The Progress of Love

inflated wading pool on the lawn. “Are those yours?” she said politely.
    “Are you kidding? Those are my daughter’s she dumped on me. I’ve got one married son and one married daughter, and another son—the only time I see him he’s in a motorcycle helmet. I was an early starter.”
    Isabel had begun to back the car out of the drive when Denise gave a cry of surprise. “Mom! That’s the pilot!”
    A man had come out of the side door and was talking to the catering woman.
    “Damn it, Denise, don’t scare me like that!” Isabel said. “I thought it was one of the kids running behind the car.”
    “It’s the pilot I was talking to at the airport!”
    “He must be her husband. Keep the cake level.”
    “But isn’t that strange? On Daddy’s birthday? The woman who made his cake is married to the man who’s going to take him up in the plane. Maybe he is. He’s got a partner. He and his partner give flying lessons and they fly hunters up North in the fall and they fly fishermen to lakes you can only fly to. He told me. Isn’t it strange?”
    “It’s only moderately strange in a place the size of Aubreyville. Denise, you have to watch that cake.”
    Denise subsided, feeling a little insulted. If a grownup had cried out in surprise, Isabel wouldn’t have shown such irritation. If a grownup had remarked on this strange coincidence, Isabel would have agreed that it was indeed strange. Denise hated it when Isabel treated her like a child. With her grandmother, or Laurence, she expected a certain denseness and inflexibility. Those two were always the same. But Isabel could be confiding, friendly, infinitely understanding, then remote and irritable. And sometimes the more she gave you, the less you felt satisfied. Denise suspected that her father felt that about Isabel, too.
    Today Isabel was wearing a long wraparound skirt of Indian cotton—her hippie skirt, Laurence called it—and a dark-blue halter. She was slim and brown—she tanned well, considering she was a redhead—and until you got close to her she looked only about twenty-five. Even close up, she didn’t look more than twenty-nine. So Laurence said. He wouldn’t let her cut her dark-red hair, and he supervised her tan, calling out, “Where are you going,” in a warning, upset voice, when she tried to move into the shade or go up to the house for a little while.
    “If I let her, Isabel would sneak off out of the sun every timemy back was turned,” Laurence had said to visitors, and Denise had heard Isabel laugh.
    “It’s true. I’ve got Laurence to thank. I’d never last long enough on my own to get any kind of a tan. I get the fried-brain feeling.”
    “Who cares about fried brains if you’ve got a gorgeous brown body?” said Laurence, in a lordly, farcical way, tap-tapping the smooth stomach bared by Isabel’s bikini.
    Those little rhythmic slaps made Denise’s own stomach go queasy. The only way she could keep from yelling out “Stop it!” was to jump up and rush at the lake with her arms spread wide and silly whoops coming out of her mouth.
    When Denise saw the catering woman again, more than a year had gone by. It was nearly the end of August, a close, warm, cloudy day, when they were near the end of their summer’s stay at the Log House. Isabel had gone to town on one of that summer’s regular trips to the dentist. She was having some complicated work done in Aubreyville, because she liked the dentist there better than the dentist in Ottawa. Sophie had not been at the Log House since the beginning of summer. She was in Wellesley Hospital, in Toronto, having some tests done.
    Denise and Peter and their father were in the kitchen making bacon-and-tomato sandwiches for lunch. There were a few things that Laurence believed he could cook better than anybody else, and one of them was bacon. Denise was slicing tomatoes, and Peter was supposed to be buttering the toast, but was reading his book. The radio was on, giving the noon news. Laurence liked to hear the news several times a day.
    Denise went to see who was at the front door. She did not immediately recognize the catering woman, who was wearing a more youthful dress this time—a loose dress with swirls of red and blue and purple “psychedelic” colors—and did not look as pretty. Her hair was down over her shoulders.
    “Is your mother home?” this woman said.
    “I’m sorry, she’s not here right now,” said Denise, with adignified politeness she knew to be