a stupid jerk.”
    The man talking to the first man said, “Which one you going to marry?”
    “They don’t know you, Kelvin. They’re just stupid.”
    But they did know him. One was Reg Hooper, one was Bud DeLisle. Bud DeLisle that sold real estate. They knew him. They had talked to him in the barbershop; they called him Kelvin. “Hey, Kelvin, which one you going to marry?”
    “Nerds,” says Trudy. “That’s what Robin would say.”
    “You think they’re your friend, but they’re not,” says Kelvin. “How many times I see that happen.”
    Trudy goes to the kitchen to put on coffee. She wants to have fresh coffee to offer Janet when she comes in. She apologized this morning, and Janet said all right, I know you’re upset. It really is all right. Sometimes you think they’re your friend, and they are.
    She looks at all the mugs hanging on their hooks. She and Janet shopped all over to find them. A mug with each one’s name. Marie, Josephine, Arthur, Kelvin, Shirley, George, Dorinda. You’d think Dorinda would be the hardest name to find, but actually the hardest was Shirley. Even the people who can’t read have learned to recognize their own mugs, by color and pattern.
    One day, two new mugs appeared, bought by Kelvin. One said Trudy, the other Janet.
    “I’m not going to be too overjoyed seeing my name in that lineup,” Janet said. “But I wouldn’t hurt his feelings for a million dollars.”
    For a honeymoon, Dan took Trudy to the island on the lake where his