The Progress of Love

the birthday cake. Denise went with her to hold the cake on the way home. The plane ride was arranged for five in the afternoon. Only Isabel knew about it, having driven Denise to the airport last week. It was all Denise’s idea. She was worrying now about the clouds.
    “Those streaky ones are okay,” said Isabel. “It’s the big piled-up white ones that could mean a storm.”
    “Cumulus,” Denise said. “I know. Do you think Daddy is a typical Cancer? Home-loving and food-loving? Hangs on to things?”
    “I guess so,” said Isabel.
    “What did you think when you first met him? I mean, what attracted you? Did you know this was the person you were going to end up married to? I think that’s all so weird.”
    Laurence and Isabel had met in the cafeteria of the university, where Isabel was working as a cashier. She was a first-year student,a poor, bright girl from the factory side of town, wearing a tight pink sweater that Laurence always remembered.
    (“Woolworth’s,” said Isabel. “I didn’t know any better. I thought the sorority girls were kind of dowdy.”)
    The first thing she said to Laurence was “That’s a mistake.” She was pointing to his selection—shepherd’s pie.
    Laurence was too embarrassed or too stubborn to put it back. “I’ve had it before and it was okay,” he said. He hung about for a moment after he got his change. “It reminds me of what my mother makes.”
    “Your mother must be an awful cook.”
    “She is.”
    He phoned her that night, having asked around to find out her name. “This is shepherd’s pie,” he said shakily. “Would you go to a movie with me?”
    “I’m surprised you’re still alive,” said Isabel, that brash-talking tight-sweatered girl who was certainly going to be a surprise for Sophie. “Sure.”
    Denise knew all this by heart. What she was after was something else. “Why did you go out with him? Why did you say, ‘Sure’?”
    “He was nice-looking,” said Isabel. “He seemed interesting.”
    “Is that all?”
    “Well. He didn’t act as if he was God’s gift to women. He blushed when I spoke to him.”
    “He often blushes,” said Denise. “So do I. It’s terrible.”
    She thought that those two people, Laurence and Isabel, her father and mother, kept something hidden. Something between them. She could feel it welling up fresh and teasing, or lying low and sour, but she could never get to understand what it was, or how it worked. They would not let her.
    Aubreyville was a limestone town, built along the river. The old stove foundry, out of which Sophie’s father had made his money, was still there on the riverbank. It had been partly converted into a crafts center, where people blew glass and wove shawls and made birdhouses, which they sold on the premises. The name Vogelsang,the German name that had also appeared on the stoves and had contributed to the downfall of the company during the First World War, could still be read, carved in stone, over the door. The handsome house where Sophie had been born had become a nursing home.
    The catering woman lived on one of the new streets of town—the streets that Sophie hated. The street was recently paved, broad and black, with smooth curbs. There were no sidewalks. No trees either, no hedges or fences, just some tiny ornamental shrubs with a wire roll to protect them. Split-level and ranch-style houses alternated. Some of the driveways were paved with the glittering white crushed stone called, around Aubreyville, “white marble.” On one lawn, three spotted plastic deer were resting; at a doorway, a little black boy held up a lantern for coaches. An arrangement of pink-and-gray-speckled boulders prevented people from crossing a corner lot.
    “Plastic rocks,” said Isabel. “I wonder if they have weights or are stuck into the ground?”
    The catering woman brought the cake out to the car. She was a stout, dark-haired, rather pretty woman in her forties, with heavy green eye shadow and a perfect, gleaming, bouffant hairstyle.
    “I’ve been on the lookout for you,” she said. “I have to run some pies over to the Legion. You want to take a look at this and see if it’s okay?”
    “I’m sure it’s lovely,” said Isabel, getting out her wallet. Denise took the cake box onto her lap.
    “I wish I had a girl this size around to help me,” the woman said.
    Isabel looked at the two little boys—they were about three and four years old—who were jumping in and out of an